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Fighting Fascism at the Apocalypse

By Jack Luzkow. A Dutch translation of this essay was published in Nexus 99.

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Warnings past and present

America, today, is in the midst of a fascist coup. This is not about populism, nor authoritarianism. This is a fundamental attempt to destroy liberalism and democracy. It is dedicated to following a messianic figure who shall lead America out of the wilderness to ‘Make America Great Again’. Like all fascisms, Donald Trump’s version comes in the name of the Flag, the Cross, and nostalgia. It comes because of the fear of the future, the fear that white Christians are being displaced by Muslims and Mexicans, the fear of irreversible decline, the fear of China, the fear of technology and the robots that are coming for American jobs. By electing Donald Trump for the second time, as Pankaj Mishra might put it, Americans have affirmed a ‘cult of redemptive violence’.[1] They have advocated the ‘self-surrender to large movements […] and charismatic leaders’. They have demonstrated a fear of the future and of the ‘Other’, and the ‘challenges and perils of individuality’. They have affirmed a ‘yearning for re-enchantment’ amidst a never-ending flight from the ‘reality’ that has emerged. They have agreed that the good society is one that excludes Muslims, people not white, immigrants and migrants. And they have endured, or approved, fascist threats to academic freedom, continuing attempts to silence the free press and open contempt for the judiciary and science.

In the early 1950s, Hannah Arendt described the Great War as an ‘explosion’, but she also seemed to anticipate the world of today.

[The] quiet of sorrow which settles down after catastrophe has never come to pass. We seem to be living in a period of perpetual ‘chain reaction […] which nobody seems to be able to stop […] civil wars […] bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; migrations of groups welcomed nowhere […] assimilated nowhere […] homeless […] stateless […] rightless […] the scum of the earth.[2]

Arendt saw total ‘cynicism’, despair, fear of the future, loss of the past; nobody seemed to belong anywhere. ‘Hatred’, although present in the prewar world, ‘began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere’. Political life was in full ‘disintegration’. There was a cloying ‘pervasive hatred of everybody and everything’, to the point that ‘everybody was against everybody else’ and most of all against ‘his closest neighbors – the Slovaks against the Czechs, the Croats against the Serbs, the Ukrainians against the Poles’.[3] As for the ‘Rights of Man?’ There were none, nothing was ‘inalienable’

 

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Arendt clearly anticipated the horrors that were coming. Fascism was not dead. She envisioned the storm from paradise, a perpetual ‘state of emergency’ that was the normal condition of the oppressed (and especially of the Jews). Of the existential position of humanity in general, Arendt was not optimistic. Several world wars in a generation, leading to ‘homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth’, led her to conclude the likelihood of ‘a third world war’ in the future. She also discussed ‘the irritating incompatibility’ between what humanity can do – the wonders of modern technology – and its inability to ‘understand the sense’ of the world it had created, and the ‘destructive forces’ unleashed by its own ingenuity. There was a desperate need for a new ‘political principle’.[4]

The crisis of the century, Arendt wrote, explained the rise of Hitler to power. She reflected on several themes: masses, not classes, conspiracies, terror, loyalty to a leader, the secret police. But it also had at its center, the problem of superfluousness, the homunculus man – the status of millions of human beings – abandoned by modernity, and its brutal accelerations. Humanity was lost in history and had lost its moral compass.

Arendt pointed to the essential role of propaganda in dispensing with truth. Hitler in Germany and Lenin and Stalin in Russia instinctively disrupted the existing order of things by gaslighting their populations; convincing them that fantasy was real, while reality was unreal. ‘In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world’, wrote Arendt, ‘the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true’. To which she added:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow […] one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.[5]

The politics of hate

Fascism, said historian Robert Paxton, is ‘marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood […]’ and fear of the future.[6] Karl Mannheim, in the aftermath of World War I and its attendant barbarism, noted that ‘everywhere, people are awaiting a messiah, and the air is laden with the promises of large and small prophets […]’.[7] And John Le Carré, interviewed on NPR in 2017, observed ‘no direction joined by nothing very much, except fear and bewilderment about [what] the future holds […]. We are mysteriously unfocused’.[8]

He might have added that we are chronically divided and uprooted. Many, if not most Americans today, think they are the victims of globalization. Some 1 percent of us own up to half of American tradable wealth. We live in a period of shifting borders: moral, sexual, political, geographic. We do not agree on the number of genders. We mourn the loss of the traditional family, and traditional neighborhoods where we knew our neighbors. Many of us fear getting old because of inadequate social protection. Or we fear getting sick because health care is unaffordable. Too many of us fear that AI is coming for our jobs, our futures, and that of our children. Americans living in the hinterlands are deeply suspicious and resentful of the ‘elites’ of the metropolis, who have already moved many working-class jobs to China. There is an annoying feeling that liberal democracy does not work for millions who see no future for themselves and their children. Across Europe and America, we are tormented by the fear of replacement, of displacement. ‘They’, the non-Westerners, the Muslims, people of color, are coming for us and they will replace us. ‘We’ are irrelevant. We have no value. We are lost in history.

