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As in the 1930s, a bankrupt liberalism, grotesque social inequality and declining living standards are empowering fascist movements in Europe and the U.S.
Chris Hedges
36 min ago
The Bankruptcy of the Liberal Ass — by Mr. Fish
Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in their lot with discredited and reviled establishment politicians who slavishly do the bidding of the war industry, oligarchs and corporations.
The bankruptcy of the liberal class means that those who decry the folly of permanent war and NATO expansion, mercenary trade deals, exploitation of workers by globalization, austerity and neoliberalism come increasingly from the far-right. This right-wing rage,
dressed up in the United States as Christian fascism, has already made
huge gains in
Hungary,
Poland,
Sweden,
Italy,
Bulgaria and
France and may
take power in the Czech Republic, where inflation and
rising energy costs have seen the number of Czechs
falling below the poverty line double.
By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.
Extremism is the political cost of pronounced social inequality and political stagnation. Demagogues, who promise moral and economic renewal, vengeance against phantom enemies and a return to lost glory, rise out of the morass. Hatred and violence, already at the boiling point, are legitimized. A reviled ruling class, and the supposed civility and democratic norms it espouses, are ridiculed.
It is not, as the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill has
points out, as if fascism ever went away. “The U.S. did not defeat fascism in WWII,”
he writes, “it discretely internationalized it.” After World War II the U.S., U.K. and other Western governments
collaborated with hundreds of former Nazis and Japanese war criminals, who they
integrated into western intelligence services, as well as fascist regimes such as those in Spain and Portugal. They
supported right-wing anti-communist forces in Greece during its civil war in 1946 to 1949, and then
backed a right-wing
military coup in 1967. NATO also had a secret policy of
operating fascist terrorist groups. Operation Gladio, as the BBC detailed in a now-forgotten investigative series,
created “secret armies,” networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union made a military move into Europe. In actuality, the “secret armies” carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres and false flag terror attacks against leftists, trade unionists and others throughout Europe.
See my interview with Stephen Kinzer about the post-war activities of the CIA, including its recruitment of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and its creation of black sites where former Nazis were hired to interrogate, torture and murder suspected leftists, labor leaders and communists,
detailed in his book
Poisoner in Chief: Sideny Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control,
here.
Fascism, which has always been with us, is again ascendant. The far-right politician
Giorgia Meloni is expected to become Italy’s first female prime minister after elections on Sunday. In a coalition with two other far-right parties, Meloni is
forecast to win more than 60 percent of the seats in Parliament, though the left-leaning 5-Star Movement may put a dent in those expectations.