Thanks to Tom Burghardt's antifa bulletin, #260.
Michael Pugliese *****
THE BETHUNE INSTITUTE FOR ANTI-FASCIST STUDIES Web: http://bethuneinstitute.org Research Directors: David Lethbridge, sacar at shuswap.net Helmut-Harry Lowen, hloewen1 at uwinnipeg.ca - July 2000 -
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Denial, Disguise, and Demagogy: THE DENIAL OF FASCISM IN THE SERVICE OF FASCISM ____________________________________________________________________
By David Lethbridge http://www.bethuneinstitute.org/documents/denialoffascism.html
Over the last two decades, when fascist organizations began to rebuild and mobilize, they found it necessary to engage in a tactic which has become known as "Holocaust-denial."
Of course the leadership of the various fascist groups knew perfectly well that the Nazis had murdered millions of Jews, Communists, Poles, Ukrainians, Roma, homosexuals and others. But the new fascist leaders also recognized that the reality of the Holocaust constituted a major stumbling block to fascist recruitment. What's more, by denying the Holocaust the fascists were able to relativize the historical actions of the Nazis through arguing that all sides had engaged in atrocities, and in this way to dismiss the specificity of fascist violence. The third value in Holocaust-denial was to use the issue as a weapon against Jews and Communists, their traditional targets and enemies. Jews and Communists, who insisted on the reality of the Holocaust, were to be seen as perpetrating a monstrous lie, a "blood libel" against the "Aryan" people who, now cast as victims, had a duty to respond by organizing a new fascist movement.
Unfortunately for the fascists, Holocaust-denial has not been an altogether successful tactic. It has now become necessary for the fascists not only to deny the Holocaust but, in the service of fascism, to deny fascism itself.
Consider the statement of Alexis Lopez, leader of the Chilean neo-fascist New Fatherland Society Movement, who organized an international neo-Nazi gathering in Santiago, Chile, this past April: "We're not going to redefine German Hitlerism. We're going to elaborate a system of thought which has its origins in National Socialism, but which is completely removed from its historical context. Nazism belongs to the past millenium."
Lopez maintains that the new movement will "share the values of the spirit," and will "see in nationality and socialism legitimate and transcendent principles to defend the identity, culture, traditions and origins of our peoples." They will be opposed to "globalism," and will strive for "ecological development," and will "reject any threat to life, especially abortion." Furthermore, the new movement will "reformulate racism, xenophobia, and discrimination, rejecting them as political categories." "Our struggle," Lopez claims, "is for respect for difference."
And just as Holocaust-denial was necessitated by the desire to re-build a mass movement, so too is the denial of fascism and of Hitlerism. But these various forms of denial are in reality simply so many levels of disguise. Unlike the professional stripper who removes one veil after another to reveal the living flesh beneath, these new fascist pimps wrap themselves in more and more veils, layer after layer, to prevent their true nature from exposure. Did we murder six million? Surely not. Are we white racists? No, not at all. Did we not attempt to destroy the workers' movement and enslave the working class? On the contrary, we are its champions. Are we not exponents of the most anti-human forces? No, you are quite mistaken, we believe in spiritual values, the conservation of nature, and in respecting the value and diversity of all human life!
It would be easy enough to say that there is nothing new here. And in a sense that it is true. For what was Hitler's national socialism other than the use of contemporary disguise and demagogy in order to implement the ideology of the most reactionary factions of the bourgeois class? And these were identified as long ago as 1850, in Marx's "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" - as family, property, religion, and order. And certainly Hitler's Nazis promoted themselves, quite falsely, and just like Alexis Lopez, as the defenders of the working class, and as being "beyond both capitalism and communism," and as rooted in the desire to harmonize the human order with the order of nature.
And yet, on the other hand, there is something new here, and something quite insidious. Lopez is part of a growing movement known as the International Third Position (ITP).
ITP propaganda asserts a form of extreme nationalism. It claims to favor an end to racism through the national and racial autonomy of peoples. Politically, it aims at the dissolution of contemporary states and their replacement by smaller, racially pure nations. Racial and political separation - rather than domination and oppression - characterizes the new fascist propaganda.
On the surface, then, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are eliminated by the racial and political separation of states, and the subsequent enforcement of strict laws against immigration.
What is less openly discussed in ITP propaganda are the concrete consequences of a policy of racial-national separation. One would suppose, for example, that a great many people of color might resist being forced out of such "white homelands" as Europe and North America are alleged to be. At that point, such territories would have to be forcefully and violently cleared of the resisting racial group.
Furthermore, to return non-white peoples to their "homeland," (a regressive, biological concept in itself) would be to return such peoples to lands both economically and ecologically ravaged by centuries of capitalist-imperialist plunder, forcing them away from the industrial wealth of the capitalist metropoles to the largely poverty stricken perimeter.
But in a very real sense the pretence to holding non-racist and socialist positions falls away quickly when the surface demagogy is peeled away. While there are now dozens of ITP websites on the Internet, and at least three in Canada, the main ITP website, run by the Italian fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore, and long-time British reactionary Derek Holland, tells the real story through its "links" page. There, one finds dozens of websites run by Klansmen, Nazis, and Christian Identity white supremacists; Paul Fromm's Canadian racist and anti-immigrant CAFE site; Afrikaner organizations; anti-abortion and anti-gay sites; the Holocaust-denial sites of Ernst Zundel and David Irving; and, under the heading "Twentieth Century Heroes," such pro-Nazis and fascists as Leon Degrelle (the Belgian SS leader), Oliveira Salazar (the fascist dictator of Portugal), and Corneliu Codreanu (leader of the bloodthirsty Romanian Iron Guard). Indeed, common to all the ITP websites, is a vicious white racism lurking just below the surface and, equally common, a quite open and explicit hatred of Jews and Communists.
And what of the alleged socialism of Lopez and of the ITP? ITP propaganda is devoted primarily to its racial-nationalist ideology, and is conspicuously shy in revealing its economic intentions. Despite occasional references to the corporatism of classical fascism, or the smoke-and-mirrors monetary policy of British bigot G. K. Chesterton, no economic program is revealed. And this is because the claim to go "beyond capitalism and communism" is as false in the ITP as it was in Nazi Germany. Either the major means of production are owned by a small circle of capitalist industrialists and financiers, or they are owned by the people themselves - there is no third alternative, nor can there be.
In denying Hitlerism, the fascism of the International Third Position returns to its pre-Hitlerian origins but does so in the disguise of contemporary concerns and passions. Beneath the layers of obfuscation, the ITP hearkens back to the nationalist racism of the British Empire, of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, of Count Gobineau and Edouard Drumont, and the whole dark legion of racist, antisemitic, and ultranationalist ideologues who laid the groundwork of twentieth-century fascism and Nazism.
The International Third Position has been referred to in many quarters as a "left-right convergence." And certainly fascism intends the use of left issues and leftist phraseology to lure the disaffected. But beneath the surface, there is little that is new, and little that is "left" in the ITP. The now threadbare cloak of Hitler himself may be thrown off (only to be picked up later, one suspects), and bright new clothes put on to suit the current fashion and attract the young, but the political body that animates the clothes is still the same old monster.
( A Footnote: Millionairess Rosine de Bounevialle, has recently died and left her $3 million estate to ITP leader Roberto Fiore. De Bounevialle was a confidante of A. K. Chesterton, member of the British Union of Fascists and founder of the League of Empire Loyalists. De Bounevialle edited the antisemitic journal "Candour" after Chesterton's death. "Candour" has now become a publication of the ITP.)
Copyright 1998-2000 The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies. All rights reserved.
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