Historical fascism (2024)

Book Review from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blood and Power. The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism. By John Foot. Bloomsbury, 2023. 416pp.

It has become common for the cry of ‘fascism’ to go up, from both right and left, every time a government or political party enacts or proposes policies which seem destined to increase state control over the system we live under. Some even argue that western capitalism itself is in fact fascism, if a cleverly dissimulated form. One thing historian John Foot’s new book on Italian fascism does is to give the lie to all this. It shows, in the starkest possible terms, how different fascism, in its original incarnation anyway, really was from what many idly give that label to today.

Blood and Power takes the reader on a harrowing journey of violence, torture and murder, without which fascism could never have taken hold of Italy and then ruled the country for over 20 years, only finally collapsing when its leader, Mussolini, made the fatal mistake of allying himself with Nazi Germany and being brought down when Hitler was brought down. Otherwise, the author speculates, the regime may have lasted longer, as did the similar set-up in Spain under Franco. But this book is not just a conventional, linear account (of which there are many) of Italy’s ‘ventennio nero’ (‘black 20 years’), but rather an excavation of that period ‘from below’, seen in large part, that is, via the on-the-ground experiences of many ‘ordinary’ individuals who lived, and not infrequently died, under fascist terror.

And terror it truly was, some of it stomach-churning as we see it depicted on the page. From as early as 1919, those who opposed the politics of fascism, either through declaring themselves ‘socialists’ or ‘communists’ or just voicing opposition to its ‘lawless’ approach, were subjected to brutal and terrifying treatment at the hands of increasingly large and merciless bands of fascist thugs. They were intimidated, beaten, tortured, maimed and often murdered, while the ‘democratic’ state and its authorities (ie, police and military) looked the other way, allowing a sort of ‘state within a state’ to develop. As the author writes, ‘fascism eliminated its opponents with gusto or reduced them to a state of fear’ (…) ‘it was fundamental, visceral, epochal and life-changing: both for those who experienced it, and those who practised it’.

Nor was there any redress for victims, and once the fascist party had taken full power from 1925 onwards, after which elections and any semblance of democracy ceased, it became all the more implacable. So, for example, as the author tells us, ‘it became nigh on impossible to print or distribute any kind of newspaper that wasn’t in full support of Mussolini and fascist rule (…) prisoners were often ‘disappeared’ or ‘committed suicide’ in prison (…) ‘torture was common, ritualised and sanctioned from above.’ The regime relentlessly pursued all its opponents, having no compunction about even sending its spies and agents abroad in pursuit of those who had fled the country and wreaking vengeance on them there. In all, according to the author, Italian fascism was ‘responsible for the ‘premature deaths” of at least a million people, in Italy and across the world’, including of course many thousands of Jews who were transported from Italy to the gas chambers in the latter part of the war.

How does all this compare to what is often referred to as fascism, or at least potential fascism, nowadays, in particular the ‘populist’ politics and regimes that have risen up in recent times? How, for example, does it compare to the current right-wing government in Italy, often labelled ‘neo-fascist’? How does it compare to the politics of Donald Trump in the US and the foreboding about what might be to come if he wins the 2024 presidential election? How does it compare to attempts by the Conservative Party in this country to undermine trade unions or criminalise certain forms of expression or to the apparently racist and ultra-nationalistic policies of right-wing groupings such as the Reform Party? The knowledge that this book imparts of the reality of Mussolini’s one-party state makes it clear that, however retrograde and undesirable it may be, the kind of modern-day populism exemplified above does not bear comparison to the vicious, ultra-repressive, anti-democratic nature of fascism in its original Italian form.

What, however, Italian fascism does share with today’s ‘populist’ ideologies or governments and indeed with the more ‘enlightened’ administrations in most Western countries is that the purpose of them all is to manage the profit system (ie, capitalism). And, broadly speaking, this takes place most effectively, as far as capitalism is concerned, in a political environment where there are democratic elections and scope for relatively free circulation and exchange of ideas. Regimes that do not allow this (eg, China and Russia today), while by no means impregnable in the longer term, inhibit such development and, in the way they operate, are the closest things that exist today to the kind of system excavated and characterised so expertly by John Foot in his exploration of Italian fascism. It should be added that such regimes also inhibit the spread of consciousness necessary for the establishment of the alternative system of society beyond the system of wages, money and profit which this journal calls socialism.

Howard Moss

British fascists online (2022)

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago, YouTube’s algorithms carried me towards some video essays made by the alternative media commentator known as Morgoth. I’d been vaguely aware of Morgoth and similar reactionaries, such as Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes and Keith Woods, for some time, but hadn’t paid too much attention to them. After all, I knew that they called themselves ‘traditionalists’, ‘racial nationalists’ or ‘third positionists’ – in a word, fascists – and I only have so much time to devote to the ramblings of people who would happily deport or kill my non-white friends and family. On the other hand, it’s good to know your enemies, so I resolved to trawl through some of the videos and livestreams made by Morgoth and his cronies in order to get a sense of what the far right are saying and doing online these days.

Racial nationalists

Morgoth’s worldview is a macabre one. In between garbled references to right-wing philosophers, Morgoth rails against the ‘liberal elites’ and ‘globalist’ technocrats whom he sees as running the world – all controlled and funded, of course, by rootless cosmopolitans like George Soros. According to Morgoth, these elites are set on crushing the ‘Western Spirit’, subjecting the population to their nihilistic ideology of hyper-individualism, hedonistic consumerism and, worst of all, racial diversity. By promoting mass immigration and miscegenation throughout the Western world, the elites, according to Morgoth, want to undermine and ultimately eradicate the white native stock. To stop this from happening, Morgoth proposes that whites should unite to reactivate the Faustian spirit of the West by creating a racially pure ethno-state. As he puts it at the end one of his videos: ‘We’re going to be the masters in our own land again!’ (YouTube, ‘Roger Scruton & Words of Power’).

For obvious reasons, Morgoth never appears on camera. Judging by details contained in his various monologues, he seems to be a Generation X factory worker from North-East England. He has a blog, Morgoth’s Review, and a large number of video essays on YouTube and other digital platforms favoured by the far right, such as BitChute and Odysee. He also occasionally pops up as a guest on other so-called ‘dissident right’ social media channels and has now started to consolidate his oeuvre on his Substack page. His video essays, which are often illustrated by footage or photographs from his countryside walks, address a wide range of topics and Morgoth often sweetens the red pill of ethno-nationalism with discussions of contemporary popular culture. In recent years, far-right organisers have been using online gaming as a recruitment tool, pipelining young men towards racial supremacism during in-game chats and associated livestreams, and Morgoth himself often combines his political rants with analyses of videogames, fantasy novels, television dramas and films.

Many of Morgoth’s videos rhapsodise about the wonders of Nature, although even these are shot through with expressions of hatred towards minority groups. In one video (YouTube, ‘A Tale of Two Country Walks’), for example, Morgoth laments that, on a visit to the Norwegian fjords, he was obliged to share his authentic appreciation of the awe-inspiring landscape with ‘cripples’ and ‘fat slobs’ who were able effortlessly to enjoy the same scenery from the comfort of an adjacent car park. Morgoth’s main business, however, is racial hatred and his regular attacks on racial minorities often contain elements of so-called scientific racism or ‘race realism’. In a 2017 blog post (‘Equality is a Cruel Mistress’), for instance, he cites a table of national IQ rankings to argue that the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is too unintelligent to be the Shadow Secretary of State.

Morgoth, and the British far right in general, are obsessed with the so-called ‘Asian grooming gangs’ that have come to light in English towns such as Rochdale and Telford in recent years. Research produced by the Home Office suggests that the sexual grooming of young girls in Britain is not a disproportionately ‘Muslim problem’, but Morgoth, like other far-right figures in Britain such as Tommy Robinson, talks exclusively about Pakistani men preying on white English girls and defiling the racial purity of the nation. There’s an all-too-familiar racist fantasy at work here. In his memoir Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote luridly about the ‘satanic joy’ of ‘the black-haired Jewish youth’, who ‘lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people’. The image of a racialised Other who enjoys what is rightfully ‘ours’ and stands in the way of our own satisfaction is deeply imprinted on the fascist imagination.

