The recent riots in the UK have demonstrated, yet again, the inability of liberals and leftists to figure out how to appeal to working-class people who are attracted by the far right. Once fascism is in the air, it is pointless to pander to xenophobia, as liberals do when they embrace an anti-immigrant agenda, or to rail against austerity, as leftists do. To deal with the UK’s rioters, and similar mobs across Europe and the US, progressives must first commit to not abandoning them.
My shocking introduction to the fascist mindset happened three decades ago, when Kapnias, an aging Greek peasant, decided to educate me. His twisted insights, though revolting, still hold clues for places like northern England, eastern Germany and US Midwest.
Kapnias had grown up dirt poor, a semi-bonded farmhand in a Peloponnesian village dominated by his landowner boss — a liberal patriarch who, during the Nazi occupation, was a British intelligence asset, his house functioning as a hub of the resistance. Watching British officers who had parachuted in enter the farmhouse, sometimes accompanied by bearded communist partisans, Kapnias knew that something was afoot — something he was unceremoniously excluded from.
“I was an untouchable,” Kapnias told me.
“Until my white angel touched me,” he added, while proudly placing in my hand a leather-bound volume in an advanced state of disrepair: a 1934 edition of Mein Kampf that his Gestapo instructor, his “white angel,” had given him as a parting gift during the final stages of the occupation.
Savoring my revulsion, he proceeded to explain his hatred for the Allies.
“Their arrogance, their self-importance, their hubris led myriads to their death,” he said.
Even before enlisting in a unit of collaborators, where he encountered his white angel, hatred drove him.
Sure, had Kapnias been better off, he might not have succumbed to the lure of Nazism. However, poverty does not explain why he collaborated when most boys from his village, no less disadvantaged, joined the Resistance. When marginalization combines with deprivation, a certain type of person falls headlong into a moral void. Like Kapnias, they become susceptible to the perverse logic of a super race whose time has come.
When I raised the Nazi massacres of his own people, Kapnias would have none of it. For him, it was the British, his Greek boss and the leftists who brought carnage to the land — a word I did not hear being used with such gusto again until Donald Trump deployed it in his presidential inaugural address in 2017.
When I pushed him to comment further on the Nazi murders of hundreds in a nearby town, it was his cue elatedly to proclaim: “Real men eliminate those who stand in their way, and thus survive. And if they die, through their death they accept their unfitness to live. My white angels were above God. Unlike the Italians, the British, or our own mob, they did not hesitate to use any means. No wincing! No fear! No passion! No love! No hatred! You had to see them with your own eyes. They were magnificent!”
As he spoke, his face lit up, my pained reaction to every word filling his heart with pleasure. The British flashmobs who rioted against immigrants, supporters of Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland, and the resurgent American white supremacists might not be as vocal or articulate in their fascism, but they come from the same psychic place, and we can draw four lessons from their example.
First, fascist violence is a recruitment tool. Its chief purpose is to outrage us so that we denounce them and demand violent police action and long prison sentences. That is how they gain recruits who, Kapnias-like, delight in watching their anger infect us.
Second, fascists are not community defenders or builders. They talk a good game about ruined communities, but the closest they get to community-building is riots and social-media threads that evoke, but never satisfy, people’s hunger for community.
Third, while fascism breeds on a bed of austerity, fascists would never rail against austerity. Austerity has no face, unlike Jews or Muslim asylum seekers, and fascism needs faces as focal points of the violent hatred that drives it.
Fourth, immigrants are irrelevant. As Kapnias taught me, fascists happily embrace foreigners as their white angels, including those, like Elon Musk or Trump, who boast the kind of exorbitant wealth that they claim to decry. Even if there are no brown faces or newcomers around, fascists would conjure some Other to focus their hatred on.
These four lessons suggest what we must avoid. For starters, when governments and mainstream parties adopt an anti-immigration “lite” agenda, fascists smell blood in the water, and their appetite for cruelty explodes. Similarly, those who treat fascists like victims of austerity, poor education, or bad luck only make them angrier. Telling them that anti-Semitism or Islamophobia are the fool’s anti-capitalism (although correct) works no better.
So, what must we do? The answer, I suggest, also comes from the UK, in the form of Ken Loach’s most recent film The Old Oak, written by Paul Laverty. When a group of Syrian refugees is deposited in the midst of a ruined northern English town, a publican and a refugee succeed in defusing the clash between the new arrivals and the wretched locals whom deindustrialization and austerity made susceptible to the fascist mindset. Under the slogan “eating together, sticking together,” they set up a communal dining hall where no fascist trope is tolerated, but no one is harangued, demeaned, or attacked, either.
The Old Oak’s moral clarity, and its testament to the power of solidarity, is as good a contemporary guide as any on how to stop victims from turning against each other.
Its message is universal: There is nothing inevitable about resurgent fascism.
Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 party and professor of economics at the University of Athens.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS