What Is Fascism Good For?

Just a drop in a bucket, now reaching spillover point, of evidence of the long US slide into outright fascism.

I am willing to allow that attempts to interrupt Congressional proceedings may be legally questionable, but the thing to worry about is why he is driven to do this, to adopt a relatively extreme protest against a series of Holocaust-level war crimes by a US ally – now at the stage of actively starving to death two million people – one whose crimes are being encouraged and abetted by the US to the horror of the entire world except for rich, mainly white billionaire Americans (has Heil Hitler! Kanye West reached that status, yet [?] – he surely will) and their progeny in Israel (or is it the other way around).

All this in a climate of fanatic populist hostility – the product of a toxic froth whose source can be identified at the very top echelons of society and their billionaire sponsors – that allows the Trump administration to detain and deport foreigners who also protest the genocide, to detain and harass US citizens who also protest the genocide, to attack and punish US students who also protest the genocide, to defund universities who don’t protest the genocide but apparently don’t do enough to stop their students protesting the genocide, while also deporting unknown numbers of undocumented immigrants, some to garishly outlandish prisons in El Salvador.

Not to mention a host of other signs of rapid deterioration of the liberal-bourgeois structures that had held for immediately preceding generations, roughly up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 whose more fundamental purposes arguably were to greenlight the enrichment of the military-industrial complex through the continuation of the war in Vietnam, set up Israel as a nuclear power and in effect suppress all threats to US global hegemony no matter to the dangers for the survival of the human species.

Elon Musk appears to give fascist salute during Trump inauguration celebration (PBS).

Nothing sums this up better than the grotesquely silly fascist salute from Elon Musk upon celebration of Trump’s January inauguration, the man who as director of DOGE, without any pretence at democracy or procedure, placed himself above the entire formal structure of government in order to impose cuts, and who is the primary beneficiary—perhaps the only beneficiary—of Trump’s withering tariff war with China, in as much as these plug the hole in the dyke to shut off the potential flood of cheap, better-than-Tesla electric cars from China to American citizens.

The host of signs of late-embryonic fascism may be identified in such things as the assault on free speech by the security-surveillance complex through the connivance of social media (like Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s Facebook, that cannot tolerate pro-Palestinian posts but are perfectly OK with Kanye West’s unmelodious rap rant Heil Hitler!); and development of a climate of peak hysteria and delusion among key US allies, including much of Europe.

Does anyone find this just a tad unusual?

For a while, in the first few weeks of the Trump administration there was some discussion, not least by me, as to whether we had transitioned from a three-front Biden war for the perpetuation of US global hegemony towards a restoration of a 19th Century Balance of Power model of competing empires – a satanic version of the BRICS model of multipolarity.

The notion of a transition has been looking more and more opaque as the weeks have sped by with demonstration and refinement of an astonishing anti-democratic transactionalism from the President for his own benefit, the benefit of his family and coterie (of which acceptance of a gift of a Boeing 747-8 from Qatar would be merely one symbol), inhuman disregard for the plight of two million starving Palestinians or for the egregious war crimes of Israeli expansion into the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria – whose illegal jihadi leader Trump finds handsome (!), and where he is proposing to lift sanctions that should never have been levied in the first instance; continuation of the sick nonsense, on behalf of Israel, of Iran being a “nuclear threat,” while ignoring Israel’s 250 nuclear warheads; and the display of idiotic theatrics today in Istanbul as Trump plays to seize both a huge chunk of Ukrainian national wealth through the mineral deal and for a normalization of relations with Russia, with all the business opportunities for US and Russian oligarchs that such a development will surely and eventually entail.

I have had to wonder whether some analysts for whom I normally have the highest regard, and still do, like Jeffrey Sachs and Chas Freeman, were going temporarily soft in the head a little earlier in the week when they waxed optimistic about what they hoped might turn into a sweeping demolition of barriers to peace along all the major outstanding international conflicts of at least this month.

I think I am right to be skeptical and I suggest that the reason for their conciliatory frame of mind is their predominant focus on what is happening internationally to the relative exclusion of what is happening domestically.

What is happening domestically is a drift toward fascism, and I don’t see anything like sufficient pushback from people who would be pushing back if we could sustain a robust optimism in the final triumph of democracy – people like Gavin Newsom for example, governor of California, whose promises of sanctuary cities just evaporate before the aggressive and often unconstitutional tactics of the ICE.

