International Fascism - A Bug or A Feature?

Reading It Really Can Happen Here (Los Angeles Review of Books) raised a few questions for me.

Did we feed the beast of fascism, thinking it was the shield against Communism?

This fascist transnationalism continued after the war, becoming in many ways more considerable than ever. With East-Central European populations now strewn across the globe due to border changes, deportations, migration, and asylum claims, many former fascists set up movements in their new nations, paradoxically creating stronger international ties. The Ustaše had ruled a German-occupied Yugoslavia as the Independent State of Croatia, and had committed genocide against Jews, Serbs, and Romani during the war, but many prominent members of the organization were allowed to resettle in Australia, the United States, and Canada—where they created new movements, campaigning against the Tito regime in communist Yugoslavia. In the United States, the clandestine Operation Paperclip recruited Nazi scientists for government employment after the war, with over 1,000 finding new homes in the country. It was not until the 1970s that an Office of Special Investigations was established by the Department of Justice to track down and deport Nazi collaborators.

My first stepfather brought me John Birch Society books; there was a reading room in Anderson back in the Seventies. He was as ardent an anticommunist as he was a Democrat. My recollection was that everyone in government was a Communist; the only anti-Communists were them. It made no sense to me, who even then had developed a sense of paranoia. I had also learned enough not to believe that the Soviet Union would take us over - if anything, we would destroy them. Civil War history had already taught me the Puritan streak was dangerous; the Germans and the Japanese learned this lesson just as did the Confederacy.

But underlying this question was another: is there something inherent in human nature that favors fascism?

I almost wrote “America” instead of “human nature,” but the review essay addresses transnational fascism.

That Nazi propaganda postcard from the 1930s questions whether “the United States [would] be willing to agree to such frontiers” of Canadian conquest. The transnational fascism at work in this message involves not merely the specific Nazi connections to American ideals but also the more general implication that fascism is able to take root and grow anywhere, as Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here acknowledged. Fascism’s blood-and-soil ideology is paradoxically capable of appealing across national borders, manipulated to evoke universal aspirations and local traditions. Reposition the map in that postcard slightly further north and we perceive Trump’s greed for Greenland. Fascism doesn’t just cross borders—it’s been everywhere all along. It can happen here.

There is a great appeal in protecting and loving our own. 

Fearing those from elsewhere who do not look, act, and/or talk like we do is natural.

Love is a grand thing.

But there is a point where the gentleman caller becomes a stalker. Loving one's own can justify abusing one's own.

We are always The Other to someone. 

In America, we have the rich who think they should rule. It has always been that way. Watch Meet John Doe for an example. 

However much we aspire to be rich, there has always been a distrust of them.

We have been racist. Ask the American Indians. Then ask the immigrants: the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Italians, the Jews, the Hispanics, the Germans, the Greeks, the Vietnamese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Arabs, the Poles, and the list goes on. Ask the descendants of slavery. 

And we have tried to rise above our racism, but fear is always hunting us.

Democracy requires courage. Not everyone is up to that requirement; they will seek succor in what stills their fears. Even if that succor will end by slitting their throats.

Democracy has enemies on two sides: fascism and Marxist-Leninism. We can call them authoritarians, or we can call them totaliarians, but those words obscure their shared danger to us. Worse, when they were used, they sanitized the authoritarians. Our ancestors had a better word for both: despots.

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