I: Introduction
A week or two before I started work on this article, I shared a post on Twitter that said, “Liberal response to fascism,” under which was a photo of Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini, among others in a room just before signing the Munich Agreement in 1938, to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. On the same post and to the right of that photo was the iconic one of a member of the Red Army holding a Soviet flag on the Reichstag building in Berlin, after they defeated Nazi Germany in 1945; above this photo, it said, “Communist response to fascism.”
You can call the use of the two photos ‘commie’ or ‘tankie’ propaganda if you wish, Dear Reader, but it’s also basic history, far from being a pair of insignificant details. The liberal West was appeasing fascism right up until the Nazi invasions of Poland and France, whereas Stalin had been strenuously trying, with no success, to create alliances with the capitalist West against the fascists. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, some of the bloodiest fighting in military history happened between the two sides (i.e., the Battle of Stalingrad), and in the end, about 27,000,000 Soviets died in the fighting against Naziism, ultimately doing most of the work liberating Europe from fascism (even bourgeois historians acknowledge this fact).
I mention all of this as a reaction to a response to my Twitter post from some shit-lib who imagined they were providing “context” to it. This “context” was another post mocking the one I’d shared, with a photo of Western Allies dropping bombs on Germany, above which it said, “Liberal response to fascism,” and beside this, a photo of Stalin shaking hands with Joachim von Ribbentrop after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact; above this photo, it said, “Communist response to fascism.”
[Incidentally, the needed context behind the treaty between the Soviets and the Nazis is that it wasn’t an alliance or a ‘friendship’ of any sort: Nazis and communists have always hated and opposed each other. The treaty was a non-aggression pact, which means, “If we don’t get in your way, you won’t get in our way.” A full explanation of why the treaty was agreed on can be read here, but I’ll give you a few key points: the Soviet Union needed to buy time in order to complete their industrialization and prepare for war, since they knew all too well that the Nazis could not be trusted, and they’d invade soon enough; also, many Western capitalist states also signed treaties of the sort with Nazi Germany, not just the Munich Agreement–these included Poland, France, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Albania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria.]
I wanted to respond to this blatant liberal propaganda, but the response to my post was set up not to allow me to do that, so I was furious, and this is why I’m writing this article now. It should be always remembered that Twitter is owned by a man who brazenly and shamelessly did a Nazi salute on TV during Trump’s inauguration. Musk didn’t do that out of ‘social awkwardness,’ as some in the liberal media tried to portray it: he’s known for having far-right sympathies, and he was clearly demonstrating to the world that the American government had removed its liberal mask and exposed its fascist face; we were meant to understand that there is nothing we can do about the current resurgence of fascism in the West, and so my article here is about the close relationship between liberalism and fascism, and communism’s diametrical opposition to the two sister ideologies.
II: Of Horseshoes and Fish Hooks
Most people in the West subscribe to the liberal belief in the horseshoe theory, which holds there to be a nearness between the far left and the far right, in spite of the fact that the two ideologies are at diametrically opposite ends of the political spectrum. The liberal centre is regarded as a comfortable middle point between the two extremes, which makes liberalism seem more attractive as an ideology–a convenient appearance for it to have, something those who espouse liberalism must surely, and smugly, be happy about.
Now it is of course true that fascism is an extreme and ugly ideology to support–you won’t get any disagreements from me on that point, I assure you, Dear Reader. As for Marxism-Leninism being regarded as another unwanted “extreme,” well, while it is true that communists have taken a hard line against those who oppose their goals, they have had far better reason to do so than fascists ever did. There were and are pressures put on communists, by such things as capitalist encirclement, that forced them to resort to authoritarianism, and decades of Cold War anticommunist propaganda has wildly exaggerated the violence communists used against their foes, as well as taken much, if not all, of that violence out of its proper historical and political context, as I’ve argued elsewhere, in one form or another.
Furthermore, it is crucial to understand what make fascism and communism polar opposites, so much so that the horseshoe theory–as implied by that second Twitter meme mentioned above–is such a slap in the face, not just to communists, but also to leftists of any stripe. Consider the goals of fascism, as opposed to the goals of communism. Fascists want a militarily strong nation well-protected against what is perceived as the threatening presence of foreigners; this belief naturally leads to racial and ethnic prejudice and bigotry, xenophobia, and violence against anyone deemed the “other.” Communists want the means of production to be controlled by the workers, not by bosses, an abolition of private property; such a change would result in a democratic workplace where workers receive the full fruits of their labour; furthermore, communists want this change to be global, since capitalists of other countries would push for a capitalist counterrevolution in any country that has had a socialist revolution.
