A police militarized to address the wounds of racial inequities by violence, and a recent history of unsuccessful imperial wars have made us susceptible to a narrative of national humiliation by enemies both internal and external. Photograph: Carol Guzy/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstockįascist propaganda takes place in the US in already fertile ground – decades of racial strife has led to the United States having by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.įascist forces have found a popular leader, unconstrained by the rules of democracy, in the figure of Donald Trump. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. In keeping with a tradition that includes the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, I have been writing for a decade on the way politicians and movement leaders employ propaganda, centrally including fascist propaganda, to win elections and gain power. Philosophers have always been at the forefront in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. And my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life to discuss it. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump. The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight. Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes.
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