Paranoid

Indeed, Morgoth, like the rest of the political far-right, is very paranoid. To justify his sense of victimhood, he conflates completely different traditions of political and philosophical thought into a single straw-man enemy. Liberalism, leftism, postmodernism, neo-liberalism and socialism are lumped together and presented as the more or less interchangeable snares of the Machiavellian globalists. Unsurprisingly, this leads Morgoth into incoherence and self-contradiction; in one video he even makes the bizarre claim that socialists have been responsible for ushering in ’a globalist, capitalist society’ (YouTube, ‘The Good, the Bragg and the Stormzy’).

The question therefore arises: why should we pay any attention to confused bigots like Morgoth? One reason is that there is clearly a receptive audience for their ideas. Research findings published by the organisation Cybersecurity for Democracy last year showed that far-right news stories produce far more user engagement, in the form of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, than other types of online content. Some of the key figures on the far right, meanwhile, have significant numbers of followers. At the time of writing, Morgoth himself has nearly 50,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He has also been given mainstream credibility – if that is the right word for it – by featuring as a guest on the podcast of the British conservative hack James Delingpole. In 2019 the singer Morrissey even shared a Morgoth video on his website. All in all, it’s a level of exposure that socialists could only dream of. It’s therefore worth considering the reasons for the popularity of this type of content.

It has to be said that some of Morgoth’s material is quite entertaining. Morgoth can turn a good phrase and knows how to appeal to his listeners’ interest in popular culture. In one video, for example, he indulges in a fairly amusing rant against the 90s television chef Jamie Oliver, suggesting that the ‘middle-class’ neo-liberal multiculturalism that arose in the New Labour years was ‘forged in the basket of Jamie Oliver’s moped, alongside the quail eggs and Japanese lager’ (YouTube, ‘Do Millennials Dream of Jamie Oliver’s Moped’). This combination of comedic sarcasm and pop-culture awareness gives Morgoth’s content a certain piquancy.

Phoney radicalism

Another dangerous aspect of Morgoth’s work is its phoney radicalism. Morgoth’s philosophical touchstones are the fascist favourites Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger. But he is canny enough to acknowledge some leftist thinkers, too. In one video (YouTube, ‘My Trip Down South’) he alludes to Jacques (sic) Deleuze and he often refers to the leftist philosopher Mark Fisher. For example, to support his own critique of cultural decline under neo-liberalism, he draws on Fisher’s concept of the ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ – the interesting claim that cultural innovation has stagnated since the 1990s and that popular culture today is merely recycling the themes and styles of earlier periods.

In fact, like so many fascist writings, Morgoth’s musings often appear to be consistent with socialist understandings. For example, he attacks the commodification of human life that capitalism produces (although he contradicts himself by warning white women to be mindful of their declining ‘sexual market value’, which sounds pretty commodifying to us). He is also critical of contemporary liberal catchwords such as ‘white privilege’ – as are socialists, since such notions tend to undermine working-class solidarity. Morgoth’s critique of Extinction Rebellion (YouTube, ‘Extinction Rebellion: Worst Controlled Opposition EVER!’), meanwhile, also has a superficial affinity with socialist arguments. Morgoth makes the point that XR are not a truly radical group and that their demands essentially amount to a call for working-class austerity; again, socialists would be inclined to agree. But Morgoth predictably blames the environmental crisis on overpopulation and ignores the fundamental role of capitalist production and over-production in generating global heating and other environmental threats. In fact, it’s not clear whether he even accepts the reality of human-made global heating, as he seems to reject the notion of scientific consensus; when it comes to understanding the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, he places his faith in the mumbo jumbo of the discredited scientific crank Dolores Cahill (YouTube, ‘A Letter From The NHS’). As always, the fascist mind rejects the scientific, materialist analyses of social phenomena in favour of scapegoating and irrational conspiracy-mongering.

As already noted, Morgoth is far from the only racial nationalist at work on the internet today and regular debates among nationalists of various stripes sometimes attract thousands of viewers. And while these men sometimes trade in outright lies and misrepresentations – for example, Morgoth suggests in one video that Marx and Engels might have been funded by the Rothschild banking family (YouTube, ‘The People vs The Gammon’) – their ideas are often couched in radical-sounding language, providing critiques of capitalism, ‘neo-liberalism’, consumerism and commodification. This is, of course, the socialism of fools. But what gives far-right ideas their traction and plausibility – at least among some white working-class people – is that they identify and seem to provide an explanation for real problems affecting our class, such as declining living standards and the lack of stable, full-time jobs and affordable housing.

