US: The Dawn of the Donald and Fascistic Whitelash

Fascism: I sometimes fear.

"I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you...

It doesn't walk in saying,
"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution."

Michael Rosen




One of the weakest aspects of the anti-fascist struggle of our Parties is that they react inadequately and too slowly to the demagogy of fascism, and to this day continue to neglect the problems of the struggle against fascist ideology.

Many comrades did not believe that so reactionary a brand of bourgeois ideology as the ideology of fascism, which in its stupidity frequently reaches the point of lunacy, would be able to gain any mass influence. 

This was a serious mistake.

The putrefaction of capitalism penetrates to the innermost core of its ideology and culture, while the desperate situation of wide masses of the people renders certain sections of them susceptible to infection from the ideological refuse of this putrefaction.

Under no circumstances must we underrate fascism's power of ideological infection. On the contrary, we for our part must develop an extensive ideological struggle based on clear, popular arguments and a correct, well thought out approach to the peculiarities of the national psychology of the masses of the people.

Georgi Dimitrov



SEE ALSO:  http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/robert-paxton-professor-emeritus-of.html


ROBERT PAXTON ON FASCISM

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional
solutions;
• the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior
to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination
of the individual to it;
• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies
any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies,
both internal and external;
• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent
if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating
in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating
the group’s historical destiny;
• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal
reason;
• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are
devoted to the group’s success;
• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without
restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being
decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a
Darwinian struggle.