Epilogue
Towards a Contemporary Understanding of Fascism
Highly instructive as it is, the story of Hitler obviously does not tell us all that we need to know about fascism. So here are some essential supplementary points.
Briefly on the Rise of Fascism in Italy
At the close of World War I, Italy was still a young nation state. The Kingdom of Italy had been formed only in 1861 – and that without Rome and Venice, which were acceded a few years later – in the wake of Camillo Cavour’s work for unification of a fragmented Italy and the military campaigns of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Economic development was extremely uneven, literacy rate was the lowest in Western Europe, and hunger, unemployment and inflation made life miserable. There was widespread national disgruntlement over the perception that, under the Treaty of Versailles, Italy as one of the victorious allied powers had not been given the same favourable settlement as Britain, France and USA. The old political parties came to be considered absolutely worthless and people felt that a major change was needed to save the country. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, peasants in many places seized land while workers went on strike and even took over factories. Left parties were gaining in membership and influence.
Benito Mussolini was born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, who was an ardent socialist. Benito himself was a socialist with great oratorical skills. From December 1912, he worked as the editor of the Italian Socialist newspaper, Avanti! When World War I broke out, he supported the Italian government’s neutral stance but very soon he reversed his stand, writing in favour of Italy’s entry into the war. In November 1914 he was formally expelled from the socialist party and became a committed nationalist and anti-socialist.
After the war, when a wave of nationalism was sweeping across the war-ravaged country and small nationalist groups were sprouting everywhere, Mussolini assembled these groups into a single national organization in March 1919, calling it Fasci di Combattimento or the Fascist Party. The name Fasci (Fascist) was taken from an ancient Roman symbol that contained a bundle of wooden rods around an axe, with its blade popping out.
The fascists in uniforms held parades and rallies with the slogan “Believe! Obey! Fight!” They claimed that modern Italy is heir to ancient Rome and its legacy and spawned the dream of an Italian Empire that would provide “living space” for colonization by Italian settlers and establish control over the Mediterranean Sea. Slowly but steadily, they gained popular support with an aggressive nationalist platform, winning 35 seats in the 1921 elections. In October 1922, amidst fears of a communist-led revolution, Mussolini gathered his followers and foot soldiers (the 'Blackshirts' composed of marginalized ex-servicemen) and staged a so-called “March on Rome”. King Victor Emanuel III refused to allow the army to stop the marchers and thereby allowed the Fascist seize power without firing a shot.
The Italian cabinet led by Luigi Facta resigned in protest and, asked by the King, Mussolini formed a new cabinet as Prime Minister on 31 October. The latter got the electoral law drastically modified so his party could win a highly controversial election in April 1924. By 1925 he concentrated all power in his own hands and declared himself dictator of Italy under the title Il Duce or 'The Leader', suspending the free press and disbanding individual rights as well as rival political parties.
In October 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. In 1938, following in the footsteps of Hitler, Mussolini passed the “Manifesto of Race”, which stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship and imposed all kinds of restriction and ostracisation. In May 1939 Italy entered into the “Pact of Steel” with Germany and on September 1 the Second World War began.
In the aftermath of a series of defeat Italy suffered under his leadership, on 25 July 1943 the Grand Council of Fascism passed a motion of no confidence for Mussolini. The King dismissed him as head of government and had him arrested. On 12 September 1943, he was rescued from captivity by German paratroopers and Hitler put him at the head of a puppet regime in northern Italy – the Italian Social Republic – informally called the Salò Republic. In late April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee from Italy but both were captured by Italian communists and summarily executed by a firing squad on 28 April 1945 near Lake Como. Only two days later, Hitler would commit suicide to save himself from the advancing columns of Russian Red Army.
