Flags and Fascism

If you want an indication of the madness into which British elite society has descended in the last few years, just consider its attitudes to two flags – the Ukrainian and the Palestinian.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian flag fluttered from public buildings across the land, alongside the Union Jack. It became almost treasonous – and a sign of a depraved fascistic mindset – not to unconditionally support Ukraine and the sending of whatever weapons it requested (including cluster bombs) for its fight against the indisputably evil Vladimir Putin.

Now, following the genocidal Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the completely opposite mentality reigns. Displaying the Palestinian flag is semi-illegal and a sign, according to our government and the ‘opposition’, of hate-filled venom and support for terrorism.

This is despite the fact that, in the words of British veteran Joe Glenton, the two cases, “they’re not exactly the same, but they are similar. There are people resisting an occupation.”

To explain the flagrant double standards, it’s easiest to look at Britain’s inveterate ‘how high’ Atlanticism, which means it automatically does whatever it thinks the US wants. But there are deeper, historical reasons – to do with Empire and who is considered worthy of support and who isn’t – onto which we should shine a light.

Universal human rights

In January 1941, when trying to get Congress to approve his lend-lease proposals, Franklin Roosevelt set out what would become war aims (even though it would be almost a year before the US entered WW2 and then explicitly because of Pearl Harbor). “Freedom,” he said “means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them.”

The speech formed the foundation of the famous Atlantic Charter (released in August 1941 still months before the US entered the war) whose third point emphasised self-determination to those deprived of it.

This set off a torrent of speculation that the right to self-determination should apply not only to those suffering under Nazi and Fascist tyranny but to the hundreds of millions of subjects of western empires across the world. Clearly they didn’t live under governments of their choosing. What about their freedom?

Winston Churchill, at that stage, in Orwell’s phrase “posing as a democrat”, went to great pains to make sure people didn’t lapse into error on this matter. The charter’s third point, he told the House of Commons, only pertained to the restoration of self-government to the states and nations of Europe “now under Nazi yoke”.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since these words were uttered – including (often involuntary) decolonisation. But the attitude behind them, as shown by the black and white reactions to Gaza and Ukraine, has proved remarkably resilient.

Ukraine is an example of the unbearable sight of Europeans suffering from war crimes and human rights abuses. Gazans, clearly, don’t merit similar sympathy despite their plight being much worse. In fact, they are perpetrators, not really genuine victims at all. And to go back to the Churchillian distinction, you can’t restore self-determination to Palestinians because they’ve never actually enjoyed it – not under the British mandate, not under post-war Egyptian control, and certainly not under Israeli occupation since 1967.

People like us

This aliveness of this attitude can be seen in a myriad of ways. Ukrainian refugees are treated with the understanding due to people who we can, there but for fortune, imagine being. Refugees from the Middle East, by contrast, are seen as dangerous interlopers who we must keep out – either from Britain or continental Europe – by any means necessary. This ‘people like us’ mentality can even be discerned in something as apparently innocent as the inclusion of Israel and Australia in the Eurovision song contest.

In recent years, it has been common to suggest that post-Brexit Britain is in danger of “creeping fascism”. But the fascist temptation is, in my opinion, equally strong in both Britain and in the European Union from which it so tortuously parted company from just three years ago.  While pro-Palestinian demonstrations are denounced as “hate marchers” by Tory politicians in Britain, in Germany and France they are simply banned and Israeli Jews protesting against the slaughter are arrested.

Fascism is not Nazism

“Much against their will the British governing class have been forced into the anti-Hitler position,” George Orwell noted on the eve of the Second World War. These days, for the wealthy and powerful, the same impediments to realising your heart’s desire don’t exist. But I don’t want to suggest that a revitalised Nazism is the danger. The master race ideology, later annihilationist insanity, and the impulse to empire-build on the European continent, strictly limit its appeal. But classical Fascism – of the Italian vintage – is a different matter.