Fascists are nationalists; communists are internationalists. Fascists see their own as naturally superior and worthier than the “weak,” “uncivilized,” and “backward” foreigners and other “undesirables” (e.g., LGBT people, etc.), and therefore fascists regard all of these people with utter contempt. Communists see all of humanity, regardless of race, ethnicity, country of origin, colour, sex, sexual orientation or identity, ability or disability, etc., as of equal worth and thus deserving of equal rights and of having all of our basic needs met (food, shelter, healthcare, education, employment).
Yet somehow, because of “authoritarianism,” liberals cannot tell fascists and communists apart.
Finally–and now we come to the more important point to be made, and which should remove all of this confusion–it is fallacious to think of political life, or any aspect of life, really, as being in a state of permanent stasis. The point shouldn’t need to be made, but it does. As Heraclitus once said, “Everything flows.” A central idea in Marxist philosophy is dialectical and historical materialism, which contends that contradictions in the physical world have collided throughout history (e.g., the rich vs the poor), forcing change in the form of sublations (going from ancient slavery to feudalism, then to capitalism). So that liberal “centre” doesn’t just stay in that “reasonable” place forever.
Anyone who has carefully observed political history should know that, in spite of and often because of, worker agitations to push our world in the more egalitarian left direction, the ruling class has relentlessly pushed our world in the rightward direction. Since the ruling class, by definition, has the power, their efforts have always been far more successful than those of the people. Facing such formidable difficulties is why we on the left must take a hard line against any reactionary elements even within our own ranks. These difficulties force us to be authoritarian, when we’d rather just liberate the world. Fascists, on the other hand, are authoritarian because they are bullies.
So the above should explain why the horseshoe theory is at best inadequate, and at worst an outright lie, for showing the relationship between fascism and communism. The only way to do a comparison between the two opposing ideologies is to see them in a dialectical relationship, that is, in the context of the unity of opposites.
Now, one mustn’t confuse the unity of opposites with an identity of opposites, which is an idiotic, ridiculous idea. I years ago wrote an article called Everything Flows, in which I discussed the dialectical unity of opposites, yin and yang, Heraclitus, Hegel‘s philosophy, and all of that sort of thing. After sharing the article on a page on Facebook, some bitch trolled me about it, saying she hated all ‘that yin and yang shit’ (her words, more or less), and absurdly claiming such an idea would require us to see good in something like leukemia: talk about the most moronic of reductio ad absurdum arguments, which only demonstrated a total ignorance of how dialectical thinking works.
One is not trying to say that black is white, or good is bad. One is saying that we cannot have a sense of black without one of white, or one of good without one of bad. The unity lies in a continuum of varying shades of lighter and darker grey, and of all the intermediate points between good and bad. One extreme reacts against the other.
As I discussed in my article, The Ouroboros of Dialectical Materialism, fascism’s rise in the 1920s was a reaction against the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the attempted communist revolutions in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Romania in the 1910s and early 1920s. When fascism was defeated (or more accurately, suffered a setback) at the end of WWII, socialist states proliferated in East Europe to replace the fascist ones. That is the dialectical unity of the opposites of fascism and communism in action in history. The unity is a movement between opposites: everything flows.
Anyways, a far better representation of the relationship between fascism, liberalism, and communism is the fish hook theory. If you click on the link and look at the picture, you’ll see one of a fish hook lying on its side. On the left is the end that’s to be attached to the fishing line, and the hook begins to curve up from the centre, with the far right hooked around at the top, and the barbed end pointing back at the centre. Obviously, the left is communism and socialism in general, or anti-capitalism; the centre is liberalism, and the far-right hook is fascism.
Here we see the true relationship between liberalism and fascism: the former leads towards the latter, and the latter falls back on the former when necessary. The left, on the other hand, is left out.
III: Examples of the Truth of the Fish Hook Theory
To start off, we need to recall a quote from Stalin that I’ve used a number of times, but will now quote in its entirety, so that its meaning is clearer: “Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.” –J. V. STALIN, from , “Concerning the International Situation,” 1924.
