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Saudis Goad Obama to Invade Syria |
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Thursday, 11 February 2016 15:13 |
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Lauria writes: "The Russian-backed Syrian Army's encirclement of Aleppo, the battle that could determine the outcome of the five-year-old war, has sparked a Saudi plan with allied Arab nations to hold a war maneuver next month of 150,000 men to prepare for an invasion of Syria."
King Salman greets the president and first lady during a state visit to Saudi Arabia, January 27, 2015. (photo: Pete Souza/The White House)
Saudis Goad Obama to Invade Syria
By Joe Lauria, Consortium News
11 February 16
Syrian rebels, including dominant jihadist elements, torpedoed Geneva peace talks by setting preconditions to come to the table. But the maneuver also renewed pressure on President Obama to commit to a “regime-change” invasion of Syria alongside Saudi and other Sunni armies, as Joe Lauria explains.
 he Russian-backed Syrian Army’s encirclement of Aleppo, the battle that could determine the outcome of the five-year-old war, has sparked a Saudi plan with allied Arab nations to hold a war maneuver next month of 150,000 men to prepare for an invasion of Syria.
Saudi Arabia’s desire to intervene (under the cover of fighting Islamic State terrorists but really aimed at ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) has been welcomed by Washington but dismissed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander and some Western analysts as a ruse.
Iranian Maj. Gen. Ali Jafari told reporters in Tehran, “They claim they will send troops, but I don’t think they will dare do so. They have a classic army and history tells us such armies stand no chance in fighting irregular resistance forces.”
“The Saudi plan to send ground troops into Syria appears to be just a ruse,” wrote analyst Finian Cunningham on RT’s website. “In short, it’s a bluff aimed at pressuring Syria and Russia to accommodate … ceasefire demands.”
But I don’t believe it is a bluff or a ruse and here’s why: It appears instead to be a challenge by the Saudis to get President Barack Obama to commit U.S. ground troops to lead the invasion. The Saudis made it clear they would only intervene as part of a U.S.-led operation.
After meeting Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington on Monday, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said: “The coalition will operate the way it has operated in the past, as an international coalition, even when there is a ground-force contingent in Syria. There would be no international coalition against ISIS [an acronym for the Islamic State] in Syria if the U.S. did not lead this effort.”
Riyadh knows better than anyone that it doesn’t have the military capability to do anything beyond pounding the poorest Arab country into dust, that would be its neighbor Yemen. And it can’t win that war either. But when Saudi Arabia’s ambitions outsize their capabilities, who do they call? The “indispensable nation,” the United States.
President Obama has so far resisted direct U.S. combat involvement in the Syrian civil war despite longstanding Saudi, Israeli and neocon pressures. They clamored for intervention after the chemical weapons fiasco in Ghouta in the summer of 2013. The attack supposedly crossed Obama’s “red line,” (although there is growing evidence that the sarin attack was a “false flag” provocation by the rebels to draw the U.S. military into the war on their side).
Obama came close to acceding to that pressure. On Aug. 30, 2013, he sent out a breast-beating John Kerry, playing the role normally reserved for the president, to threaten war. However, after the British parliament voted against intervention, Obama threw the issue to Congress. And before it acted, he accepted a Russian deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons (though Assad continued to deny any role in the sarin attack).
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh contends Obama backed away because British intelligence informed him it was the rebels and not the Syrian government that carried out the chemical attack.
Even earlier in the conflict, Obama resisted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pressure to set up “a no-fly zone” inside Syria (which would have required the U.S. military destroying Syria’s air defenses and much of its air force, compromising the government’s ability to battle Sunni jihadist groups, including those associated with Al Qaeda).
Obama also defied the Saudis, Israelis and the neocons in pushing through the Iranian nuclear deal over their strident opposition in 2015. But Obama has not shown the same resolve against the neocons and liberal interventionists elsewhere, such as in Libya in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014.
Regarding Saudi Arabia’s new offer to intervene in Syria, the Obama administration has welcomed the Saudi plan but has not committed to sending in U.S. ground troops, preferring instead to deploy some air power and a limited number of Special Forces against Islamic State targets inside Syria.
However, the Saudi plan is being discussed at a NATO defense ministers’ summit in Brussels this week. In Istanbul last month, Vice President Joe Biden hinted at a possible Obama change in position when he said if U.N.-led peace talks in Geneva failed, the United States was prepared for a “military solution” in Syria. (In making that comment, Biden may have given the rebels an incentive to sink the peace talks.)
