OMNI
NEWSLETTER ON
RISE OF US EXECUTIVE POWER AND TOTALITARIANISM
#5, July 20, 2020
Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice
(#1 Jan. 10, 2012; #2 April 17, 2014; #3 June
8, 2017; #4 March 6, 2019)
What’s at
stake: NAZISM, FASCISM, DICTATORSHIP,
POLICE STATE, TOTALITARIANISM, EXTREME FAR RIGHT? Many books and articles have been written to
distinguish among these categories. My more
limited subject is the rise of the power of the US presidency from its
beginning to the present, which is denied by nobody. I don’t try to answer whether or not that
historical fact makes the present federal government fit one or more of the
preceding labels. But some of these books
and articles do, and they sound an alarm for our democracy. And my second section (and see preceding
newsletters) gives information about the rise of Hitler for context.
#1 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2012/01/fascism-usa.html
#2 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/04/
#3 http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2017/06/omni-totalitarian-fascism-newsletter-3.html
#4 https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/03/us-totalitarianism-fascism-newsletter-4.html
CONTENTS
The
Increasing Power of the Presidency in the US
Michael
Roberto. The Coming of the American Behemoth.
Chris
Hedges. Tyranny or Revolution?
Henry
Giroux. Neolibeeral Fascism, The Terror of the Unforeseen.
Nancy
MacLean. Democracy in Chains.
Federico
Finchelstein. …History of Fascist Lies.
The
Global Radical Right
The
Rise of HITLER and Nazism
Benjamin
Hett. The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the
Weimar Republic.
George
Paulson on Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire.
Thomas
Childers. The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany.
TEXTS
The Rise of Presidential Power in the US
Michael Joseph Roberto. The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of
Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940.
Monthly Review P, 2019. 466pp.
Publisher’s
Description:
Most people in the United
States have been trained to recognize fascism in movements such as Germany’s
Third Reich or Italy’s National Fascist Party, where charismatic demagogues
manipulate incensed, vengeful masses. We rarely think of fascism as linked to the essence of monopoly-finance capitalism,
operating under the guise of American free enterprise. But, as Michael
Joseph Roberto argues, this is exactly where fascism’s embryonic forms began
gestating in the United States, during the so-called prosperous 1920s and the
Great Depression of the following decade. Drawing from a range of authors who
wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s, Roberto examines how the driving force
of American fascism comes, not from reactionary movements below, but from the
top, namely, Big Business and the power of finance capital. More subtle than
its earlier European counterparts, writes Roberto, fascist America’s racist,
top-down quashing of individual liberties masqueraded as “real democracy,”
“upholding the Constitution,” and the pressure to be “100 Percent American.”
The Coming of the American Behemoth is intended as a primer, to forge much-needed discourse on
the nature of fascism, and its particular forms within the United States. The
book focuses on the role of the
capital-labor relationship during the period between the two World Wars,
when the United States became the epicenter of the world-capitalist system.
Concentrating on specific processes, which he characterizes as terrorist and
non-terrorist alike, Roberto argues that the interwar period was a fertile time
for the incubation of a protean, more salable form of tyranny—a fascist
behemoth in the making, whose emergence has been ignored or dismissed by
mainstream historians. This book is a necessity for anyone who fears America
tipping ever closer, in this era of Trump, to full-blown fascism.
Praise for the book:
Lucid, hard-hitting, rich in historical detail, and passionately
Marxist in its dynamic definition of fascism as an “inherent function of
monopoly-capitalist production and relations whose telos was and remains the
totalitarian rule of capitalist dictatorship,” Michael Roberto’s The Coming of the American Behemoth is a vital and
necessary book. Fundamental to fascism, Roberto contends, is the growth of
state power in the service of the capitalist ruling class, the reactionary
politics of the middle class, and the manipulation of public consciousness by
ad-men and PR experts who turn everything and everyone into commodities. All
were fascist processes, Roberto shows, “because they aimed at the domination of
capital over society.” This book could shift the discussion. —Paul Breines,
co-author with Andrew Arato, The Young Lukács and the
Origins of Western Marxism
·
Marx taught us that it
is impossible to deal effectively with the problems of the present without
understanding how they evolved out of the past. This would seem to hold in
spades for what most people see as the surprising rise of fascism in the U.S.
today. Yet, while early European versions of fascism never lacked for the
attention of its critics, our homegrown variety, which flourished between the
two World Wars, has been almost entirely forgotten. No more, thanks to this
absolutely essential contribution by Michael Roberto. Highly Recommended. —Bertell Ollman, author, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method and
hundreds of books, articles, manuals, and games dealing with Marxism
·
In this carefully
researched study of what contemporaneous US Marxists had to say about 1930s
fascist processes, Michael Roberto argues that the essence of
fascism—capitalist dictatorship—is entirely compatible with liberal democracy.
His thesis not only illuminates Depression-era politics and economics but also
carries profound implications for our time.
Barbara Foley, author, Radical Representations:
Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941
Michael Joseph Roberto retired in 2016 from the faculty of North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical State University, the largest historically black
educational institution in the United States, where he taught contemporary
world history. A longtime political activist in Greensboro, NC, he has worked
as a journalist and published essays in Monthly Review, Socialism and Democracy, and other scholarly journals.
Roberto is also a percussionist who has performed with leading jazz and R&B
musicians.
Chris Hedges:
America Faces A Historic Choice — "Ugly Corporate Tyranny" Or
Revolution. Popular
Resistance.org (7-17-20).
By Chauncey Devega, Salon. Time is broken in Donald Trump's
America. Minutes feel like hours, hours feel like days. Weeks are months, and
months are years. And there is an overwhelming sense of time warped by dread
as the country careens towards a dangerous climax on Election
Day — whatever the outcome. Disorientation is a feature of life
in a failing democracy where fascism is ascendant. In a widely read conversation
here at Salon during the first few weeks of the national pandemic lockdown
and the implosion of America's economy, journalist and bestselling
author Chris Hedges warned that, compared to what.. -more-
Henry A. Giroux and the culture of neoliberal fascism. mronline.org (8-25-19).
HENRY A. GIROUX’s book The Terror of the Unforeseen analyzes
the conditions that have enabled and led to Donald Trump’s rule and the
consequences of that rule, that have ushered in an authoritarian version of
capitalism. Giroux provides a realistic analysis that holds out the hope that,
through collective efforts, change is possible and democracy […] Source
Trump and the spectre of fascism.
mronline.org. 7-30-19.
According to Giroux “a distinctive
economic-political formation has been produced” one he calls “neoliberal
fascism.” He continues: “Neoliberalism and fascism conjoin and advance in a
comfortable and mutually compatible project and movement that connects the worst excesses of capitalism with fascist
ideals;…” After years of neoliberalism, Giroux believes that “the
mobilizing passions of fascism have […]
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS
The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America By
Nancy MacLean. Viking, 2017.
I excised several opening
paragraphs. For the complete review: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/democracy-in-chains-nancy-maclean.html?mcubz=3 --Dick
American democracy was
unprepared to defend itself against the agenda of Buchanan and conservative
benefactors. Buchanan may not have been the only actor in this movement, and
the role of conservative donors and economists has been documented elsewhere,
but we are now living in a world he helped shepherd into reality. Public choice
economists argue that those with the most to lose from change will pay the most
attention, which has certainly been the case with Charles and David Koch. They and their friends have invested
enormous sums in organizations that have changed the national debate about the
proper role of government in the economy. Our politically polarized and
increasingly paralyzed government institutions are the result.
With this book MacLean joins a growing chorus of scholars and
journalists documenting the systematic, organized effort to undermine democracy
and change the rules. In “Dark Money,” Jane Mayer tells the tale of the
Koch brothers. In Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the
New Deal, the historian Kim Phillips-Fein shows how a small
group of businessmen initiated a decades-long effort to build popular support
for free market economics. The political scientist Steven M. Teles writes about
the chemicals magnate John M. Olin in The
Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.
Power consolidation
sometimes seems like a perpetual motion machine, continually widening the gap
between those who have power and money and those who don’t. Still, “Democracy
in Chains” leaves me with hope: Perhaps as books like MacLean’s continue to
shine a light on important truths, Americans will begin to realize they need to
pay more attention and not succumb to the cynical view that known liars make
the best leaders.
Heather Boushey is the
executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable
Growth.
A version of this review appears in print on August 20, 2017, on
Page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Minority
Rule.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review/democracy-in-chains-nancy-maclean.html?mcubz=3
Also see review in The Nation (Sept. 25/Oct. 2, 2017),
“Mont Pelerin in Virginia” by Kim Phillips-Fein.
HISTORY
OF FASCIST LIES
Federico
Finchelstein. A Brief History of Fascist Lies.
U of California P, 2020.
In this short companion to his book From
Fascism to Populism in History, world-renowned
historian Federico Finchelstein explains why fascists regarded simple and often
hateful lies as truth, and why so many of their followers believed the
falsehoods. Throughout the history of the twentieth century, many supporters of
fascist ideologies regarded political lies as truth incarnated in their leader.
From Hitler to Mussolini, fascist leaders capitalized on lies as the base of
their power and popular sovereignty.
This history
continues in the present, when lies again seem to increasingly replace
empirical truth. Now that actual news is presented as “fake news” and false
news becomes government policy, A Brief History of Fascist Lies urges
us to remember that the current talk of “post-truth” has a long political and
intellectual lineage that we cannot ignore.
Federico Finchelstein is
Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang
College in New York City. He is the author of several books, including From
Fascism to Populism in History, Transatlantic Fascism, and The
Ideological Origins of the Dirty War. His books have been
translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese,
Turkish, and Italian. He contributes to major American, European, and
Latin American media, including the New York Times, the Washington
Post, the Guardian, CNN, Foreign
Policy, Clarín, Corriere della Sera, Nexos,
and Folha de S.Paulo.
"There is no better book on fascism's complex and vexed
relationship with truth."––Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
"Federico Finchelstein delivers a vital compendium on a dark seam running
through our modern politics. This is not just a deft intellectual history of fascism,
but an urgent reminder of the deep well of hate that lies beneath our era of
'alternative facts' and 'fake news.'"––Ishaan Tharoor, Washington
Post
"At a time when politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro claim
that information they don’t like is 'fake news,' Finchelstein's history of
fascist lying strikes a chord. From Mussolini onward, truth is what the leader
needs it to be."––Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of Italian and History, New
York University
"Finchelstein brings clarity and precision to the debate about the
populist far right at a time when pundits across the globe casually throw
around the term 'fascist' with little regard for its history or meaning.
Ranging from Europe to the United States to Latin America, Finchelstein shows
that dismissing contemporary xenophobic
populists as insane swindlers does little to weaken or defeat them and
merely allows them to keep winning by waging war on the truth."––Sasha
Polakow-Suransky, Deputy Editor, Foreign Policy, and author
of Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash against Immigration and
the Fate of Western Democracy
The far right: a global phenomenon.
Mronline.org (9-26-19)
In recent years, the reactionary,
authoritarian and/or fascist extreme right wing has been in the ascendant all
over the world: it already governs half of the world’s countries. Among the
best-known examples are: Trump (United States), Modi (India), Orbán (Hungary),
Erdoğan (Turkey), Daesh (Islamic State), Salvini (Italy), Duterte
(Philippines), and now Bolsonaro (Brazil).
NAZI RISE TO POWER
The Rise of Totalitarianism in Nazi Germany
THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY
Hitler's Rise to Power
and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett. Henry Holt and Co., 2018. 304 pp.
A riveting account of
how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic
and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen.
Why did
democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did
a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter
Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances
for our own time.
To say that
Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if
Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist
insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner
from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the
misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and
his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts
to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given
him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.
Benjamin Carter
Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller
whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be
when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today,
when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of
strongmen sounds ever louder.
REVIEWS
Praise for The
Death of Democracy
Named
"Book of the Week" by CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS
Named a Best
Book of the Year by The Daily Telegraph (UK) and The Times of London
“[An] extremely
fine study of the end of constitutional rule in Germany. . . . With careful
prose and fine scholarship, with fine thumbnail sketches of individuals and
concise discussions of institutions and economics, . . . [Benjamin Carter Hett]
sensitively describes a moral crisis that preceded a moral catastrophe.” --
Timothy Snyder, The New York Times Book
Review (Editor's Choice)
"At a time
of deep distress over the stability of democracy in America and elsewhere,
Benjamin Carter Hett's chronicle of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the
rise of Adolf Hitler could not be more timely. 'The Death of Democracy' makes
for chilling reading." -- Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post
"If this
is an oft-told and tragic tale, Hett's brisk and lucid study offers compelling
new perspectives inspired by current threats to free societies around the
world. . . . It is both eerie and enlightening how much of Hett's account rings
true in our time." -- E. J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
“Particularly
instructive. . . . a penetrating study of how Nazism overtook the Weimar
Republic. Hett never mentions Trump; the societal parallels are, of course, far
from exact. But his account carries a troubling ? and clearly intentional ?
resonance.” -- Richard North Patterson, Huffington
Post
ABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Benjamin Carter
Hett is the author of Burning the
Reichstag, Crossing Hitler, and Death in the Tiergarten. He is a professor
of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York, and holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and a law degree
from the University of Toronto. Born in Rochester, New York, he grew up in
Edmonton, Alberta, and now lives in New York City.
Big lies. Mronline.org (6-11-19)
Benjamin Carter Hett on what we can learn from Hitler’s rise
to power.
NATIONALISM
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5:33
PM (2 hours ago) |
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Hello Dick,
Your thoughts (or Chomsky’s , I can’t remember, sorry) on
Weimar, and its relevance today really got me thinking. Chris Hedges, as you probably know,
frequently references Weimar and the rise of fascism in his talks. I’ve
started a new book that adds yet more fascinating context (namely, the very
deep roots of German nationalism
that the Nazis were able to tap into) to the story. Mark Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire.” Mazower, if you
don’t know him, is an excellent historian. His book on the German
occupation of Greece during WWII won all kinds of awards. His book
“Dark Continent” is the best short single volume work on modern Europe I think
I’ve ever read.
Rule by Fear : A
new one-volume book offers an updated history of the rise and fall of the Third
Reich By Richard J. Evans..
A review of The
Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by Thomas Childers
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-men-who-made-the-third-reich/
. . . . Only from about page 50
does the narrative broaden out, when we encounter the conditions in postwar
Bavaria that allowed Hitler to emerge onto the political scene. Charged with
investigating the myriad ultra-right-wing groups that proliferated in the
aftermath of an abortive attempt to stage a communist revolution in Munich in
early 1919, Hitler found his way into the tiny German Workers’ Party, which, as
Childers remarks, “had no program, no plans, no advertising, no mimeograph
machine, not even a rubber stamp (a vital necessity for any German
organization).”
Attracting
growing numbers of adherents with his spellbinding oratory, Hitler took over
the party, reorganized it, and led it into a disastrous attempt to seize power
in Munich on November 9, 1923, in the notorious beer-hall putsch, which he
launched in imitation of Mussolini’s successful March on Rome the previous
year.
Learning
the lesson of his failure—which also earned him a spell in prison—Hitler
focused on winning votes for his party, part of a larger strategy of working within the political system in
order to undermine it. Childers is absolutely clear that this tactic was combined at all times with
intense and pervasive violence on the streets, particularly from the
brown-shirted stormtroopers, the strong-arm wing of the movement. Childers’s
view of the ill-fated liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic is
correspondingly gloomy, stressing the continuity of political murders (376 from
1918 to 1922 alone), the economic disasters of hyperinflation and depression,
and the radical dynamism and increasingly effective organization of the Nazis, who by the early 1930s were reaching
saturation levels in their electoral campaigns, as well as engaging in extreme
and brutal assaults on their opponents. . . .
Childers
convincingly depicts the rapid series of moves through which Hitler
outmaneuvered them, using a ruthless combination of legislative decrees and street
violence to create a one-party state by the summer of 1933. Over 100,000
socialists and communists were thrown into improvised concentration camps and
subjected to horrifying brutality before being released as a warning to anyone
else who dared to oppose the Hitler government. Childers is indeed particularly
good on the violent nature of the Nazi seizure of power between January and
July 1933. He comprehensively demolishes the once-fashionable view that Hitler
achieved supreme power by the general consent of the German people and with
only a minimal use of force, exercised mainly against despised minorities and
marginal groups. Hitler’s rise during this period was based on terror in its
rawest, most radical form. . . .
Like
Shirer, Childers sees Nazi Germany as a totalitarian society, at least in the
sense that the regime aimed to subordinate everyone totally to its will.
Goebbels boasted that Hitler and his government had made “a total revolution”
that “encompasses every aspect of public life from the bottom up” and erases
“any realms in which the individual belongs to himself.” Yet it is on this
subject that Childers arguably underestimates the degree to which people did
manage to preserve some privacy and autonomy for themselves. More generally, he
says far too little about German resistance and dissent, which has become the
subject of a great deal of research over the past few decades, or about the
limits of Hitler’s power.
Even
so, Childers avoids falling into the same trap as Shirer: He doesn’t argue that
the Nazi dictatorship and its policies were welcomed by the great mass of
Germans. For example, the anti-Semitic violence in which the regime engaged
from the start, in an attempt to drive Germany’s tiny Jewish population into
emigration, was far from universally embraced. The economic recovery was much
more popular, though Childers doesn’t really say how it was achieved, and he
seriously underestimates the extent to which rearmament provided its
motor—indeed, the economy in general gets rather short shrift in the book.
Childers
also offers an excellent account of
Hitler’s radicalization of the regime as he sacked his more moderate generals
and ministers in 1937–38 and replaced them with men more willing to do his
bidding. Here again, he makes it clear that war was the last thing the
great mass of ordinary Germans wanted, despite all the regime’s efforts to
prepare them for it. He also pays due attention, as Shirer did not, to the
morale of ordinary Germans during the war. Hitler’s popularity reached its
height after the defeat of France in 1940, before plummeting into the depths with
the reversals on the Eastern front from Stalingrad onward, the devastating
aerial bombings of German cities, and the Allied landings in Normandy in 1944.
. . . more
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-men-who-made-the-third-reich/
Also see the Review: “How the Radical Right
Played the Long Game and Won” By HEATHER
BOUSHEY. NYT, AUG.
15, 2017.
Contents: US Totalitarianism Newsletter #4, March 6, 2019 https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/03/us-totalitarianism-fascism-newsletter-4.html
(in rough chronological order)
Germany: from Weimar Republic
to Hitler by Noam Chomsky
USA Up
Through Bush II
F.
H. Buckley. The Once
and Future King. The
Rise of Crown Government in America. And
supportive review by Bradley Gitz.
Charlie
Savage. Takeover:
The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.
Andrew Rudalevige. The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing
Presidential Power after Watergate.
Naomi Wolf. The End of America: A Citizen’s Call
to Action.
Obama
“Expansive
use of Executive Orders” by McManus.
Trump
Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright,
“American Fascism, in 1944 and Today” by
“Donald Trump: A Fascist by Any Other Name” by
Bill Weinberg
Numerous
Executive Orders by Aimee Crochet
Overview
and Resistance
Chris
Hedges, YouTube: “Stop
Fascism,” Roman Empire and USA
4 Reviews of Hedges’ book American Fascists
Anti-Fascism
and Democratic Restoration
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray.
The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America by F. H. Buckley.
Contents
of US Totalitarianism, Fascism Newsletter #3 (at end)
END OMNI NEWSLETTER ON TOTALITARIANISM, FASCISM #5
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