Interplay of Economic and Socio-Political Factors In the emergence of Fascism
Since the classic models of fascism arose in Italy and Germany in the post-war situation of severe economic crisis, many see that as the single most important source of fascism, both as a movement and a state form. But then, why did not war-ravaged imperialist countries other than Italy and Germany – say France and Britain – witness a comparable development of the fascist current culminating in fascist takeover of the state?
The question arises because both these countries suffered economic devastation thanks to World War I. France bore the brunt of German onslaught: according to official estimates, 712,000 buildings, 20,000 industrial compounds, 2.5 million hectares of agricultural land, 20,000 kilometers of canals, 2000 buildings, 62,000 km of roads and more than 5000 km of railroads were destroyed. The total estimated damage was 34,000,000,000 Francs. Britain lost its position as the number one global economic power to the US in the aftermath of the war. Both countries experienced harsh consequences like double-digit unemployment, falling incomes and the like, slowly maturing into the Great Depression. Despite all this, and despite the fact that anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe including France and Britain, the fascist groups in these two countries never came anywhere near taking power. Similar is the case of the US too, which experienced the great crash of 1929 and slipped into the Great Depression. The divergence between Italy and Germany on one hand and France and Britain on the other is explained not so much by the degree of economic crisis as by the very different political conditions.
In the first group of countries, fascists came to power taking advantage of intense socio-economic crisis and political instability. In Italy, five governments were formed under various coalitions between 1919 and 1922. In Germany too, frequent changes in government was the norm from day one of the Weimer Republic: between 1919 and 1932 the country saw as many as fourteen chancellors. In both countries, the overbearing authority of the King/Reich president in appointing and dismissing heads of government as well as in sanctioning/rejecting decrees and legislations only added to the political chaos and thoroughly undermined the authority of the parliament. In fact parliamentary democracy as the best and most stable (because camouflaged) form of bourgeois rule was overthrown and substituted by the fascist state before it could consolidate itself and secure the support of broad sections of the working people and the ruling classes. In Germany for instance, the broad consensus among the ruling elite was to overthrow the 'Weimer nuisance' (as they perceived it) and revert to the monarchial form of their rule. By contrast, the parliamentary system in France and Britain was already firmly established, leaving very limited political space for fascists to grow steadily and attain power.
The overall experience of 19th-century fascism thus refutes the economic deterministic, pseudo-Marxist notion that views fascism simply as a product of severe economic crisis.[1] As our case study on Nazism demonstrates, political factors can very well play an even more important role in the advent of fascism. Kurt Gossweiler puts this cogently at the end of his aforementioned article Economy and Politics in the Destruction of the Weimer Republic:
"In sum, the motives of the ruling class for the destruction of the Weimer Republic and the establishment of the fascist dictatorship were, in the final analysis, economically substantiated but by no means economically determined. The decision to exclude the subjugated classes from a share in state power and concentrate this very state power in the hands of the executive, in effect handing over power to the fascists, was a political decision – indeed, an expression of the primacy of politics."
The primacy of politics also explains why the process and pace of growth as well as the peculiar forms and features of fascism vary so widely across countries and historical periods. Mussolini rose to power much earlier and more rapidly than Hitler not because economic disruption was more severe in Italy than in Germany, nor because the IL Duce was more capable or ruthless than the Fuhrer. He achieved easy and quick success because (a) the political vacuum was more profound in his country: after all, Italy did not even have anything like the Weimer Republic and (b) the King himself handed over power to Mussolini on a platter even when he had no popular mandate, while president Hindenburg refused to oblige Hitler even after the Nazis became the largest political party in Parliament following the Reichstag elections of end July 1932.
