On 7/31/11 8:41 AM, Michael Meeropol wrote: > All this talk about Obama is pretty much beside the point. > > Ever since the beginning of the Bush Presidency there has been a growing > undercurrent that looks dangerously like a precursor of fascism --- > Obviously it would have an American twist to it, be much more based on > religion than the Mussolini-Hitler versions, but its key element will > make McCarthyism look like an ACLU convention.
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/weimar-germany-and-contemporary-america-any-parallels/ Weimar Germany and contemporary America: any parallels? Although my admiration for Noam Chomsky is unbounded, as well as his interlocutor Chris Hedges, I am afraid that the interview Hedges conducted with Chomsky on Truthdig making parallels between contemporary America and Weimar Germany is nonsense. Here are the most relevant paragraphs: “It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.” “The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.” To start with, the economic situation during the late Weimar Republic was far worse than today in the U.S. In 1932, there were 5 million unemployed German workers out of a total population of 66 million, an unemployment rate of 30 percent–twice what we are suffering in the U.S. today. Also, keep in mind that unemployment insurance, which had been introduced in Germany in 1927, was the victim of fiscal austerity after the 1929 market crash. All public funding was suspended, which resulted in higher contributions by the workers and fewer benefits for the unemployed. A brief article from the June 19, 1932 New York Times should give you a feel for the desperate situation in Germany: In the Bischofshem forest hikers found the corpses of a family of five—father, mother, and three children from 3 to 7—a brief note in the man’s pocket stating that economic misery had determined him and his wife to commit suicide, and take their children with them. “The courageous don’t grow old,” the note concluded. Its writer was 35 years old, a World War veteran, out of work, trying to eke out a living selling newspapers. He had shot his wife and children, and then himself. Eighteen thousand people killed themselves in Germany last year, according to the provisional figures. Berlin alone had nearly seven hundred suicides the first four months of this year. The suicide curve seems to be rising steeply, and common sense interprets this as the reflection of constantly increasing economic pressure. The other economic fact that should never be forgotten was the heavy burden imposed on Germany through the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI. For example, France took over the coal-rich Saar region and Germany was forced to provide France, Belgium, and Italy with millions of tons of coal for ten years. The other thing missing entirely from Chomsky’s assessment is the differences between the German working class in the Weimar Republic and our own situation. To put it bluntly, there is no fascist threat in the U.S. today because there is no Communist threat. The two movements are dialectically related. Despite all the hysteria about “socialism” on Fox News and at Tea Party rallies, there is not the slightest sign that American workers are thinking in class terms, let alone radicalizing. In fact the overall response of workers to economic crisis now is pretty much the same as it has been since every downturn since the early 1970s, namely to seek personal solutions. Back in 1989 Michael Moore made his first documentary “Roger and Me” that examined the impact of unemployment in Flint, Michigan—his home town. One worker was raising rabbits to sell as food; another had decided to move to Texas where there were jobs aplenty—at least that is what he heard. What you didn’t see was organized resistance. By comparison, Germany had been the scene of massive and organized resistance ever since the end of WWI. Massive Socialist and Communist Parties were involved in one revolutionary struggle after another starting with Rosa Luxemburg’s ill-fated Spartacist uprising. In 1921 and 1923, there were Communist-led insurrectionary struggles that were doomed to fail because of ultraleft sectarian mistakes largely inspired by Bela Kun, the Comintern emissary to Germany. For example, in Saxony coal miners often used dynamite against the army and cops just as Bolivian tin miners did in their revolution in 1952. By comparison, the Massey Energy company has the blood of 29 dead miners on its hands and the trade unions in West Virginia do nothing but issue press releases. This is not to speak of the utter lack of a radical movement embedded within the coal mines. If anything the radical movement had more of a presence in the 1970s but as is the case across the board it declined into nothingness. If fascism is meant to stave off working class revolution, then it would serve no purpose at all in the U.S. today. Since Chomsky’s parameters include Blacks and “illegal immigrants” (his words, unfortunately—nobody is illegal) rather than workers, it is worth taking a look at how much of a threat they pose to the existing system as well. To start with, the sad truth is that the Black community has not been mobilized for nearly a quarter-century and if anything is even more demobilized today under Obama. Illusions in a “Black president” have been widespread on the left except among the vanguard like Glen Ford’s Black Agenda website. 