Antifascism and Tea Parties

I agree with this article and I encourage you to read it and share it.

Today on the same topic I was shown this article. I have a problem with the article for two reasons. Number one, I think it greatly confuses authoritarianism in governments with fascist political movements. And number two, I think it is very irresponsible to encourage "the Tea Party" as an "ally" in protecting "the constitution"... when I feel they themselves represent the closest thing we currently have to an indigenous fascist movement.

Given the stakes involved, and how much this later article is in drastic need of correction, I will use the following words to clarify a few things...




My problem with the Naomi Wolf article is that I think she confuses "fascism" with governments that happen to be authoritarian in the way they rule. The United States certainly got more "authoritarian" under George Bush... yet I simultaneously have attended public meetings of socialists, anarchists, and other leftists, as well as some labor rallies and some immigrant workers' rallies throughout the last decade and in spite of the USA-PATRIOT Act I have experienced a great deal of operative political freedom in doing so. In a "fascist" country I would probably have been imprisoned or killed for such doings....

Czarist Russia, England under the rule of Mary I, the current ruling "junta" of Burma , Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, and the Belgian Congo in the 1800's all were or are generally repressive governments. What is different about Nazi Germany (and Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy), is that the level of violence that came to characterize these states were not hereditarily present. Medieval Europe, various Colonial governments of Africa and Asia, and a few contemporary military dictatorships (Idi Amin's Uganda?) were throughout their existences based on pretty clearly established patterns and organizations of violence, religious persecution, etc...

Fascism in the 20th century as it has historically existed was very different in this respect- very different from how casually the word is thrown around today in a generally juvenile / irresponsible fashion! Mussolini came to power after Italy's Biennio Rosso (two years of unprecedentedly militant working class upsurge, factory occupations, etc...) that were ultimately unable to consolidate themselves and resolve that country's economic crisis. Germany's Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 1930s was a liberal multiparty democracy... before its political stability collapsed through its' parties' inability to resolve the financial crisis. Franco as well came to power after the traditional conservative parties were electorally defeated by the left...

Fascism is different from any state's authoritarianism because it always appears as an organic mass movement; a political mobilization of people whose lives have been greatly disrupted by a political/economic crisis, and who find themselves in the process of attempting to wrestle political power away from the establishment in order for their competing agenda to be implemented. Generally, the rank and file of fascist movements consists of people who find themselves in between capital and labor. They aspire to believe in capitalism but despite their labors find themselves unable to reap the benefits of it- benefits that especially tend to dry up in a recession. At the same time they are generally strangers to the tradition of struggle from below, as generally "leftist" notions of class struggle and solidarity are often non-existent to people whose life ambition is to become "independent" small-businessmen! The result is an increased disposition to feeling isolated, paranoid, victimized, and the political spasms which tend to follow generally maintain the self-interested "man in the middle"'s preference for securing his own stability indifferently to the effect it as on society as a whole, the environment, minorities, etc...

This is important because the demands all political movements make are shaped by certain values. It is easier, for example, to value personal responsibility, thrift, hard work, etc... when you are the owner of a store, or a well paid highly skilled worker, than if you are one of the 1 million- plus $6.15/ hour stiffs at walmart where the managers force you to do extra work off the clock, the health care plan sucks, and you know that where workers have tried to get a better deal before the whole store has been shut down and then re-opened on the other side of town but with different workers...

The fetishization of "The Founding Fathers" and "The Constitution" that so many "tea party" types have is more often than not NOT a stable foundation upon which to build a Left- Libertarian alliance for anything other than the shortest term most minute issues (ex legalizing pot?)- and even then it's likely to be extremely problematic for all involved, as you may discover should you happen to be called a "nigger" or a "faggot" by your supposed "ally". It is useful to recall the founding fathers were making decisions about 240 years ago. They did not live in a world of antibiotics, corporate agri-business, mass media, coronary bypass surgery, suburbs, interstate highway systems, or internal combustion engines- let alone FEMALE or BLACK voters! If Bill and Ted's time machine was available today and we brought back several of them to the present in order to guide us out of the catastrophe we're living in I'm willing to bed they'd be rather ill equipped to make appropriate decisions. How do you expect someone who has never turned on or SEEN a lightbulb to know what to do about "Derivatives?"

The point is that it never really is about the founding fathers... or the constitution. It's about the IDEA of this mythical, stable, wonderful past. The mythology of gloried Aryanism that so infatuated Hitler sprung from the same root: an inability to deal with the present leads one to idealize a better past... Today, it is increasingly indisputable that Capitalism in its highest stage of development and its lowest stage of regulation is managing to destroy the environment, throw people out of work, and kill other people in wars at an alarming rate. If, like good Americans we believe in Freedom and The Individual and Capitalism and want to bring the standards of living we imagine prevailed for (some white) people back the 1950s any sort of real serious structural analysis is probably not going to be too attractive- particularly if our life's ambition is to BE a successful capitalist!

Our own historical myth-making and romanticizing really isn't that different from the Gernmans'. "Germany was a great and proud and free nation of culture, ability, intelligence and accomplishment- before the filthy Jew and the thieving gypsy and their friends the Communists came in to get a free living off our backs! 6 million Jews is 6 million Germans out of work! Really, is this so different from what we hear today? "Lazy blacks on welfare with big TVs, and immigrants from Mexico taking "our" jobs, and those goddamned sand-niggers in Afghanistan jealous of our freedoms and wanting to hurt us for them- are the real problems!"

These patterns of thinking were developed long ago and are consciously propagated by the media apparatus of which Beck and Limbaugh are but the darkest, most extreme (and honest!) manifestations of. For is no coincidence that every "Golden Age" of Young, Free America's progress tended to only be possible because it came at the expense of various darker skinned people... The Frontier gave us homesteads at the affordable cost of just a few million murdered "Indians"... Our charming and historic Southern Cities (and capital building) were built by black slaves. When the frontier ran out we went to war with Mexico to make it bigger. The first interventions against Latin America were by white supremacist "Filibusters" attempting to carve out chunks of Nicaragua for themselves. Latter attempts differed little in motivation. Even the entire Post War boom we're so thankful for wasn't so much the product of Americans' hard work and ingenuity in entrepreneurship as it was many Europeans' and Asians' hard work in killing 50 million people and incinerating much of their industrial capacity in World War Two... So the budget looks a little tight today? What could possibly be more historically instinctive than sending the Mexican's home, taking away TV's and apartments from the blacks, getting women back in the home, and perhaps creating jobs by hiring more soldiers to kill the dirty Arab? etc... etc...

The characters of Beck and Limbaugh I mention again because they are so colorful and prominent and PURE examples of the pettiness, the selfishness, the greed, the hate, the self righteous bigoted hypocrisy, the war love and infernal misogyny that many are capable, under the right conditions, of embracing. Like the Nazis- who for years before the great depression were a tiny, marginalized sect generally ignored or made fun of by the great bulk of people- the stuff these two are made out of might in "normal times" be safely enough segregated away from mainstream consideration in one of history's darker sewers...

What a crisis of political legitimacy does is that it exposes the established structure and the ideas upon which the established structure operates as incapable of continuing to run society. What HUNGER does to any living being is to drastically broaden what one might consider palatable. Before the French Revolution peasants were EATING GRASS. We are not today eating grass... though most processed and preservatized foods we're able to still afford at walmart have about the same nutritional value. The thing about the hungry man though is that as long as he is a man at all, he will find a way to eat... however previously innocuous the rubbish bins of this morning's breakfast once appeared.

The Tea Party is not an ally. It is not a way forward. Just because it is "standing up to the establishment" does not mean we should merge with it or applaud it. Eric Roudolph and Timothy McVeigh stood up to the reprehensible, "elite" establishment, too. So did "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, Eugene "Bull" Connor, Father Coughlin, David Koresh, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and, in fact... Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini!

The Republican and Democratic parties have made clear what they have to offer us. Endless war, budget cuts for things people need, unemployment and outsourcing, Healthcare as a money maker for corporations and as a luxury for a dwindling pool of "consumers", and yes... civil rights and liberties for most people put on hold, tabled, avoided, or quietly relocated. It is probable the American people despite all their handicaps will increasingly realize such an agenda is not in their best interests.

As that happens, new political ideas and organizations will be formed to step into the vacuum. It's too early to see what shape this will take. But the polarization we can already see. On one hand human dust beats the racist deathbed with its bloody axe, encouraging the working class to cut off a limb or two of its own so the rest might not starve for the time being... This is not hyperbole. Think Rwanda. And Machetes. This stuff can happen.

On the other hand, there is a tradition of militant organizing and antifascism. There are the old, half or more forgotten ideas that An Injury To One Is An Injury To All. There's the knowledge that the people we work next to every day, who might not look like us, who might talk different than us or have been born somewhere different than us, are none the less as deserving as ourselves to prenatal care or an education. There's a gut instinct that tells us people without money shouldn't have to pay for a crisis that people with LOTS of money created. There are "socialist" and "radical" notions that "private property" in the form of Planet Earth's 793 Billionaires' bank accounts are less important than the 16,000 children who die every day of hunger.

The Tea Party of Sarah Palin's vengeful, indoctrinated idiots is probably the closest thing to a nascent fascist movement the United States has seen in a long time. The American Left has been hiding, scattered, disorganized, and confused for far too long. It is time for it to get its act together and show us what a real alternative to the same old politics of war, racism and poverty could look like. The long term costs of this not happening are ghastly.