HOW FASCISM WORKS: The Politics of Us and Them is just flat terrifying

HOW FASCISM WORKS: The Politics of Us and Them
JASON F. STANLEY
Random House
$17.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • With a new preface • Fascist politics are running rampant in America today—and spreading around the world. A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history.

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The reason I want to review this right now is the 14 May Buffalo mass shooting and its root cause, the idiotic and racist replacement theory. It is a pernicious and evil set of beliefs demanding that white people remain in power forever because it's theirs by right, as Author Stanley explains. Colonialism and racism and fascism are in lock step, and their grip on the unintelligent, badly educated, and ill-informed is only strengthening.

I make no apologies for my opinions, or for expressing them in strong and probably insulting terms, as those who subscribe to these idiotic beliefs make no apologies for theirs or their own method of expressing them. I oppose these views. I oppose their open, uncontested expression. I oppose people who make their own need to control others, body, mind, and soul, their purpose for public action. And no, demanding that these True Believers NOT be allowed to dictate the continued lives, personal liberties, and rise to political power of those who are not them, is not at all the same thing.

This book is a compendium of pithily expressed, carefully researched, and very well-sourced conclusions that are not readily dismissable based on modern evidence. I cede the floor to Author Stanley:

Fascist politics does not necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state, but it is dangerous nonetheless. Fascist politics includes many distinct strategies: the mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeals to the heartland, and a dismantling of public welfare and unity.

On fascism's roots:

In book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that people are not naturally led to self-governance but rather seek a strong leader to follow. Democracy, by permitting freedom of speech, opens the door for a demagogue to exploit the people’s need for a strongman; the strongman will use this freedom to prey on the people’s resentments and fears. Once the strongman seizes power, he will end democracy, replacing it with tyranny. In short, book 8 of The Republic argues that democracy is a self-undermining system whose very ideals lead to its own demise. Fascists have always been well acquainted with this recipe for using democracy’s liberties against itself; Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels once declared, “This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed.” Today is no different from the past. Again, we find the enemies of liberal democracy employing this strategy, pushing the freedom of speech to its limits and ultimately using it to subvert others’ speech.

–and–

In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared: We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything. Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

On racism's roots and branches:

“Check your privilege” is a call to whites to recognize the insulated social reality they navigate daily.

–and–

Hutu power movement was a fascist ethnic supremacist movement that arose in Rwanda in the years before the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

–and–

Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman: “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman quoted Nixon as saying in a diary entry from April 1969. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

–and–

Mussolini denounce{d} the world’s great cities, such as New York, for their teeming populations of nonwhites. In fascist ideology, the city is a place where members of the nation go to age and die, childless, surrounded by the vast hordes of despised others, breeding out of control, their children permanent burdens on the state.

See also my review of Cockroaches for extra and personal information about the racist roots of Rwanda's genocide. See my review of The Man Who Lived Underground for a prescient prefiguring of the Othering that racism relies on's horrific costs.

Author Stanley doesn't, I think I've shown, pull punches. He also sources his claims with admirable clarity. There are dozens of notes in each chapter; there are dozens of reputable scholars cited. In his Epilogue, Author Stanley considers the hazards and risks we're running simply by normalizing (or really continuing to normalize) the ongoing fascist politicizations we see around us now.

Pratap Mehta wrote: 'The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics….When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.'

–and–

In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, nonwhites, homosexuals, immigrants, “decadent cosmopolitans,” those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order. By describing black Americans as a threat to law and order, demagogues in the United States have been able to create a strong sense of white national identity that requires protection from the nonwhite “threat.”

–and–

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.

What's happening now is not the Will of the People. It's not the inevitable outcome of "them" becoming a threat. This is proof of "...a growing body of social psychological evidence substantiates the phenomenon of dominant group feelings of victimization at the prospect of sharing power equally with members of minority groups. A great deal of recent attention has been paid in the United States to the fact that around 2050, the United States will become a 'majority-minority' country, meaning that whites will no longer be a majority of Americans," threatening “...the lengthy history of ranking Americans into a hierarchy of worth by race, the “deserving” versus the “undeserving.” And I feel confident I need not say directly that deserving = white for you to get the full, appalling picture. If you're up for more, there's On Tyranny, which I've reviewed; it's another, and shorter, work of synthesis and explication.

