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.

Some American myths in the month of November

So the American people will have four more years of “socialism”. However will they cope? Some aren’t taking it well at all, such as Donald Trump who came over all Benito Mussolini and called for a “March on Washington”. In the interest of historical accuracy, it is only fair to point out that Benito Mussolini was actually invited to march on Rome in 1922 and bring to power the world’s first Fascist government.

Do you feel, consciously or not, a sense of relief that Obama won? Do you suffer from guilt about feeling relieved? Have I just hit upon a new psychological state – relief guilt? Given the absurdly constricted nature of the choice, you can debate endlessly whether it was right to vote for Obama or shun the whole corporate charade. Some, like Noam Chomsky, have confronted that dilemma.

But, from an international perspective, I don’t think voting or not voting is the main problem. It’s fundamentally irrelevant. The enduring problem is that the American Presidential election campaign puts out so many myths that possess a stickiness that attaches them to the cultural landscape. Before you know it, the elusive reality bird that you worked so hard to track down has flown away.

So here are three myths that urgently need dispelling.

Myth 1

Laissez-faire bad/Government intervention good

Obama spent $14 billion bailing out General Motors. Romney would have let the company go bankrupt. Whether the latter is actually true is highly questionable given that George W started the enormous bail out of corporate America. But the General Motors’ bail-out was presented as a victory against the ideological denseness of pure laissez-faire and for the United Auto Workers Union.

But it was a strange kind of victory. Post bail-out, the UAW signed a deal with General Motors in which, aside from its existing members getting a below the cost of living pay “increase”, also ensured that new car workers would be hired at half the pay rate, $16 a hour, that their predecessors received. This result of government intervention is not good. It’s not loitering on the outskirts of good. It’s very bad.

The General Motors bail-out exemplified 21^st century government intervention in which corporations are saved from their own mistakes through gifts of taxpayer money, while their workers and customers get the discipline of free markets. And this happens while the tax burden continues to be shifted away from corporations and the rich and onto the shoulders of the majority.

Anti-austerity but pro-capitalist economist Ha-Joon Chang has shown how General Motors’ failure was preceded by dabbling in every conceivable corporate fad over the last 30 years – shareholder value, buying other car firms and creating a highly profitable finance arm. But when it came to the state saving the company from bankruptcy, “the US government”, says Chang, “deliberately took shares that do not have voting rights (albeit priority in dividend payouts) – so that it would not have any say in the management of the company.”

Chang has noted the same reticent government intervention in Britain, where the government has legally nationalised two large banks, but does not control them."This is not even capitalism anymore," he says. “What is the point of owning a bank, when you have to negotiate hard, or (one suspects) even beg, in order to set the pay of your employees or make it lend more in the way you want?”

The original bail-out of the banks was, in scale and expense, the supreme example of “not laissez-faire” dwarfing all others. But was it a good thing? It saved the economy from collapsing at the time and saved the banks at massive taxpayer expense, transferring a large proportion of their debt to the public. This was followed by a huge infusion of quantitative easing which they used to recapitalise themselves. But they are still indebted. Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King said recently that advanced economies won’t be able to escape “their current predicament” without more write-downs of debt by banks and more recapitalisation. So what began in 2008 is not over.

Just possibly, in 2008, the banks should have received a classic dose of laissez-faire and been allowed to go bust along with their debts. Then new public, debt-free, banks could have been created, as suggested by, among others, Joseph Stiglitz. The “pain” would have been more intense in the short-term but not prolonged.

But our governments “intervened” the make sure this didn’t happen and we are living with the consequences.

Thomas Frank quotes a line from the 1930s American socialist, Norman Thomas, in his book, Pity the Billionaire. “There is no Socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam’s lap, putting them back on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.” But there’s quite a lot of capitalism about it.

Myth 2

The middle class is the bedrock of a strong economy, democracy etc

Obama clothed his campaign in the need for a “strong middle class”. Romney vowed to “protect the middle class”. But like the fabled word “community”, the larger the middle class looms in political rhetoric, the more it disappears in reality.

According to US census research, published in September, the gap between rich and poor has widened to its highest level since 1967.  “The gains from economic growth in 2011 were quite unevenly shared as household income fell in the middle and rose at the top,” said Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about the data. Average incomes fell for the bottom 80% of earners and rose for the top 20%. The top 1% of households experienced a 6% rise in income.

The income of the median American family is lower than it was in 1998. In a 2011 article about the disappearing American middle class, the US journalist Paul Harris said, “I do not care if you are a Tea Party activist or a Socialist party USA organiser, you should be able to agree on one thing, at least: this is unsustainable. Something has to give. But no one in the current political system looks like they have an answer.”

In Britain, as Ed Miliband’s rhetoric about the “squeezed middle” shows, the political class are having to come to terms with the new reality but are equally clueless about what to do about it. In Britain, on current trends, the entire bottom 50% will be poorer by 2020. The Trades Union Congress in the Britain thinks companies should be encouraged to raise the average wage. Well, that could work. In another galaxy.

As far as the vanishing middle class in the US is concerned, it’s plus ca change, no matter who lives in the White House.

Myth 3

“Equal Pay” is more achievable under Obama than Romney

Ok, so maybe this myth is a bit of a cheat, but language speaks volumes, if you’ll pardon the tautology. To keep referring to “equal pay” in the context of contemporary America and Britain is akin to waxing lyrical about “human rights” in a Roman coliseum at lion time. Pay in both countries is staggeringly unequal and getting worse. And neither Obama, nor Romney, had he been elected, will do anything about it. Obama clearly didn’t in his first four years, as the above census data shows. This is not meant to justify any kind of gender pay discrimination or retarded Republican views on abortion or contraception, but the “equal pay” mantra gives the impression of railing against privilege when, in reality, it does nothing of the kind.

In order to even begin addressing pay inequality the debate needs to move on from just talking taking about discrimination to understanding and, acting upon, exploitation: the remuneration workers get in compensation for their contribution to profit, the two elements of which are wildly out of sync. This, in turn, needs to expand to look at who decides pay levels, and thus the economic autocracy we live under will come gradually into focus. This is a mammoth intellectual shift which, as the Presidential election campaign showed, the political mainstream is incapable of making.

As the American writer Walter Benn Michaels has said, the ostensible Left in the US is little more than the “human resources department of the right". It is, despite what Donald Trump believes, not dangerous to the status quo.

The Czech dissident and later head of state, Václav Havel, developed the concept of “living in truth” as a means of defying the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It entailed, in part, a refusal to accept the lies of official propaganda. It is becoming a principle that is applicable to living in western, “democratic” countries. Whether one votes or not.