In this quote, when Stalin says “Social-Democracy,” we can read the word liberal, for social democracy is as far left as liberalism is willing to go to appease the working class: we see manifestations of this tendency in Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the rest of the Squad. Any liberal who is less left than that, or more centrist, is simply closer ideologically to fascism, in spite of how “anti-Trump” he or she sounds.
More importantly, though, we can read in Stalin’s quote an explanation of how the fish hook theory works. Both liberalism and fascism support each other: the former is (objectively) the moderate version; the latter is the extreme version. The former wears a mask of benevolence; the latter, lacking the mask, shows its ugly face.
Both ideologies serve capital, just in different ways. Only socialism and communism are a challenge, and a threat, to capitalism, and that’s why liberalism and fascism oppose the left. Liberalism is willing to make a few concessions here and there to the working class, to keep them at bay; but if the working class still insists on socialist revolution, then the gloves are off as far as the liberals are concerned. The fascists are then let off their leashes.
An example of social democratic opposition to communism, in favour of the capitalist status quo, was when the Majority Social Democratic Party (MSPD) of the Weimar Republic used military force (i.e., the Freikorps) to crush the Spartacist uprising in January, 1919. The SPD had wanted Germany to stay in WWI, which the German far left had opposed, leading to a split between them and the SPD centre left; furthermore, the far left–led by people like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht–wanted Bolshevik-style revolution as against SPD reformism.
The crushing of the Spartacist uprising, which included the extrajudicial killings of Luxemburg and Liebknecht by members of the volunteer Guards Cavalry Rifle Division, done with the tacit approval of the MSPD, further established the split in the German left, leaving them all too weak to stop the rise of the Nazi Party a decade later. So the centrist Weimar MSPD was “left” in theory and pro-capitalist reactionary in practice. In all of this, we can see a prime example of how social democratic liberalism enables fascism, in spite of its paying lip service to opposing racism. Now the Stalin quote’s meaning should be clear.
In the US, Teddy Roosevelt, the “Progressive,” could be seen as an example of the country moving in a social democratic direction, to redistribute the wealth in a non-revolutionary way. Elsewhere, though, was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which paved the way for US imperialism in Latin America, interfering in their political affairs if those southern countries do anything the US government disapproves of. This means that whenever a Latin American country elects a left-wing government, as Guatemala or Chile did, the US and their CIA intervene, bring about a coup d’état, and replace it with a far-right government to ensure US-friendly policies. Once again, social democracy leads to fascism–Stalin’s quote rings true.
After WWII, when liberal agendas in many parts of the Western world echoing the New Deal of FDR (who also put Japanese-Americans in internment camps during WWII, recall) were in effect, with such social democratic reforms as welfare capitalism, strong unions, and the like, other, sinister things were going on in the shadows. As I said above, fascism wasn’t really defeated at the end of WWII: it merely suffered a major setback. While some ex-Nazis were tried and punished for war crimes, many others were given government jobs in the US (Operation Paperclip), including work in NASA and NATO, and in the West German government.
The capitalist West knew that, during the Cold War, there was no one better at fighting communists than fascists. Such an alliance between the socially-democratic-oriented West with fascism also included Gladio in Europe, and Operation Aerodynamic with Ukrainian fascists, a precursor to the war going on there now with Russia.
Indeed, ex-Nazis in West Germany made East Germans nervous enough to build the Berlin Wall, or Anti-fascist Protection Rampart, as the GDR called it. Contrary to popular belief (which was spawned by Cold War anticommunist propaganda), the purpose of the Berlin Wall was not to cage people up cruelly inside a “totalitarian” state (though there was a legitimate concern about “brain drain,” that is, the GDR feared losing their much-needed scientists, doctors, engineers, professors, and other highly-skilled people to the temptation of high wages in West Germany and West Berlin); most East German workers were content to live in a country with lots of workers’ benefits, and in fact, there has been much nostalgia and regret among workers in the former GDR over the loss of those benefits, as has also been true in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Bloc. The Wall’s existence was mainly about keeping the West German fascists, the ex-Nazis, out–hence the East German name for the Wall. West Germany’s 1955 inclusion in NATO–clearly an enemy and a threat to global communism–heightened the tensions and need for protection.
