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Derek (1:44)

Hello everybody. This is Conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. That is your daily news feed at this point. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian on Blue sky and still on Twitter and the podcast itself is on Instagram and threads. And please support our Patreon now. Today I've got a public service educational resource type brief for you called Anti Fascist Woodshed, in which I'll be reviewing six books that define fascist eras and recount how they have been opposed. This is a kind of Here we Are now what episode that hopefully interrupts the doom scroll with the sobriety of some practical considerations. So I'll be looking at, in order, Timothy Snyder's on Tyranny from 2017, Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism from 2004, Paul Mason's how to Fight Fascism 2018, Mark Bray's The Antifascist Handbook from 2017, Curzio Malaparte's Technique de Coup d'Etat from 1931, and then also 40 Ways to Fight Street Legal Tactics for Community Activists by Spencer Sunshine published in 2021. Now these books range from popular nonfiction to academic history to pragmatic field guide style, and their politics range from liberal to anarchist. And here's a mea culpa off the top. The positionality is not diverse here, at least not yet. I don't have feminist or non white writers on this list, and that's because I'm still reading them and I wanted to get this episode out earlier rather than later. But I will return with another of these next month, I think, looking at books like Joyful Militancy by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Let this Radicalize youe by Kelly Hayes and Mariam Kabah, and Being Numerous by Natasha Leonard. Now on this politics and positionality note, I'm not going to pretend I approach this topic with the view from nowhere. There are two basic political approaches to this literature. Broadly, perhaps crudely put. The defenders of liberalism view fascism as an aberration of human nature that can be fought against through the reassertion of institutions and a return to rational and regulated capitalism. This is a focus on manners for the most part, but leftists view fascism as an inevitable acceleration of the capitalist and colonial machine that can't be avoided or repaired without a structural reorganization of wealth and resources. Now I'm firmly in the latter group. I won't apologize for that. I don't think this is a moment to pine for the Obama era or any fiction of American exceptionalism. And further related to the mandate of this podcast, I believe that the encouragement to believe in a wholesome and functioning America under capitalism inevitably leads to disillusionment and cynicism and therefore the proliferation of conspiracy theories. I also resonate strongly with the observation of Aime Cesaire. He's the Martiniquet poet, author and politician who was a key figure in the Negritude movement in Francophone literature. In his 1950 discourse on colonialism, he concluded that, quote, Europe is indefensible and what he was doing was dissing the commentariat class who positioned the Holocaust and the rise of fascism as an unfortunate spiral into madness that betrayed the glory of the Enlightenment. Cesaire was like, nah, it's not that. And after quoting Cesaire, anti fascist historian Mark Bray, whose book is in today's pile, writes that quote, quote, the only long term solution to the fascist menace is to undermine its pillars of strength in society grounded not only in white supremacy, but also in ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, nationalism, transphobia, class rule and many others. This long term goal points to the tensions that exist in defining anti fascism, because at a certain point, destroying fascism is really about promoting a revolutionary socialist alternative, in my opinion, one that has anti authoritarian and non hierarchical qualities to a world of crisis, poverty, famine and war that breeds fascist reaction. So that's Mark Bray. So we'll get to him. So these are my biases. But all that said, I also grapple honestly with Paul Mason's view. I'm looking at his book today too, that in tough times, leftists and centrists really should think hard about compromise and collaboration. And I think that we do that here on Conspirituality Podcast. It's hard work. It's not always clear how much friction an alliance will benefit or suffer from, but there's also deep value in working with what you have, as you have to do in, let's say, a family. That said, let me start with my most critical review. This is of Timothy Snyder's on 20 Lessons from the 20th Century. And hopefully this will model the best of uneasy alliance making. Okay, so the pros. This is a short pamphlet. It's 78 pages and I think it'll get you warmed up into thinking about an unfamiliar political reality. It's kind of like calisthenics. I feel like it has some good psychosocial tips. Do not obey in advance is the one that everybody remembers from about a thousand Facebook posts. But I'll come back to that one. He says, you know, make eye contact and small talk with your neighbors to foster community. Use corporeal politics, as in gather publicly, but also keep your private life private and develop courage. All great points, and all very sensible too, including, you know, a general feeling of you must defend institutions that you shouldn't fold on your professional ethics, you know, as in if the executive order says don't treat trans children with gender affirming care, but you know that it's not yet a law, you know what to do. Okay, so some good points there. Here are the cons involved in Snyder's book from my point of view. And I'll just say, you know, right off the top that there's a reason that this pamphlet is really popular. It's simple. And unfortunately that means it's simple to the point of simplistic, it's aphoristic, it's purpose built for social media. And I would say Rachel Maddow type OP eds. And as a rule of thumb, I'd also say that the measure of how popular an analysis is on resistance liberal Facebook is also a measure of how thin and easy its message is and how little it will actually challenge the assumptions of the Democrat mainstream. Now, since 2017 Snyder has been a favorite commentator on big networks like msnbc, and I would say this is another sign of how hemmed in his analysis might be. But my main hesitation with Snyder comes from reading the academic criticism of his main work, such as the book