Patrick Comerford
The choice of the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is particularly apt. It comes after a month of constant bombing by the Trump regime of fishing boats in Caribbean waters simply because they fly the flags of Venezuela and Colombia, without supporting evidence for the excuses given and in violation of international law.
I do not agree where María Corina Machado stands on many political issues, nor am comfortable with many of her social values and views. But deomcracy is not democracy if it is not also for those democrats I do not agree with. If you want regime change, then María Corina Machado shows how to do it peacefully, unlike the Trump regime.
Trump is huffing and puffing. He thinks he has brought peace to the Middle East, and, honestly, I truly hope that in some way he has. But if peace arrives, it has been long overdue.
I am reminded of the epigram by the Roman historian Tacitus in his biography of his father-in-law, Agricola: ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. It is part of a speech by the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus, in which he condemns the Roman invaders, saying they ‘ravage, slaughter, and usurp under false titles; and that ‘where they make a desert, they call it peace’ – ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant – and it remains a critique of imperialism and the nature of violent conquest.
We may have peace, of sorts, in Middle East, but the hostages have yet to return to their families, much of Gaza is still going to remain occupied, the people of Gaza have been given no hope for either democracy or housing, and Gaza has been turned into a desert that is going to remain without peace for decades, if not generations.
Perhaps the real reasons any agreement has been reached in recent days is because Nethanyahu overstepped the mark when his planes bombed Qatar and tried to take out the Hamas negotiators. Without Qatar has a broker, and without anyone in Hamas left to talk to, the Middle East faced the prospect of a catastrophe close to Armageddon-like proportions.
I am sure too that the coalition parties that have supported Nethanyahu fear the generational consequences of the criticism they face from the families of the hostages, and were warned that continued in havoc and devastation in Gaza have become a contributing factor – not matter how illogical and offensive that is – in the rise of antisemitism.
Trump’s demands for the Nobel Prize are petulant and, as if he couldn’t get any lower – debasing. This is the man who claims the wars he has ended include a war between ‘Aber-baijan’ and Albania, although there is no such place as ‘Aber-baijan’, and he may have been referring to Azerbaijan and Armenia. Nor have Serbia and Kosovo or Egypt and Ethiopia recently gone to war, the border exhanges between Cambodia and Thailand never amounted to war and Malaysia was the mediator, the agreement between Rwanda and DRC signed in the White House, and both Pakistan and India, like Serbia and Kosovo, deny Trump every played a role in their negotiationss.
Trump’s promise was to end Russia’s war against Ukraine a key pledge in his re-election failed. The war continues relentlessly, nor has he ever renounced his desires to annex Greenland or even Canada. Meanwhile, war is being glorified and the Defence Department has been relabelled the War Department
Trump's obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize has taken internation attention away from the reality that rvery hour in every day brings yet another event in the White House or on the streets of towns and cities in the US that everone of us ought to find shocking. Here are 14 example of what has happened In the past week or two:
1, we have heard Trump in the White House admit he is taking away freedom of speech in defiance of court rulings;
2, government has been shut down and the Democrats are being blamed, even though the Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House;
3, Trump has called for the arrest of the Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois, local politicians are being arrested by ICE on the streets, at press conferences and in hospitals, without warrants and without IDs;
4, a Presbyterian pastor, the Revd David Black, was shot in the head in Chicago by ICE agents who then laughed to one another;
5, congressional electoral boundaries are being redrawn to fix the elections next year;
6, funding is being withdrawn capriciously from universities and academics are being denied permission to leave the US, in a parallel of the old Soviet way of denying exit visas;
7, racial profiling is now being used in making decksions about who to detain;
8, armed and masked men refuse to identify themselves as they lift people off the streets, family homes are being raided and families being broken up, and children don’t know where their parents are;
9, allies are traduced and betrayed, enemies are rewarded, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been humiliated while Putin has been feted;
10, people who are legally resident in the US are being deported to countries they never heard of and never lived in, or missing and unaccounted for, with no-one in charge being answerable or caring about these lost human lives;
11, troops have been deployed on the streets of Chicago, Washington DC, Portland and Memphis against the people they are supposed to defend and in defiance of locally elected state authorities;
12, pressure is put on television channels to sack comedians, journalists are being expelled from the White House press pool, and those who have tried to make Trump accountable legally in the past, including the former FBI director James Comey and the Attorney General of New York Letitia James, are being pursued through the courts with weaponised fraud charges;
13, the spectre of a non-existent organisation, Antifa, has been created and labelled ‘terrorist’ when there is no such organisation and the word simply means ‘anti-fascist’;
14, Pete Hesgeth has been shown to draw inspiration from and to plagiarise the speeches of Goebbels …
It is only a few years since any one of these events on any one day would have made headline news in newspapers and on major television news shows across the world. Had so many things happened in such a short span of time a few years ago in a small country in Central America or Latin America, there would have been sanctions or even a US-led invasion.
Have we become inured to what is happening in the US? We are no longer shocked or surprised. It is no longer headline news. And what comes out of MAGA mouths was parroted and mimicked by speaker after speaker at both the Reform and the Conservative party conferences in recent weeks.
Robert Jenrick fuelled a fire of toxic nationalism after he doubled down durinhg the Conservative Party conference this week on his commments about not seeing another white face in Handsworth. He spent, on his own admission, all of 90 minutes in Handsworth, but thinks he’s so knowledgeable about the place to tell Tories in Aldrige-Brownhills that it is ‘absolutely appalling. It’s as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country.’ He claims it’s not the kind of Britain – or Britian if you’re eating Badenoch-branded chocolate – he wants to live in. To make what he said even worse, he said unashamedly, he ‘didn’t see another white face there.’