Fascism matters, first of all, for the quality of life and in some cases life itself in the US, and it matters, secondly, for the quality of life and in many cases life itself in the rest of the world. Why?

What is fascism for?

To secure totalitarian control, at first domestically and then internationally. Fascism needs a militarization of society and a militarization of the economy. That is already well advanced.

What does a militarized society need? It needs a motive and a purpose. The ultimate motive is profit. Unbrooked military aggression on behalf of profit needs enemies, especially enemies with assets to be seized. And when the enemies at home are taken care of, fascism needs enemies abroad. Or fear of enemies abroad may be induced for the purposes of establishing absolute control at home.

The purpose of fascism is to prepare society, on behalf of its self-appointed masters, for a totalistic war against imagined or actual enemies at home and imagined and actual enemies abroad, whose capital assets can be redirected into the accounts of the supermenschen, whose appetites will grow every day more obscene to the measure of their needs for self-protection on a burning planet or on some alternative home in or beyond the solar system.

[su_note note_color=”#a5e0ef” radius=”0″]In short, and to be clear, the US is turning to fascism because it considers fascism as the best available means for securing perpetual global hegomony, and this project needs fascism at home so as to enable fascism overseas.[/su_note]

Ukraine

Zelenskiy and the Europeans had issued an ultimatum to Putin last week that Russia should accept their calls for a ceasefire from Monday of this week OR ELSE (sanctions, sanctions, sanctions). Trump added his voice of stern avowal.

Putin responded with an ultimatum of his own to Ukraine that it should engage with Russia in direct negotiations; these would “resume” the aborted peace negotiations of Spring 2022. Trump, seeing the possibility of an unprecedented TV opportunity for self-aggrandizement, said he might join Zelenskiy and Putin in a threesome, and ordered Zelenskiy to the bedroom.

Zelenskiy muttered something about a ceasefire first, but anxious to impress Trump, said he would go but would only talk to Putin, but then named a Ukrainian delegation (mainly blowhards) and went to Ankara, not Istanbul.

Putin said he wouldn’t be there himself, but named a delegation (serious crew, mainly experts).

Will anyone actually meet anyone else? Too soon to know: seems unlikely for today, Thursday; might be possible tomorrow and into the future, assuming anything at all takes traction and I am doubtful.

The main problems are these. First off, serious negotiations require heaps of preparation, and they don’t begin with a meeting of the big guys. The big guys come in at the end, when it is approaching the moment for signatures.

It is absolutely obvious to me, no matter his dance steps, that Zelenskiy has nothing he wants to negotiate short of Russian capitulation. There can be no genuine negotiation for as long as Zelenskiy or anyone else for that matter in his entourage, perhaps even in his regime, is in charge. There is no peace without regime change.

Russia is very obviously prepared to negotiate and has made its negotiation positions crystal clear. BUT neither Ukraine, nor either of Trump’s two competing peace envoys Kellogg and Witkoff, nor Trump himself, can bring themselves to meet Russian demands. Russia is inflexible: its demands [logical and just] will increase rather than diminish, the longer this process takes, and Russia is the military superior against the entire clutch of its adversaries and is winning on the battlefields.

The Europeans do not want a peace settlement. Their maneuvers are not the maneuvers of peace-makers, their maneuvers are those of spoilers – they will do whatever they can to make a farce of peace negotiations, in favour of the continuation of war.

Why?

Because they want the US to stay committed to Ukraine, to the war, to European security (sic) and to the European project, if it might be so called, the project to sustain the idea of an independent and robust Europe as something of weight in global affairs.

They want to be able to afford relatively generous social welfare societies. They want their current elites to continue to be elite. They don’t want the awful depth of their deceptions and incompetence over the proxy war with Russia over Ukraine ever to be exposed. They would be very happy to see Russia fall apart into little chunks that trhe Europeans could eat for supper.

They don’t cherish the thought of having to settle for being a relatively minor, moderately wealthy peninsula at the edge of the vast EurAsian continent. They want to bask in the glory of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century palaces, cathedrals and museums, railway stations and factories-turned-restaurants, gallery portraits and broadwalk statues of their national heroes and in the dying rays of the evening summer sun they want to muse upon how magnificent a heritage this is and how magnificent they are!

Iran

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