French novelist Renaud Camus, at almost the same time (2008) Fareed Zakaria was celebrating the end of history and the global victory of liberalism, democracy and peace, warned that a ‘great replacement’ was underway. In France, he saw a ‘decivilizing process […] an erasure of national feeling’. Everything is put into question: ‘our language […] our religion […] our laws, our customs, our habits, our food, our freedom’.[9]

Walking in a village in southern France, Camus was ‘astonished that the population had completely changed in a generation’. He did not see the ‘same people at the windows and on the sidewalks’. He was walking into ‘another culture, another civilization’. Camus denounced what used to be called a ‘melting pot’. Today we use the term ‘multiculturalism’. But it is the same, and it arouses either intense support or vigorous opposition. They are coming for us, the long-term natives, and they will displace ‘us’. But ‘we’ have nowhere to go.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq has expressed similar sentiments in Submission, a novel in which a Muslim is elected president of France. In Submission, Houellebecq sees the decline of his culture, his nation, and the ‘submission’ (if not destruction) of French culture. He feels despair, his country and its culture are in decline. His civilization has failed. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, no way to defend what he has already lost: his identity, his memories, his past, his future. He cannot even claim his dignity, because he has even lost that.

It is the same in America, where many Americans see a decivilizing process and everything is put into question: gender, the unity of our nation, our language, our future. America for two decades has seen a succession of crises, all of which have divided us into many nations, which are divided even further into silos by the social media. There is a cloying feeling that we are a country in deep decline, except for an elite which benefits from globalization. We easily succumb to demagogues who suggest that we are failing because of perceived enemies, such as Mexicans, Muslims, and foreigners.

Viktor Klemperer, who remained in Nazi Germany and chronicled events while Adolf Hitler was in power, observed the spread of fascist ideas as they crept into daily life. The first step toward fascism, he observed, was the Big Lie: the denial of verifiable reality, and the assertion that the lie is based on facts. Hitler’s Big Lie was that Jews had contaminated German blood and made Germans weaker by mixing with Germans. Hitler embraced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a conspiracy theory which held that Jews were behind a conspiracy to take over the world. Stopping this evil was doing the work of the Lord. Violent cleansing, said Hitler, was redemptive; it would assure the future. Hitler would make Germany great again.

In the United States, Trump’s Big Lie is that he won the election in 2020. Not only did Trump insist on this lie for four years; he made agreement mandatory within the Republican Party. Senators, Vice President JD Vance, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson eventually consented, and then embraced the pure invention of Trump. Yes, Trump had ‘won the 2020 election’. Trump has also insisted on conspiracies: Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The Deep State must be exposed and defeated.

Donald Trump knows that the first rule of fascism is to accuse others of fascism. The main thing is that you get to name the opposition. Jews were vermin said Hitler. Democrats are communists, insists Donald Trump. Naming something is controlling it. And control is power.

For a fascist like Trump, the Big Lie becomes the new truth. Truth reflects the assertion of the Leader. Truth is not established by fact, but by repetition of the Big Lie. Like Hitler, Trump knows that people have a short memory. After many repetitions, the Big Lie becomes the new past. The good fascist depends on people forgetting the past, the Big Lie helps to simplify the world. It helps to amplify the message. Those who oppose the Big Lie, are the new enemies. Once they are silenced, the Big Lie becomes the eternal Truth. Russia did not invade Ukraine; Ukraine invaded Russia.

The Big Lie has always been a kind of echo chamber. Once the difference between truth and falsehood is erased, the fascist is on the way to power. George Orwell, in 1984, pointed out how the past could easily be erased and a new ‘truth’ put in its place. ‘Whoever controls the past’, said Orwell, ‘controls the present’. And whoever controls the present, gets to describe the past. Donald Trump has erased the past in numerous ways. Barack Obama was not born in the United States. January 6, 2021 was not an insurrection. It was an attempt to rescue the United States from a stolen election. If there were genuine conspirators present that day, they were members of antifa, a secretive leftist organization. Covid would go away, like a miracle.

