Fascism will always come home to roost
For all their masquerading, the United States, and Western Europe have long supported fascism at the expense of black and brown people.
In a few days, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the next President of the United States, and the liberal class will resume their bellyache about the Republicans and how they will dismantle the institutions of American democracy. The current Palisades Fire ravaging California and the inadequacy to respond is the poignant reminder that the American project of fascism has come home to roost.
From West Asia to South America, the United States has historically been a harbinger for fascism and authoritarianism. The recent regime-change in Syria, the genocides in Gaza, Sudan, and Congo, and the constant meddling in Venezuelan politics are but a few examples of the American and more broadly Western European commitment to ensure Anglo-Saxon domination and hegemony through repression, mass violence, destruction, and death.
The deeply racist and sexist MAGA-crowd, if not the genocide-funding Democrats should shatter the myth of America and the collective West as this so-called beacon of liberty, freedom, and democracy.
For all their masquerading, the United States, and Western Europe have long supported fascism at the expense of black and brown people.
Nazi Germany and Western support
For three years, beginning in 1931, Time Magazine featured Adolf Hitler as ‘Man of the Year.’ Meanwhile, the New York Times downplayed Hitler’s antisemitism, claiming that it was “not as genuine or violent as it sounded” and was only a tactic to fuel populist rhetoric.
For all the exceptionalism of Hitler and the crime of the Jewish Holocaust, the neoliberal Western world and its ruling classes have long bolstered fascist leaders if it helped them achieve their geopolitical and economic agendas.
In 1938, the British and French, under the leadership of then British prime minister Neville Chamberlain placated Hitler by turning a blind eye to his hegemonic and expansionist desires. The Munich Agreement of 1938 enabled Hitler to illegally annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.
The desire for Lebensraum - German for living space - was the Hitler’s term for the illegal territorial expansion and settlement to the East, towards the Soviet Union. This was shaped and inspired by American colonialism and genocide of the indigenous people of Turtle Island. Hitler also admired the British subjugation, pillaging, and colonialism of the peoples of West and East Asia, especially India; “Let’s learn from the English, who, with two hundred and fifty thousand men in all, including fifty thousand soldiers, govern four hundred million Indians.”
Not only did Hitler laud British and American imperialism in Mein Kampf but he ultimately admired the foundation of America as a white supremacist state. Laws such as banning mixed marriages in the United States, ultimately inspired the third Nuremburg Law which expressly forbade marriages between Germans and Jews. “The racially pure and still unmixed German has risen to become master of the American continent,” Hitler writes, “and he will remain master as long as he does not fall victim to racial pollution.”
Hitler praised American laws in relation to racial conceptions of citizenship. To Hitler, the United States was the one state that banned immigration to “physically unhealthy elements.” Hitler was marvelled by the racial superiority codified in laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924 that sought to ban immigrants, particularly people of colour such as Indians, Japanese, Chinese, other East Asians and nearly all Arabs.
While Hitler often occupies the place of the “greatest evil” in the Western conscience, the United States and Western Europe have long tolerated and supported the fascist-likes of Hitler. There were many fascist leaders prior to and following World War II, and the United States and its Western allies lent support, be it Benito Mussolini in Italy, Suharto in Indonesia or Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
Avowed racist Winston Churchill was charmed by both Hitler and Mussolini. In 1919 he wrote, “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism. Hitler and his Nazis have surely shown their patriotic ardour and love of country.” This is the same Churchill that condoned the use of chemical weapons on indigenous people in India and Iraq; “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilized tribes.”
For all the exceptionalism of Hitler, and his barbarity, what did the West do about the Nazis and deep-seated German fascism?
Following World War II, the United States recruited 1,600 German Nazi war criminals through the secret intelligence program Operation Paperclip between 1945-1960. These included scientists, engineers, and doctors who continued Hitler’s work and developed rockets, missiles, aviation, and chemical and biological weapons for the United States. Many of these scientists were members of the German SS and SA – Nazi paramilitary organizations – of which the former was involved in the patrol of concentration camps. The CIA also recruited Nazi spy leader Reinhard Gehlen who served as a CIA Asset, alongside other Nazi officials in West Germany. The Paperclip Operation led by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency sought to whitewash the pasts of these ardent German Nazis.
The United States has long supported clandestine operations to prop up fascist and dictatorial regimes. From overthrowing democratically elected leaders from Mohamed Mossadegh in Iran to Patrice Lumumba in Congo to sponsoring mass killing across South America to suppress socialists, communists, trade unionists and other leftist groups. Under the veneer of “democracy,” the United States’ modus operandi for decades – if not since its emergence – has been the sponsoring of global misery, destruction, and death.
Colonialism is fascism turned inwards
In his incredibly profound and formative book Discourse on Colonialism, Martinique-born author, poet, and revolutionary Aimé Césaire wrote that fascism was not an unexpected turn to the right or a divergence, but rather a continuation of Western civilization. Fascism was connected to the global systems of slavery and imperialism that are rooted in racist ideologies. Césaire wrote that fascism was indeed colonialism turned inward. Discourse on Colonialism seeks to challenge and break away from the conception that Hitler, and the Holocaust for that reason is an aberration, a break from European liberalism. Far from it, Césaire argues that the violence that Hitler enacts is not unprecedented but rather rooted in the same methods used by Britain and France except they were committed against white people.
Thus, Césaire is challenging the exceptionalism of Hitler, and by extension his violent crimes against Jews. About Hitler and Nazism, Césaire writes, “it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the "coolies" of India, and the "niggers" of Africa.”
While not disregarding the brutality Jews experienced under Nazi Germany, Césaire points out the double standard that the Holocaust is taught at the single ‘worst crime’ in humanity whereas the crimes of American, British, and French imperialism against indigenous people are not afforded the same weight. Black intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois writes it succinctly in his book The World and Africa, “There was no Nazi atrocity-concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”
What can be said about the genocidal crimes of the Belgians in the Congo where over 10 million Congolese were murdered and their limbs chopped off for failing to meet a daily quota on rubber plantations?
What can be said about the genocide in Gaza, where for 15 months, Israel backed by America, Germany, Britain and France, have murdered more than a quarter of a million Palestinians through constant bombing and a man-made famine while inflicting all kinds of unimaginable conditions?
What about Armenia, Rwanda, Namibia? The intention is not to equate genocide or human suffering but to point out the singularity of the Holocaust in the Western conscience because as Césaire argues, the barbarity that has been exercised on people of colour were made on White or European people – respectively, the crimes committed and condoned abroad were turned inward. Césaire points out that before Europeans were victims of Nazism, “they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it.”
Fascism and its support by the West never disappeared. Fascism is embedded in the very fabric of Western civilization. Media censorship, draconian mass surveillance, police repression, income inequality, prison slavery, homelessness and lack of social services represent the material and physical manifestations of Western colonialism abroad, returning to the imperial metropole. The barbarism and plunder pursued by the West will continually reproduce in ways that will wreak irreparable destruction and violence. The very ability to imagine a more sustainable and equal system depends on the continuous struggle to act and resist against empire and its fascist murderous machine.