The talks collapsed last Wednesday when Syrian rebel groups set preconditions for joining the talks, which were supposed to be started without preconditions. (However, the U.S. mainstream media has almost universally blamed Assad, the Iranians who are supporting Assad, and Russian President Vladimir Putin who has committed Russian air power to the offensive around Aleppo).
So, with the Syrian government now realistically viewing victory in the war for the first time, the panicked Saudis appear to be prodding Obama on whether he’s ready to be remembered as the president who “lost” Syria to the Russians and Iranians.
Like most leaders, Obama is susceptible to his “legacy,” that vain concern about how “history will view him.” It is an attitude that can conflict with doing what’s best for the country he leads and, in this case, would risk direct confrontation with Russia. Even embedding only hundreds of U.S. Special Forces with Saudi and other Arab troops inside Syria could lead to disaster if they are struck by Russian warplanes.
The Saudis are counting on U.S. domestic criticism to motivate Obama, such as this from New York Times columnist Roger Cohen: “Syria is now the Obama administration’s shame, a debacle of such dimensions that it may overshadow the president’s domestic achievements. Aleppo may prove to be the Sarajevo of Syria.”
Emile Hokayem, a Middle East scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote that it’s understandable for Obama to seek a negotiated settlement of the war. “But to do so while exposing the rebellion to the joint Assad-Russia-Iran onslaught and without contingency planning is simply nefarious.”
It is up to Obama to resist such pressure and not commit the folly of risking a direct confrontation with Russia by committing U.S. ground forces to what would amount to an illegal invasion of Syria. It might be in Saudi Arabia’s interests, but how is it in America’s?
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist based at the U.N. since 1990. He has written for the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Johannesburg Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. He can be reached at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
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Duke Energy Gets Paltry Fine for Massive Coal-Ash Spill |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36376"><span class="small">Katie Herzog, Grist</span></a>
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Thursday, 11 February 2016 15:09 |
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Herzog writes: "In February 2014, nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolina's Dan River, coating the waterway with a thick, toxic sludge. The responsible party was Duke Energy, the nation's largest power company."
Up to 82,000 tons of toxic coal ash spilled into North Carolina river from 'antiquated' storage pit. (photo: Shutterstock)
Duke Energy Gets Paltry Fine for Massive Coal-Ash Spill
By Katie Herzog, Grist
11 February 16
 n February 2014, nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolina’s Dan River, coating the waterway with a thick, toxic sludge. The responsible party was Duke Energy, the nation’s largest power company. In a settlement last year, Duke pled guilty to federal pollution crimes and agreed to pay $102 million in fines and restitution. Tuesday, Duke was fined another $6.6 million by North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality for crimes related to the spill.
“The state is holding Duke Energy accountable so that it and others understand there are consequences to breaking the law,” North Carolina Environment Secretary Donald van der Vaart said.
But are there consequences? Really?
While these latest fines might seem steep to those of us who are not huge utility companies, Duke Energy has assets of $120.7 billion. Six and a half million is loose change to Duke, a company whose CEO made $10.5 million the year after the coal-ash spill — a $2.5 million raise from the year before. And even the $102 million Duke agreed to pay the feds is hardly enough to clean up the damage the company caused. As ThinkProgress points out, a study from last year “estimated the ecological, recreational, aesthetic, and human health damages from the spill totaled $295,485,000. And that study looked at only the first six months after the spill, meaning the total damage could end up being higher.”
It’s been two years since the spill and Duke has yet to clean up its dozens of other coal-ash sites littered around the state. And if/when it does, the cost for the cleanup — and fines and restitution — may be passed on consumers, who have little choice about where they get their electricity.
Even if $6.6 million were a game-changing amount of money for a monolith like Duke, the company is so powerful in North Carolina that it could well get out of it. After the spill, the state imposed a $25 million fine on Duke because of pollution from a pair of coal-ash pits, but the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality then privately negotiated the settlement down to $7 million to cover pollution at all of the company’s coal-ash sites in the state. At the time, Frank Holleman, attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, called the deal “a total surrender and collapse by DEQ.”
It wasn’t the first time DEQ failed to protect the state from Duke Energy. In 2013, the year before the big spill, citizen and environmental organizations attempted to sue Duke three times for violating the Clean Water Act by failing to clean up leaky coal-ash storage sites. Each time, the DEQ blocked the groups’ attempts at the last minute.