The trajectory of fascism in Spain was altogether different. Gramsci in his 1921 article On Fascism gives us the following picture of Spain circa 1916:
"The revolutionary movement surged forward; the unions organised almost the entirety of the industrial masses; strikes, lockouts, states of emergency, the dissolution of Chambers of Labour and peasant associations, massacres, street shootings, became the everyday stuff of political life. Anti-Bolshevik fasces were formed. Initially, as in Italy, they were made up of military personnel, taken from the officers' clubs (juntas), but they swiftly enlarged their base until in Barcelona, for example, they had recruited 40,000 armed men. They followed the same tactics as the fascists in Italy: attacks on trade union leaders, violent opposition to strikes, terrorism against the masses; opposition to all forms of organisation, help for the regular police in repressive activity and arrests, help for blacklegs in agitations involving strikes or lockouts. For the past three years Spain has floundered in this crisis: public freedom is suspended every fortnight, personal freedom has become a myth, the workers' unions to a great extent function clandestinely, the mass of workers is hungry and angry, the great mass of the people has been reduced to indescribable conditions of savagery and barbarism."
Even in such a situation, the fascist groups such as the Falange had very little mass suppport and no presence in the Parliament; in fact there was no question of their coming to power on their own in the face of the brave resistance put up by the Left. In the electoral arena too, the Popular Front -- a socialist-communist coalition which also included some other progressive forces -- defeated the right-wing coalition called National Front (the fascists did not join it but supported its policies) in 1936. When the PF government went ahead with progressive economic and political reforms, there was a military revolt led by General Francisco Franco. Members of the Falange joined the revolt and allowed themselves to be subsumed first into the Falange Española Tradicionalista – a new conglomeration of right wing forces cobbled up by the General -- and, following victory in the civil war, into the military dictatorship of Franco.
In the process the fascists gave up much of their original credo. Franco on his part did share certain fascist attributes such as extreme right-wing nationalism, communist--bashing, assault on all democratic forces, remorseless torture and genocide including in concentration camps and he did join forces with Mussolini and Hitler before and during World War II while feigning neutrality. But he did not build up, or come to power on the strength of, a fascist movement. Fascism’s ability to mobilise one section of society against another, to fan up frenzied mass violence and legitimize state repression – the unique features that set it apart from other forms of authoritarianism – was no part of his political arsenal.
When the dictatorial regime ended with his death in 1975, political parties were legalized (some relaxation had started earlier), elections were held in June 1977 and the country slowly limped back to normal parliamentary democracy. The rise and fall of fascism in Spain was thus a different story altogether, even though socio-economic conditions were largely similar to those in Italy and Germany.
Fascism of Our Times: Trump’s America
Alongside the unprecedented waves of protest[2] that greeted the election of Donald Trump as the President of America, an animated discussion flooded the print and electronic media: did this obnoxious right-wing politician represent the advent of fascism in the US?
On one side of the argumentative discourse[3], which continues unabated to this day, are those who hold that characterisation of Trump as a fascist is theoretically untenable because some of the essential attributes of fascism or fascist rule are absent here. For them, ‘right-wing populist demagogue’ works fine as a description of the incumbent president. A growing number of commentators and activists, however, don't agree. They argue that it is the nature or function of the government, not the form, that counts. Hence the “concept of functional fascism: under the Trumpite Republicans, a 21st century form of fascism is being developed functionally” (Steven Jonas in 21st Century Fascism: Trump Style – Part I (OpEdNews, 1 April, 2018) without recourse to abolition of parliament and Hitler/Mussolini-type dictatorship.
Defining Features
Commentators who see the Trump Administration as a fascist one seem to base themselves on this approach. Early on, when Trump was campaigning to be nominated as the official candidate of the Republican Party, Andrew J. Wood in The Rise of Fascism in the United States came up with an “abbreviated list of groups or ideas attacked, labeled, and stereotyped by Trumpism”:
“Women, Islam, Immigrants, Black Lives Matter, The Media (except for those few that laud—or employ—Trump himself), Welfare recipients and the poor more broadly, China [and certain other countries], any and all political and ideological opponents, the “establishment,” (except, it seems, the established military, police forces, prison system, institutions of capital, and so on)”.