 

It’s little remembered that liberals, when forced in the 1920s to choose between Mussolini’s black-shirts and the workers’ movement they physically smashed, enthusiastically plumped for the former. And once in power, Mussolini’s economic policy, in its initial years, followed some eerily familiar patterns:

·        Fascism embraced austerity in the form of cuts to welfare spending and slimming down the civil service (reduced by 65,000 in 1923 alone). Just as in 21^st century Britain and Europe, austerity has been imposed for more than a decade with the exception of – just as with Mussolini – skyrocketing military spending.

·        Fascism increased VAT, a regressive tax because everyone – billionaire and disability claimant – pays the same. In Britain, VAT stood at 8% in 1979. Now it is 20%. Since 2008 around 80% of the member-states of the EU have increased their VAT rates. Mussolini also reduced tax on corporations. In Britain corporation tax stands at 25%. It was 51% in 1981. ‘Social Democrats’ in Europe have likewise sought to ‘stimulate’ growth through corporate tax cuts.

·        Fascism put technocrats in full charge of economic policy. In its first three years of power, liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, formerly of the Centre party, was granted “unprecedented  authority” as minister of finance. Today, the European Central Bank now oversees EU economic policy, ensuring the debt of member-states doesn’t rise above acceptable levels.  And the ECB and the European Commission have no compunction about imposing technocratic governors like Mario Draghi on recalcitrant countries. In non-EU Britain, the central bank – the Bank of England – is now ‘independent of political control’. In fact, a key neo-liberal reform across the world has been to remove economic decision-making from the hands of politicians and give it to unelected technocrats.

·        Fascism privatised state enterprises. Between 1922 and 1925, the fascist government implemented a “large-scale privatisation policy”, selling most of Italy’s state-owned telephone networks, for example. The aim was to balance the budget, a “core objective of fascist economic policy in its first phase”. Privatisation of utilities such as telephones and water was a signature policy of Thatcher in Britain and embraced by her successors. Since the 1980s, the privatisation mania has spread around the world, including to Europe.

·        Fascism was not initially anti-Semitic or at least no more so than other western ‘democracies’. It implemented policies of confiscating Jewish property and rounding up Jews as a result of its alliance with Nazi Germany but this attitude was not home-grown.  At first, being Jewish and Fascist was not some kind of hideous non-sequitur.  Fascism was, however, inherently racist towards non-white people from the get-go, employing poison gas on a wide scale in its 1936 invasion of Ethiopia, for example.

This indicates that elite liberalism of the kind represented by both Britain and the EU (which means liberties for the elite) is not, in principle, incompatible with Fascism. This is not to say everyone to the Right of Jeremy Corbyn is a Fascist itching to remove the mask, but many people will tolerate it if the only alternative is seen as worse  – for example some sort of socialism, which is regarded as far more inimical to freedom.

For instance, the election of the far-right Georgia Meloni in Italy – in her youth a member of a neo-Fascist party – was seen was by many as the trigger for a period of unbridled conflict with the EU. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Her “relatively conservative 2023 Budget law,” notes one assessment of Meloni’s first year in office, “quelled investors’ fears.” Maybe, in truth, if you are an investor (or a CEO, or someone of ‘high net worth’), there isn’t much to be afraid of.

The danger of Europeanism

Much-vaunted Europeanism is not an antidote to this. It can easily degenerate into the idea that we must protect our European culture and freedoms from outsiders, usually of a darker skin tone, who seek to destroy it. And, when all is said and done, the EU is a trading bloc for Europe. If you’re not lucky enough to live there – and the vast majority of the world’s population obviously aren’t – well, that’s tough luck.

Culture can easily serve as a synonym for the way race was used in decades gone by. For example, justifying the invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Mussolini said he was putting an end to slavery in a “barbaric pseudo-state” and bringing the benefits of western civilisation. And slavery certainly existed under Haile Selassie. Naturally this civilising mission entailed wide-scale extermination of the native population.

