I don’t like how every racist act in the US is being attributed to “fascism” as if the whole last 400 plus years didn’t happen here and people didn’t use “democracy” to keep that racism in place on their own volition.
Reflexive antifascism is definitely something that “radicals” do to avoid actually coming into conflict with (even to enter into a bona fide alliance with!) liberalism and capitalism. When every bad thing is caused by some external force, fascism, the actual system is left free of blame. This is why I think it’s important to understand the fascism is the only possible outcome of liberalism and capitalism. It’s not an accidental thing that just comes out of nowhere every once in a while.
This is something that runs deeper through our society.
Fascism, as it manifested itself in the 1940s all the way up to the Holocaust, developed quite logically from ways of thinking already very present in society. Scientific racism, antisemitism, colonialism, white-supremacy, nationalism, capitalism, etc all cooked up this monster together. And it was one in a long row of unspeakable crimes against humanity cooked up in Europe. The slave trade, the genocide of native inhabitants of places Europeans colonised, and many smaller scale genocides, concentration camps and horrific mass murders. If you look at history honestly, it’s clear the Holocaust has long deep root in European culture.
But facing that big wake up call after the Holocaust? That’s not something Europe ever wanted to do. So fascism was positioned as an exception, a black page on an otherwise clean sheet, something that could be set apart from the rest of European history. Never to be compared to anything else.
This way of thinking upholds the white supremacist idea of ‘western civilisation’ so logically it is most popular with racists who don’t want to think of themselves as nazis while believing many of the same things and with liberals who like to think that our society is mostly doing just fine as it is.
But we are all raised with this narrative and treating fascism as an exception is easier and more comfortable than facinng the deep darkness of our history and our present so quite a few radicals also fall for this. And a lot of antifascists know that in theory fascism is deeply rooted in western white supremacist culture, but that knowledge isn’t always understood so deeply that it is translated into better activism.
QueerAnarchism 