Other commentators drew attention to several conspicuous symptoms of a fascist regime: the President’s ugly war on the media and the intelligentsia; his demagoguery, threats to imprison Hillary Clinton, scathing personal attacks on judges and courts that make decisions which he does not like; appointment of Federal Court judges known for their right-wing views; plans to repatriate millions of migrants; “the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism” emanating from the President and his cabal (Henry A. Giroux in The Ghost of Fascism in The Age of Trump, Truthdig, 15 February 2018); and so on.
America today stands witness to the fact that fascist ideas and practices are a poison that inevitably spreads beyond the organised fascist groups or parties and infects large segments of civil society. In our country we have seen how the installation of the Modi government brought in its trail a spike in mob lynching and other hate crimes against Dalits and Muslims all over India and also against African students and even people from India's North East in the national capital. The Trump Presidency has similarly emboldened white supremacist forces and led to a manifold increase in sporadic racist attacks on black people and immigrants, even as fascist groups scale up their organised violence. There is hardly any effort to stem the tide: even after the terror unleashed by neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in August 2017, the President refused to unequivocally denounce the terrorists or take action against responsible officials. At the same time, concerted hate campaigns on the social media are rapidly rising. A recent study by George Washington University shows that over the last five years white nationalist and neo-fascist movements in the US have grown by 600% on Twitter, outperforming Isis, exactly as the Sanghi troll army in our country is wreaking havoc on social media. The mainstream media is also not free from such racist and misogynist attacks. As Youssef El-Gingihy wrote in The Age of Trump And 21st Century Fascism:
“The representation of Muslims and refugees in mainstream discourse as variously stray dogs, swarms and cockroaches is disturbing. This dehumanisation has very dangerous historical precedents[4] in that it legitimises the perpetration of violence against the other. The moment that one denotes others as non-human then it follows that they can be treated as such.” (The Independent Online, 5 March, 2017)
Another core component of fascism, as we have seen in the case of Hitler Germany, is populist demagoguery. Right from day one of his campaign, Trump has been high on it. In some cases he really means it – a good example would be his reactionary, isolationist central slogan "America First" and its derivative "Buy American – Hire American". In many other cases, however, nobody takes his populist soundbites very seriously. To cite just one among many available examples, soon after assuming office – on 3 January 2017 to be precise – he tweeted, specifically mentioning general Motors by name, "Make in US or pay a big border tax!" This was of course not followed up with any appropriate executive order but the tweet certainly made his followers happy.
So we see in the world's most powerful state unmistakable signs of the rise of a fascist regime, having as its foundation the modern surveillance state with more insidious means of control and repression than the gestapo and the jackboots, where the Guantanamo Bay[5] and the expanding network of private prisons filled with immigrants and people of colour take the place of concentration camps even as Islamophobia, xenophobia and white supremacy substitute for anti-Semitism, where and a symbiotic blend of official demagoguery with racist terror unleashed by state and non-state actors increasingly emerge as defining features of Trump’s America.
Genesis and Trajectory
In The Origins of American Fascism Michael Joseph Roberto (Monthly Review Online, Volume 69, Issue 02, June 2017) reflects upon a unique feature of fascism in the US as distinct from fascism in Italy and Germany. We reproduce here a small part of his observation:
“As the economic crisis worsened in 1931–32, the Nazis were positioned for a surge in the polls from their lower-middle class, Protestant base. Whatever reservations they had about Hitler’s ultra-nationalist rhetoric, Germany’s ruling classes eventually decided that he was their only hope against the threat of political collapse and socialist revolution. When the general crisis became a crisis of class rule in January 1933, capitalists were compelled to line up, step by step, with Hitler.
“In the U.S. capitalist epicenter, the driving force of fascism came from the capitalist class itself, intent on extending and protecting the wealth and power it had gained during the boom years of the 1920s. In Germany, by contrast, fascism found its natural base in a disaffected lower middle class moved by rising nationalist anger over the punitive accords of Versailles. In Germany, terrorist ultra-nationalism brought Hitler and his party to power. In the United States, capitalists with the assistance of the State smashed labor during the Red Scare and shared common ground with reactionary terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in promoting the doctrine of “100 percent Americanism.”