How does Duke have so much power? It could be friends in high places: North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) worked for Duke Energy for 28 years, and the company gave $3 million to his super PAC in 2014.
In addition to the latest $6.6 million fine, the DEQ said Tuesday that it reserves the right to levy additional fines for violations associated with the spill. We won’t hold our breath.
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FOCUS: The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27654"><span class="small">Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic</span></a>
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Thursday, 11 February 2016 13:32 |
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Coates writes: "But what is obvious is that the systemic issues that allowed men as different as Bill Cosby and Daniel Holtzclaw to perpetuate their crimes, the systemic issues which long denied gay people, no matter how wealthy, to marry and protect their families, can not be crudely reduced to the mad plottings of plutocrats. In America, solidarity among laborers is not the only kind of solidarity."
Tulsa burns in the race riots of 1921. (photo: Wikimedia)
The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
11 February 16
Black poverty is fundamentally distinct from white poverty—and so cannot be addressed without grappling with racism.
here have been a number of useful entries in the weeks since Senator Bernie Sanders declared himself against reparations. Perhaps the most clarifying comes from Cedric Johnson in a piece entitled, “An Open Letter To Ta-Nehisi Coates And The Liberals Who Love Him.” Johnson’s essay offers those of us interested in the problem of white supremacy and the question of economic class the chance to tease out how, and where, these two problems intersect. In Johnson’s rendition, racism, in and of itself, holds limited explanatory power when looking at the socio-economic problems which beset African Americans. “We continue to reach for old modes of analysis in the face of a changed world,” writes Johnson. “One where blackness is still derogated but anti-black racism is not the principal determinant of material conditions and economic mobility for many African Americans.”
Johnson goes on to classify racism among other varieties of -isms whose primary purpose is “to advance exploitation on terms that are most favorable to investor class interests.” From this perspective, the absence of specific anti-racist solutions from Bernie Sanders, as well as his rejection of reparations, make sense. By Johnson’s lights, racism is a secondary concern, and to the extent that it is a concern at all, it is weapon deployed to advance the interest of a plutocratic minority.
At various points in my life, I have subscribed to some version of Johnson’s argument. I did not always believe in reparations. In the past, I generally thought that the problem of white supremacy could be dealt through the sort of broad economic policy favored by Johnson and his candidate of choice. But eventually, I came to believe that white supremacy was a force in and of itself, a vector often intersecting with class, but also operating independent of it.
Nevertheless, my basic feelings about the kind of America in which I want to live have not changed. I think a world with equal access to safe, quality, and affordable education; with the right to health care; with strong restrictions on massive wealth accumulation; with guaranteed childcare; and with access to the full gamut of birth-control, including abortion, is a better world. But I do not believe that if this world were realized, the problem of white supremacy would dissipate, anymore than I believe that if reparations were realized, the problems of economic inequality would dissipate. In either case, the notion that one solution is the answer to the other problem is not serious policy. It is a palliative.
Unfortunately, palliatives are common these days among many of us on the left. In a recent piece, I asserted that western Europe demonstrated that democratic-socialist policy, alone, could not sufficiently address the problem of white supremacy. Johnson strongly disagreed with this:
Coates’s sweeping mischaracterization diminishes the actual impact that social-democratic and socialist governments have historically had in improving the labor conditions and daily lives of working people, in Europe, the United States, and for a time, across parts of the Third World.
There is not a single word in this response relating to race and racism in Western Europe or anything remotely closely to it. Instead, Johnson proposes to bait with race, and then switch to class. He swaps “labor conditions and daily lives of working people” in for “victims of white supremacy” and prays that the reader does not notice. Indeed, one might just as easily note that the advance of indoor plumbing, germ theory, and electricity have improved “the labor conditions and daily lives of working people,” and this would be no closer to actual engagement.
This pattern—strident rhetoric divorced from knowable fact—marks Johnson’s argument. Reparations, he tells us, do not emerge from the “felt needs of the majority of blacks,” a claim that is hard to square with the fact that a majority of blacks support reparations. Instead, he argues, the claim for reparations emerges from a cabal of “anti-racist liberals” and “black elites” seeking to make a “territorial-identitarian claim for power.” In fact, the reparations movement runs the gamut from the victims of Jon Burge, to those targeted by North Carolina’s eugenics campaign, to those targeted by the same campaign in Virginia, to those targeted by “Massive Resistance” in the same state, to the descendants of those devastated by the Tulsa pogrom. Are the black people of Tulsa who suffered aerial bombing at the hands of their own government“black elites” in pursuit of “territorial-identitarian claim?” Or are they something far simpler—people who were robbed and believe they deserve to be compensated?
Johnson denigrates recompense by asserting that the demands for reparations have not “yielded one tangible improvement in the lives of the majority of African Americans.” This is also true of single-payer health care, calls to break up big banks, free public universities, and any other leftist policy that has yet to come to pass. For a program to have effect, it has to actually be put in effect. Why would reparations be any different?
But ultimately, Johnson doesn’t reject reparations because he doesn’t think they would work, but because he doesn’t believe specific black injury through racism actually exists. He favors a “more Marxist class-oriented analysis” over the notion of treating “black poverty as fundamentally distinct from white poverty.” Johnson declines to actually investigate this position and furnish evidence—even though such evidence is not really hard to find.
Concentrated poverty. (photo: TheAtlantic.com)
Courtesy of Emily Badger, this is a chart of concentrated poverty in America—that is to say families which are both individually poor and live in poor neighborhoods. Whereas individual poverty deprives one of the ability to furnish basic needs, concentrated poverty extends out from the wallet out to the surrounding institutions—the schools, the street, the community center, the policing. If individual poverty in America is hunger, neighborhood poverty is a famine. As the chart demonstrates, the black poor are considerably more subject to famine than the white poor. Indeed, so broad is this particular famine that its reach extends out to environs that most would consider well-nourished.
Neighborhood poverty. (photo: TheAtlantic.com)
As the chart above demonstrates, neighborhood poverty threatens both black poor and nonpoor families to such an extent that poor white families are less likely to live in poor neighborhoods than nonpoor black families. This is not an original finding. The sociologist Robert Sampson finds that:
….racial differences in neighborhood exposure to poverty are so strong that even high-income blacks are exposed to greater neighborhood poverty than low-income whites. For example, nonpoor blacks in Chicago live in neighborhoods that are nearly 30 percent in poverty—traditionally the definition of “concentrated poverty” areas—whereas poor whites lives in neighborhoods with 15 percent poverty, about the national average.*
In its pervasiveness, concentration, and reach across class lines, black poverty proves itself to be “fundamentally distinct” from white poverty. It would be much more convenient for everyone on the left if this were not true—that is to say if neighborhood poverty, if systemic poverty, menaced all communities equally. In such a world, one would only need to craft universalist solutions for universal problems.
Neighborhood poverty covering a younger demographic. (photo: TheAtlantic.com)
This chart by sociologist Patrick Sharkey quantifies the degree to which neighborhood poverty afflicts black and white families. Sociologists like Sharkey typically define a neighborhood with a poverty rate greater than 20 percent as “high poverty.” The majority of black people in this country (66 percent) live in high-poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of whites (94 percent) do not. The effects of this should concern anyone who believes in a universalist solution to a particular affliction. According to Sharkey:
Neighborhood poverty alone, accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.
No student of the history of American housing policy will be shocked by this. Concentrated poverty is the clear, and to some extent intentional, result of the segregationist housing policy that dominated America through much of the 20th century.
But the “fundamental differences” between black communities and white communities do not end with poverty or social mobility.
Data covering trends within incarceration. (photo: TheAtlantic.com)
In the chart above, Sampson plotted the the incarceration rate in Chicago from the onset imprisonment boom to its height. As Sampson notes, the incarceration rate in the most afflicted black neighborhood is 40 times worse than the incarceration rate in the most afflicted white neighborhood. But more tellingly for our purposes, incarceration rates for white neighborhoods bunch at the lower end, while incarceration rates for black neighborhoods bunch at the higher end. There is no gradation, nor overlap between the two. It is almost as if, from the perspective of mass incarceration, black and white people—regardless of neighborhood—inhabit two “fundamentally distinct”worlds.
The pervasive and distinctive effects of racism are viewable at every level of education from high school drop-outs (see pages 13-14 of this Pew report, especially) to Ivy league graduates. I strongly suspect that if one were to investigate public-health outcomes, exposure to pollution, quality of public education or any other vector relating to socio-economic health, a similar pattern would emerge.