Where do we go from here? How do the majority of US citizens resist this ever-worsening attack on our bodies, our minds, our freedoms and rights?

First, VOTE. Second, read and learn from the folks farther along the trail through the thickets of trouble and outrage meant to scare and dishearten you. Nothing about the fascism threatening reason and freedom in the US is inevitable or unstoppable or, most importantly, right and correct. You've watched The Handmaid's Tale and read Christian Nation...you know what's at stake for women, and every single one of you knows a woman; also for QUILTBAG folks, and if you're reading this you know at least one of those (me). Act like this is an emergency.

Because it very much is.

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, traitorous fascist sympathizers aren't new

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
BRADLEY W. HART
Thomas Dunne Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It's always been a failing of the left-wing political folk to see the Apocalypse in each and every thunderation from the Christo-Fascist Right as the ongoing battle for the USA's soul continues. There are now, there were in the 1950s, there were in the 1930s and 1940s, traitorous scum whose personal vision of a Perfect World contains only people like them, who are willing to do anything legal or not to enforce their will on the eternal majority who don't want that. In an article in The Nation, the author of the think piece I've linked to comments most saliently on the Red Scare years' school-textbook battles, book burnings, and other such performative outrage with this pithy remark:

Most Americans don’t think that proponents of critical race theory are secretly spreading “Marxism” in the schools, either, or that woke corporations are somehow supporting the same evil project. The people who make such claims are a small minority, just as they were in the 1950s.

The fact is that our country's been under some form of internal attack from fascist and/or authoritarian right-wing rabble since Day One. So has every other political structure. Let's not forget the fate of Periclean Athens. It's the eternal project of greedy, selfish control freaks to get everything they can into their own hands and to control what they can't possess.

Author Hart made a well-researched and -written alarm call against calm, resigned acceptance of the culture coup attempted during the 45th president's term in this book. He uses the well-documented and clearly overcome existence, activities, and failures of Nazi sympathizers in the US. It is an effective technique; it uses as its organizing principle a simple structure: Each chapter is dedicated to a single organization active in promoting German/Nazi interests in the US, and gives some crucial details about how and why this choice was made. It also characterizes and puts into timely context the people who made up the institution in question. This avoids a common trap in histories of zeitgeists or social movements, the dreaded alphabet soup of initialism and too-similar or too-often-repeated names. That admittedly more synthetic approach can weave a tapestry of details. It more often than that causes severe MEGO disease.

The most disturbing take-away of this entire loudly rung tocsin is that these forces of anti-democratic rage failed because they lacked a credible, powerful leader. Today's versions, it is very frightening to realize, do not suffer from that lack. It isn't that Author Hart is unaware of this, it's that he seemed to feel he shouldn't make as much of the echoes I heard in each chapter of current events as I would've preferred. There is something to be said for taking off the gloves and hitting the enemy within hard. It's something "they" do a lot of (see my review of The Obama Hate Machine) and with a lot less factual basis than Author Hart presents.

Why this book only gets four stars from me is the quite startling number of uncorrected typos that made it from the DRC I read into the library copy I checked out. Scandalous! And, in the end, there were moments that I found myself not quite satisfied with the case the author made for some person or organization's motivation for opposing the US entry into WWII. Mixed motives are more common than pure ones on every gradation of the ideological spectrum, as (for example) morally based pacifism is present among right-wingers, too.

Perhaps the most telling thing that I noticed go underremarked was the utter ineffectuality of Hoover's FBI in going after right-wing terrorism. Red Scare propaganda against our nominal allies the Soviets was rife. How telling that is...British intelligence informed the US government better about domestic threats than Hoover's FBI.

I was still angered and unsettled and unnerved by this read. I am recommending it to all and sundry who think the Right's victory in the 2022 midterm elections is somehow inevitable. We who do not wish to have our country scourged by the hypocrites and religious nuts of this book's modern counterparts should heed Author Hart's dictum: "{U}nfortunately, the merchants of hate always seem to have someone to listen to them." Let's plug the holes in our national awareness. It can only help the side dedicated to the rights and duties of citizens against the Right's attacks on them.

RED MILK, weird title (so what else is new) for Sjón's latest & best

RED MILK
SJÓN (tr. Victoria Cribb)
MCDxFSG
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A timely and provocative novel about a mysterious Icelandic neo-Nazi and the enduring global allure of fascism.

In England in 1962, an Icelandic man is found dead on a train bound for Cheltenham Spa. In his possession, policemen find a map on which a swastika has been drawn with a red pen. Who was he, and where was he going?

In a novel that reads as both biography and mystery, the internationally celebrated novelist Sjón tells the story of Gunnar Kampen, the founder of Iceland's anti-Semitic nationalist party, with ties to a burgeoning network of neo-Nazi groups across the globe. Told in a series of scenes and letters spanning Kampen's lifetime—from his childhood in Reyjavík during the Second World War, in a household strongly opposed to Hitler and his views, through his education, political radicalization, and his final clandestine mission to England—Red Milk urges readers to confront the international legacy of twentieth-century fascism and the often unknowable forces that drive some people to extremism.

Based on one of the ringleaders of a little-known neo-Nazi group that operated in Reykjavík in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this taut and potent novel explores what shapes a young man and the enduring, disturbing allure of Nazi ideology.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is so much that goes into making a person's life. So many moments of seeming ordinariness, so many times unremembered but never forgotten.

Author Sjón absolutely understands this, relies on it, makes me aware of how unaware I am in my life. Living it day-to-day it's unremarkable. After it's over, as it's ending...those are the times reflection becomes available to the average person. Author Sjón takes that truth and makes it the structure of the novel.

We're reading the life of Gunnar after it's over, after it's been picked apart and examined...this book reads like an evidence box would, pick up this letter, what did this key open...and that lets us contextualize the story as the tragedy it really is.

I was gobsmacked to learn this is a based-in-fact story, this was a real person, the ending is factual. How Gunnar came to hold beliefs so horrible to me was all in the oblique and the sidewise and the interstitial parts of the text. Lest that sound Arty and pretentious, I hasten to say that there is no better way I evoke an honest emotional response than this. Author Sjón trusts you to Get It. He allows you not to know.

I'll take that sense of being allowed to find the truth in the fiction over being spoonfed any day.

What I hope you'll enjoy, resonate with, in this read is that quality of discovering the meat of the life Gunnar led, and placing the pieces in order for yourself. While you're never left in doubt about your position in time, you're not going to get everything there is simply by that means.

I think it was a real, living person that I found in this novel. Would I have "liked" him? I don't think so. But I wouldn't have known him the way I do because Author Sjón showed him to me in this simple, elegant piece-by-piece fashion. I like novel-Gunnar a little bit. He was so very empty. He found something to fill what a human can't live without having full. AND it was something awful. Something vile, foul...but it filled the void.

I understand the souls whose quest to be Whole leads them in dark, ugly, despicable places that one fraction better.

Thank you, Author Sjón. I can get better at being a good version of me after this read.

ON TYRANNY, the perfect inexpensive gift for your favorite high-school grad or college student

ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
TIMOTHY SNYDER
Tim Duggan Books
$9.99 trade paper or ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism.

On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

My Review: Not for its perfection of style but for its perfection of wisdom and its amazing timeliness. As I write this today, 24 March 2018, I saw the face of our future president in Emma Gonzalez as she stood silent, focused, determined, at a march made by young people to demand their lives be protected from ammosexual assholes. She spoke for six minutes and twenty seconds in total, the same amount of time that it took one piece of shit human being to slaughter seventeen of her classmates.

I believe that her speech...the few words, the long silence...will be the spark of the youth revolution our country so very badly needs. I am hopeful that Emma Gonzalez will be, by her very adamantine sense of self and her charismatic gravitas, the voice that alerts her compatriots to Author Snyder's clarion call to clarity:

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.

The most unbelievably high stakes are at risk in the November 2018 elections. Buy this book not for yourself but for your hopes of a reasonably happy future for the United States of America, buy it in quantity and give it to everyone you know and/or can find who is under 25, and talk to them about why you're giving them this short, clear, concise, and urgently necessary book.

Your life, my life, the life of a truly great nation, depends on them showing up at the ballot box on 6 November 2018. This is neither hyperbole nor alarmism. It is simply the truth. Looking away from the horrors of the current kakistocracy's rise to any position of power higher than hall monitor at the local middle school will only ensure the brutal and vicious agenda of these lowlife scumbags and their horrifying cadres of disgustingly venal and/or stupid supporters will succeed.