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FTR #1162 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, there was much beating of the breasts and tearing of the hair by mainstream and “alternative” journalists and political forces.
Declaring the (predictable) assault by Trump and much of the GOP on the integrity and accuracy of the election results to be an “attack” that “threatened American democracy,” they might be seen as closing the barn door after the horse had gone.
In fact, “American democracy” had its brains blown all over the back of a limousine in Dallas, Texas on 11/22/1963.
This program presents aspects of the long-dead American democratic process that have escaped widespread examination.
Keying the discussion is a quote from Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. “Welcome back America!” she wrote on Twitter. . . .
In 1968, Farewell America–a book presenting an oblique, somewhat enigmatic account of the JFK assassination was published, allegedly authored by “James Hepburn.” In the years since its publication, the book has come to be understood as something of a response by French intelligence to both the JFK assassination and overlapping attempts by elements of CIA and French fascist and revanchist forces to overthrow and/or assassinate Charles De Gaulle.
An excellent account of this important, but largely unrecognized element of U.S. and world history was presented in a remarkable tome titled The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot. We present Talbot’s account of the attempts at overthrowing De Gaulle and that event’s intersection with the intrigue that took President Kennedy’s life.
(With holiday gift-giving season fast approaching, we emphatically recommend The Devil’s Chessboard for those who truly value democratic process and integrity.)
The World War II leader of the Free French forces and the French president for 11 years, De Gaulle had run afoul of powerful elements of the French military and intelligence forces, as well as Allen Dulles’s CIA. Outraged at his attempt to grant Algeria its independence in order to conclude a brutal guerilla war, De Gaulle was viewed as an outright traitor by the OAS (L’Organisation de L’Armee Secrete–The Secret Army Organization).
Because of De Gaulle’s insistence on pursuing conventional military and nuclear independence from both the U.S. and NATO, and the belief that he was “soft on communism,” elements of Dulles’s CIA collaborated with the OAS forces, acting in tandem with Reinhard Gehlen’s BND cadres.
The coup was led by Maurice Challe, a decorated French Air Force general, who planned to airlift elite paratrooper elements into France, where they would join with other armored and airborne forces staged outside Paris.
Alerted to the impending coup, De Gaulle rallied the French populace behind his besieged government, and the coup lost momentum. Challe surrendered after his fellow coup plotters lost enthusiasm for the operation.
Early on in the coup attempt, credible political and journalistic individuals and organizations set forth the assistance to the coup provided by elements of the CIA and Pentagon, supplemented by U.S. reactionaries.
Following the coup’s failure, OAS gunmen ambushed De Gaulle, who escaped with his life due to the skill and loyalty of his security detachment.
Interestingly–and perhaps significantly–an OAS terrorist named Jean Souetre was arrested in Dallas on 11/22/1963 and deported to Mexico. Some analysts believe that a French fascist and criminal element was involved with the operational phase of the JFK assassination in Dallas.)
In 2002, a book was published (after the death of its author) which presented De Gaulle’s pointed analysis of the killing JFK, which he felt was altogether similar to the attempts on his life.
De Gaulle’s analysis of the methodological template of both Kennedy’s murder and his own, very near brush with death is poignantly accurate and telling.
(The JFK assassination has been discussed in many programs over the years, including The Guns of November, AFA #‘s 11, 12 and 13, 15 and 37, and many For The Record programs, including FTR #‘s 876, 961, 962, 963, 971, the long series of interviews with Jim DiEugenio (#1031 through #1056, excepting #1039 and 1123.)
Program Highlights Include: Analysis of JFK’s 1957 speech endorsing Algerian independence; Guy Banister investigator Maurice Brooks Gatlin’s claim to have carried a large sum of money from the CIA to French conspirators plotting the overthrow of De Gaulle; Gatlin’s 1965 death in a fall from a high-rise hotel window in Panama.
1. Keying the discussion is a quote from Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. “Welcome back America!” she wrote on Twitter. . . .
. . . . Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo was less diplomatic. “Welcome back America!” she wrote on Twitter. . . .
