Today I came across this article in the National Post that, while the conclusions are not exactly the same as mine they are still very similar and for the same reasons:
The far-left side of fascism
It
is fashionable among the radical left to demonize the growing number of
elected conservative governments in the Western world as the rise of
the extreme or alt-right. This is most pronounced in the anti- fascist (
antifa) movement, particularly on university campuses. However, the
anti- fascist movement has a sophomoric misunderstanding of fascism and
its location on the political spectrum. More disturbing, this lack of
understanding extends to its own social media and even physical tactics
that mimic the mob psychology, street rage and bullying that are
hallmarks of the fascism they denounce.
Fascism
is best thought of as a nationalistic version of socialism, embodied in
Hitler’s National Socialist party, which was shortened to the Nazis.
Fascist governments like those of Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini (
and, to some degree, Spain’s Francisco Franco) in mid- 20th century
Europe believed in totalitarian control of the economy and oppressive
state curtailment of individual liberty. Those are the antithesis of
conservative principles. Fascism subsumes all ideology to the goals of
the state and the need for state surveillance. The extreme version of
conservatism isn’t fascism, as the left wants us to think. It’s
libertarianism.
Instead of left and right
or liberal versus conservative, a better schema is to locate movements
on a spectrum that runs from tyranny to liberty. Fascism embodies many
elements of the socialist’s state control of society. For libertarian
icon Friedrich Hayek, Hitler’s National Socialism “was indeed socialist
in concept and execution,” while H. Pierre Secher, biographer of one of
Austria’s leading socialists, Bruno Kreisky, wrote of the striking
similarities between the leftists and the fascists in that country:
“Ideologically, the distinction between
the ‘ Sozis’ (Socialists) and Commies on the one hand and Nazis on the
other, was probably only the internationalism of the Marxists and the
nationalism of the Nazis. In every other respect they agreed on the
evils of capitalism.” The connection of Jews with capitalism helped fuel
the anti-semitism of the Nazis.
Mussolini’s
claim that in a fascist regime there was to be “everything within the
state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” is of
course the totalitarian opposite of the libertarian ideal. Mussolini was
long involved with the socialist movement in Italy, breaking with it
because of personal ambition and because his socialist brethren would
not support Italy’s entry into the First World War. Once in power, he
inaugurated a major extension of welfare spending and public works
projects. Mussolini’s insistence that his fascist deputies take seats on
the far right of the Italian Constituent Assembly may have led some
observers to wrongly conclude that fascism was right wing.
Students
have been drawn to the appeal of totalitarian certitude long before
political correctness and the antifa movements arrived on campus. When
the conservative sociologist Peter Berger, whose family fled Austria
from the Nazis, found himself in the midst of a violent, left- wing
antiwar demonstration in the 1960s, he said it reminded him “of the
storm troopers that marched through my childhood” with student
protesters adopting from fascists “their anti- intellectualism, their
anger, their street theatre, their glorification of youth, or their
mysticism.” There was also their “mob psychology” and “the militant
antireason impervious to argument.” These characteristics are all amply
evident in today’s campus protests against a fascism they hotly denounce
but whose tactics they generously employ.
Off
campus, the triumph of religious appeal over reasoned argument today is
found in the radical environmental movement, whose early roots were in
German fascism. The historian Anna Bramwell, while making the common
mistake of conflating conservatism and fascism, nevertheless wrote that
“Greenness was seen as an incipiently sinister conservative or even
Fascist idea in German thought” going back to Hitler’s support of
renewable energy to help reduce Germany’s dependence on oil, in short
supply through much of the war. The anti- fossil- fuel movement uses the
fascist’s appeal to emotion over reason, demonizing all who dare
question it as “climate change deniers.”
Today
the rise of extremism is more pronounced and frightening on the left
than the right. The demonization of the right as fascism, that therefore
forfeits its place to be heard in the public square, employs the
strategy developed by the Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse. One of the
progenitors of the socalled New Left in the 1950s, Marcuse maintained
that certain views on the right had to be silenced because this freedom
of expression was “serving the cause of oppression.” In this line of
thought, censorship serves the cause of freedom because intolerance
against the right, while indulging extremism from the left, somehow
levels the playing field for democratic debate. That absurd notion is at
last managing to take hold in many academic and media circles today.
