The new fascism - two photos say it all

 

THESE two photographs, circulating round the world yesterday, tell us all we need to know about the new fascism threatening humanity.

The first shows US Marines in Afghanistan, posing proudly with a home-made addition to the Stars and Stripes which ‘coincidentally’ happens to be the same as the Nazi SS logo.

The second shows a Greek riot cop kicking in the head a protester who had dared to show his opposition to the slavery and poverty being imposed on his people by the IMF and the banks.

We do not think it is an exaggeration to describe the current neoliberal global regime as a new form of fascism.

On the level of political ideology, there are clearly big differences between the nationalist corporatism of Mussolini and Hitler and the internationalist capitalism we now must confront.

But there are similarities, and indeed a traceable continuation, on a deeper level.

At the end of the Second World War, the US and UK recruited large numbers of former Nazis and Fascists into their Gladio network of anti-communist secret armies.

At the same time the West learned from the Nazis’ work in various fields – from rocket science to  mass manipulation by propaganda, which also proved so easy to transfer to the commercial realm.

As so often happens, the victory of capitalism over fascism turned out in the long term to have been more of a merger.

While, on paper, the neoliberal model presents itself as the ‘democratic’ opposite of fascism, that has always been a lie, as anybody paying a modicum of attention will have noticed.

Now that it finds its hegemony under threat, its fascistic essence is becoming harder to conceal.

It is significant that more obviously identifiable far-right extremists, who in the 20^th century would have been fiercely opposed to ‘cosmopolitan’ capitalism, are now instinctively drawn to defending the neoliberal world order, as we have previously noted.

Like the US Marines attracted to the SS branding, they somehow know that this is the same entity, resurfaced after its apparent death nearly 70 years ago in a new guise but with the same life-hating brutality.

Millions gave their lives to defeat the evil of the original fascist incarnation. 

And now a new generation are going to have to do it all again.

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