Bloodlands from 2010, in which he equates Stalin era mass death with from political murders and resource mismanagement with Nazi genocide, which he reduced to the notion of ecological panic. It was actually much more than that. Now all of this is in the persuasive but contested style of Hannah Arendt, with the focus being on totalitarianism as such, as opposed to the ideas and mechanics of fascism versus State communism. And this commits Snyder to a highbrow brand of horseshoe theory. Hitler and Stalin are the same and their regimes were equally horrible. Twinned totalitarianisms is his phrase, and this has been a standard liberal trope for 75 years, and along with red scare rhetoric on the far right, it's been effective at silencing the richness of leftist philosophy and of leftist opposition to Stalin and other oppressive regimes. And sure enough, his book does not contain the word capitalism at all, which is incredible. Here's a key sentence that betrays some of these Both fascism and communism were responses to globalization, to the real and perceived inequalities it created, and the apparent helplessness of the democracies in addressing them. Now globalization as a term is doing a ton of laundering work replacing capitalist exploitation and colonial abuse. I also love perceived inequalities and the implication that Russia had a functioning democracy in 1917. And if keywords mean anything to you, here are some more you will not find in this Racism, patriarchy, sexism, and colonialism. Now, not every book has to be about everything, but come on, these seem to be basic themes you might want to shout out from your office at Yale. And without these broader contexts, there is a reduction to psychology in this book that might be detectable in that first lesson. Don't obey in advance. This is useful advice if ICE comes to your door without the proper court orders. But as a psychological take, if you have not been questioning the fundamental logic and morality of capitalism in your daily life so far, I'm sorry to say you might already be in a state of obeying in advance. Now does this inside baseball matter if it helps shake people awake from complacency? No. But I will say that it probably won't get you beyond a warm up stage. And if you stay there, I don't think you'll figure out who has actionable theories and analyses that will take you beyond the present crisis. So forgive me here for saying it, but I don't think there's a lot of incentive for liberal pundits to really go beyond micromanaging present crises and their psychological implications with more than suggestions for self soothing. Because commenting in favor of a more just capitalism keeps a certain amount of drama going, and there are mainstream liberal rewards for being the good guy, but not so much for being the cranky guy who says let's look in the mirror here. So next book Paxton's the Anatomy of fascism from 2004 Robert Paxton isn't so much of a look in the mirror guy either, but he is a solid distiller and sorter of fascist history. This book is longer. It's more difficult than Snyder's book, but it's absolutely worth the effort in my opinion. Paxton is 93 years old. He's been doing this for a long time, and in Anatomy of Fascism he's able to examine more than a century of fascist movements. And he's really good at showing how every emergence of fascism is slightly different, and that we shouldn't be distracted by aesthetics or whether the ideologies line up perfectly. Maga doesn't goose step, and as much as RFK Jr would want everyone to look like extras in Leni Riefenstahl music videos, these are not defining features of fascism per se. Fascism is really about behavior, and Paxton points out that only a few fascist movements are successful, often generally on organization and political opportunity and tactics. His opinion in our time is important, I think, because with all of his scholarship on board, he was at first skeptical about whether the Trump era really fit the profile of the fascist movements that provoked the Second World war. But after Trump's mob attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Paxton basically said, yeah, this is a fascist movement now. He's also white and male like Snyder, and he's old enough to expect blind spots. His focus on racism and politics in places like the Global south is pretty limited. He doesn't have a strong focus on how fascism overlaps with patriarchy or misogyny. But check this out for definitional concision. Paxton says that fascism this is a definition that I read out into the record on last Thursday's episode. I'm Just going to repeat it here because it's so good. He says that fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity in which a mass based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites abandons democratic liberties and pursues, with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Now the whole book just unpacks these very dense and precise phrases. His focus is on social behavior and that encourages readers to look broadly, not necessarily psychologically. But he also examines the fragility of fascist obsessions and why that makes them so volatile. He roots these movements in a raw anxiety over loss and humiliation and the urgent need to restore an imperiled glory, but that's shared amongst the group. Now he does have an ambivalent take on the relationship between capitalism and fascism by pointing out that fascism will often pay lip service to anti capitalist sentiments before it attains power, but then it will cozy up to the capitalist elite as things get real. My final points of appreciation here are that Paxton leans nicely into the fact that liberals and centrists often tolerate fascists taking control because that's easier than accommodating actual leftist reforms. Also, he pushes back strongly against the psychologization of fascism, which in my view. Now this isn't his point, it's mine. It often serves the liberal agenda of pretending that fascism is somehow mainly a fever dream and an aberration. But he's really firm on it being dangerous to conclude that fascism is a form of, you know, mental disturbance or delusion, because that provides an alibi for the so called normal fascists, the leaders and militants who were once ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Also, he points out the obvious, that no one had real access to Hitler except Dr. Morell, and no one really knows what's going on in Trump's head, do they? And Paxton points out that the notion that fascists are repressed sex