How much of a political threat the far right pose today is another question. On the one hand, as we know, fascism is always over-diagnosed by left-wing commentators. While recent years have seen the establishment of neo-Nazi political organisations in Britain such as Patriotic Alternative, such groups often have a relatively short shelf-life – for example, the English Defence League, which sprang to life in 2009, has been relatively inactive for the last ten years – and some more recent groups, like National Action, have been banned by the state and forced underground. On the other hand, right-wing, authoritarian and often explicitly racist governments have come to power in recent years in several countries around the world. Then there is the question of far-right violence. Across the world, far-right terrorist attacks have become more common in recent years and are notoriously hard to predict, because their perpetrators have often been ‘radicalised’ online and are not part of any monitored group.

In recent years, the far right have largely been purged from mainstream tech platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. But it’s not clear how effective the censorship of far-right ideologues has really been: it has arguably only pushed them towards the more loosely-regulated ‘alt-tech’ platforms and handed them a propaganda advantage by allowing them to pose as victims. What we can say for sure is that, from the socialist point of view, far-right arguments need to be combated with better ones. Like all reactionaries, Morgoth is disdainful towards the academic subject of Media Studies (YouTube, ‘Clapping for Stalin and The Burnley Banner’); but the popularity of his ideas suggests a need for robust media literacy and political clarity.

Racial nationalism needs to be exposed for the nonsense it is and anybody attracted to it should know that whatever they may claim, Morgoth and his fellow Aryans don’t represent the interests of workers in Britain or anywhere else. They claim to be ‘traditionalists’, but their right-wing brand of identity politics is completely at odds with the working-class traditions of mutual aid and solidarity and with the history of working-class struggle against wage slavery. They also describe themselves as politically incorrect ‘dissidents’ or the ‘dissident right’, but in fact they are defenders of the status quo. They reproduce the dominant ideology, dividing humanity along national and racial lines and obscuring what almost all of us have in common: our membership of the exploited class.

SH

Outside Right (2019)

Book Review from the May 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know’. By George Hawley (Oxford University Press £10.99)

The label Alternative Right (now usually shortened to Alt-Right) was coined in 2008. It refers to a ‘far-right radical movement’ in the US, which has had some impact but is possibly now in decline, plagued by infighting. Here George Hawley discusses its origins, history and influences, and its connections to other political viewpoints.

As a movement rather than an actual party or organisation, the Alt-Right consists of a range of views, but the obnoxious core beliefs of its supporters can be described fairly simply. The oft-cited Fourteen Words are: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’, while the website of the National Policy Institute, an Alt-Right think tank, describes it as ‘dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States and around the world’. The Alt-Right is explicitly racist, seeing race as a biological category, and advocating white identity politics and a white ethnostate; it wishes to end all non-white immigration to the US. It is anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, and often misogynistic.  Some of its supporters are neo-Nazis, but by no means all. It is not populist, as it holds in contempt many who are not part of the elite, calling them ‘norms’ and viewing them as not ‘racially aware’.

The US political system, together with the vast sums spent by the two main parties, means that the Alt-Right has had little electoral success. It is mainly an online movement, setting up its own websites, making great use of social media, trolling people with other ideas and seeking to influence others. It has been open to doxing, where the real-world identities of anonymous Alt-Right bloggers and contributors are revealed by opponents, which often causes problems for them. Its informal nature means it is impossible to say how many supporters or sympathisers it has, though its core advocates are fortunately fairly few in number.

The main example of Alt-Right activism that was not online was the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. This became very violent, with many protesting in opposition, and one counter-protester was killed when a car was driven into a group of them. The rally clearly harmed the Alt-Right’s reputation, though Donald Trump claimed that both sides shared responsibility for what happened.

Hawley gives a fairly thorough account of the various influences on the Alt-Right, their links to European organisations and their differences from mainstream conservatives. However, what the book lacks is much description and analysis of their ideas and aims. Presumably this is because, as he says, they do not ‘offer a coherent or well-developed set of policy proposals’. But some more discussion of the views of its main figures, beyond the brief descriptions given, would have been helpful.