Another principle of fascist conversion, said Klemperer, is the use of magical incantations. Donald Trump will defend the borders. He will stop Canada from sending all that fentanyl into America. He will annex Canada. He will stop the Mexican ‘rapists and drug criminals’. He will stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He will claim Greenland for the US. He will destroy antifa, even if there is no antifa. He will privatize parts of our National Parks and then ‘dig baby dig’ – for oil and gas. And then the great lodestone, he will think about privatizing Social Security, and Medicare, and the Post Office, and some parts of National Parks, and then keep digging everywhere, no matter the quality of air, no matter the condition of our lungs, no matter the consequences for global warming, which might even affect Mara Lago in Florida. In sum, Donald J. Trump is, by implication, man and superman, remote and yet imminent, human and semidivine.

Hitler came to power because of magical thinking, when Germans needed true belief. When they needed heroic intervention. When they needed a mythmaker who could reconcile all contradictions. Who could overcome enemies. Who could make Germany great again and reverse its decline, until the treachery of Jews, or Slavs, or other puerile immigrants, was suppressed. Hitler would deliver Germans from their tormented past. He would restore their belief in themselves and in their history. In a godless world, Germans needed a messiah, a savior. A new church. A master who would deliver them. Even when the end was coming for Germany, even when defeat was imminent, magical thinking prevailed. Nothing is rational about fascism. It appeals to instinct, to will, to possibility. Many Germans insisted that defeat was not possible, so long as Hitler lived. Even in the eleventh hour, multitudes of Germans didn’t lose faith.

Fritz Stern explained why magical thinking was mesmerizing and irresistible for the German masses:

They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life […] materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied.[10]

What Stern observed in Germany, we can also observe in America and Europe. There is an annoying sense that liberalism has failed because it preaches materialism. That it prioritizes individualism and individual success – and brutal competitions – rather than solidarity and community. Like the Germans that Stern referred to, we search for a new community, for a new faith to replace the nihilism we feel. We search for fixed standards. We hope for a new national religion.

Hannah Arendt, in Men in Dark Times, observed individuals herded by technology and capitalism into a common present with vastly unequal distributions of wealth and power. The result would not be progress, but humiliation, and then resentment. Arendt called this ‘negative solidarity’. This could be catastrophic, even more so because the digital revolution that would arise several decades after Arendt’s visions, would make envious and resentful comparisons ever more toxic.

Tossed together into a common present, isolated from pasts they might still nostalgically long for, individuals would now be in competition with each other – globally. This was a war of all against all. The result of radical individualism was radical anarchy. Lost in all this, said Arendt, was any lingering sense of humanity. The world would be integrated by technology, but at the expense of humankind. And all this could be catastrophic. After all, Hitler had already demonstrated what could happen when existential evil in the form of racialized hatred is combined with apocalyptic technologies and (demonic) utopian longings for an elusive future.

Arendt had fastened onto the current crisis in the twenty-first century. Radical individualism, when globalized, leads to many losers, and eclipses any quest for humanity in a sea of competing egos: and precisely when the idea of humanity is more critical than ever.

Mankind […] no more than a concept or an ideal, has become something of an urgent reality […]. When Europe […] began to prescribe its ‘law’ to all other continents, it so happened that she herself had already lost her belief in them.[11]

Thomas Mann had clear explanations why fascism – indelibly connected to war – could become a fetish among Germans. He noted how ‘the hearts of the poets flamed high when the present war came – and they thought they had loved peace […]’. They had loved peace, but when the cannons roared, they welled up with ecstasy ‘as if nothing in the world better, more beautiful, or happier could have happened to them and to the people whose voice they are […]’. Mann would soon recognize the sickness blighting Europe, the moral corruption that was the root of that sickness. Paxton writes:

He expressed his epiphany in his Diaries, dated 27 March, 1933, two months after Hitler had become Chancellor. What Mann described was a ‘revolution’ as never before, ‘without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice’. The ‘common scum’ had taken power, ‘accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses’. Mann called this the ‘revenge of the very types who lost the war […] while the nobler elements in Germany are condemned […]. Concentration camps everywhere filled with ‘prisoners of war’.[12]

On April 3, 1933, Mann reported that Hitler had handed down a new gospel to the press: the right to criticize included the obligation to tell the ‘truth’. But the truth, said Mann, in Hitler’s Germany, was ‘treason’.

