The Distractions: Global Fascism is a Fact

            by John Kinsella

In attempting to dilute the impact of the crypto-fascists of the now on community (the Australian Broadcasting Commission moves further and further right with each government incision), those who would label the nationalistic and bigoted agendas of rightwing groups around the world as ‘lukewarm’ versions (if versions at all) of earlier fascisms are actually mediating grounds for fascist behaviours.

Further, to say ‘fascism’ is really only a term of ‘abuse’ when used regarding the now is to smokescreen the issues: as if it’s a tit-for-tat. I’m afraid that it’s real, and has very specific co-ordinates rooted in an admiration for aspects of historical fascism and the essential fulcrums of racism and notions of national superiority and exclusiveness. 

Origins and histories of terms are paths to understanding their meaning, but the real-time applications of terms matter inherently. The politics of race and religious hate, the attempts of imperialist and ‘post’-imperialist nations and their supporters to separate immigration to ‘their shores’ from their own invasive activities (past and present) that led to such movements and displacements in the first place, are part of the resurfacing of fascism as much more than just a term of ‘abuse’ by those opposed to rhetoric and actions of the rightwing politicians and their ‘parties’.

There is a rising global fascism in which race and religious hatred become an international commodity in the wall-building of the 'local', and a language-in-common in creating an exclusive economy of shared values; denying this strongly suggests a sympathy with at least some of the likely outcomes of exclusion. I have come across this again and again with Brexit — nominally left-wing individuals with sympathies for Little Englands as a cultural normative which gradually reifies within their selective application of left values (rights of their workers, their environment, their socialism).

To say the signs of fascism might only be evidenced in religious and immigration issues but be less evidenced in other aspects of daily (governmental and social) life of, say, Europe, is a gross dereliction of observation: for those who aren’t of the right, or who aren’t sympathetic to the right, or who aren’t benefiting from policies of the right while feigning left-wingism, it is appallingly obvious that European ‘democracies’ are using the military and the police to enforce their belief systems. One doesn’t get to vote to dissolve militaristic nation states to be replaced by community consensus!

The French nuclear power network, the tyranny of nuclear weapons, the trashing of the environment, are also expressions of militarised nationalisms, and when linked with anti-immigration and a bigoted religious programme (even in so-called secular states), it is the machinery of fascism we are dealing with, whoever is in power.

And when the far-right gets hold of this machinery, the consequences are obvious. No fascism? So the support of Farage and Le Pen and Trump and Putin by overt neo-Nazi groups is incidental? Of Hanson in Australia (who admires Putin's leadership 'strength')? Incidental? No — fascism didn’t vanish after the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler and their acolytes; rather it took on different forms, different forms that allow the apologists of the Western state and its fascist underpinnings to thrive, to dominate, to control.

We might not have reached a 1939 scenario quite yet, but we are in the early 1930s again and moving inexorably again towards Global Fascism on an horrific and disastrous scale.

When we see the bigotries of Australia’s One Nation party becoming part of regular political discourse — the signs promoting candidates (alongside their leader Pauline Hanson), well-known for their far-right views, a common sight at the moment on rural and suburban roadsides, one becomes aware that we ARE in the grip of a fascism that is normative now, that has shifted the discussion to excuse itself as speaking for the people as a whole.

And it’s when the people as a whole shift further and further right because this is seen as ‘the way things are’, and their ‘intellectuals’, ‘scholars’, ‘writers’, and media commentators (and others), try to change the language of the discourse to make the fascism of Hitler seem a ridiculous comparison, that we have real problems. The comparisons on many ‘finer points’ and a few blunt points are there to be made.

Recognising this, rather than denying it and playing pseudo-historical games with terminologies, is part of a process of preventing the worst. Fascism changes according to the times, but in the end, it is time and all it contains that the fascists seek to control. They reach back right into the DNA — they have been present long before official origins, and operate outside an historian’s conservative (because you are, you are!) conceptual containment policies.