“It is a peculiarity of the development of American fascism that at the present stage this fascism comes forward principally in the guise of an opposition to fascism, which it accuses of being an ‘un-American’ tendency imported from abroad. In contradistinction to German fascism, which acts under anti-constitutional slogans, American fascism tries to portray itself as the custodian of the Constitution and ‘American Democracy’. It does not yet represent a directly menacing force. But if it succeeds in penetrating to the wide masses who have become disillusioned with the old bourgeois parties it may become a serious menace in the near future.”
Georgi Dimitrov, Political Report to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern (July-August 1935)
El-Gingihy continues,
“Already in the 1930s, the most astute American observers traced fascism’s origins to big business and financial capital. … Perhaps the most intriguing of these forgotten works is Carmen Haider’s Do We Want Fascism? (New York: John Day, 1934). A Columbia-educated historian, Haider traveled to Italy in the 1920s to study the structure of Mussolini’s corporatist state, documenting her findings in one of the earliest academic studies of European fascism. On returning to the United States, she conducted a similarly rigorous investigation of the nascent fascist movement in her own country. In Do We Want Fascism? she argued that the rise of American fascism would not require a distinct party, as in Italy and Germany. Rather, fascism could penetrate the two-party system and lead to a fascist state, which Haider defined as ‘a dictatorial form of government exercised in the interests of capitalists.’”
However, for this to actually happen, certain conditions were necessary. While fascist/semi-fascist and kindred groups existed in the fringes of US society since – or even before – the 1930s, in the period following WW II the socio-economic and political conditions[6] conducive to the growth of fascism on a broader scale have been maturing steadily, especially since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s. With the passage of time the ever-growing inequality of wealth and income, the continuing erosion in real income and employment opportunities, decades of costly privatisation in education and health care that pushed ordinary Americans under mountains of debt, the menace of terrorism, and more recently, the home mortgage foreclosures[7] that rendered thousands homeless overnight coupled with the financial crisis that the greedy financial elite brought upon the country – all these added up to create a tremendous overload of frustration, anger, sense of deprivation and insecurity. Particularly since 9/11, this atmosphere was utilized by both the ruling parties to chisel out a surveillance state or national security state and now we have the Trump Presidency as a natural culmination of the process. As Youssef El-Gingihy points out,
“Fascism is generally preceded by the decay of democracy and the rule of law. In other words, it does not happen overnight. Post 9/11, the war on terror brought about the erosion of civil liberties with indefinite detention, torture, the extraordinary rendition programme with a global network of “black-site” prisons into which enemy combatants were disappeared, blanket NSA surveillance and extra-judicial bugsplat[8] drone assassination of targets including US citizens…. Such powers, disproportionate to the threat of terrorism, inevitably begs the question: who are the real enemies of the state? Is this apparatus increasingly going to be deployed against citizens by authoritarian states? A customary mistake has been to focus on the individual figurehead of Trump when it is the national security state that has evolved into a proto-fascist entity. As Edward Snowden presciently warned, all it will now take is for a leader to come in and flick the switch into a totalitarian nightmare. The Trump victory may well herald this transition.” (ibid)
In his election campaign Trump took great pains to deflect the blame for the 2007-08 crash from the guilty financial elite on to those at the bottom – the immigrants and non-whites – and his political opponents; once in office, he adopted the most inhuman measures, as we saw in the case of Mexican immigrants. In justifying his conduct, the US President stooped so low as to say that Mexico was deliberately sending murderers and rapists into the US. As for his other major plank of right-wing populism – Muslim-bashing – the conflation of Muslims and terror has been the most convenient tool for whipping up Islamophobia since long, but Trump carried it to new heights with his travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries[9]. It is hardly surprising that, as a Pew Research Center analysis points out, by November 2017 anti-Muslim assaults surpassed by far the post-9/11 levels.
