THE BETHUNE INSTITUTE FOR ANTI-FASCIST STUDIES
Research Director: David Lethbridge
Web: http://bethuneinstitute.org
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
- June 2002 -

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THE UNDERBELLY OF NOSTALGIC FASCISM BENEATH THE POST-FASCISM
OF CONTEMPORARY IMPERIALISM
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David Lethbridge
http://www.bethuneinstitute.org/documents/underbelly.html

Sometimes a single image says everything; it remains only to unpack its
contradictions. Case in point: there is a photograph of David Duke, the
former Nazi, the former Klansman, and now leader of the white racist
National Organization for European American Rights, standing beside
Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the French fascist party, the Front 
Nationale.
Le Pen's arm is around Duke's shoulder, each man smiling broadly for the
camera.

What is the meaning of this image? What political reality does it so
concretely represent? On the one hand, it speaks to the loosely aligned
network of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, reactionary
ultra-nationalists, and racist populists that stretches from the USA
through Canada, Europe, and Russia; the hundreds of organizations led by
David Duke, Don Black, Paul Fromm, Marc Lemire, and so many others; the
Klans, the neo-Nazi groups, the British National Party, the Front 
Nationale
and dozens of similar parties in all quarters of Europe. These are the
organizations and leaders so often simply identified with the phrase
"contemporary fascism."

But this network, this political formation, is not at all the face of
contemporary fascism. On the contrary, it is a nostalgic underbelly of a
fascism that is far more dangerous for being so rarely identified as 
such -
the technocratic, heavily militarized, post-fascism of contemporary
imperialism.

This underbelly of nostalgic fascism looks resolutely backward; its
dystopia lies always in the past. The heart of its demagogic propaganda 
is
the "pure nation" - the pure white nation - of the nineteenth century.
Allied around this central concept, are a series of other concepts,
sometimes hidden, sometimes nakedly revealed, but always oriented 
towards a
politics of time past: white racism, antisemitism, homophobia, 
clericalism,
Christian Identity, Strasserism, Hitlerism, Holocaust-denial. Nostalgic
fascism unites the imperialist project of the nineteenth century with 
the
classic fascist horror of the 1920s to the 1940s.

Which is not to say that nostalgic fascism can simply be written off as 
a
descending moment, a collapsing termite-ridden structure, in the overall
movement of history.

The recent elections in France are evidence enough of that. Suddenly 
faced
with a choice between the fascist leader Le Pen, and the reactionary
right-wing Chirac, the vote went overwhelmingly for Chirac, (not least
because the large French Left failed to unite around an alternative.) So
that now Chirac - quite fraudulently - claims to speak for all of 
France.
And Chirac has made it clear that he intends to do away with many of the
progressive positions the French working class had won decades ago. 
French
workers, for example, had won a 35 hour work week. But soon that 35 hour
week will be gone. The constraint over capital that French workers
commanded, partial though it was, is being actively eroded. The 
nostalgic
fascism represented by Le Pen, and by the whole international network 
that
stands behind him, pushes the political center ever further to the 
right.

And yet, why Le Pen? Why Duke? Why Fromm? The most powerful card in 
their
hand, the one they play repeatedly and which they hope can trump all
others, is the immigration card. "Hordes of non-white immigrants are
swarming into the white homelands," they declare. Asians, Moslems, 
Africans
are alleged to be overwhelming Europe and North America. "The white 
birth
rate is dropping! The tide must be stemmed! Soon the great nations of 
white
European civilization will become nothing more than foul third-world 
slums
inhabited by diseased and sullen mongrels!" This racist diatribe is
repeated a thousand times daily by the propagandists of nostalgic 
fascism.
Nevertheless, and despite its horrendous racism, in the present 
political
juncture it cannot be said that this is a losing strategy. Indeed,
anti-immigrant politics is the primary force behind the relative 
successes
of the far-right.

And it is a politics to which the liberals have no answer since to face 
the
question squarely would reveal nothing but the post-fascism of 
contemporary
imperialism. Why are relatively large numbers from Asia and Africa
emigrating into Europe and North America? The answer reveals a scandal 
that
the ruling classes are not eager for the masses to hear. Centuries of
colonialism, and the more recent phenomena of neo-colonialism, the
political and military crushing of national liberation struggles, the
deliberate policy of under-development, the policies of corporate
globalization, and the conscious undermining of the economic and 
political
power of the so-called Third World, has led to a situation of on-going
starvation and poverty, misery and hopelessness. The prosperity of the
imperialist nations is predicated on the poverty of the rest of the 
world.

Post-fascism is still a fascism. But it resembles hardly at all the
underbelly of nostalgic fascism. Post-fascism can do away almost 
entirely
with antisemitism; it no longer requires it. Post-fascism can do away 
with
overt Hitlerism, and Holocaust-denial. Even racism, sexism, and 
homophobia,
while still notoriously and extensively practiced, are no longer, 
strictly
speaking, required elements of post-fascism.

All that is required in post-fascism is the essence of fascism - the
destruction of working class power, the ruthless elimination of every
movement toward socialism, and global tyranny backed up by an 
increasingly
vicious and automated military machine.

Nostalgic fascism and the militarized technological post-fascism of
contemporary imperialism (and, in particular, US imperialism) are 
sometimes
moving in the same direction; sometimes they are in opposition; but 
always
they are operating within the same problematic. They are - in the 
profound
sense of materialist dialectics - existing in a hesitant unity fraught 
with
contradiction.

There are other images, ones which exist only in the imagination. It is
possible to see, behind the smiling united image of Duke and Le Pen, the
ghost of George W. Bush, embracing these monsters with one arm while
pushing them aside with the other.

And there are still other images, which hold now an almost clandestine
power: the Winter Palace on the evening before the insurrection, the 
snow
falling lightly from the sky, red flags gathering far from view, but 
moving
closer...

Copyright © 1998-02, The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies

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