By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

 

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 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: Sidney 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.

Meloni got her start in politics as a 15-year-old activist for the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, founded after the World War II by supporters of Benito Mussolini. She calls EU bureaucrats agents of “nihilistic global elites driven by international finance.” She peddles the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that non-white immigrants are being permitted to enter Western nations as part of a plot to undermine or “replace” the political power and culture of white people. She has called on the Italian navy to turn back boats with immigrants, which the far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini did in 2018. Her Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy, party is a close ally of Hungary’s President, Viktor Orban. A European Parliament resolution recently declared that Hungary can no longer be defined as a democracy.

Meloni and Orban are not alone. Sweden Democrats, which took over 20 percent of the vote in Sweden’s general election last week to become the country’s second largest political party, was formed in 1988 from a neo-Nazi group called B.S.S., or Keep Sweden Swedish. It has deep fascist roots. Of the party’s 30 founders, 18 had Nazi affiliations, including several who served in the Waffen SS, according to Tony Gustaffson a historian and former Sweden Democrat member. France’s Marine Le Pen took over 41 percent of the vote in April against Emmanuel Macron. In Spain, the hard-right Vox party is the third largest party in Spain’s Parliament. The far-right German AfD or Alternative for Germany party took over 12 percent in federal elections in 2017, making it the third largest party, though it lost a couple percentage points in the 2021 elections. The U.S. has its own version of fascism embodied in a Republican party that coalesces in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump, embraces the magical thinking, misogyny, homophobia and white supremacy of the Christian Right and actively subverts the election process.

Economic collapse was indispensable to the Nazis’ rise to power. In the 1928 elections in Germany, the Nazi party received less than 3 percent of the vote. Then came the global financial crash of 1929. By early 1932, 40 percent of the German insured workforce, six million people, were unemployed. That same year, the Nazis became the largest political party in the German parliament. The Weimar government, tone deaf and hostage to the big industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans and austerity rather than feeding and employing a desperate population. It foolishly imposed severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment insurance. Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and rage rippled through the population. Mass rallies, led by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago, denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals, artists and the ruling class, as internal enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold well. 

The evisceration of democratic procedures and institutions, however, preceded the Nazis’ ascension to power in 1933. The Reichstag, the German Parliament, was as dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress.  The Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932, relied on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to largely rule by decree to bypass the fractious Parliament. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was “a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship,”  historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes.

Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own legislative impasses. As in 1930s Germany, our courts  — especially the Supreme Court — have been seized by extremists. The press has bifurcated into antagonistic tribes where lies and truth are indistinguishable, and opposing sides are demonized. There is little dialogue or compromise, the twin pillars of a democratic system.

The two ruling parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war industry, global corporations and the oligarchy, to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has established the most pervasive and intrusive system of government surveillance in human history. It runs the largest prison system in the world. It has militarized the police. 

Democrats are as culpable as Republicans. The Obama administration interpreted the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force as giving the executive branch the right to erase due process and act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son, who was never linked to terrorism, along with 9 other teenagers at a cafe in Yemen. It was the Obama administration that signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. It was the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street and abandoned Wall Street’s victims. It was the Obama administration that repeatedly used the Espionage Act to criminalize those, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed government lies, crimes and fraud. And it was the Obama administration that massively expanded the use of militarized drones.

The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which they likely staged, by employing Article 48 to push through the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. The fascists instantly snuffed out the pretense of Weimar democracy. They legalized  imprisonment without trial for anyone considered a national security threat. They abolished independent labor unions, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications.

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation’s infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world’s largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions. Fascism in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker observed, not because people believed its conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the fact that they saw through them. Fascism thrived in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” He added, “nobody would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.”

As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation. 

Hett defines the Nazis as “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” The rise of the new fascism has its roots in a similar exploitation by global corporations and oligarchs. More than anything else, people want to regain control over their lives, if only to punish those blamed and scapegoated for their misery. 

