The Ultra-Low Moral Foundation of the Fascism/Fascist Epithet.
Posted by Ed Folsom, February 22, 2025.
(Photo: Fox News Digital. Anti-Trump Rally, Washington D.C., January 20, 2025.)
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)
Low-down, crude old us vs. them, fancied up with talk of fascism and democracy (and unity).
In August of 1961, some 16 years after the end of World War II and the deaths of German National Socialism’s Adolph Hitler and Italian Fascism’s Benito Mussolini, the German Democratic Republic of East Germany began erecting a wall between itself and West Berlin. The leaders of the GDR called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall—in English, the Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart—as if it was necessary to keep out a tide of fascists from the other side.
The Wikipedia page titled Berlin Wall explains: “The Soviet Bloc propaganda portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from ‘fascist elements conspiring to prevent the will of the people’ from building a communist state in the GDR.” But the Berlin Wall was really built to prevent the people of the GDR from continuing to flee to the West via the only route the government had not already sealed off. By 1961, 3.5 million residents of the GDR—roughly 20% of its population—had already fled to the West. After the wall was built, those who were caught trying to escape were either arrested or shot on the spot. One 1973 order told GDR troops guarding the Anti-fascist Protection Rampart: “Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used.”
There were no free, multiparty elections in the German Democratic Republic until after the Anti-fascist Protective Rampart was torn down in 1989. A March 1990 report from the U.S. Helsinki Commission on the then-recent election in the GDR declared: “This was the first free, multiparty election in the GDR.” It was the first free multiparty election in the German Democratic Republic since the nation was declared into existence in October of 1949.
The GDR was a totalitarian police state. According to historian Sean McMeekin’s book, To Overthrow the World—The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, in 1975 the GDR’s secret police force, the Stasi, had 180,000 unofficial collaborators (government snitches among the citizenry) on its books in a population of 17 million—that’s one for every 94 citizens. McMeekin points out, that was “seven times as many informers per head of population” as Nazi Germany had. In what sense was this totalitarian police state that arrested and shot its citizens for attempting to escape and that never held free multiparty elections, a democratic republic? In what sense was the wall that it built to prevent its citizens from escaping, anti-fascist? Only in the sense that Orwell describes in the quoted passage, above.
In the same way that the Government of the GDR claimed to be anti-fascist and democratic, the people around us who now claim to be anti-fascists fighting fascism, and democratic protectors of democracy, abuse rhetoric to symbolically elevate themselves to a high moral plane, most often while standing on the lowest of moral plains.
Oh, you don’t think so? Let’s dig a little deeper into the roots of this tradition. First, the German Democratic Republic was not unique in its use of the words democracy and democratic to mean something other than what any right-thinking person associates with democracy or democratic process. All the nations of the European East Bloc during Soviet Socialist times–Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, the GDR, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Albania—were called “people’s democracies,” even though they existed under communist rule. Even Cambodia under rule of genocidal Khmer Rouge communists was named Democratic Kampuchea. It has long been a rhetorical thing with communists.
These days, it’s common to hear people call the results of free and fair elections or referendums that they don’t like a “threat to democracy” purely because those results threaten their entrenched political interests (For instance, “Brexit,” any election in which Donald Trump is a candidate, the relatively recent Polish and Slovakian elections, the more recently annulled results of the Romanian election, and elections in France, Germany, and the Netherlands whenever the political right appears to be ascending). This amounts to nothing more than: “Democracy means the people vote for us. It is threatened whenever they vote against us.”
The origins of “fascist” as a political epithet hurled against all who are insufficiently left-pure.
As for the tradition of posing as anti-fascists occupying the moral high ground against fascists, where do you suppose that got its start? The Wikipedia page titled Antifa (Germany) tells us:
“According to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the view of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the [antifa] movement. The antifa movement has existed in different eras and incarnations, dating back to Antifaschistische Aktion, from which the moniker antifa came. It was set up by the then-Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the late history of the Weimar Republic.”