But one should take into consideration another dimension of the whole development. In addition to the sense of deprivation and insecurity, there was also a great popular urge for change. This yearning expressed itself in mammoth mobilisations against capitalist globalization in general and WTO/World Economic Forum in particular, and more recently in the powerful occupy movement; but none of these ushered in any perceptible positive change. It was in this backdrop that the Republican Party nominee for the 2015 presidential election, who combined in himself the business acumen of a millionaire real estate developer and the mass communication skills of a reality TV star, won the race "by consolidating a 'whitelash' – white supremacist assertion amongst the prosperous elite – while channeling the anger and insecurity felt by America's unemployed white working class in a racist and xenophobic direction.”[10]
Thus it was that a distinct change – reactionary, regressive, but appealing to many in its aggressive nationalism – took place in the style or method of governance and top administrative personnel, but without any alteration in the state form.
Can the present dispensation carry on without a systemic/constitutional change – without recourse to a formal fascist takeover of the state? Michael Joseph Roberto poses this question in a particular way:
“The question now is whether Trump and his circle of ultra-nationalist fanatics, Wall Street barons, generals, and assorted political hacks can engineer an American-style Gleichschaltung[11], “bringing into line” the rest of the executive, the judiciary, the military, and the media behind Trump’s agenda “To Make America Great Again.”
And his answer is:
“…On the basis of its particular development in the United States, the American Gleichschaltung seems more likely to be a collaboration than a dictatorship—a collective undertaking by those who administer Republican control at all levels of government. Though many of the leading figures of financial capital backed Hillary Clinton, these same members of the 1 percent now stand to benefit from the new administration’s attacks on all forms of economic regulation and intervention …” (ibid).
This, of course, is but one of many possibilities, what with the spurt in various forms of populist authoritarianism – not just in America but in all parts of the world -- as the emerging new normal in this era of decaying capitalism. There are other prospects too, including that of mass disillusionment setting in sooner rather than later, and sounding the death knell of the increasingly draconian rule. It is important to note, as the CPI (ML) Resolution referred above points out, “Trump's ascendance has galvanised progressive forces into anti-fascist unity and resistance. The Black Lives Matter movement, that began during Obama's second term, taking on the killings of Black men and assaults on Black people by police, has emerged as a mainstay of the resistance. Feminists, Latino workers, Black people have joined hands in massive mobilisations right from the first day of Trump's Presidency.” And this trend was reflected in results of the recent midterm elections too, when a good number of women, African-Americans, Native Americans, Muslims and LGBT minority candidates from both the Democratic and the Republican parties – some of them avowed socialists – became elected to the Congress.
Barbarism or Socialism?
The first big wave of fascism appeared nearly 100 years ago when in the wake of the first imperialist World War the old economic model of laissez-faire was facing a deep structural crisis and crying out for a thorough structural solution. Three models of reform or transformation then appeared on the global horizon. The first was the most radical and comprehensive: the socialist revolution accomplished in Russia. The second offered a partial yet substantial reform: the Keynesian breakthrough in bourgeois economic theory, the New Deal in the US, and the welfare state policy in post-war Europe. While the first was envisioned and executed by the revolutionary proletariat and the second by the most farsighted and in that sense historically progressive sections of the bourgeoisie, the third one – fascism – was initially dished out by sections of the petty bourgeoisie and very soon adopted by the most powerful, racist/national chauvinist and expansionist sections of finance capital.
All three models have since been rolled back, and neoliberalism has emerged as the dominant global order. Today that order, once hailed as heralding the end of history, is in a deep crisis that has engulfed everything from the economy to the environment, bringing human civilization to another historic crossroads: forward to socialism, or backward to barbarism, one of the modern forms of which is fascism.