We have seen this movie before.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

 

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WHY IS FASCISM RISING? FASCISM NEVER LEFT THE WESTERN WORLD SINCE WW2, GLOBALISATION IS A SNEEKY FORM OF FASCISM — IN WHICH THE ELITE CONTROLS EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE. THIS IS WHY THE WEST (AKA THE USA) HATES INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM, WHILE HYPOCRITICALLY "PROMOTING" THEM. WHEN PEOPLE ARE ALLOWED TO VOTE FOR THEIR TRUE STATUS, THE WEST CALLS THIS A SHAM OR A FARCE... WHILE IRELAND FREED ITSELF FROM THE ENGLISH EMPIRE, WHILE THE US FREED ITSELF FROM THE ENGLISH EMPIRE WITH THE HELP OF THE FRENCH WHO THEN GOT SHAFTED BY THE AMERICANS, WHILE YUGOSLAVIA GOT FRAGMENTED BY US/NATO IN A DUBIOUS WAR, THE WEST WON'T ALLOW A LEGITIMATE SPLIT OF A REGION WHICH HAD BEEN CONCOCTED DURING THE COMMUNIST REGIME OF THE USSR BECAUSE IT IS INCONVENIENT TO THE HEGEMONIC ASPIRATIONS OF THE US EMPIRE. WE DESERVE BETTER CLUES THAN "TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY" WHICH IS DISREGARDING THE PEOPLE WISHES....

 

HERE, THE DONBASS REPUBLICS NEED SOME MIGHTY HELP TO FIGHT AGAINST A WESTERN HEGEMONY THROUGH A CORRUPT KIEV GOVERNMENT. THEIR ONLY SOLUTION, BEING RUSSIAN, IS TO REJOIN RUSSIA , LIKE THEY WERE BEFORE 1922.... HISTORY DID NOT START YESTERDAY....

 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed two decrees recognizing the former Ukrainian regions, Kherson and Zaporozhye, as independent sovereign states. The decrees come into force immediately.

“Recognize the state sovereignty and independence” of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions “effective from the day of signing,” say the two decrees dated and signed September 29. In the documents, the head of state refers to the universally recognized principles and norms of international law, the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, enshrined in the UN Charter.

The move comes on the eve of the official ceremony where the Russian president is expected to sign the treaties on incorporating Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as the two Donbass republics, into Russia.

Referendums on joining Russia were held in Zaporozhye and Kherson, as well as in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People's Republic (LPR), between September 23 and 27.

In the Kherson region, 87.05% voted in favor of declaring independence and joining the Russian Federation. Zaporozhye Region also supported the idea of splitting from Ukraine and joining Russia, with 93,23% of voters backing it. In the DPR, 99.23% of those who voted were in favor, while LPR showed a slightly lower figure of 98.42%.

 

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COMMENT:

 

gunnlaugur egill steindórsson.    Looking at 12 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine, including approximately 1.5 million who live in the Crimean peninsula, when this is taken into account, we can assume most of them live in the region south, but 95 - 98% is unrealistic. We know Russians living in the south and close to Russia have had some fewer privileges over the years; we can see from the Russian's meaning of nazi Ukraine is a statement;

Truth be told, from 1999 - 2018, we can see systematically ethnic Russians removed from offices such as judges and military leaders; in this case, we can consider Ukraine having a fascist tendency.
Or, basically, any powerful office occupied by a pro/ethnic Russian.

But overall, people forget that our news is a little different for a person like me, born outside the EU but still from a semi-neutral state. As we can see from 2014, the Ukraine government bullied and killed ethnic Russians how ever, noone really cares as Russia phobia is rampant.....

 

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By Vladislav Ugolny

 

Last week, referendums on once-again becoming part of Russia were held in the Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR) People’s Republics, as well as in the liberated territories of Zaporozhye, Kherson, and Nikolaev regions (the latter was annexed to Kherson Region).

According to the results, the ‘For’ option won all four by an overwhelming margin. RT’s correspondent in Donbass, Vladislav Ugolny, has been observing the sentiment there for the past eight years. He describes how the referendums took place, what they meant to local residents, and why their outcome simply could not have been different.

 

All arguments ‘against’

For those who are sufficiently immersed in the history of the struggle of the Russian residents of Ukraine for unity with their historic homeland, the results of the referendums are hardly surprising. But it is also worth pointing out from the start that not everyone in these regions took part in the vote.

In 2020, one soldier told his comrades-in-arms that he was only serving in the DPR army for the sake of a good salary by local standards. He said that, at the time, he was ready to dig trenches and go on guard duty. But in case of a resumption of active military operations, he would be at Yuzhny, a station from which buses are dispatched to Russia.

Active hostilities resumed over six months ago, eventually leading to the second referendum in Donbass. And this warrior did not take part in it.

Why? Did keep his word and escape? No, he died in 2021. He could have said anything – soldiers like to scratch their tongues. But when his comrades-in-arms came under Ukrainian fire and their wounded had to be evacuated, he volunteered. During the rescue operation, he was killed in action. He did not live to see the fighting intensify, nor did he live to see the new referendum.