Yes, the origins of the tradition trace back to the Soviet Union. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin and the faction around him took a hard-left tack. As the same Wikipedia page informs us:
“An atmosphere of revolutionary fervour was created and saw any enemy of the ruling group around Stalin denounced as “wreckers” and “traitors”, an attitude that was translated on to the international stage, where both social democrats and communist dissidents were denounced as fascists.”
In other words: “Everyone other than us is a fascist.”
This notion of who was fascist and who was anti-fascist was exported to Germany where, in 1932, the KPD founded Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action, or Antifa) as a communist front. The same Wikipedia piece tells us that Antifaschistische Aktion:
“functioned as an integral part of the KPD during its entire existence from 1932 to 1933. A member of the Comintern, the KPD under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann was loyal to the Soviet government headed by Joseph Stalin to the extent that the party had been directly controlled and funded by the Soviet leadership in Moscow since 1928.”
You might think, based on the present-day rhetoric of the left, that the primary enemy of the KPD and Antifaschistische Aktion in 1932 would have been Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis). Instead, it was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Under Stalin’s then-prevailing doctrine of “social fascism,” fascism was the final stage of capitalism rather than any particular political movement. Anti-fascism was anti-capitalism. The KPD viewed the SPD as the most insidious and dangerous representatives of capitalism in Germany–standing the most firmly in the way of communism’s inevitable triumph–so the SPD was the main enemy.
The KPD declared that the Communist Party was Germany’s “only anti-fascist party.” After occasionally even joining with Hitler’s National Socialists to do battle against the SPD in 1932, Antifaschistische Aktion was dissolved and went underground in 1933 when the National Socialists came to power in Germany.
Antifa rose again in 1960s West Germany, smearing the West German government of the 1960s and 1970s as fascist. The Wikipedia piece explains:
“In his sympathetic history of Antifaschistische Aktion, published by the Association for the Promotion of Antifascist Culture, Bernd Langer notes that ‘antifascism was always a fundamentally anti-capitalist strategy’ and that ‘communists always took antifascism to mean anti-capitalism. Therefore all other parties were fascist in the opinion of the KPD, and especially the SPD.’”
Moving forward, the piece explains:
“The contemporary antifa movement has its roots in the West German Außerparlamentarische Opposition left-wing student movement and largely adopted the aesthetics of the first movement while being ideologically somewhat dissimilar.”
Hmm–they look the same, they have a nearly identical flag design, but they are “ideologically somewhat dissimilar” to Antifaschistische Aktion…But similar enough to still call all political opposition fascist, evidently.
The Antifa (Germany) page tells us:
“According to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the view of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.”
So, that’s where the tactic originates of calling oneself anti-fascist–meaning that you actually oppose everyone who is not as far left as you, while you appear to others to mean that you are only opposed to actual Nazis. It originated with Soviet communism, the communist international and Antifaschistische Aktion. Maybe it’s no mere coincidence that Antifa’s biggest sympathizers in the U.S. include so many people who denounce capitalism and tout the supposed benefits of socialism, including those disaffected, nihilist youth talking about “late stage capitalism” these days.
The rhetorical tactic of declaring oneself anti-fascist and one’s political opposition fascist has been heavily used by the some of the most loathsome characters ever to walk the face of the planet. I guess run-of-the-mill lefties must figure that anything that’s been used to make communists seem morally superior to their opposition is bound to work really well for themselves too. They are flogging the tactic to death like it’s all they’ve got. But the tactic leaves them on a very low moral plain, and it is losing its effectiveness in this country beyond its power to resonate with already mesmerized fellow-travelers.
Fascist: “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”
Far from being the good and pure battling unmitigated evil, as they would have you believe themselves to be, the hurlers of the fascist epithet are among the lowest of the low, merely battling for their own power and control by all means necessary.
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