Looking at the way the war on terror has been prosecuted in places like Iraq, Syria and Libya there are clear echoes in the way the immense cost to the indigenous populations of imposing allegedly morally superior regimes – or in the case of Libya no regime at all – is downplayed in a manner that simply wouldn’t happen if they were white and European.

All this is supremely relevant because the government our governments are giving carte blanche – and weapons – to, to bomb hospitals and commit ethnic cleansing is basically Fascist. In a letter to the New York Times in 1948, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among others, claimed that Tnat Haherut (the Freedom party) in the newly-created state of Israel was “closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”. Tnat Haherut was the forerunner of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. He is unquestionably “nationalist, genocidal, chauvinistic” and his coalition government, the most right-wing in the country’s history, contains out and out Fascists. One, Bezalel Smotrich, identifies as a “fascist homophobe”, lives in an illegal settlement, and denies that the Palestinian people even exist. Another, national security minister Ben-Gvir, was convicted in Israel of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.

Netanyahu’s government is, in classic fascist style, attacking the independence of the judiciary and is brutally cracking down on free speech among Israelis.

There are internal conflicts. The government contains a self-confessed “fascist homophobe” but the Israeli Defence Force, which is leading the attack on Gaza, proclaims a progressive attitude to LGBTQIA+ people unusual among the world’s militaries. But just as in the Ukraine, where the support for the Nazi Azov Battalion has gone hand in hand with allegedly advancing the rights of sexual minorities, these apparently intractable contradictions are not insurmountable.

Bringing it all Back Home

The classic ingredients of fascism – extra-parliamentary violence against the Left, cracking down on free speech, corporate-friendly economic policies, war preparation, and blatant racism – are already present in the UK and Europe, ready to be assembled into a coherent whole. Anyone who doesn’t the see connection between support for genocide abroad what happens domestically is engaging a fatal delusion.

The Nazis and capitalism: the reign of the unorthodox

If the idea of the Nazis being socialists is crude propaganda that still leaves the question of how to correctly categorize them economically and politically. There is doubtless a brand of deterministic Marxism that will assert that between 1933 and 1945 capitalism had to take the genocidal and apocalyptic form it actually did in Germany in those years. But I don’t think that’s true. Economically, National Socialism was profoundly irrational – nihilistically dedicated to total war against enemies (the US and the Soviet Union) that it had no real chance of defeating. And it was even more manically dedicated towards the extermination of the European Jews. As is well known, deportations of Jewish people to the extermination camps took precedence over military necessities even in the time of looming defeat. If ‘capital’ was secretly in the saddle in the Third Reich years, it evidently had a death wish.

But at the same time, as remarked upon in part one, capital accumulation and profit-making were inserted into the very fibre of the Nazi economy. The death camps were privately insured, Zyklon B was supplied by a subsidiary of I.G. Farben and famous, brand-name firms ran slave labour factories in the vicinity of the death camps.

The only conclusion, I think, is that capitalism, given the chance, will happily operate under a variety of political cultures – and unapologetically assert its interests – but the nature of those cultures is not something exclusively determined by capitalists or their acolytes. As noted by David Schweickart in After Capitalism, there have been many different kinds of capitalism – Keynesian liberal, state developmental (as practiced by Japan and South Korea), third world “comprador capitalism”, our neoliberal version and, of course, the current Chinese model where the state retains a great deal of control through ‘state owned enterprises’ and rules out any complications resulting from multi-party elections. The original Marxist concept of a capitalist base determining the superstructure of culture is far too simplistic.

So the Nazis – and Hitler in particular – were quite aware of the existing power structure and the social role they had to play in order to get into power – eliminating organised labour and the Marxist threat. But they were not bound by economic orthodoxy – they needed to tap into and channel mass desires and discontents. This can be clearly seen in their rise to power.

