We must be cautious in our cheerleading as the invasion of Ukraine proceeds with its cold-blooded assault on innocent civilians. The Russian attacks are inexcusable. They cannot be justified but they can be explained. Such explanations do not make these war crimes less repugnant and cruel. Here in North America and throughout most of Europe, it does seem to many observers of the conflict that the US is wearing the white hat and Putin the black hat. And yes, images of the war crimes committed by Putin’s shock troops are seared into our imaginations each night, sparking feelings of righteous indignation towards Russia. But as we rightly condemn the Russian invasion, let us not forget the imperialist history of the US, a country which is judged by many to be the most dangerous terrorist state in the world, guilty of a long list of war crimes that would take pages just to innumerate. I have spent many years condemning these very war crimes. Clearly, the US is not a benign hegemon. Just look at the invasion of Vietnam, the US involvement in Chile, Nicaragua and Cuba, the bombing of Serbia, the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Afghanistan, all accomplished under the US banner of promoting democracy. The US cannot in any way be conceived as a benign hegemon, not because of the character of its leaders, although this does play a factor, but because of the imperatives of the military industrial complex and its geostrategic imperatives involving natural resources (water, minerals, and fossil fuels) and the policy adhered to by the US that it will never allow any country to supersede it as the world’s greatest and most dominant military power. Neither can Russia be trusted, as it has made clear in its own imperialist history. Rogue states understand only too well other rogue states. And Putin’s nuclear brinksmanship does not exactly bode well for the world-at-large. Ukraine is stuck between two imperialist powers. Recent NATO expansion and European Union expansion into the Baltic states and democracy-promotion on the part of the US is, understandably, not received well in Russia. It is looked upon as a direct threat to Russian security. Security and strategic interests are at stake here. What would happen if Russia entered into a military alliance with Canada and Mexico? The Monroe Doctrine stipulates that this can never be allowed to happen. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? Certainly the weapons manufacturers don’t want a peaceful solution. And those industries producing and supplying fossil fuels are celebrating the war behind closed doors, and this can only place the world at greater risk from environmental destruction. The slim chances of saving the environment are now put on hold. We should indeed support Ukraine in this bloody and murderous invasion by Putin. But at the same time we should try to bring this conflict to a peaceful conclusion, not by playing into the hands of NATO, or Russia, but by supporting the idea of Ukraine as a neutral buffer state, much like Finland, between NATO and Russia; this would be one step to resolving the conflict. And NATO expansion should be abandoned. Having NATO in Western Ukraine and Russia in Eastern Ukraine would lead to a disastrous ongoing civil war. Neutrality for Ukraine is not an ideal solution, but it could prevent World War III. In the meantime, Russian troops must leave Ukraine immediately. Any peace settlement needs to ensure the protection of Ukraine’s language rights and sovereignty. And NATO needs to put an end to any expansionist dreams it might still harbor in its inglorious triumphalist imagination.
—
Professor Peter McLaren, B.A., B.Ed., M.Ed., Ph.D., F.R.S.A., Ed.D (honoris causa), Dip Tchg
Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies,
The Donna Ford Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University
Co-Director and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice,
The Paulo Freire Democratic Project
Co-Founder, Instituto McLaren de Pedagogía Crítica, Ensenada
Chair Professor, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China (2015-20)
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles
Most Recent Books:
He Walks Among Us: Christian Fascism Ushering in the End of Times.
Breaking Free: The Life and Times of Peter McLaren (with Miles Wilson)
Post-Digital Dialogues on Critical Pedagogy, Liberation Theology and Information Technology (with Petar Jandrić)
Tracks to Infinity: The Long Road to Justice, The Peter McLaren Reader, Volume 2.
Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution
Madeleine Albright, without irony, has written a book on resisting fascism. She has also published an op-ed in the New York Times pushing the same argument.
Albright, former secretary of state under Bill Clinton, is alarmed. She wants to warn the public to stop the fascism emerging under the Trump regime before it’s too late.
Unfortunately, moralism on the part of the infamous and notorious is often the enemy of both historical memory and the truth, in spite of their newly discovered opposition to tyranny.
It defies belief that a woman who defended the killing of 500,000 children as a result of the imposed U.S. sanctions on Iraq can take up the cause of fighting fascism while positioning herself as being on the forefront of resistance to American authoritarianism.
Albright appears on ‘60 Minutes’ in 1996.
Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, once said of those measures: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.”
Is any policy worth the death of 500,000 children?
Albright, however, is not alone.
Hillary Clinton, herself a former war-monger and an unabashed ally of the financial elite, has also resurrected herself as a crusader in fighting the creeping fascism that now marks the Trump regime.