Yes, with the middle path of non-neoliberal, pro-people, progressive regimes in Latin America failing to deliver on a sustainable basis – much like the short-lived New Deal or welfare state models of the past century – these two are the only real options today.
Significantly, in both US and UK the growth of right-wing populism have had its opposite in the shape of left currents – once represented by Bernie Sanders in US and persistently by Jeremy Corbin[12] in UK – which rejected the new liberal credo and thus succeeded in drawing considerable mass support, especially from the youth. This trend has been visible elsewhere too.
The bottom line: the crisis of and popular backlash against the neoliberal order marked by growing inequality have created new historic opportunities for both the radical left and the radical right. This reconfirms a cardinal fact of history. The idea of socialism, and the Left in the broader sense as its protagonist, is the only political force that can – and must – mobilise all left, democratic and progressive people in the struggles to resist and defeat the new breed of fascist and authoritarian populist forces. In the process, the ‘Age of Anger’ will, sooner or later but most certainly, develop into a qualitatively new ‘Age of Revolution’.
Notes:
1. This mechanistic approach even led a section of India Marxists to assert that since there is no acute economic crisis in India today, the Modi dispensation cannot be seen as fascist!
2. In addition to street demonstrations, various other forms of protest and sensitization were also witnessed. Thus the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan staged the Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in October 2017. Notably, Brecht wrote this “parable play” (as he subtitled it) on his way to America and was set in the American context.
3. The present debate is essentially an updated version of the one that emerged in the 1930s. Intervening in the debate, A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens argued that “to search for national resemblances based on what some writers called a “fascist minimum” was a mistake. “The national peculiarities of each country, its specific economic and social position, its historical traditions,” they wrote, “all play a part in shaping the form that fascist movements and fascism take.” (The Peril of Fascism, (International Publishers, New York, 1938)) It will be interesting to note that this view was at one with Dimitrov's detailed exposition, made three years ago, on the multiplicity of forms and features of fascism.
4. The author alludes to the Nazi practice of calling Jews “vermin”, “a dangerous bacillus” etc. for provoking and justifying hate assaults on them.
5. This notorious military detention camp-cum-torture chamber, established by President George W. Bush in 2002 was sought to be closed down by President Obama, but he failed in the face of bipartisan opposition in the Congress. One of the first things Trump did as president was to sign an executive order to keep it open indefinitely.
6. In tracing the still incomplete evolution of the American model of 21st century fascism, one must also factor in the roles played by certain essential elements of post-war US history which got deeply embedded in the ruling American ideology, such as McCarthyism, rabid militarism (cold, hot and proxy wars and the military-industrial complex), the penchant for full- spectrum global domination, both encouraging and fighting terrorism to serve American geo-political goals.
7. As a strategy to counter economic slump, Americans were goaded into “sub-prime” home loans -- loans provided on very easy terms with little mortgage. When crisis struck in 2007-08, many distressed homeowners failed to pay their dues on time and lost their homes as premature settlement of their loans.
8. This term, borrowed from a computer game of the same name, is used by US authorities when humans are murdered by drone missiles. Suspected or alleged terrorists are likened to bugs that must be swatted on sight, without any judicial process. This is an Obama-era legacy carried ahead by the present dispensation, even in sovereign states like Pakistan.
9. In a sharply divided (5-4) judgment the Federal Supreme court rejected the claim of anti-Muslim bias and upheld the ban in late June 2018. Crucial to this outcome was the stance taken by Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch, who got his seat last year after Republican Senators blocked Obama nominee Merrick Garland for ten months.
10. Resolution on International Situation adopted at the Tenth Congress of CPI (ML) Liberation (March 2018).
11. Literally, coordination or consolidation, by which Nazis meant totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society.
12. In the face of the Corbyn wave, the fascist UKIP’s vote share dropped sharply from 12.6% in the 2015 general election (which represented a rise of 9.5% compared to 2010) to 1.8% in 2017.