Such investigations are of little use to Johnson, who prefers ideas over people, and jargon divorced of meaningful investigation. The “black managerial elite” are invoked without any attempt to quantify their numbers and power. “Institutional racism” is presented as a figment, without actually defining what it is, and why, in Johnson’s mind, it is insignificant. “Black plunder” is invoked in Chicago, with no effort to examine its effects or compare it to “white plunder.” Johnson tells us that “universal social policies” and an expanded “public sector” built the black middle class. He seems unaware that the same is true of the “white middle class.” A useful question might arise from such awareness: Has the impact of “universalist social policies” been equal across racial lines? Johnson can not be bothered with such questions as he is preoccupied with —in his own words—“solidarity.”
I am not opposed to solidarity, in and of itself, but I would have its basis made clear. When an argument is divorced of this clarity, then deflection, subject-changing, abstraction, and head-fakes—as when Johnson exchanges“laborers” for the victims of white supremacy—all become inevitable.
Bombast, too. In Johnson’s rendition, black writers who trouble his particular “solidarity” are not sincerely disagreeing with his ideas, they are assuaging “white guilt” and doing the dirty work of interpreting black people for “white publics.” Johnson lobs this charge as though he is not himself interpreting for white publics, as though he were holding forth from the offices of The Amsterdam News. And then he lobs a good deal more:
...Coates’s latest attack on Sanders, and willingness to join the chorus of red-baiters, has convinced me that his particular brand of antiracism does more political harm than good, further mystifying the actual forces at play and the real battle lines that divide our world.
This not the language of debate. It is the vocabulary of compliance. ?In this way, a strong and important disagreement on the left becomes something darker. Critiquing the policies of a presidential candidate constitutes an “attack.” A call for intersectional radicalism is “red-baiting.” And the argument for reparations does “more political harm than good.”
The feeling is not mutual. I think Johnson’s ideas originate not in some diabolical plot, but in an honest and deeply held concern for the plundered peoples of the world. Whatever their origin, there is much in Johnson’s response worthy of study, and much more which all who hope for struggle across the manufactured line of race might learn from. Johnson’s distillation of the Readjuster movement, his emphasis on the value of the postal service and public-sector jobs, and his insistence on telling a broader story of housing and segregation add considerable value to the present conversation. His insistence that airing arguments to the contrary is harmful does not.
It is not even that a solidarity premised on the suppression of debate—a solidarity of ignorance—is wrong in and of itself, though it is. It is that a solidarity of ignorance blinds one to complicating factors:
Social exclusion and labor exploitation are different problems, but they are never disconnected under capitalism. And both processes work to the advantage of capital. Segmented labor markets, ethnic rivalry, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and informalization all work against solidarity. Whether we are talking about antebellum slaves, immigrant strikebreakers, or undocumented migrant workers, it is clear that exclusion is often deployed to advance exploitation on terms that are most favorable to investor class interests.
No. Social exclusion works for solidarity, as often as it works against it. Sexism is not merely, or even primarily, a means of conferring benefits to the investor class. It is also a means of forging solidarity among “men,” much as xenophobia forges solidarity among “citizens,” and homophobia makes for solidarity among “heterosexuals.” What one is is often as important as what one is not, and so strong is the negative act of defining community that one wonders if all of these definitions—man, heterosexual, white—would evaporate in absence of negative definition.
That question is beyond my purview (for now). But what is obvious is that the systemic issues that allowed men as different as Bill Cosby and Daniel Holtzclaw to perpetuate their crimes, the systemic issues which long denied gay people, no matter how wealthy, to marry and protect their families, can not be crudely reduced to the mad plottings of plutocrats. In America, solidarity among laborers is not the only kind of solidarity. In America, it isn’t even the most potent kind.
The history of the very ideas Johnson favors evidences this fact. At every step, “universalist” social programs have been hampered by the idea of becoming, and remaining, forever white. So it was with the New Deal. So it is with Obamacare. So it would be with President Sanders. That is not because the white working class labors under mass hypnosis. It is because whiteness confers knowable, quantifiable privileges, regardless of class—much like “manhood” confers knowable, quantifiable privileges, regardless of race. White supremacy is neither a trick, nor a device, but one of the most powerful shared interests in American history.
And that, too, is solidarity.
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The F Word: Yes, Donald Trump Is a Fascist, and That Matters |
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Thursday, 11 February 2016 09:59 |
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Paul writes: "In various forums, academics and journalists have warned us not to use the fascism label, as it would be inaccurate from a political theory perspective. Many of these people are smart and perfectly well meaning. But they're wrong."