Speaking recently at the PEN World Voices Festival, Clinton appeared to have completely removed herself from her notorious past as a supporter of the Iraq war and the military-industrial-financial complex in order to sound the alarm “that freedom of speech and expression is under attack here in our own country.” She further called for action against America’s creeping authoritarianism.
‘Flight from memory’
It’s an odd flight from memory into the sphere of moral outrage given her own role in supporting a number of domestic and foreign policies both as a former first lady and as secretary of state.
There was the refusal to punish CIA torturers, the drone killings, the lavishing of funds to the military war machine, the shredding of the federal safety net for poor people and the endorsement of neoliberal policies that offered no hope or prosperity “for neighbourhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work.”
Clinton’s critique of Trump’s fascism does more than alert the public to the obvious about the current government, it also legitimatizes a form of historical amnesia and a long and suppressed legacy of cruelty and human misery. It gets worse.
Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief and CIA director under George W. Bush, has joined the ranks of Albright and Clinton in condemning Trump as a proto-fascist.
Writing in the New York Times, Hayden, ironically, chastised Trump as a serial liar and in doing so quoted the renowned historian Timothy Snyder, who stated in reference to the Trump regime that “Post-Truth is pre-fascism.”
And yet he’s now being regarded as an honest, expert commentator on intelligence and other issues.The irony here is hard to miss. Not only did Hayden head Bush’s illegal National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program while the head of the NSA, he also lied repeatedly about about his role in Bush’s sanction and implementation of state torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Dubious heroes
The United States and its Vichy Republican Party has drifted so far to the fascist right that people like Albright, Clinton and Hayden are serving as heroes in the political and ethical resistance to fascism.
While the call to resist fascism is to be welcomed, it has to be interrogated, not aligned with individuals and ideological forces that helped put in place the racist, economic, religious and educational forces that produced it.
I am not simply condemning the hypocrisy of former politicians who are now criticizing the emerging fascism in the United States. Nor am I proposing that only selective condemnations should be welcomed.
What I am suggesting is that the seductions of power in high places often work to impose a silence upon people that allow them to benefit from and become complicit with authoritarian tendencies and anti-democratic policies and modes of governance. Once they’re out of power, their own histories of complicity are too often easily erased, especially by the mainstream media.
Their newly found stances against fascism do nothing to help explain where we are and what we might do next to resist it now that it’s engulfing American society and its economic, cultural and political institutions.
What is often unrecognized in the celebrated denunciations of fascism by celebrity politicians is that neoliberalism is the new fascism.
And what becomes invisible in the fog of such celebration is neoliberalism’s legacy and its deadly mix of market fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, rabid individualism, unchecked selfishness, shredding of the welfare state, privatization of the public sphere, white supremacy, toxic masculinity and all-embracing quest for profit.
‘Savage politics’
The new and more racist, violent and brutal form of neoliberalism under Trump has produced both a savage politics in the U.S. and a corrupt financial elite that now controls all the commanding institutions of U.S. society.
Systemic corruption, crassness, overt racism, a view of misfortune as a weakness, unapologetic bigotry and a disdain of the public and common good has been normalized under Trump, but it’s been gaining strength for the last 50 years in U.S. politics. Trump is merely the blunt instrument at the heart of a fascistic neoliberal ideology.
We need to be wary, to say the least, about those mainstream politicians now denouncing Trump’s fascism who while in power submitted, as noted U.S. sociologist Stanley Aronowitz puts it, “to neoliberal degradations of health care, jobs, public housing, and income guarantees for the long-term unemployed (let alone the rest of us).”
What is often ignored in the emerging critiques of fascism is neoliberalism’s legacy coupled with the mainstream media’s attempts to hold up many of its architects and supporters as celebrated opponents of Trump’s fascist government.
Trump is the extreme point of a long series of attacks on democracy —and former politicians like Albright and Clinton cannot be removed from that history.
Unchecked and systemic power, a take-no-prisoners politics and an unapologetic cruelty are the currency of fascism because they have long been the wedge that makes fear visceral and violence more than an abstraction.None of these politicians have denounced nationalism, the myth of American exceptionalism and the forces that produce obscene inequality in wealth and power in the U.S., or the oppressive regime of law and order that has ruled the U.S. ruthlessly and without apology since the 1980s.
This lethal mix is also a pathological condition endemic to brutal demagogues such as Trump. Trump and his ilk demand loyalty —not to justice and democracy, but loyalty to themselves, one that stands above the truth and rule of law.
Stamp out amnesia
The calls to resist fascism are welcome, but they can’t be separated from the acts of bad faith that helped produce it.
The fight against fascism is part of a struggle over memory. We must not engage in historical and social amnesia.
It is also a fight to defend the public spheres and institutions that make civic literacy, the public imagination and critical consciousness possible. We must expose the forces that are and have been complicit in the longstanding attack on democratic institutions, values and social relations, especially those that now hide their past and ideological convictions.
Any resistance to fascism has to be rooted in the call to make education central to politics with a strong emphasis on the teaching of historical consciousness and civic literacy as crucial weapons.
At the same time, the fight must be unwavering in its refusal to equate capitalism and democracy. We are at war over not just the right of economic equality and social justice, but also against the powerful and privileged positions of whiteness, toxic masculinity and the elimination of solidarity and compassion.
This is a war waged over the possibility of a radical democracy while acknowledging that the rich and powerful will not give up their power without a fight.
Looking for guidance on fascism in the U.S. today? Listen to Parkland activist Emma Gonzalez, 18, not Albright, Clinton or anyone else who has been complicit.(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
And so instead of listening to complicit politicians and others deeply embedded in a system of exploitation, disposability, austerity and a criminogenic culture, we need to listen to the voices of the striking teachers, the Parkland students, the women driving the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter organizers and others willing to make resistance visible, collective and widespread.
The fight against American-style fascism cannot and will not be lead by establishment politicians and pundits parading as the new heroes of the resistance to Trump’s fascism.
Fascism is all too often relegated to the history books.
The word conjures up a period in which civilized societies treated democracy with contempt, engaged in acts of systemic violence, practised extermination and elimination, supported an “apocalyptic populism,” suppressed dissent, promoted a hyper-nationalism, displayed contempt for women, embraced militarism as an absolute ideal and insisted on obedience to a self-proclaimed prophet.
But the seeds that produced such fascist horrors have once again sprung to life, returning in new social and political forms.
Today, a culture of fear dominates American society, one marked by massive inequities in wealth and power that not only uphold structures of domination, but also view differences as threats, compassion as weakness and shared responsibilities —if not the common good itself — as pathology.
Fascist thought is on the rise all over the world, but its most blatant and dangerous manifestation has emerged in the Trump administration.
Fear and the ethos of mass consumerism —coupled with widespread insecurity and ignorance —now drive people into a malignant notion of security, self-inflicted cynicism and into the arms of demagogues like Trump. For too many Americans, critical thinking and hope have given way to emotional bonding and the revival of the discourse of ultra-nationalism and bigotry.
Trump: Not Hitler, but dangerous nonetheless
Trump is not Hitler in that he has not created concentration camps, shut down the critical media or rounded up dissidents; moreover, the United States at the current historical moment is not the Weimar Republic.
But in the Trump era, remnants of fascism exist in different shapes and forms and include a celebration of the cult of the leader, systemic racism, the embrace of a toxic macho-populism and state support for ultra-nationalism, racism and the threat of violence against critics.
All of these elements are evident in Trump’s rhetoric and policy initiatives.
Trump’s corporate brand of neoliberal fascism is highly visible in right-wing policies that favour deregulation, corporate power and the interests of the ultra-rich.
Instead of draining the corporate swamp, Trump has embraced the merging of corporate and political power, and in doing so has turned the state into a battering ram designed to serve the most powerful and wealthiest members of society.
Trump’s mode of fascism is a unique product of our times, our commercial culture, and a corporate controlled media, all of which saps the foundations of a viable democracy.
American culture is advertising-saturated and celebrity-based, and has permitted a rich self-promoter to abandon any pretense of civility, accountability or integrity in order to hype, scam and market his way to power.
Call it Fascism, American-Style. It’s returned in the shadow of neoliberalism, with its celebration of the market as the template for governing all of society and its concentration of economic and political power in relatively few hands.
Friendly with dictators
How else to explain Trump’s unapologetic support and friendly attitude toward right-wing dictators such as the self-confessed killer, Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, all of whom have a fawning attraction to Trump given he exhibits little interest in their massive human rights violations.
Trump and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte speak during a bilateral meeting at the ASEAN Summit in Manila in November 2017.(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Trump’s fascism is also on full display in his ramping up of the police state, his relentless racist rhetoric, taunts and policies that cast Blacks, immigrants and Muslims as people unworthy of respect, compassion and dignity, and in his support for a war culture.
The latter is marked by his expansion of the U.S. military budget, his provocations aimed at North Korea and reckless policies such as recognizing Jerusalem the capital of Israel —widely condemned by almost all world leaders — that destabilize the Middle East, Asia and other parts of the world.
But there are more subtle, if not under-examined, indicators that point to resurgence of fascist principles in the United States.
One of the most powerful is Trump’s war on youth.
Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways. And it’s more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, if not democracy itself.
In an apparent war on children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis — not the least of which was the president’s support and defence of an accused serial pedophile, Roy Moore, in his unsuccessful attempt to win an Alabama Senate seat.
‘Foreclosed hope’
Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of casino capitalism or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.
Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued, “the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.”
American youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behaviour being criminalized in schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation.
Several states are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime that carries a huge fine, or subjects young people to possible felony charges? Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare.
The most recent example is evident in budget and tax reform bills that shift millions of dollars away from social programs vital to the health of poor youth to the pockets of the ultra-rich, who hardly need tax deductions.
As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”
She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor – almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”
Cruel mindset
The Trump administration is more than willing to pass massive tax cuts for the rich while at the same time refusing to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which supports over nine million children.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, meantime, has argued that tax cuts shouldn’t benefit the poor because they will just waste the money on booze and women.
So if you’re not rich, it’s because you’re lazy. Really? Tell that to the 10,000 people, some of them children, who may die each year as a result of losing their health insurance due to the proposed Senate tax bill.
Such a mindset, and statements like Grassley’s, are more than cruel, they represent a political and economic system that has abandoned any sense of moral and social responsibility.
In this view, children are undeserving of aid because offering such government support flies in the face of a ruthless neoliberal ideology that insists that the only responsibility of government is to aid the rich and powerful corporations.
If the poor are suffering and subject to harsh conditions, according to Grassley’s logic, it is because of a lack of character.
Another under-analyzed example of Trump’s war on youth can be seen his cancellation of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), instituted in 2012 by former president Barack Obama.
Under the program, over 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 were allowed to live, study and work in the United States without fear of deportation.
Loyola Marymount University student and dreamer Maria Carolina Gomez joins a rally in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program, in California in September 2017.(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
In revoking the program, Trump enacted a policy that is both cruel and racist, given that 78 per cent of DACA residents are from Mexico. These are the same immigrants Trump once labelled rapists, drug addicts and criminals.
Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe are more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by a market-driven survival of the fittest ethos.
‘Systemic derangement’
It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and emergence of fascist politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state with no regard for its children.
Trump is the apostle of moral blindness and unchecked corruption, and he revels in a mode of governance that merges his never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with deeply authoritarian politics.
One of the most disturbing features of Trump’s fascism is his disregard for the truth and his embrace of an infantilism that demonstrates, for young people, a lack of any viable sense of critical thought, agency and commitment to social and economic justice.
What’s more, Trump has unleashed a rancid populism and racist-fuelled ultra-nationalism that mimics older forms of fascism and creates a culture of cruelty that both disparages its children and cancels out a future that makes democracy possible for them — and therefore all of us.
At the same time, Trump has embraced a merging of corporate power and politics that is characteristic of all fascist regimes, and in doing so, he has shifted wealth and resources away from vital social programs for young people into the hands of the financial elite.
There is more at work here than regressive tax policies, there is also an attempt to disable the welfare state by eliminating its funding.
Domestic terrorism
One result is what might be called the unleashing of a form of domestic terrorism — terrorism practised in one’s own country against one’s own people —in which young people are subject to state violence and relegated to forms of terminal exclusion, spheres of social abandonment and set adrift in a state of disorientation and despair.
Under this new resurgence of fascism, thinking is dangerous, public spheres that promote critical thought are considered pathological and youth are viewed as a threatening disoriented class, especially those marginalized by race, sexual orientation and class.
And so under Trump, the winds of fascism have accelerated into a hurricane and pose a haunting crisis for youth, the future and democracy itself.
That crisis of youth under the Trump regime is a political disaster of the first order and threatens every vital cultural and political ideal, principle, social formation and public sphere that makes a democracy possible. It’s best illustrated by Trump’s support for Moore, a homophobe, unabashed racist and an accused child predator, sexual harasser and sexual abuser.
Yes, fascism us making a comeback and is with us once again — yet Moore’s defeat in the deep-red state of Alabama to his Democratic challenger gives us reason to hope. Black voters, particularly black women, and young voters stood up to say “no more.”
Fascism requires those among us who value equity, fairness, justice and morality to defeat it. To stop fascism, it is crucial that we show that democracy is the only alternative, and that the grotesque elements of fascism will be challenged. Here’s hoping Alabama is just the beginning of such a struggle.
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