2. In a 1968, Farewell America–a book presenting an oblique, somewhat enigmatic account of the JFK assassination was published, allegedly authored by “James Hepburn.” In the years since its publication, the book has come to be understood as something of a response by an element of French intelligence to both the JFK assassination and overlapping attempts by elements of CIA and French fascist and revanchist elements to overthrow and/or assassinate Charles De Gaulle.
An excellent account of this important but largely unrecognized element of U.S. and world history was presented in a remarkable tome titled The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot. We present Talbot’s account of the attempts at overthrowing De Gaulle and that event’s intersection with the intrigue that took President Kennedy’s life.
(With holiday gift-giving season fast approaching, we emphatically recommend The Devil’s Chessboard for those who truly value democratic process and integrity.)
The World War II leader of the Free French forces and the French president for 11 years, De Gaulle had run afoul of powerful elements of the French military and intelligence forces, as well as Allen Dulles’s CIA. Outraged at his attempt to grant Algeria its independence in order to conclude a brutal guerilla war, De Gaulle was viewed as an outright traitor by the OAS (L’Organisation de L’Armee Secrete–The Secret Army Organization).
Because of De Gaulle’s insistence on pursuing conventional military and nuclear independence from both the U.S. and NATO, and the belief that he was “soft on communism,” elements of Dulles’s CIA collaborated with the OAS forces, acting in tandem with Reinhard Gehlen’s BND cadres.
The coup was led by Maurice Challe, a decorated French Air Force general, who planned to airlift elite paratrooper elements into France, where they would join with other armored and airborne forces staged outside Paris.
Alerted to the impending coup, De Gaulle rallied the French populace behind his besieged government, and the coup lost momentum. Challe surrendered after his fellow coup plotters lost enthusiasm for the operation.
Early on in the coup attempt, credible political and journalistic individuals and organizations set forth the assistance to the coup provided by elements of the CIA and Pentagon, supplemented by U.S. reactionaries.
Following the coup’s failure, OAS gunmen ambushed De Gaulle, who escaped with his life due to the skill and loyalty of his security detachment.
Interestingly–and perhaps significantly–an OAS terrorist named Jean Souetre was arrested in Dallas on 11/22/1963 and deported to Mexico. Some analysts believe that a French fascist and criminal element was involved with the operational phase of the JFK assassination in Dallas.)
In 2002, a book was published (after the death of its author) which presented De Gaulle’s pointed analysis of the killing JFK, which he felt was altogether similar to the attempts on his life.
De Gaulle’s analysis of the methodological template of both Kennedy’s murder and his own, very near brush with death is accurate and telling.
Dave,
I sincerely appreciate your life’s work in disseminating the critical information necessary to cut through the fog of current and historical misinformation, disinformation, and partisan drivel. I may not always agree with all of your conclusions, but the work you’ve done is invaluable.
Thank you.
I agree with the comments and echo them. You have made a tremendous contribution to humankind, Dave.
There’s definite echoes of Farewell America here: We’re getting reports from the US’s NATO allies about the their interpretation of the January 6 pro-Trump DC insurrection. Three anonymous officials spoke to Business Insider
, including a French police official responsible for public security in a key section of central Paris. And according to that anonymous police official, the available evidence strongly points toward the Trump administration deliberately orchestrating the storming the Capitol for the purpose of pulling off a coup. The other two anonymous NATO officials appear to largely agree. As one of the officials put it, “Today I am briefing my government that we believe with a reasonable level of certainty that Donald Trump attempted a coup that failed when the system did not buckle”:
“They said the circumstantial evidence available pointed to what would be openly called a coup attempt in any other nation. None were willing to speak on the record because of the dire nature of the subject.”