There are some points I tried to make on Facebook earlier this week in response:
1, 90 minutes do not make someone an expert analyst on any topic, particularly if most of those 90 minutes are spent looking down at litter on the street or looking into a camera, rather than looking people in the face, or, even better talking to them.
2, Jenrick seems to want to talk to white people only. He did not talk to or listen to anyone who was not white. What sort of human being denies the dignity and shared humanity of another person because of their ethnicity or culture? There is only one word to answer that.
3, Jenrick thinks Handsworth is ‘as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country.’ Obviously, he does not know what a true slum is like, he has never visited a real slum. But then, if he had, he could not be so slick about the words he spouts out in his rush to judgment. Indeed, if he had ever visited some of the slums I know, and had a conscience, he would abandon his political and social opinions.
4, And Jenrick came with prejudice in the sense of pre-judging what to expect: if he bothered, he might have seen the Handsworth I know, which is diverse, creative, culturally vibrant and has much that is beautiful. Rushing to judgment without looking around you, without listening to people, without talking to them, and without respecting their lifestyle and integrity is contributing to shaping a Britain than none of us should want to emerge in the future.
Jenrick has described himself as an ‘Anglofuturist’. But Hope Not Hate, the anti-racist think-tank, has shown how Anglofuturist accounts on social media are full of AI-generated images moon bases emblazoned with the Union Jack, giant spaceships hovering over Westminster, and Maglev trains zooming through green and pleasant countryside.
Beneath the surface, however, some of the most prominent advocates in the Anglofuturist movement are deeply racist. The Hope Not Hare analysis of Anglofuturism raises awkward questions for Jenrick – who hopes soon to lead the Conservative Party – and the movement as a whole.
MAGA ideas have infected British politics. We can expected them to inspire Reform and their far-right partners painting flags on roundabouts, protesting outside hotels that house huddled and frightened asylum seekers, and waving their flags through the streets of London. But it is sad indeed how they have also become acceptable within one of the mainstream political parties. One Nation Tories are now very thin on the ground indeed, and figures such as Michael Heseltine (Lord Heseltine), Dominic Grieve and Andy Street seem to have become lone voices in their own party.
The Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, said this week, ‘No one should be surprised that Donald Trump is employing fascist tactics – prosecuting his opponents, weaponising the federal government and attacking the very fabric of our democracy.’
Writing in the Guardian today, the former Prime Minister Gordon Browne says the rise of Reform UK has parallels with the rise of the hard right in 'in every one of Europe's major countries and from India and Thailand to the US and Argentina, and the examples he cites from across Europe include Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
But if democrats -- left, right and centre -- are going to unite to defeat the rise of this new fascism, it is important to ask: what is Fascism, and what is Anti-Fascism?
In a paper ‘Fascism Anyone?’ in the Spring 2003 edition of Free Inquiry, Lawrence Britt outlines 14 characteristics of fascism.
Britt studied the fascist regimes in many places in the 20th century, including Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Suharto in Indonesia, the colonels in Greece and Pinochet in Chile. He found they had 14 elements in common, which he calls the identifying characteristics of fascism.
A similar list is based on his political novel June, 2004 about an authoritarian government in the US under a Republican administration. The book was published in 1998, while the list is found in an article published in 2003.
Britt’s 14 characteristics of fascism are:
1, Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
2, Disdain for the importance of human rights
3, Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
4, The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
5, Rampant sexism
6, A controlled mass media
7, Obsession with national security
8, Religion and ruling elite tied together
9, Power of corporations protected
10, Power of labour suppressed or eliminated
11, Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
12, Obsession with crime and punishment
13, Rampant cronyism and corruption
14, Fraudulent elections
The Italian philosopher and author, Umberto Eco (1932-2016), is best known in the English-speaking world for his popular novel The Name of the Rose (1980). He also wrote extensively on fascism. In his essay ‘Ur-Fascism’ or ‘Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt’ (Il fascismo Eterno, or Ur-Fascismo), first published in 1995, Eco provided an analysis of fascism and a definition of fascism, discussed the fundamental characteristics and traits of fascism, and out forward some principles by which we can recognise fascism today.
He too identified 14 characteristics of fascism:
1, The cult of tradition: ‘One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.’
2, The rejection of modernism: ‘The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.’
3, The cult of action for action’s sake: ‘Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.’
4, Disagreement is treason: ‘The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.’
5, Fear of difference.: ‘The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.’
6, Appeal to a frustrated middle class: ‘One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.’
7, The obsession with a plot: ‘The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.’
8, The enemy is both strong and weak: ‘By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.’
9, Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy: ‘For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.’
10, Contempt for the weak: ‘Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.’
11, Everybody is educated to become a hero: ‘In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.’
12, Machismo and weaponry: ‘Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of non-standard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.’
13, Selective populism: ‘There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.’
14, Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak: ‘All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.’
I can identify most of the 14 traits on both lists in the behaviour of the Trump regime and some right-wing politcians in the UK.
How many can you identify in speeches at the Reform and Conservative party conferences?
Meanwhile, as Charlie Kirk is being transformed into the Horst Wessel of the MAGA movement, I can imagine that somewhere in an attic in America or in an hotel room in England, a young girl is hiding, writing a diary.
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