25 years ago there were still stirrings of Black Power that occasionally led to conferences for a Black political party, demands for reparation, as well as other signs that the sixties were still alive. Today there is virtually nothing like this going on. Now it is true that undocumented workers are facing more and more repression and have begun to play the role of scapegoats reminiscent of Jews in the 1930s. An article in today’s New York Times even connects the dotted lines between racist legislation in Arizona and the fascist ties of the man who drafted it: The state senator who wrote the law, Russell Pearce, had long been considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party — often to the delight of his supporters. There was the time in 2007 when he appeared in a widely circulated photograph with a man who was a featured speaker at a neo-Nazi conference. (Mr. Pearce said later he did not know of the man’s affiliation with the group.) In 2006, he came under fire for speaking admirably of a 1950s federal deportation program called Operation Wetback, and for sending an e-mail message to supporters that included an attachment — inadvertently, he said — from a white supremacist group. That being said, it is important to acknowledge that the repression in Arizona is being carried out by the cops and not the Minutemen, a paramilitary formation that never gained much traction. In a period of deepening polarization, such as during the late Weimar period, you will see the working class and its allies in combat with such militias as the official bodies of repression become overburdened. During the 1930s in the U.S. you found many such paramilitaries, most notably the Silver Shirts in Minnesota who functioned as a kind of auxiliary to the bosses who were fighting against the CIO. The Trotskyists confronted the Silver Shirts successfully as recounted by Farrell Dobbs in Teamster Politics. In an article I wrote about fascism in 1992 prompted by worries among the left (including the sect I used to belong to that should have known better) that Pat Buchanan represented some kind of fascist threat, I tried to remind readers what was going on in the 1930s: Local 544 took serious measures to defend itself. It formed a union defense guard in August 1938 open to any active union member. Many of the people who joined had military experience, including Ray Rainbolt the elected commander of the guard. Rank-and-filers were former sharpshooters, machine gunners and tank operators in the US Army. The guard also included one former German officer with WWI experience. While the guard itself did not purchase arms except for target practice, nearly every member had hunting rifles at home that they could use in the circumstance of a Silver Shirt attack. There is nothing—I repeat, nothing—going on like this today. I am afraid that Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges are succumbing to the kind of fascists under the bed hysteria that I have seen on the left going back to the Nixon administration, a politician widely accused at the time of being a new Adolph Hitler. One can only wish that the current occupant of the White House was only half as progressive as Nixon whose Keynesian economics and pro-environment policies put Obama to shame. Perhaps the only analogy with the Weimar Republic that makes sense is the “lesser evil” politics that sections of the left promoted then and now. The Socialist Party in Germany kept backing bourgeois politicians as an alternative to Hitler, even as their anti-working class policies were creating the resentment among backward layers that helped feed the Nazi movement. The main alternative to the SP, the Communists, were just as bankrupt having developed the “third period” insanity that failed to make any distinctions between the SP and the Nazis. While a real fascist threat is nowhere near on the agenda in the U.S., it is still incumbent upon us to break with the “lesser evil” mentality that allowed one of the big working class parties in Germany to help Hitler rise to power. By exaggerating the threat of fascism today, segments of the left—particularly the Communist Party—try to stampede people into voting for whichever Democrat is running in a presidential election. In October 20, 2008 Noam Chomsky urged a vote for Obama in swing states in order to “stop McCain”. In 2012, I am sure that we will hear arguments for backing Obama against whichever slug the Republicans nominate. And all the while, the political landscape keeps shifting to the right. Ultimately there will be such disgust with the existing two-party system that millions of people will begin to struggle in the streets and through electoral means to oppose the system that is killing them. When that begins to happen, you can be sure that a genuine fascist movement will take shape. After all, we are living in country that has arguably had a more savage history than the Nazis during their relatively short reign. Let’s never forget that Hitler understood the need from learning from American democrats when he was getting his act together: Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity. (John Toland, “Adolf Hitler” Vol II, p 802, Doubleday & Co, 1976) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