Their increase in popularity was astoundingly rapid – the Nazis gained 2.6% of the vote in 1928 but by the summer of 1932 they were the largest party in the German Parliament, gaining close to a 38% vote share. Traditionally, this has been ascribed to the Great Depression and the mass unemployment it generated – nearly 18% of the workforce was without a job in 1932. But this is only a partial explanation.

The response of the German government to the depression was to institute crushing austerity. Under Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Centre party, who was known as the “hunger Chancellor”, public spending was cut by 15% between 1930 and 1932. The largest falls in were in housing and healthcare spending and there were also significant reductions in unemployment benefit, payments to pensioners and support for the disabled and war veterans.

 Heinrich Brüning, the "Hunger Chancellor"

The Nazis campaigned on an anti-austerity platform, saying they wanted to preserve the social insurance system, demanding “generous expansion of support for the aged” and advocating building highways. Researchers who have analysed the NSDAP’s route to power found a strong correlation between austerity and both increased votes for the Nazis and people joining the party. Conversely, the socialist SPD – though outside government – passively supported austerity, and the Communists benefited mainly from increases in unemployment.

In power, the Nazis similarly went against the economic grain. They instituted massive state funded public work schemes in housing, land reclamation and highway construction (the famous autobahns).Tax reliefs were given to companies that created jobs and increased investment and unemployment was reduced from six million in 1932 to less than a million four years later. Of course, the main reason unemployment so successfully conquered and economic depression warded off was that the economy became wholeheartedly dedicated to rearmament and war (wehrwirtschaft or ‘war economy’ in Nazi parlance). War was not just a result of Nazi foreign policy; the entire economy was geared towards it happening.

Nazi economic policy – cutting taxes, spending money and instituting public works schemes – could in fact be described as Keynesian except that it was before Keynes. He most certainly existed at the time but his most important work – The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money – wasn’t published until 1936. As economist Joan Robinson put it, “Hitler had already found how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occurred”.

Except that Hitler didn’t cure anything. He had no interest in economics and outsourced economic policy to a banker called Dr Hjalmar Schacht, who had enthusiastically backed the NSDAP as they neared power but never actually joined the party. Among Schacht’s many departures from orthodox economics was a money printing scheme which created 12 billion marks out of thin air between 1935 and 1938. The money was used to pay armaments manufacturers and didn’t appear in the government’s budget. Any resemblance to quantitative easing is purely coincidental. But let’s just say it didn’t end well.

Why is this relevant, beyond historical debates about what National Socialism actually was? Well, over the past decade the Left has been confronted with an apparently ultra-orthodox and unyielding economic approach that demands cuts in public spending – austerity – to deal with an economic downturn. Past over-indulgence putatively makes this medicine thoroughly deserved – witness the UK general election campaigns in 2010 and 2015.

It has escaped attention that 21^st century austerity is only half orthodox. It insisted on massive cuts to public spending – cuts that caused destitution and death – but responded to the threat of private sector bankruptcies with ultra-low interest rates, bail-outs and unconventional money creation schemes (quantitative easing again). Stern, unbending austerity for the public and endless indulgence for the ‘wealth creators’.

Austerity is now fraying at the edges – the Conservatives in the UK are trying to claim it’s over even though it plainly isn’t. However, this is only partly because it’s gone on so long without achieving its supposed aims – the deficit in the UK was meant to be erased by 2015, remember. It’s also because a new, ‘natavist’ Right has little patience with it. Donald Trump in the US is many things – misogynist, racist, serial liar, idiot – but he’s not a purveyor of austerity. This was former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, talking about Trump in the Guardian newspaper in June:

The Trump administration is building up a substantial economic momentum domestically. First, he passed income and corporate tax cuts that the establishment Republicans could not have imagined even in their wildest dreams a few years ago. But this was not all. Behind the scenes, Trump astonished Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat’s leader in the House of Representatives, by approving every single social program that she asked of him. As a result, the federal government is running the largest budget deficit in America’s history when the rate of unemployment is less than 4%.

I’m old enough to remember when record, civilisation-endangering budget deficits were what the Left was bound to bring into being if it got anywhere near power. When way back in 2012 Niall Ferguson evinced that young people should “welcome austerity” and that “if young Americans knew what was good for them, they’d all be in the Tea Party”. But Trump’s record deficit has not put off enthusiastic former Tea Party members in the slightest. His “dedicated supporters”, says one article, “are many of the same folks who made the Tea Party the dominant force in American politics in 2010”. Ferguson meanwhile says Trump’s tax-cut fuelled, deficit building “is not something I can enthusiastically condone”. Maybe we should all join the Tea Party … oh wait.

But it’s not just Trump. The Italian government currently engaged in a face-off with the European Commission over its budget plans to introduce a €780 a month ‘basic income’ for unemployed Italians and to decrease the pension age is not of the Left. It is a coalition between the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right Lega. The government’s deputy Prime Minister is Matteo Salvini who has promised to deport 500,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ and been compared to Trump. But this is a government that insists it wants to “abolish poverty”.

I’m not suggesting there has been a Damascene conversion of the Right to anti-austerity. There are still many fiscally orthodox right-wingers around, such as the Austrian Freedom Party and Bolsonaro in Brazil. But as patience with never-ending austerity grows thinner and thinner, we can expect a much more flexible attitude towards it on the Right. And as the Nazis showed, there are clear historical precedents.

What means is that policies cannot be judged as being Left or Right merely in terms of whether they alleviate poverty and redistribute resources. To be classed as Left they also have to tilt the balance of power away from capital and the elite in favour organised labour and the citizenry. This is something the nationalist Right will never do.

How about some 'market non-conforming democracy' Angela Merkel?

If the yes votes wins Sunday’s Greek referendum and Syriza falls, “too many will believe”, fretted the Guardian’s columnist in chief, Jonathan Freedland on Saturday, that Brussels and Berlin engineered the toppling of a democratically elected government.

I wonder where they could have picked up that delusionary belief?

It clearly can’t have come from the senior German conservative politician, described as “one of Europe’s most influential politicians” who told the Times newspaper  last week that Angela Merkel’s CDU would block any deal with the ‘communists’ Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, campaign vociferously for a ‘yes’ vote, and then install a ‘technical’ government in Syriza’s place.

Revelations from Martin Schulz, German social democrat (!) and President of the European Parliament, to the effect he wanted to Syriza to resign and be replaced with a “technocratic government so we can continue to negotiate” obviously had no effect.

But, perhaps, you know, “too many” have just been paying attention to the record of Eurozone institutions and core country governments like Germany’s since the beginning of the financial crisis. A record that betrays an unbending desire to topple recalcitrant governments and views the will of the people as a minor impediment to which no credence should be given.

Let’s have a brief refresh

Ireland, February 2011

On the eve on the Irish general election in February 2011, the European Commission helpfully intervened to point out that the result would have absolutely no effect on the country’s IMF-EU bail-out conditions, imposed after the financial sector imploded and its enormous bad debts were transferred to the state. It could not be renegotiated as it was “between the EU and the Republic of Ireland, it's not an agreement between an institution and a particular government,” the Commission said.

The Irish government, it emerged last month, was strong-armed by European Commission into agreeing the 2010 bail-out in the first place, and also to accepting that ‘senior bondholders’ such as large banks, should not share any losses. The ex-General Secretary of the Irish government’s Finance Department, told an inquiry into the causes of the financial crisis in June that the European Commission applied enormous pressure through “misinformation” and “anonymous media briefings” so that Ireland swiftly agreed to the €85 billion IMF-EU bail-out.

All this was quite in keeping with the views expressed in May 2011 by now European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, that fiscal policy was “too important” for voters to have any say over, and should be determined in “dark, secret debates”.