Going back to the US, while LBJ in the 1960s was concerned with the War on Poverty and the Great Society, again a kind of social-democrat agenda, his administration also used the Gulf of Tonkin incident (a lie, incidentally) to justify more American involvement in the Vietnam War, which involved maiming and napalming poor Vietnamese who had, a number of years back, just shaken off the yoke of French colonialism and were now trying to achieve self-determination. Elsewhere in the mid-1960s, the CIA helped Suharto to overthrow Sukarno, and the former’s new regime then also killed between half a million to a million Indonesians who were either leftists or suspected of it. Suharto would rule Indonesia with an iron fist for many years, like a true fascist. In these incidents we can see yet again a marriage of liberalism with far-right-wing violence.
Next, we have another liberal, President Jimmy Carter, under whose administration Zbigniew Brzezinski helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight Soviet influence there, leading to the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s, as so propagandistically portrayed in the movie, Charlie Wilson’s War. A genuine attempt was being made, with the aid of the Soviet Union, to modernize the country, establishing socialism and helping to improve women’s rights in Afghanistan, for example; yet the US, fearing the influence of “commies,” preferred having the country ruled by reactionary religious fanatics, leading ultimately to the Taliban and a setting-back of women’s rights far into the past (not to mention setting the stage for bin Laden et al).
[Note that as I go through all of this history, I’m being selective with my examples, since there are so many more out there that also prove my point, yet limited space won’t allow me to include them all. This is, after all, just a blog post, not a book. Still, my selectiveness is caused by such constraints; it’s not about excluding any supposed anti-fascist liberal tendencies.]
IV: The Liberal Conditions That Gave Rise to Trump’s Fascism
Liberals, in their collective delusion that they all share ‘progressive’ values, like to imagine that Trump’s election was something that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, that there had been no political precedent to his supposed deforming of the system. As I have argued in other posts, though, such an idea is as far away from the truth as anything could possibly be. Trump is no aberration…he’s the culmination of a system that has always been the problem.
Trump personifies the truth of the fish hook theory: that liberalism enables and inevitably leads to fascism; by using Trump as controlled opposition, the fascism of the system also relies on liberalism to steer the people away from supporting a truly revolutionary politics by getting them to rely on leaders who promise change, but who ultimately lead the people back to voting for one of the mainstream parties. Sanders and AOC are two examples of such sheepdogs of the left; that civil meeting between Trump and Mamdani in the Oval Office before reporters should also raise a lot of red flags…and I don’t mean the Soviet or the Chinese kind.
To see how we got to Trump via liberalism, I’ll make a summary of the major events from the dissolution of the USSR to the present. We already know of all of the Cold War anticommunist propaganda used to discredit Marxism-Leninism, all while using social-democratic welfare capitalism to make life reasonably comfortable for the Western working class. That was the two-pronged first step in liberalism’s gradual slide towards today’s fascism…though few saw it coming.
The next steps were taken during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, after the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union had been achieved. Many Russians, immediately disillusioned with the return to capitalism and its empty promises of a “free market” horn of plenty, wanted a return to the Soviet system, and were ready to vote for communist Gennady Zyuganov in 1996, since Yeltsin was so unpopular (and for very good reason). Clinton, however, intervened, and his help ensured the reelection of Yeltsin. Indeed, this blatant foreign interference in Russia’s democratic process was frankly acknowledged in Time magazine…and liberals hypocritically complain about Putin’s supposed interference (which never happened) in the 2016 US election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
So getting rid of communism, and keeping it away were necessary first steps in liberalism’s gradual slide towards fascism. Wiping out free-market resistor Slobodan Milosevic, fracturing the former Yugoslavia in the process in the US/NATO “humanitarian war” of 1999, was another early step. Bill Clinton also killed welfare, and enacted NAFTA (which has continued harming the local Mexican economy to this day) and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Clinton may have started off with talk of how he’d raise taxes and deal with the problem of the American healthcare system, and he even spoke of allowing gays into the military, but such promises to a great extent didn’t materialize as hoped. Instead, apart from the issues I mentioned above, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 resulted in mergers and acquisitions in the media, leading in turn to about 90% of American media being controlled by six huge corporations. This means that the information most Americans have access to is decided on based on the agenda of the rich, not on what’s relevant to the needs of the people.