None were willing to speak on the record because of the dire nature of the subject. What transpired was so unthinkable it’s unspeakable. And yet it happened with plenty of warnings beforehand that something big was in the works. That’s why the French police official is predicting that an investigation would reveal someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law enforcement on the Capitol. A sentiment shared by none other than Kim Dine, the chief of the Capitol Police from 2012 to 2016:
And note one of the massive possible areas of fallout for the US had Trump actually pulled the coup off, even if only for a couple of days: Once the US becomes a dictatorship, its financial system is subject to sanction. Something that would effective cripple the contemporary global financial system:
Yes, if Trump pulled this coup off, prompting the sanctioning of the US financial system, we really could be looking at a massive global economic crisis. An economic crisis rooted in the collapse of the dollar as a global safe haven that could upend the global economic order. Have fun trying to fathom that. The longer the coup lasted, the worse the damage, but even a short-lived coup could be damaging enough to prompt a massive reshuffling of the global economic order as the dollar loses its safe-haven status. It’s an example of the global nature of threat posed by the Jan 6 coup attempt. And an example of just how much money foreknowledge of events could be worth. Imagine what how profitable it could have been to groups who just happened to be well positioned in highly speculative bets that benefited from an event that destabilized the dollar.
Also keep in mind that this report is just the initial response of foreign officials to the events of that day. America’s allies are presumably continuing to study what happened as more information comes out. The diplomatic fallout is an evolving situation. It raises a question about one of the long-term consequences of those events: what are America’s allies going to assume about the likely stability of the United States the next time a Republican wins the White House? After all, it wasn’t just a coup attempt. It was a popular coup attempt, at least popular with Trump’s core base which remains the core base of the Republican Party. So one of America’s two major party’s is basically pro-coup at this point, something governments around the world have no doubt noticed. So, again, how will world handle future Republican administrations? We see, but they’re presumably going to be putting a lot more thought into how the world might go about suddenly decoupling itself from the US financial system going forward. A permanent threat of a financial emergency rooted in a bad reputation. It would be a fitting Trumpian farewell to America.
This next article titled “Biden delays release of JFK assassination files” by MATT MCNULTY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and AFP, 23 October 2021 includes some of the following. President Joe Biden has determined that ‘an interim release’ of the remaining classified files ‘shall be withheld from full public disclosure’ until ‘later this year’ — nearly 60 years after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963. However, a second batch of records will be released to the public in a ‘more comprehensive release’ in a little over a year on December 15, 2022, the memo announced. The cause was reportedly due to the coronavirus pandemic has slowed down the the review process by the National Archives to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations’ which they assert “outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.” US law requires that all government records on the assassination be disclosed ‘to enable the public to become fully informed.’
The obvious question the reader should ask, is what secrets are so important to withhold from the public 57 years later?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10122889/Biden-delays-release-JFK-assassination-files.html
These next two main stream media articles show how serious our situation is that the US is heading towards fascism. The first article was written by Jason Stanley who is a philosophy professor at Yale University. He is the author of How Fascism Works. It is one of the 10 best articles I have read this year. It explains and links a lot of details and tactics that have been used by the clearly dominant element in the Republican Party to convert the US to a fascist government.
After this is another good article from NPR on December 23 by correspondent Melissa Block which explains the tactic of how the Republicans used the “Big Lie” about voter fraud in the 2020 election to place restrictions on voting rights to destroy the democracy.
As an aside and not mentioned in either article, the Anti Vaxxer Movement could be interpreted as supporting a Nazi’s “Master Race” theory where only the fittest survive.
FIRST ARTICLE:
The Guardian UK, December, 22, 2021, America is now in fascism’s legal phase by Jason Stanley:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/22/america-fascism-legal-phase?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
America is now in fascism’s legal phase | The far right | The Guardian
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
So began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to last.
Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. 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.
Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.
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. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.
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. 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.
My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. 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. 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. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her.
Philosophers have always been at the forefront in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. 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.
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. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.
Photo Caption: Fascist forces have found a popular leader, unconstrained by the rules of democracy, in the figure of Donald Trump. Photograph: Carol Guzy/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock
Fascist 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. 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. As WEB Du Bois showed in his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction, there is a long history of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.
The novel development is that a ruthless would-be autocrat has marshalled these fascist forces and shaped them into a cult, with him as its leader. We are now well into the repercussions of this latter process – where fascist lies, for example, the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, have begun to restructure institutions, notably electoral infrastructure and law. As this process unfolds, slowly and deliberately, the media’s normalization of these processes evokes Morrison’s tenth and final step: “Maintain, at all costs, silence.”
Constructing an enemy
To understand contemporary US fascism, it is useful to consider parallels to 20th century history, both where they succeed and where they fail.
