The
following is an adaptation of my remarks
given at “How to Survive
Fascism,” a recent teach-in at the Rutgers
School of Communication
and Information in New Brunswick, NJ on
April 9, 2025.
1.
The role of the enemy/dominant superior
race
Fascist
regimes need an enemy, the personification
of society’s problems,
and they must eliminate the scapegoat.
People are whipped into a
frenzy to eliminate the source of their
problems. And these regimes
are preoccupied with crime and punishment.
Umberto
Eco called it “an appeal against the
intruders,” a fear of
difference. Also, fascists view themselves
as a dominant race as a
way of asserting state power.
In
Nazi Germany, they enemies were LGBTQ
people, trans books, Jews,
political dissidents and others. Today in
the U.S., there is the war
on DEI (code for Black people), white
replacement theory and the
centering of white hetero cisgender
Christian men. The enemies are
banned books, Latin American “gangs,”
pro-Palestinian students
and faculty activists.
A
White supremacist government under Trump is
weaponizing antisemitism
and criminalizing pro-Palestinian speech on
the pretext of protecting
Jewish people, all towards the goal of
eliminating democracy and
higher education. It won’t stop with the
scapegoats or low hanging
fruit. Soon they will be deporting citizens,
not just permanent
residents, green card holders and
undocumented people.
Pastor
Martin
Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who spoke out
against Nazi
Germany and was thrown into the death camps
and survived, wrote a
poem called First
They
Came. This
poem captures
how no one is safe under a fascist
government:
2.
The role of capitalism
Corporate
power is protected under fascism, but labor
rights and power,
democracy and the rule of law, equal rights
and human rights are
suppressed. The wealthy put the fascists
into power. There is rampant
cronyism and corruption, fraudulent
elections.
Today
it is Elon Musk and Tesla, a cabinet of
billionaires and a
techbroligarchy that has signed up for the
fascism in the name of
profits, deregulation and tax cuts. Hitler
had Henry Ford. The Ford
Motor Company used slave labor in Germany to
build military vehicles
for the Third Reich.
Fascists
appeal to a frustrated middle class, and
capitalize on an economic
crisis or a sense of humiliation or
victimhood.
Today
we see law firms, universities, liberal
institutions, media companies
and others trying to appease and comply with
fascists and maintain
their power and profits. Martin Luther King
spoke in “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” of white moderates who
hinder social progress more
than the Ku Klux Klan and care more about
maintaining order than
justice.
3.
Imperial boomerang
Aimé
Césaire
in Discourse
on
Colonialism
(1950) wrote
of a “terrific boomerang” to explain the
origins of European
fascism in first half of the 20th century.
Similarly, Hanna Arendt
spoke
of the “boomerang
effect” in The
Origins
of Totalitarianism
(1951). Nazi Germany was the barbarism of
colonization of
non-Europeans turning inward on Europe. In
other words, the West gets
a taste of the way they treat the Global
South, colonized Black and
Brown people.
4.
The fascism that always existed in America
against marginalized
people in America
Fascism
always existed for Black, Brown and
indigenous people in this
country, the internally colonized people,
and now it is being visited
upon white people.
People
claim we are better than this, that this is
not who we are. But we
have BEEN like this since day one.
Consider
the genocide of Native Americans and
abduction and placement of
children into torture centers known as
boarding schools, where
thousands died and were raped, beaten,
starved, murdered and buried.
Black
people were enslaved, then after the Civil
War there was a real
promise of democracy and voting rights.
During Reconstruction, there
were 2,000 Black elected officials, a
governor, senators, members of
Congress, and Black majorities in the
Mississippi and South Carolina
legislatures. When the federal troops that
were protecting Black
people were removed from the South, white
lynch mobs and the Klan
were able to take it all back. They
assassinated Black elected
officials, lynched, destroyed Black
communities and rewrote state
constitutions banning Black folks from
voting.
There
was a mass deportation of 1.8 million
Mexican Americans during Great
Depression, stemming from anti-immigrant
sentiment and the belief
they were taking jobs from white people.
During World War 2, America
interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in
concentration camps.
Further,
Nazi Germany was inspired by the U.S. when
it enacted its Nuremberg
laws that segregated Jews from Aryan
Germans, using the Jim Crow
segregation laws and American genocide of
Indigenous people as a
guide.
5.
Universities in an authoritarian regime
Keep
in mind that authoritarian regimes do not
have liberal arts colleges.
There is a disdain of culture and the arts
and intellectuals.
Fascism
looks down on education, critical thinking,
and any challenges to the
leader’s power. You can’t have people
thinking for themselves,
and can’t have people learning about ethnic
studies, queer studies
or women’s studies lest they get ideas about
challenging the status
quo and disrupting the social hierarchy,
thinking about revolution,
and the like.