Donald Trump supporter rides in his car. (photo: Reuters)
The F Word: Yes, Donald Trump Is a Fascist, and That Matters
By Ari Paul, teleSUR
11 February 16
With Trump’s threats to round up Latino immigrants or bar Muslims from entering the United States, Nazi analogies from his critics abound.
 e stoked fears of the white working class by appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment. He mixed that with anger toward the political and economic establishment by pointing to NAFTA as a reason jobs were vanishing. His intolerant rhetoric of non-Christian America was considered so dangerous that in response to one speech a liberal commentator joked that it “probably sounded better in the original German.”
Donald Trump? No, that’s Patrick Buchanan.
Buchanan hasn’t been a big feature on the right since the 1990s, and a lot of that has to do with the establishment knowing then how toxic he was. In 1992, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote of his “fascist underpinnings,” insisting that his mix of “nativism, authoritarianism, ethnic and class resentment” and his conversion to “protectionism” put him the classic mold of fascism.
Now, we have another politician bringing on those very ideas, and again it’s rattling the Republican establishment. The conservative journal National Review forcefully condemned Trump’s rise. The moderate one-time Republican ex-mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg vowed to run for president if Trump (among other radicals he doesn’t like) gets the presidential nod.
With Trump’s threats to round up Latino immigrants or bar Muslims from entering the United States, Nazi analogies from his critics abound. In various forums, academics and journalists have warned us not to use the fascism label, as it would be inaccurate from a political theory perspective. Many of these people are smart and perfectly well meaning.
But they’re wrong.
The skepticism comes from a healthy place: Americans, especially on the left, are too quick to label anything they believe is too right-wing to be fascist, in the same way right-wingers throw around the term “socialist” without understanding what that means. Traditionally, in the United States, our most right-wing pundits and politicians don’t actually believe in the very specific tenets of fascism, which calls for an immense amount of state power in economic affairs. Instead, libertarianism, at least in fiscal affairs, is the prominent idea.
And that’s where Trump gets interesting. Economically, he’s quite unlike the other Republican candidates. He doesn’t blast social security or threaten to take away anyone’s Medicare. In fact, the state features strongly in his economic vision. For example, he blasts NAFTA and promises to proactively bring manufacturing jobs back, traditionally the political domain of the labor left, which is why some union members are supporting him.
It’s important to remember this when one considers how much fascism was seen as a reactionary response to the appeal of socialism and communism to the rebellious working class in Europe. Much of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric had as much to do with anger at prevailing economic order as it did with his hatred of communists. The state, he promised, would provide for the German citizenry, still suffering from the fallout of the first World War. Many of those programs would be too state-centered for our modern-day Republicans.
In short, Hilter’s appeal was a strong state, both in terms of the military and the economy, pinning the blame not on the ruling class but on minority scapegoats. That’s where we see the fascist tendencies in the movement Trump has created. The journalist Chris Hedges told me in an interview in 2006, “Fascist movements are always indigenous and they look for indigenous symbols. Hitler or Mussolini may seem exotic and strange to us, but they didn’t to Germans and Italians. They built on Teutonic myths. In the case of Mussolini, harkening back to the age of Augustus and imperial Rome.”
So too is the same with Trump’s call to “make America great again” and his obsession with “American winning,” as if our old empire came and went, and it’s time to assert ourselves once more. And while Trump may not look characteristically fascist in the way we’re conditioned to think they look, he certainly has attracted a questionable crowd.
The white nationalist website Daily Stormer endorsed him. He has the support of at least one white nationalist PAC. And to make things worse, former Ku Klux Klan chief David Duke said that, if anything, Trump’s politics were too radical. There was footage of a Trump supporter shouting “Sieg Heil” at a rally, and there’s been numerous accounts of non-white and non-Christian people threatened and harassed at his rallies. The more we look at that, the more Trump and his supporters look like the Tea Party and look more like our local version of the far right movements in Europe that rally at once against austerity and immigration.
The answer, then, is to see Trump and his followers for what they are, and know now that after the election, even if he’s not president, he’s created a big enough block of people who are closely associated with a dark ideology. That means it is necessary to build strong anti-austerity left movements like the ones in Greece and Spain. There’s hope for that in the ascendance of Bernie Sanders. But the movement will have to be bigger than him, and carry own after this election year.
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