Hitler was a genocidal antisemite. Though fascism involves disregard for human life, not all fascists are genocidal. Even Nazi Germany turned to genocide only relatively late in the regime’s rule. And not all fascists are antisemitic. There were Italian Jewish fascists. Referring to the successful assimilation of Jews into all phases of Weimar era German life, my father warned me, “if they had chosen someone else, some of us would have been among the very best Nazis.” We American Jews feel firmly at home. Now, where the fascist movement’s internal enemies are leftists and movements for Black racial equality, there certainly could be fascist American Jews.
Germany’s National Socialist party did not take over a mainstream party. It started as a small, radical, far-right anti-democratic party, which faced different pressures as it strove to achieve greater electoral success.
Despite its radical start, the Nazi party dramatically increased its popularity over many years in part by strategically masking its explicit antisemitic agenda to attract moderate voters, who could convince themselves that the racism at the core of Nazi ideology was something the party had outgrown. It represented itself as the antidote to communism, using a history of political violence in the Weimar Republic, including street clashes between communists and the far right, to warn of a threat of violent communist revolution. It attracted support from business elites by promising to smash labor unions. The Nazis portrayed socialists, Marxists, liberals, labor unions, the cultural world and the media as representatives of, or sympathizers with, this revolution. Once in power, they bore down on this message.
In his 1935 speech, Communism with its Mask Off, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described Bolshevism carrying “on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such”. By contrast, “National Socialism sees in all these things – in [private] property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism – these forces which carry on every human civilization and fundamentally determine its worth.”
The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to justify their criminalization.
Photo Caption: Trump supporters constructed a gallows near the Capitol in the hours before the 6 January riot. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
Contrary to popular belief, the Nazi government of the 1930s was not genocidal, nor were its notorious concentration camps packed with Jewish prisoners, at least until the November pogrom of 1938. The main targets of the regime’s concentration camps were, initially, communists and socialists. The Nazi regime urged vigilante violence against its other targets, such as Jews, separating themselves from this violence by obscuring the role of agents of the state. During this time, it was possible for many non-Jewish Germans to deceive themselves about the brutal nature of the regime, to tell themselves that its harsh means were necessary to protect the German nation from the insidious threat of communism.
Violent militias occupied an ambiguous role between state and non-state actors. The SS began as violent Nazi supporters, before becoming an independent arm of the government. The message of violent law and order created a culture that influenced all the Nazi state’s institutions. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “for violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards.”
In the US, the training of police as “warriors”, together with the unofficial replacement of the American flag by the thin blue line flag, augur poorly about the democratic commitments of this institution.
Photo Caption: A thin blue line carried at a Blue Lives Matter rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, 30 August 2020. Photograph: Morry Gash/AP
For a far-right party to become viable in a democracy, it must present a face it can defend as moderate, and cultivate an ambiguous relationship to the extreme views and statements of its most explicit members. It must maintain a pretense of the rule of law, characteristically by projecting its own violations of it on to its opponents.
In the case of the takeover of the mainstream rightwing party by a far-right anti-democratic movement, the pretense must be stronger. The movement must contend with members of that party who are faithful to procedural elements of democracy, such as the principle of one voter one vote, or that the loser of a fair election give up power – in the United States today, figures such as Adam Kinzinger and Elizabeth Cheney. A fascist social and political party faces pressure both to mask its connection to and to cultivate violent racist supporters, as well as its inherently anti-democratic agenda.
Photo Caption: Armed members of the New England Minutemen militia group at an anti-mask and anti-vaccine ‘world wide rally for freedom’ in Concord, New Hampshire, 15 May 2021. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
In the face of the attack on the US capital on 6 January, even the most resolute skeptic must admit that Republican politicians have been at least attempting to cultivate a mass of violent vigilantes to support their causes. Kyle Rittenhouse is becoming a hero to Republicans after showing up in Kenosha, WI as an armed vigilante citizen, and killing two men. Perhaps there are not enough potential Kyle Rittenhouses in the US to justify fear of massive armed vigilante militias enforcing a 2024 election result demanded by Donald Trump. But denying that Trump’s party is trying to create such a movement is, at this point, deliberate deception.