freaks really doesn't track. Unless you want to pretend that sexuality in England or France was somehow more healthy in 1930. Let's turn now to Paul Mason's how to stop fascism from 2021. This is a rich, populist and muscular read from an eclectic northern English journalist activist with a broad range of experiences in anti fascist organizing and a keen sense of the value of collaboration and compromise, as I noted at the top. Now this guy's done everything from street defense against white supremacist boneheads to currently gunning for a Labor seat with a bout of what might be pragmatic or necessary deference paid to Keir Starmer, which I have some questions about. But overall, Mason does a great job in summarizing the dialectic of fascist and anti fascist history well beyond where Paxton leaves off. He follows strange new iterations of fascist grievance and impulse into the dank online world and then into the mainstream that we're suffering today. And as an old street fighter, he's particularly good at detailing how both real and symbolic violence is essential to the atmosphere of fear and intimidation in which the liberal mindset struggles to respond. Now, he's really persuasive on this point, which some academic historians are mixed on, that when liberals and the left fail to compromise and collaborate in the face of rising fascism, the consequences are really bad. The fighting of liberals and socialists in Italy, for example, left the door open to il Duce. And in Germany, the socialists and communists sometimes hated each other more than they hated the fascists, which might sound familiar to you. When liberals and leftists are split, the cops side with the liberals, if not the fascists, outright. Now, all of these failures, Mason says, can lead to depression, despair, doom scrolling. Sound familiar? And then what happens when one movement provides a shining, aggressive and triumphant vision? Mason touts the valuable lessons of liberal left alliances in times gone by, while not idealizing them too much. I think the popular front in 1930s France didn't just represent a political alliance, in Mason's view, but a cultural movement that reclaimed symbols appropriated by the right, like Joan of Arc and the tricolor. The Communists had denounced the tricolor. They refused to sing the Marseillaise, but they got on board and they sang their lungs out in the fight against fascism. And this movement also attracted artists and thinkers, and it fostered a minor boom in literature and film. And it makes me want to ask Mason about Kendrick Lamar's super bowl show, because I think this is the kind of culture making he's actually talking about. It's clearly revolutionary and reclamatory and genius, but it's also pulled off at the very center of the American empire, using all of the levers of capital. With Trump looking on and Samuel L. Jackson playing an ex Black Panther uncle Sam with 16 stars on his vest. The leftist who's unwilling to compromise does not get to rap on that stage and captivate the world with something astonishing. Now, in these alliances, are there internal conflicts? Yes. Do hardcore leftists have to defer and delay? Yes. Do liberals Stab their left flank in the back? Yes. Do alliances fall apart? Yes. But Mason argues that each attempt and failure offers lessons and promises. And in today's world, there are more immediate collaborative opportunities through online culture if we can break through filter bubbles and echo chambers. This brings me to Mark Bray's the anti Fascist Handbook 2017. Now, six books on this list. I think this is my top recommendation because Bray knows current anti fascist action from the inside out. He interviewed over 70 activists from around the world about what they actually do. And he found a transnational movement with intergenerational strategies of collective self defense against far right violence, all of which is aimed at preventing fascists from establishing a pathway to state power. Now, he's really great at summarizing the lessons that anti fascists hold dear. I'm going to do a mixture of quoting and paraphrasing here. One point is that fascist revolutions have never succeeded because fascists have always gained power legally. And this fact alone casts doubt on the liberal formula for opposing fascism, which is based on reasoned debate and police intervention. Because historically, fascism has gained entry to power by convincing the gatekeepers to open the gates. And we have to ask, why do they want to open the gates? Another key point is that fascism merely brought the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world home. These things are connected. You can't separate them out. Next point. Antifascism is both an analysis and a moral appeal. It thinks about where fascism comes from so that it can carefully respond to it and also change its response over time. But it also seeks to build the rhetorical power of the term fascist as a slur. Because Bray says that the moral register of anti fascism understands how fascism itself as a term has become a moral signifier that the vulnerable have utilized to highlight how ferocious their foes are. Next point. It doesn't take that many fascists to make a big fucking mess. In 1919, Mussolini's party had 100 members. And when he ascended to the prime ministerial ship in 1922, only less than 8% of the Italian population belonged to this party. The German workers party had 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting after the First World War. And when he was appointed Chancellor in 1933, only 1.3% of the population belonged to the NSDAP. Okay. Lastly, anti fascist action is kind of like vaccines, because the tragic irony of modern anti fascism is that when it works, the more people question its necessity. What happens when you can't see the fascists that the anti fascists ran out of town? Anti Fascism can be the victim of its own success. Now also, I want to say that Bray is just a pretty amazing scholar and frontman for this material. This book came out in 2017, just a few weeks after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. And that sent him into a firestorm of press coverage in which everyone wanted to smear and gotcha him with all kinds of conspiratorial BS about antifa and ask endless questions about face masks and vandalism. But if you watch interviews from that time, he's completely unflappable. Here he is on a C SPAN call in show. This is actually a moderate call in from a listener. Let's go now to Keith calling from Oldsmar, Florida.