You can stop worrying when Fascism will arrive. It’s been here.
The US Liberal mind is constantly waiting and wondering when Fascism will rise, and how it could have happened before, and attempting to clarify by quoting Hannah Arendt on “banality”. More on that later. I have a proposition to resolve this never-ending Waiting for Godot:
It’s always been here. The way you can tell is from US foreign policy: the CIA on behalf of the US State Department has never met a democratically elected government in the developing world that it hasn’t tried to overthrow with a bloody Fascist coup complete with death squads, disappearances, psyops, and torture. I can say more about about their well documented methods in another post, but to keep this one brief: any nation that has spent half a century imposing Fascist dictatorships on other nations is by definition, Fascist.
The USA presents as violently militarized neoliberalism internally, but as you can see from it’s chief export of Fascism, it’s the same beast. And what the US has perfected doing to developing nations always comes back home: US overseas adventures are development labs for brutalizing and controlling the domestic population, which we’ve seen abundant evidence of. Weapons used on protesters in the US, all of which are banned for use in warfare by international law, include sonic weapons, microwave crowd control weapons, and toxic tear gas and pepperspray munitions, among others. Since those tactics were normalized in US streets against protesters, we’re now seeing the increase in use of police surveillance drones, police spy planes, and police/security robots and robot dogs patrolling public streets and parks. During the Keystone Pipeline protests, Water is Life protesters in the Lakota Nation were assaulted by combined police and paramilitary operators on their own reservation for defending their own water, land, and environmental rights. They were sprayed with toxic chemicals developed by Israel for repression Palestinians, sprayed with freezing water, shot with “less lethal” munitions that can crush skulls or limbs, and literally detained in actual dog cages they couldn’t stand up in. Concentration camps full of refugees have existed since Obama and continued to increase under Trump and Biden, with no sign of reversal. Children have been routinely stolen and separated from their parents, even adopted out to white families in what the UN defines as acts of Ethnic Cleansing.
During the George Floyd protests, in Portland Oregon protesters were attacked by federal troops including BORTAC — Border Patrol Tactical squad, and FBI HRT and SWAT. BORTAC agents roved the city in unmarked vans performing illegal black-bag snatches of protesters, who were illegally held without any rights or processing in anonymous locations, for up to 24 hours without food or medical treatment, then dumped back out on the street without charge. This was a terror tactic commonly used by US-backed Fascist regimes in other nations, and you can expect to see it’s continued and increasing usage.
Citizens and residents find themselves with less and less legal recourse, with no respected universal rights. And both major US political parties are involved in these escalations. Trump and the GOP, obviously, are openly entrenching Fascism in the federal government. But what many are in denial about is that so does the DNC. Biden has mercilessly prosecuted Israel’s genocide of Palestinians with a constant flow of funding, munitions, advanced weapon systems, US operators, and deploy Naval carrier groups to enforce the illegal blockade of Palestinians and to run interference with Iran and Yemen to ensure the genocide continues. The US provides UN and Security Council support for Israel’s crimes against humanity and its own.
Kamala Harris in her failed presidential bid (and blatantly undemocratic coronation as the unelected candidate) repeated stated that she wouldn’t change a thing about Biden’s Israel policy, if anything she’d amplify it. At the very beginning of her candidacy, she announced that students protesting the genocide were “Hamas, antisemites, terrorists, flag-burners”. (See below, or on Kamala Harris’ campaign page where the statement is still online as of this writing.) Coming from a top cop law-and-order candidate like Harris, this statement is a classic Fascist statement of intent: when a population is dehumanized and ostracized from society, the intention is to unleash brutal police state repression against that population. Trump is unlikely to be any more or any less intent on the same goal. Those two candidates spent their campaigns competing for the right-most hard right positions on Israel, on the border/immigrants, and in general jingoistic investment in an unconstrained military police state at the expense of all else. The rightward march continues, regardless of which party holds power.
During the DNC convention, Palestinian protesters were physically assaulted, detained, expelled, and DNC delegates famously plugged their ears to avoid hearing the names of the murdered Palestinian children being read outside the venue. Liberals fail to recognize the Fascism within their own party and their own worldview, having been content to project the Bad Word onto their political opponents whilst continually tailing and enabling far right politics. That’s how we got here.
The USA has never been a democracy, having chosen Capitalism instead: Capitalism and democracy are necessarily enemies, only one must exist at a time. Capitalism conducts a loud and jingoistic cosplay of democracy, but constrains all politics to a narrow and continuously further-right spectrum whilst violently discarding any dissent from outside that narrow rightward-ratcheting Overton Window. The Capitalist ruling class of the USA has elected to discard their gloves and openly execute Fascist policy, in a vain attempt to save US Capitalism from it’s inevitable, and already in progress, collapse.
There is plenty of hope to be had in these dark times, friends, but the road to liberation is long. We must walk it collectively and with humility, or perish individually.