But, you can say that, technically speaking, Eurozone institutions were not toppling governments, just telling them what to do.

Hang on a minute …

Portugal, April 2011

After months of Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates refusing to accept a bail-out, the European Central Bank (ECB) intervened for the sake of the banks (sorry Eurozone). In April 2011, Portuguese banks decided to stop buying government bonds if Lisbon did not seek a rescue. The head of the country’s banking association admitted that he had been given “clear instructions” from the ECB and Bank of Portugal to cut off the tap.

During the ensuing general election campaign, ECB and European Commission experts demanded that all parties sign an accord agreeing to the bail-out memorandum. Before the election, that is. “Let's not have a public dialogue every day,” said EU economy commissioner, Olli Rehn. Portugal has since been lauded by the London School of Economics for establishing consensus over implementing austerity. Well done.

Moving swiftly on …

Greece, November 2011

You could be forgiven for thinking the Eurozone’s current travails with Alexis Tsipras and co were the first time a Greek Prime Minister had thought of holding a referendum on bail-out conditions. But back in November 2011, Prime Minister Georges Papandreou (of the centre-left Pasok party, currently riding high at about 3% in the polls), announced a referendum on whether to remain in the euro and accept the then austerity measures being proposed. But before it could happen he was called in for a swift re-education session with Angela Merkel, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the ubiquitous Jean-Claude Juncker, then European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the IMF’s Christine Lagarde. “We made Papandreou ... aware of the fact that his behavior is disloyal,” said Juncker.

But they didn’t stop there. In the words of the Financial Times journalist, Peter Spiegel: “Mr Barroso had called Mr Samaras, the Greek opposition leader, from his hotel before the meeting. He knew Mr Samaras was desperate to avoid the referendum. Mr Samaras told Mr Barroso he was now willing to sign on to a national unity government between his New Democracy party and Pasok – something he had assiduously avoided for months in the hopes he could secure the premiership on his own. Mr Barroso summoned his cabinet and other commission staff to his suite… to plot strategy. He decided he would not tell Mr Sarkozy or Ms Merkel of the conversation but according to people in the room, they began discussing names of possible technocrats to take over from Mr Papandreou in a national unity government. The first person to come to Mr Barroso’s lips was Lucas Papademos, the Greek economist who had left his post as vice-president of the ECB a year earlier. Within a week, Mr Papademos would have the job.”

Technocrats, engineered to take over from elected politicians, who’d have thought it?

Last but not least:

Italy, November 2011

Alright, this one involves Silvio Berlusconi, who you could say, deserved it, but the point still holds. If the EU could remove an obstructive right-wing politician, they would have no qualms about doing so in the case of a left-wing government - like Syriza.

According to a 2014 book by former US Treasury secretary, Timothy Geitner, he was approached by EU officials in November 2011 with a plan to overthrow Berlusconi. The idea was that the US would refuse to back IMF loans to Italy as long as Berlusconi remained in power. Geitner didn’t oblige but the plotting didn’t stop there.

According Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, Italy’s former member on the European Central Banks’s executive board, the EU decided to remove Berlusconi and replace him with former European Commissioner, Mario Monti, because he started threatening in private meetings to ditch the euro and bring back Italy’s former currency, the Lira.

What did definitely happen was that the interest rate on Italian government bonds rocketed in the autumn of 2011 and Berlusconi resigned on 9 November. He was replaced by Monti, who announced an austerity programme and the interest rate miraculously plummeted.

Greece, 2015?

The difference now is that the current Greek government is not prepared to accept ‘dark, secret debates’ or hotel room coups and won’t go quietly into the night. With a ‘no’ vote in Sunday’s referendum, Angela Merkel’s guiding philosophy of ‘market conforming democracy’ is threatening to turn into, heaven forfend, market non-conforming democracy.

And they are really, really asking for it …

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