Paul Bennett

The TV Boss Takes Power (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the recent Italian election should be read as a warning. A year ago neither Berlusconi nor his party existed. The three biggest commercial TV networks in Italy are owned by Berlusconi. These, combined with huge financial resources, were used to sell the hard right, free market ideology which won the election. It is like Murdoch deciding to make the odious Andrew Neil the next Prime Minister of Britain — or Maxwell having used his media power base to do the same for himself: from Labour MP to media tycoon to national leader. The power which can be utilized by those who own and control the media is not to be underestimated.

Media imagery

This was not just the victory of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, with its smoothly designed media imagery and appropriation of the Italian football song as its theme tune; in coalition with Berlusconi was the ultra-nationalist Northern League, led by the Yeltsin like chauvinist yob, Umberto Bossi, and the cleancd-up neo-fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, led by Gianfranco Fini. The latter is on record as stating that "Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the century”. There is no way that the neo-fascist right would have been able to achieve the respectability of government office without Berlusconi's front to work behind. It was the freshness and media potency of Forza Italia which persuaded many voters to turn a blind eye to the unpalatable historic origins of Fini’s party. As it is, we are now seeing for the first time since 1945 a group of neo-fascist politicians taking their place in the government of a major European nation state. It did not take very long for capitalism to recreate that horror, despite claims that the military victory in 1945 had defeated such an ideology once and for all.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

But this was not just a spectacular act of trickery by a media tycoon. Nor was it a relapse of millions of Italian workers into the idiocies of the Twenties and Thirties. Once again, the real stimulus to this retreat into right-wing callousness was the utter failure of the left-wing reformists to show any signs of being able to tame the effects of capitalism. Like all reformists everywhere, the PSI and PCI, running in the recent election as a so-called Progressive Alliance, were complete victims of the iron economic laws of the profit system. And like their counterparts in the British government, Craxi and his fellow political leaders were not only extremely corrupt but — sin of political sins — they were caught. So, a discredited left-centrist political tradition provided the very soil in which the simplistic messages of the hard right grew.

In itself, neo-fascists sitting in a government created out of the media power of a would-be President is not of great moment. But it is part of a political trend. In the last US election the rise of Ross Perot, a transparently right-wing crackpot, was based quite simply upon the fact that he was a billionaire with money to buy as much media time as he wanted.

Intellectually bankrupt

Against him were two discredited and intellectually-bankrupt opponents: Bush and Clinton. The most important point about the Perot campaign was not that he lost, but that there was a chance that he could have won. In the USA today the right wing ravings of the media star, Rush Limbaugh, are all the rage. Is he to be dismissed as a future Presidential hopeful? And if not a lunatic like him, what about some other smoother media created demagogue? In Russia the ultra-nationalist ravings of Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party are such that even the thuggish Yeltsin is regarded by political commentators as the most respectable option. In France Le Pen is still on the loose, still winning a fifth or quarter of the votes in the South and around Paris, and still forcing the more legitimate parties of French capitalism to adopt more racist positions so as to compete with the neo-fascists.

Schindler’s List

Anyone who has seen the new film, Schindler’s List, which in the view of the present writer is the finest film to be made by an American director in decades and should be viewed by everyone with a functioning brain, will know what happens when political instability gives way to political crisis and implosion. After the sighs of resentment at useless politicians will often come the desperate rush towards demagogic leaders and the politics of simple hate. In a century which has seen concentration camps, electoral victories by fascistic forces are to be taken seriously.

Mussolini and Hitler won the support of workers on the basis of an economic system in severe crisis and a political system which fewer and fewer people any longer believed in. Both of these factors are clearly present now. But Mussolini and Hitler won power through ritualistic techniques of persuasion essentially more typical of the last century than this one: mass rallies, flag-waving, anthems and military stunts. Today any potential dictator could do no better than obtain control of the electronic media and the press. These "barons” are elected by nobody and accountable to nobody. They are the most obvious sign that capitalism is not essentially a democratic political culture. They should be watched very carefully.

Steve Coleman