So when the American empire has an enemy (translation: there’s a country out there not willing to bow to the agenda of the empire), the media is used to smear said country with fables of oppressing its people in order to manufacture consent for war. The control of media narratives is used for this manufacture of consent. This is what happened in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine, and now Iran, causing much more mayhem in the areas than the purported intent to end such mayhem. They want to do the same to China via Taiwan.
Of course, it would be unfair to blame the entire problem on the Democratic Party, since George W. Bush’s administration did some awful things, too (the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, etc.). But when Obama became president, all of his promises to “spread the wealth around,” and undoing what Bush did (“Change we can believe in”) ended up just being more empty talk. The capitalist class did very well under the Obama administration in spite of right-wing nonsense that he was a “communist” promoting “socialism.” He signed legislation to extend the Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions, the kind of things Edward Snowden blew the whistle on. Obama was also the “Deporter-in-Chief,” using ICE to deport huge numbers of immigrants, showing that as bad as Trump is now, he’s not alone in perpetrating the evils. Obama was a liberal leading us to Trump’s fascism.
As for the Biden administration, we must not forget that it was with him that the Gaza genocide began and was allowed to continue. In spite of the hot air that AOC blathered about the administration working “tirelessly” to bring about a ceasefire (a word that means absolutely nothing to the Israeli government and military), not a finger was lifted by the US government to stop the Zionist killing rampage, which has included the killing of south Lebanese. Instead, American weapons kept being sent to Israel, as has been the case with the current Trump administration, which is proposing another 2.8 billion-dollar arms sale.
Biden never made his Zionism a secret. He also explicitly gave the reason for American support for Israel in a speech in 1986, saying that the Jewish state’s existence was “to protect [American] interests in the region.” Yes, Israel works for the Western empire, not the other way around, and the antisemites would have us all believe.
All mainstream liberal politicians support Israel every bit as much as conservatives do. This includes such liberals as Sanders and AOC, who pay lip service to the need to stop sending weapons to Israel, and who criticize Netanyahu and the IDF. Our former Canadian prime minister, the Liberal Justin Trudeau, proudly declared his Zionism in a speech while the Gaza genocide has been going on; he had only criticisms of ‘antisemitism,’ which is usually just anti-Zionism, the perfectly legitimate stance, as Israel has always been a fascist, racist, apartheid ethnostate.
The communist position, in contrast to that of liberals, conservatives, and fascists, is anti-Zionist. There was only one exception to their position, when regrettably in a momentary lapse of reason and a case of realpolitik, the USSR supported the creation of Israel out of a hope that the new Jewish state would be a socialist one, giving international communism some leverage over the Middle East, geo-strategically an extremely important area (hence the Western capitalists’ support of Israel); but when Israel showed itself clearly to be a bourgeois ally of the US, the Soviets quickly came to their senses, resumed their principled anti-Zionism, and maintained solidarity with the Arabs.
So in their unflinching support for Israel, liberals have once again showed how easily their ideology slides into fascism. Biden’s pro-Israel policy during the Gaza genocide easily and seamlessly became Trump’s policy.
V: Conclusion
Liberalism’s professed support of progressive values and causes is only a superficial one. They’ll have ‘girl-bosses,’ black bosses, gay bosses, etc., but no replacing of bosses with workers’ collective ownership of businesses, as communists would have. Liberals will have the rich taxed, but never expropriated, as the communists will have it. Some charity will be given to the poor by liberals, but an ending of the class conditions that cause poverty will never be considered by liberals, as it would be by communists.
Liberal “humanitarian war” helped normalize imperialist war and regime change in recent decades. Liberals’ extension of Patriot Act surveillance and ICE deportations have smoothly moved over to Trump’s more blatant forms of these. Liberal Zionism has enabled the current bloody, fanatical version. Social-Democratic crushing of communism enabled the rise of fascism, past and present. Liberals may back progressive legislation for whites in one’s home country, then back the fascistic overthrow of leftist governments abroad.
The ruling class uses liberalism and fascism as a “good cop, bad cop” routine, respectively to keep the populace at bay during good times, and to beat the working class back during bad times. Liberalism maintains the illusion of democratic freedom of choice; fascism is a removal of the illusion when the masses refuse to be fooled by the liberal mask.
The only way the international proletariat will ever be liberated from oppression is when they throw away the liberal illusion for good; educate, agitate, and organize, and keep fighting tirelessly to end the bourgeois charade forever.
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