The demagogue must call on the masses to become true believers, to accept his magical incantations, to follow him because he alone knows the future. The followers must have zeal not so much for any ideas, as there are few ideas, but must accept that the leader has messianic abilities for deliverance; they must also be prepared to abandon self-interest. Because Hitler believed in himself so ardently, he could attract Germans who had long abandoned a belief in themselves. It was precisely because of the fear of freedom, the loss of faith in self, that Hitler could be regarded as messianic. Friedrich Nietzsche had expressed this well in the nineteenth century. ‘There must be self-deception in order that this and that may produce great effects. For men believe in the truth of everything that is visibly, strongly, believed in’.[13]

Donald Trump does not exhibit quite the same messianic abilities, but he does possess an almost superhuman belief in himself. He exhibits no self-doubt. He appears at a moment in American history when Americans are incontestably unsure of themselves and exhibit a fear of the future that is palpable. Americans will be critical of Trump, of the chaos that surrounds him; but they will continue to see him also as messianic, as the only figure who can defeat both the Deep State and antifa, and the Democrats, and China. He remains a secular savior. He will crush the opposition. But we remain blind to the fact that many of us are the ‘opposition’.

George Orwell, in 1984, explained how the corruption of language, its detachment from meaning, could lead to a language that distorted truth to the extent that reality disappeared altogether. Language without meaning can only lead to the end of truth and […] the emergence of ‘DOUBLETHINK’:

DOUBLETHINK […] is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies […].

Literary critic and public intellectual Allan Bloom, responding to Francis Fukuyama in the early 1990s, made a prediction that was an ill omen for the future:

There will be movements agitating for the completion of the project of equality in all possible, and impossible, ways. [14]

The combination of the flag and the cross could be fatal. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Bloom could only see degradation for the future. Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man’, he writes,

is such a degraded being that he necessarily evokes nausea and revolt […]. If, as Nietzsche believed, the ‘Last Man’ is the ultimate product of reason, then reason is bad and we must look more closely to unreason for hope of salvation. God is dead, and we need new gods.[15]

It appears that the world has been made safe for reason as understood by the market, and we are moving toward a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims. The world has been demystified, and at the end of history all the struggles and all the higher dedications and myths turn out to have served only to satisfy the demands of man’s original animality.

Liberalism may have ‘won’, but it was unsatisfactory. Moreover, liberalism (and democracy) had often failed because it preached ‘competitions’, not solidarity. Communism had failed. It was neither rational nor feasible. Fascism was defeated on the battlefield, ‘but its dark possibilities were not seen through to the end’. Bloom could not imagine any alternatives. ‘I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future’. The European nations could ‘find no rational ground for the exclusion of countless potential immigrants from their homelands’. They were already looking back toward their ‘national myths’. As it turned out, Bloom’s statements were prescient: ‘fascism has a future, if not the future’. Not the least because too many are still reluctant to use the word fascism. Meanwhile, the future has arrived.

 

What can be done

As far back as 1848, liberal revolutions swept across Europe, from Paris to Berlin to Prague. Even Moscow had its Decembrist revolt in 1825. There was the Czech Spring of 1968. The Hungarian uprising of 1956. The color revolutions in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004) to establish liberal democracies. The revolution against the Revolution in Russia, 1989-1992.

Václav Havel rallied the ‘power of the powerless’ until Czechs were no longer powerless.[16] I was in Czechoslovakia in summer 1989, and everywhere people said there would be no revolution there. Several months later a civic uprising expelled the communists from power. I was in Hungary in 1989, when people were not confident that they could expel the Soviets. Several months later a civic uprising expelled the communists and disinterred the body of Imre Nagy – who had been murdered by the Soviets decades earlier, and reburied Nagy with national honors. The Arab Spring of 2011 was yet another revolt against despotism and the past. One idea inspired all these rebellions, above all else: the desire to become or to remain free. Without that, there is only anger and frustration.

What is tragic about history is that fascism could easily have been defeated. Hitler never got above 38 percent of the vote before he became Chancellor. President von Hindenburg disliked Hitler but saw him as a patriot who could face down the communists. In Italy, King Victor Emmanuel III could have declared martial law and called on the army to stop Mussolini. Donald Trump could and should have been defeated at the polls had Democrats promoted a populist program of their own: universal health care, defending labor unions, higher taxes on the rich. Democrats could have reminded Americans what happens when fascists come to power. Republicans could have impeached and convicted Trump. They could do so today!

 

Saving our souls

Fight for truth: The great philosopher and human rights advocate, Simone Weil, fought for truth by enlisting in an anti-fascist army and fighting the Spanish fascists in the 1930s. George Orwell fought for truth and freedom by fighting the Spanish Fascists in the same civil war.

Know fascism when you see it: Fascism always comes in the name of national salvation. It claims to be populist. It offers a strong leader who can unite a nation and defeat its ‘enemies’. It sanctions violence as redemptive. It attacks intellectuals and artists because they have alternative visions of the future, and because the best of them recognize and oppose the fascism they see in front of them.

Showing up: Where are the university presidents? Where are the union leaders? Where are the corporate leaders? Where are the influential legal firms? Where is the American Medical Association? If we, collectively, do not assemble, if we do not insist on and attend town halls and voice our displeasure, we will be consenting to the end of democracy as we know it.

Remember History: Once Hitler was in power, he crushed dissent. He murdered perceived enemies, like Slavs and Jews. He promoted the Big Lie that Jews were a cancer in Germany’s midst. He created the Hitler Youth to control the minds of the young. He blamed the Jews for Germany’s loss of World War I. The result of Hitler’s paradise? Germany lost a third of its territory, more than seven million Germans lost their lives, and 53 million people lost their lives during World War II. The Third Reich lasted only twelve years, not for eternity.

Insist on truth: We should know that fascism is the result of a crisis of civilization; a crisis that the fascist leader recognizes and knows how to exploit. Insist on understanding the world as it really is, not what a tyrant says it is. Let’s read philosophy and understand why Simon Weil starved herself to death because of dedication to truth. Let’s watch Federico Fellini’s films, La Strada, or Nights of Cabiria, which tell us about humanity and love, and tragedy as well, but always eternal hope.

Avoid social media: Take responsibility for your own education. I was liberated in college – well before social media – because I read philosophy, literature, and European history. I devoured the Essays of Montaigne, the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, the Ethics of Spinoza. When it came to the moderns, I could not stop reading Albert Camus: The Rebel, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague. Albert Camus had a deep disgust for the world, its fascisms, its greed, its exploitations, its wars. But he had a deep sympathy for all those who suffered in it. That humanity in him must have driven him to explain the world and its contradictions and why fascism had appeared in the first place.

The writer who affected me most, was probably Franz Kafka, and especially Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa turns into an insect. When I began to study the Holocaust, the connection was easy to make. Adolf Hitler had turned Jews into bugs, he had taken away their humanity and then murdered them once they had become ‘vermin’. It was an important lesson. Hitler and the nazis thought of Jews as bugs, as something less than human. Once I understood this, the hatred that Hitler had for Jews, I became Jewish. But there was another lesson. Once Hitler turned Jews into bugs, he turned all human beings into bugs. In defeat, Hitler also turned on Germans: they were unworthy because they were defeated. They also were bugs.

W. G. Sebald remains the indispensable novelist and essayist too few people read. The Emigrants is a tale of victims of national socialism that evinces compassion for people who deserve a more humane world. Sebald writes tenderly, in Austerlitz, about a survivor whose life was saved by the Kindertransport (Jewish children transported to England from Germany and Austria), but who remained scarred by the tragedies of history. Sebald’s stories are about us, and how we get lost in history. And how we can still remain human – by fighting fascism.

 

[1] Pankaj Mishra – Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016.

[2] Hannah Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism: Part Two: Imperialism, Meridian Books, p. 267.

[3] Idem, p. 268.

[4] The citations in this paragraph can be found in the preface to the first edition of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

[5] Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 382.

[6] Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Alfred A Knopf, 2004.

[7] Cited in Mishra.

[8] John le Carré, 5 september 2017, interview with NPR.

[9] Camus, a convicted far-right anti-Semite and Islamophobe, published the book L’Abécédaire de l’innocence in 2010, in which he introduced his concept of ‘ethnic replacement’. Zakaria, a prominent Indian-American liberal journalist, published his book The Post-American World in May 2008.

[10] Fritz Stern — The Politics of Cultural Despair, University of California Press, 1961/1974, p. xxi. Stern spoke at the Nexus Conference 2004, and his essays are included in Nexus 55 and Nexus 24.

[11] Hannah Arendt — ‘Karl Jaspers: Citizen of the World?’ in Men in Dark Times, Hartcourt, 1955 /1968.

[12] Paxton, p. 14.

[13] Friedrich Nietzsche — Human, All Too Human, trans Helen Zimmern, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1924, par. 52, p. 71.

[14] Allan Bloom — ‘Responses to Fukuyama’ in The National Interest, summer 1989, p. 20.

[15] Idem, p. 21.

[16] Havel’s famous essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ was published in Dutch translation Nexus 38.

 

Further reading: