Striking 2 Blows For Fascism— One In Erie, Pennsylvania And One In Austria

KIckl und mentor

Erie had a MAGA rally Sunday where Señor T called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately… One rough hour— and I mean real rough— the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately.” Imagine some cops grabbing him and hanging him on the spot! It might be satisfying but… there should be a trial first— a fast one, not like the bullshit going on with his trials now. Anyway, either way, that would certainly put an end to one egregious crime wave.

I wonder if Trump was cheering the Austrian election over the weekend. I’m sure Putin and Orban were. The Neo-Nazi Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded by the original Nazis after the war, won a plurality of votes and the most seats in parliament, although not enough to form a government without a coalition— and with no potential coalition partners in sight. These were the results:

• Nazis- 1,403,497 (58 seats, up 27)

• Austria People’s Party- 1,277,949 (51 seats, down 20)

• Social Democratic Party- 1,025,753 (41 seats, up 1)

• New Austria and Liberal Forum- 442,544 (18 seats, up 3)

• Greens- 397,679 (16 seats, down 10)

The only other party to win over 100,000 votes was the Communist Party (115,695— 2.38%), but won no seats.

As you probably know, the fate of Austrian Jews under Nazi rule was devastating. After the Anschluss in 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, marking the beginning of a systematic persecution of the country’s Jews, who were denied citizenship, employment and education. Like in Germany, Jewish businesses were boycotted and vandalized and Jews were subjected to physical violence and threats. Jewish property was expropriated and seized by the Nazis. And, finally, thousands of Jews were deported to concentration and extermination camps. Between 60,000 and 65,000 were murdered and most of the rest fled.

For that reason, I turned to the Jewish Telegraph Agency for a report on Sunday's election. Noting that “The leader of the Freedom Party has taken the mantle of ‘Volkskanzler,’ formerly claimed by Adolf Hitler,” Philissa Cramer warned that “The showing by the Freedom Party… is unprecedented there since the end of World War II and adds to a wave of support for far-right parties across Europe. FPO took 29% of the vote on Sunday, twice its tally from the last election in 2017, according to early results. The center-right party that currently leads the government came in second, with center-left and left-wing parties posting historically poor results.”

Just before the election, top-ranking FPO leaders attended the funeral of a longtime party politician, Walter Sucher, where attendees sang a song popularized by the Nazis that praises the “holy German Reich.” Sucher, who was 90 when he died, himself drew criticism two decades ago when, as a party representative, he saluted a meeting with the word “heil,” which is largely associated with Hitler.

In the lead-up to the election, the Austrian Jewish Students Union protested against FPO, saying that the group’s rise augured danger for Jews and others in the country.

“As young Jews, we often confront the tragic question of who would have hidden us during the Nazi era,” Alon Ishay, the group’s president, said in a statement shared by the European Jewish Congress. “The FPÖ leader’s response is brief and chilling: Herbert Kickl would have deported us.”

The wave of far-right successes across Europe are driven largely by rising anti-immigrant sentiment and discontent with the governing parties; the parties are typically fiercely nationalist and, in many cases, pro-Russia. A far-right politician, Geert Wilders, won the Netherlands’ national election in December, not long after a politician once photographed wearing a Nazi armband won Italy’s election. The far right in France posted stronger-than-expected results in the country’s surprise elections this summer. And earlier this month, a far-right party won a state election in Germany for the first time since World War II.

Time to come back to America for a minute, where, on Sunday, Timothy Snyder reflected on Trump’s Hitlerian Month. “It was Hitler's advice,” he reminded his readers in way of introduction, “to tell a lie so big that your followers would never believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. Trump followed that advice in November 2020. His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader… Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign. Its main theme in September was inspired by a lady in Springfield, Ohio, who lost her cat and then found it again. For J.D. Vance, who knew what happened, this became the basis for the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals. For Donald Trump, that became a reason to promise that Haitians in Springfield would be deported. He had found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the ‘them’ in his politics of us-and-them.”

It is fascist to start a political campaign from the choice of an enemy (this is the definition of politics by the most talented Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt). It is fascist to replace reason with emotion, to tell big lies (“create stories,” as Vance says) that appeal to a sense of vulnerability and exploit a feeling of difference. The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done. 

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler's SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government then used as justification for further oppression. Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people.

Now, the Hitlerian things that Trump says would be Hitlerian with or without this Hitlerian context of the last four years, the last year, or the last month. And this context would be Hitlerian with or without Trump's recent Hitlerian utterances. 

It is helpful, however, to see all of this together, as a whole, because it makes it harder to excuse each individual piece of the story. In September, in his most important remarks about international and domestic politics, Trump invoked blatantly antisemitic stereotypes.

In international politics, the key moment concerns Ukraine and its head of state. Since February 2022, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, has been rightly understood and admired as a symbol of physical and political courage.  When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens'kyi would (and should) flee. Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country. He has since visited the front every few weeks. 

…The essential thing, though, is the antisemitic trope Trump chose to express himself. It goes like this. Jews are cowards. Jews never fight wars. Jews stay away from the front. Jews only cause wars that make other people suffer. And then Jews make vast amounts of money from those wars. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish. And thus “the greatest salesman on earth” for Trump.  And the corrupt owner of “yachts” for Vance. A war profiteer, as in the antisemitic stereotype, not a courageous commander, as in reality. 

Indeed, most of what Trump says about Zelens'kyi, Ukraine, and the war itself makes sense only within the antisemitic stereotype. Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself. He never recalls Russian war crimes. He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right. He certainly never admits that Zelens'kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage. The war, for Trump, is just a scam— a Jewish scam. 

And that, of course, is why he thinks he can end it right away: he thinks he can just shoulder the Jew aside and deal with his fascist “friend” Putin, who for him is the “genius” in this situation, and who must be allowed to win. Despite the evidence, Trump says that Russia always wins wars, dismissing both history (regular Russian losses such as the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War) and the actual events of the ongoing Russian invasion, in which Ukraine has taken back half the territory it lost and driven the Russian fleet from the Black Sea. Russia is counting on Trump. They need him in power to win their war, and they know it. 

It need hardly be said that if Trump throws American power on the Russian side, the “deal” that follows will not end the war. It will only mean that Russia is able to kill more Ukrainians faster. Trump will then claim that the deal itself was beautiful and perfect— and try to change the subject from the slaughter he brought about through his antisemitic hubris and admiration of Russian fascism.

In domestic politics, the key moment concerns the elections themselves. In September, Trump told Americans that, were he to lose the elections, “Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss.”  Jews who did not vote for him would be, in his words, “voting for the enemy.” This was so obviously troubling that the American press, in fairness, did draw attention to it.

It is worth considering, though, just how deeply this statement reaches into fascist practice. In five essential ways this is Hitlerian antisemitism.

1.  Jews must be singled out as a group. There are countless other demographically small groups in the country who could be assigned responsibility when Trump loses the election. If the election is close, one would be able to carve out hundreds of sections of the population who made the difference. And yet somehow Trump blames Jews. They cannot be allowed, like everyone else, to go to the voting booth and make decisions on the basis of what they think, as citizens. Instead they must be treated as a group— because as a group they can be threatened.

2.  Jews must pass a loyalty test. Americans have the right to vote how they like. That is the essence of the American system. But not Jews. Those who vote for Democrats are the victim of, in Trump's words, “a hold, or curse.” Jews have to prove their loyalty by voting for the candidate who claims to be the more patriotic one— Trump. This is something that he has said over and over again. If Jews vote otherwise, he said in September, they are voting for the “enemy.” This loyalty test has been a plague for Jews for centuries.

3.  Jews have unusual powers. It seems normal to single out the Jews as a group, and to claim that they must pass a loyalty test, if you believe that their actions are especially significant. Jews will have “a lot to do” with outcome, says Trump. And therefore they can be blamed in an outsized way when he loses, and the government that results can be treated as not truly American.

4.  Jewish votes make a left-center coalition illegitimate. This has been a favorite claim of antisemites in democracies. In the first Polish presidential election after the First World War, parliament chose a centrist president. Among the votes that got him across the line were those of Jewish parties. According to right-wing antisemites, that made the process illegitimate. After loud propaganda to this effect, a fanatic assassinated the elected president. Hitler similarly said that left-center governments in Germany were illegitimate because of the supposedly central role of Jews in creating the “system.”

5.  Jews stab you in the back. Trump describes himself as the victim of the Jews. In his view, 100% of Jews should vote for him, and the fact that they do not is the result of an inexplicable plot: “I really haven’t been treated very well, but it’s the story of my life.” The idea that the Jews are responsible for betraying the natural leader of the Volk was Hitler's. He blamed electoral defeats on the Jews. The notion of a Jewish “stab in the back” arose from the First World War, where the German defeat was blamed on Jews who supposedly did not go to the front and who supposedly betrayed Germany on the home front.

And so we see the internal consistency of Trump's Hitlerian ideas, as expressed this past month. At home, Jews cannot be seen as normal Americans, since they must be presumed disloyal and to have special powers.  An election won with Jewish votes is artificial and its outcome is not to be taken seriously. Violence against Americans would be the natural outcome. Abroad, the courage of Jewish president of Ukraine must be ignored and his person denigrated. A war led by a Jewish leader is artificial and Ukrainian victories are not to be taken seriously. Violence against Ukrainians is thus the natural outcome. 

…In any event, Trump's Hitlerian month has provided more clues about the form the darkness will take.  It was a September to remember. 

In the silence about Trump's fascism, those who care about freedom and the future will hear one more reason to act.