Black rebellion, white backlash
Street violence proved invaluable to the National Socialists in their path to power. The Nazis instigated and exacerbated violence in the streets, then demonized their opponents as enemies of the German people who must be dealt with harshly. Trump’s rise followed Black protest, at times violent, of police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore. More recently, the murder of George Floyd and a historic protest movement in the US in the late spring has given fuel to fascist misrepresentation.
All of these recent developments take place as only the latest in a long US history of Black rebellion against white supremacist ideology and structures, and a parallel history of white backlash.
White vigilante groups regularly formed in reaction to Black rebellions, to “defend their families and property against Black rebellion”, the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes in her recent history of these rebellions. Hinton shows that police often acted in concert with these groups. For decades, the instigator of these rebellions has typically been an incident or incidents of police violence against members of the community, following a long period of often violent over-policing that exacerbated these communities’ grievances.
Photo Caption: Armed police forced people to lie face down in the street during the Watts riots, Los Angeles, in August 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Street movements in the US have often been accompanied by vigorous campus protests, from the protests against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, to recent campus protests for racial justice that attracted media rebuke (paradoxically, for “chilling free speech”). Politicians in both parties have feasted on these moments, using them to troll for votes. During these episodes of protest and rebellion, US politicians from Barry Goldwater onwards, placing campus protests together with Black rebellion against over-policing, have encouraged harsh law and order policing and crackdowns on leftists. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, and invented the drug war to target both:
You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Politicians have shown less interest in addressing the underlying conditions that lead to violence in poor Black urban communities – the widespread availability of guns, the massive and persistent racial wealth gap and the effects of violent policing and mass incarceration. And why should they? As long as these underlying conditions persist, politicians of either party can run for office by milking fear and promising a harsh law and order response. Morrison’s 1995 address is a warning that these conditions are ripe for harnessing by a fascist movement, one targeting democracy itself.
In its most recent iteration, in the form of the reaction against Black Lives Matter protesters and the demonization of antifa and student activists, a fascist social and political movement has been avidly stoking the flames for mass rightwing political violence, by justifying it against these supposed internal enemies.
Rachel Kleinfield, in an October 2021 article, documents the rise of the legitimation of political violence in the US. According to the article, the “bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and require defending – and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, in particular, who will safeguard their way of life.”
This kind of justification of political violence is classically fascist – a dominant group threatened by the prospect of gender, racial and religious equality turning to a leader who promises a violent response.
How to topple a democracy
We are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).
The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such bans.
Photo Caption: Opponents of critical race theory protest outside the Loudoun county school board offices, in Ashburn, Virginia, 22 June 2021. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
The key to democracy is an informed electorate. An electorate that knows about persisting racial injustice in the United States along all its dimensions, from the racial wealth gap to the effects of over-policing and over-incarceration, will be unsurprised by mass political rebellion in the face of persistent refusal to face up to these problems. An electorate ignorant of these facts will react not with understanding, but with uncomprehending fear and horror at Black political unrest.
Sometimes, you trace a fascist movement to its genesis in Nazi influence on its leaders, as with India’s RSS. In the United States, the causal relations run the other way around. As James Whitman shows in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Jim Crow era in the United States influenced Nazi law. In 2021, legislators in 19 states passed laws making access to the ballot more difficult, some with specific (and clearly intentional) disparate impact on minority communities (as in Texas). By obscuring in our education system facts about this era, one can mask the reemergence of legislation that borrows from its strategies.
Photo Caption: Trump supporters outside the Pennsylvania convention center, where ballots were being counted, 6 November 2020. Photograph: Bryan R Smith/AFP/Getty Images
Indeed, the very tactic of restricting politically vital information to schoolchildren is itself borrowed from the Jim Crow era. Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today.
Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.
According to National Socialist ideology, abortion, at any point in pregnancy, was considered to be murder. Just as it was acceptable to murder disabled people and other groups whose identities were considered dangerous to the health of the “Aryan race”, it was acceptable to perform abortions on members of these groups. In the first six years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1939, there was a harsh crackdown on the birth control movement. Led by the Gestapo, there was a punitive campaign against doctors who performed abortions on Aryan women. The recent attack on abortion rights, and the coming attack on birth control, led by a hard-right supreme court, is consistent with the hypothesis that we are, in the United States, facing a real possibility of a fascist future.
If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Act over time, unleashing unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.
There has been a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it.
Donald Trump has shown others what is possible. But the fascist movement he now leads preceded him, and will outlive him. As Toni Morrison warned, it feeds off ideologies with deep roots in American history. It would be a grave error to think it cannot ultimately win.
SECOND ARTICLE:
NPR, December 23, 2021, The clear and present danger of Trump’s enduring ‘Big Lie’, by Melissa Block:
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/23/1065277246/trump-big-lie-jan-6-election
The clear and present danger of Trump’s enduring ‘Big Lie’
Melissa Block
Pro-Trump rioters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on Jan. 6. His supporters gathered in the nation’s capital to protest the ratification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
It’s been nearly a year since the United States suffered an unprecedented attack on constitutional democracy.
When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump to a second term.
Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt, it was fueled by what’s known as the “Big Lie”: the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than 7 million votes.
Many are warning that over the past year, that “big lie” of a stolen election has grown more entrenched and more dangerous.
“I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the ‘big lie,’ ” says election law expert Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine.
Photo Caption: A rioter identified in court documents as Josiah Colt of Meridian, Idaho, jumps from the public gallery to the floor of the Senate chamber on Jan. 6. Colt has pleaded guilty to one felony count. Win McNamee/Getty Images
“This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States,” Hasen says. “I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we’re not too late already.”
A “big lie” with roots in history
In rallies across the country, Trump continues to hammer on the fiction that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
Speaking at a rally in Georgia in September, Trump trumpeted his familiar, baseless claim that the election was “corrupt” and “rigged.”
“I have no doubt that we won, and we won big,” Trump said. “The headlines claiming that Biden won are fake news — and a very big lie.”
A couple of weeks later, he repeated the fiction at a rally in Iowa. “We didn’t lose,” he insisted to a crowd that rewarded him with chants of “Trump won!”
By inverting the narrative, attempting to slough off the “big lie” and pin it instead on his opponents, Trump exploited an age-old tactic, says Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder.
Photo Caption: Former President Donald Trump repeated his lies about a “totally corrupt” election at a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on Oct. 9. “We didn’t lose,” he told the crowd, which rewarded him with chants of “Trump won!” Scott Olson/Getty Images
“Part of the character of the ‘big lie’ is that it turns the powerful person into the victim,” he says. “And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it’s a promise for the future.”
Snyder, author of the books The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, has spent years studying the ways tyrants skewer truth. Snyder points to Hitler’s original definition of the “big lie” in his manifesto, Mein Kampf and the ways he used it to blame Jews for all of Germany’s woes.
“The lie is so big that it reorders the world,” Snyder says. “And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it’s the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it’s just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf.”
A lie that’s become embedded in public opinion
Over the past year, Trump’s lie that election fraud cost him the White House has become firmly anchored in public opinion.
According to a CNN poll conducted this summer, fully 36% of Americans do not believe that President Biden legitimately won the election. Among Republicans, that number leaps to 78%.
In an NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll conducted in October, just 34% of Republicans say they trust that elections are fair, while 75% of Republicans say Trump has a legitimate claim that there were “real cases of fraud that changed the results.” Just 2% of Democrats agreed with that statement.
What’s more, says Timothy Snyder, “the ‘big lie’ is not just in people’s minds. It’s also now in the law books.”
Snyder points to the raft of new laws passed in Republican-led states that restrict voting. Over the past year, at least 19 states have passed laws limiting ballot access.
Photo Caption: Thousands came to Washington for the March On For Voting Rights on Aug. 28. Martin Luther King III, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee are among those pictured. Tyrone Turner for NPR
In addition, Trump loyalists in battleground states are running for powerful offices that control elections. These are candidates who are endorsed by Trump, because they’ve embraced his lie that he won the 2020 election.
And some Republican-controlled state legislatures have moved to seize power over elections, opening a path where they could overrule voters and substitute their own slate of electors to choose the winner.