 

There are many such people who are unhappy with what has been happening in Donbass these past eight years – where they have slowly languished as geopolitical hostages – and are also prepared to die for their land and identity. It is thanks to them and their resilience that Russia’s military offensive was possible. And these referendums also took place because of them. 

They all had a lot of reasons to hate what was happening. The wounded were often dismissed retroactively to avoid paying for their injuries. And in a betrayal of memory, the names of children killed by Ukrainians in Sloviansk and Konstantinovka, towns not controlled by the DPR, disappeared from the Alley of Angels (a monument honoring the children of Donbass killed by Ukrainians). By removing these names, it was as if DPR officials were abandoning the territories and the memory of those who remained under Kiev’s occupation.

In the early years of its independence, the LPR had constant political crises, from which the despised Igor Plotnitsky emerged as the victor. Until he was overthrown and the much more popular Leonid Pasechnik was elected.

 

All arguments ‘for’

The hope for reunification was based on the fact that Russia is a stable state governed by the rule of law, with fully-fledged institutions and an established civil society. Living their lives on the frontline of a geopolitical confrontation, Russians in Donbass dreamed that one day war would disappear.

They hoped that Donbass would become an ordinary, peaceful region of Russia, like neighboring Rostov. They hoped that they would be able to put away their weapons and return to the mines and factories, and they could teach their children without regular shelling. Or that they could sweep the streets for leaves instead of scrubbing away blood from the pavement. Joining Russia offered hope and was synonymous with victory. After all, this is why the struggle started.

Fate decided otherwise and the referendums had to be held during the fighting, with the risk of Kiev shelling the polling stations. Thus, the votes themselves did not become a moment of triumph and victory. But they could no longer be delayed, given that one of the declared aims of Moscow’s military operation was to restore peace to Donbass.

The only way to protect both Donbass and the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye from the threat of genocide by the Ukrainian state was to incorporate them into the Russian Federation. The sweeps in Kharkov Region after towns and villages were seized by Kiev earlier this month, and the convoys of refugees, were apparently the final straw.

The risk of polling stations being shelled was one reason some locals criticized the referendums. A friend of mine who is now serving in one of the DPR’s army units refused to participate in the referendum. He justified it by saying he had expressed his position a long time ago and was now defending it with a gun in his hand.

He also questioned why the entry of the republics into Russia could not have simply been done by a decree of the Russian government. Why, he asks, do they ask a question to which the answer is already obvious?

Needless to say, this warrior is not a big fan of democracy.

However, his view was marginal. Residents of Donbass, despite the risks of terrorist attacks, flocked to the polls. Since the issue was a foregone conclusion, the polling stations became a place for declaring one’s position.

Journalists were told not about the choice people made, but rather about how long they had waited for the opportunity to make it.

The procedures of the referendum were designed with the usual legal provisions in mind, but the voters themselves effectively abolished the concept of ‘secret ballot’ by ticking the ‘yes’ box publicly.

“The people of Donbass needed the referendum not to reassert their choice, which was made back in 2014 and has not changed since, but to present it to the international community in a more or less accepted framework,” a graduate of the political science department at Donetsk National University said after the vote. A leg injury prevented her from going to the polling station, but she was able to vote Yes by door-to-door voting:

As I stood at the mobile ballot box in my backyard in the rain, listening to the sound of explosions in a neighboring district, I felt joy. Because it is, in any case, a step forward after too much stagnation.

Dmitry, a native of the border town of Yenakievo, Donbass, said, “Of course I waited for the referendum and voted Yes. I cannot imagine our future any other way. Back in 2015, I was repeatedly offered the chance to leave my home region and live in Ukraine so that I would not know what war is like.

“As you can see, I refused. Voting in the referendum was not my biggest contribution, but I was glad I did it. I didn’t doubt it for a second, especially when, about 40 minutes later, a HIMARS missile was shot down over the polling station, with shrapnel hitting my neighborhood.”

This is how the referendum was held in Donbass. As for the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, the votes there were less festive there due to greater infiltration by Ukrainian security services and a bigger risk of sabotage. The lack of an eight-year wait was also a factor. However, even there, people were hoping that the Kharkov tragedy would not be repeated in their areas.

The referendums that have taken place are like a marriage proposal made after eight years of engagement. There may be reason to speculate why it was not done earlier, but the answer is obvious.

 

By Vladislav Ugolny, a Russian journalist based in Donetsk

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