How fascism came back after the decades of systematic hollowing of memory and humanity's immunity system against it: My post from exactly 8 years ago

 

8 years ago

Vladimir Suchan

May 3, 2014  ·

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Since I was born just some 16 years after World War II, I felt that the war was still somehow breathing on my neck from behind. Moreover, like some others, I was haunted by the question, an important question: How come that people seeing the rise of fascism in the 1930s could not stop it before it was too late?

This was leading me to the next question: Would we, people of modern society, do actually better than the people of the 1930s? And would we be even able to match the heroism and sacrifices of the people who then fought and won the war against fascism? One thing was for me very clear though--namely that it would be foolish and arrogant to assume that, with all the resources and new technologies that we have, we contemporaries are better off than our the generations who lived through the previous rise of fascism and the battles of World War II.

This then leads me to the present, to the "sudden" re-emergence of fascism in Ukraine where fascism has actually come to power after many years of careful preparation and planning on the part of the neoliberal and "democratic" West. How come? What happened? How is it possible?

Why could we "explain why there is such solidarity among the Nazis and what we can call the West"? ... The degree of unprecedented solidarity among Nazis and the EU and the collective West is unprecedented by any historical record. It is just astounding. Any explanation of this?"

I think that they are at least two main reasons for this abhorrence and its wide spread and support. 1) Fascism learned to disguise itself and started to present itself behind Western (neo)liberalism, humanitarianism, and democracy. Fascism has been embraced for, except for the inner circles and some initiates who do include the leaders of the Ukrainian Right Sector, fascism is not fascism, but something of a Dinosaur from Hollywood or a bygone era.

Fascism became respectable because it took on the colors of what it has always despised. Think of Russophobe Brzezinski or McCain behind the mask of a smiling (half) black man--someone like Barack Hussein Obama.

2) While fascism made itself respectable through concealment and networking, political ignorance of the masses and also the middle class has reached new heights through consumerism and corporate TV networks.

As I tried to indicate through the selection of certain passages from the recent exchange between two members of the US Council on Foreign Relations, this political dumbing of society has been a careful work of decades--leading to the creation of the Nietzschean pathetic "Last Man" or "good man"--a new willing slave whose understanding of history and politics is as strong as the ability of 85% of Americans just to find Ukraine on the map. Who is this post-historical, post-modern man? He is a "the kind of wishy-washy (Russel Mead, last issue of Foreign Affairs, p. 72) He is "focused on the short term, [and is] easily distracted and lacks in courage." (p. 79) He gravely "misunderstands and underestimates" (p. 78)--the true enemy (fascism) because he is clueless, politically uneducated, and seduced by fascism's new, respectable disguises. In the West, he is a "narcissistic consumer with no greater aspirations beyond the next trip to the mall" (p. 78)

Moreover, the comeback of fascism and the effectiveness of its concealment is not only a function of its sophistication and cleverness. It is also a direct and nearly inevitable result ... (here the heresy goes) of the demise of communism and the role it played in teaching wide masses of the people the art of politics and political awareness. Man (and the West) was plugged back to the Machine (the Leviathan) and its Matrix and it was called "freedom" and "all was good."

The great solidarity of the West and its support for fellow fascists in Ukraine is then, of course, also class based--though it is not a matter of just one class only. And the spread and effectiveness of this neo-fascist and neo-imperial solidarity is directly proportional to the loss and demise of solidarity, organization, political education, and consciousness on the part of the (potentially) antifascist forces and any other alternative.

And, of course, millions, if not billions, of dollars are spent every day to distort, falsify and conceal reality and the real character of the crisis in Ukraine and what is there at stake.