All of it, Snyder says, is a direct outcome of Trump’s “big lie” and is deeply troubling for the future.
“All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States,” Snyder says. “I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now.”
That scenario needs to be confronted immediately, Snyder says: “It’s right in front of our eyes. The most interesting and the most distressing thing about American news coverage right now is that we don’t treat the end of democracy in America as the story. That is the story.”
We delude ourselves, Snyder says, if we think we’re immune from an anti-democratic turn. “We imagine that there’s somehow this immovable American democratic background, which doesn’t really exist,” he says. “We can lose democracy just like anybody else can, just like most people have in the history of democracy. We can lose it, and we’re losing it right now.”
“The fierce urgency of now”
As of yet, the Democratic-led Congress has been unable to pass legislation to protect voting rights, a fact that Carol Anderson, professor of African-American Studies at Emory University, finds appalling.
She argues that passing voting rights laws would “short-circuit the damage that the ‘big lie’ is doing and will do.”
Anderson sees “a Democratic Party that does not understand that American democracy is hanging by a thread, and does not grapple with the fierce urgency of now.”
We have been, in her words, “baptized in American exceptionalism” — the naive belief that the demise of democracy can’t happen here.
“Even after you have had the insurrection,” Anderson says, “even after you have had these legislatures write these laws figuring out not only how to stop Black people, brown people, indigenous people from voting, but also how to lower the guardrails of democracy that prevented Trump from being able to overturn the results in these states; so even after seeing this, to not move and do what needs to be done to protect this nation?” Anderson sighs. “It’s unconscionable.”
Photo Caption: Guests arrive for a rally with former President Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Like Trump, his fans continue to perpetuate the “big lie.” Scott Olson/Getty Images
For Anderson, author of the books White Rage and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, Trump’s lie about the election sprouts from the same twisted roots as his birtherism lie, which is the conspiracy theory Trump peddled, falsely claiming that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and therefore ineligible to serve as president.
Linking both, she says, is a clear racist throughline.
“Foundational to that is the devaluation and the dismissing of American citizenship for Black people,” Anderson says. “This is about, ‘My nation is about the real Americans. And all of those folks aren’t real Americans.’ It is so vile. It is so racist. And it works. That’s the thing, it works.”
After all, Anderson says, if you repeat the lie enough times, it starts to sound like the truth.
A failed coup is practice for a successful one
In Congress, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has interviewed hundreds of witnesses to establish the truth of what happened that day.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R‑Ill., is one of just two Republicans on the committee. An outspoken Trump critic, he has announced he won’t run for reelection.
Kinzinger compares conspiracy theories to a cancer eating away at the Republican Party, and feeding that cancer, he says, is the “big lie.”
“The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence,” he says. “And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”
Beyond his committee’s mission of uncovering what happened on Jan. 6 itself, Kinzinger has broader questions.
“More importantly in my mind, what is the rot in the system that led up to Jan. 6? And where have we come since? And how do we stop anything like this from happening again?” he asks. ” ‘Cause even though Jan. 6 technically failed, there’s a lot of areas where you can learn from, if your goal is to overthrow a legitimate election and potentially do it successfully next time.”
And that is precisely the lesson from history, says Yale professor Timothy Snyder.
“It wasn’t enough, but next time, it could well be enough. And the fact that it’s been rehearsed makes me worry,” he says. “This is what historians and political scientists who study coups d’etat say. They say a failed coup is practice for a successful one.”
Photo Caption: Virginia National Guard soldiers march across the east side of the U.S. Capitol on their way to their guard posts on Jan. 16. After the riots at the U.S. Capitol Building, the FBI warned of additional threats in the nation’s capital and in all 50 states. Samuel Corum/Getty Images
What we’re potentially looking at, Snyder warns, is nothing less than the end of the democratic United States as we’ve come to know it.
“That’s just the reality,” he says. “And in order to prevent things from being frightening, you have to look right at them and say, ‘OK, that’s the monster. How can I disassemble it? How can I take it to pieces? How can I make sure that that story isn’t our only story?’ But it will be unless we tell it to ourselves straight.”
We have to confront that reality, Snyder says, if we are to find the courage and conviction to do something about it.