Amerika's Fascism

Not Just Trump's

Chicago PIGS smiling as they carry the corpse of Fred Hampton, the great Black revolutionary Marxist-Leninist leader they had just just extra-judicially executed in December of 1969

American liberals and progressives could take some advice from the Palestinian American law student Ahmad Ibsais. In a recent Al Jazeera column, Ibsais rightly takes Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (“the supposed champions of Palestinian rights and progressive humanitarianism in the United States”) to task for pinning Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza on one man – Benjamin Netanyahu. As Ibsais writes:

‘…If you were to ask senators Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, the supposed champions of Palestinian rights and progressive humanitarianism in the United States, everything that has happened to us in the past 75 years, and everything that is happening to us today, can be blamed on one man, and one man alone: Netanyahu. Sanders insistently calls the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza “Netanyahu’s war”, and demands that the US “not give Netanyahu another nickel”. Meanwhile, Warren denounces “Netanyahu’s failed leadership” as she calls for a ceasefire. For these progressive senators, the cause of all the pain and suffering in Palestine is clear: a far-right, hawkish prime minister hell-bent on continuing a conflict that keeps him in power.’

The Blame Everything on Bibi narrative is a disastrously deceptive and asinine exercise in national whitewashing. As Ibsais explains:

‘For me, for my family, for my people, what we are witnessing in Palestine today is not “Netanyahu’s war”. It is not his occupation. He is nothing but another cog in the relentless war machine that is Israel…Sure, Netanyahu is evil. Sure, he committed countless crimes against Palestinians and against humanity, throughout his long career. Sure, he is continuing to fuel the carnage in Gaza today in part for his own political survival. And he should be held accountable for everything he has said and done that caused harm and pain to my people. But the racism, extremism and genocidal intent that is on display in Gaza and across the occupied Palestinian territory today cannot and should not be blamed on Netanyahu alone.

Blaming Israel’s blatant human rights abuses, disregard for international law, and open celebration of war crimes on Netanyahu alone is nothing but a coping mechanism for liberals like Sanders and Warren. By blaming Netanyahu for the suffering and oppression of the Palestinian people, past and present, they keep alive the lie that Israel was built on progressive ideals, rather than ethnic cleansing. By blaming Netanyahu, they whitewash their seemingly unconditional support for a state blatantly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. By blaming Netanyahu, and casting Israel as a progressive, well-meaning state that would respect international humanitarian law but is currently taken over by a bad leader, they are absolving themselves – and the US at large – of complicity in Israel’s many war crimes.

The suggestion that Netanyahu betrayed Israel’s progressive, democratic foundations and caused the “humanitarian catastrophe” we are witnessing in Gaza today, ignores the systemic oppression that is inherent to Israel as a settler colony. Sanders and others may want to believe the Zionist myth that Israel is an essentially progressive country with socialist foundations, built on a “land without people” by a people without land. But they cannot escape the fact that Palestine has never been a “land without a people”. Indeed, the founding of Israel required the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are Indigenous to the land, and the survival of Israel as a “Jewish Nation”, as stated in its Nation State Law, requires the continued oppression, disenfranchisement and abuse of Palestinians.

Today, millions of Palestinians continue to live and die under Israeli occupation, and they – alongside Palestinian citizens of Israel – are subjected to what is widely described as an apartheid system. This untenable and unjust dynamic is hardly the creation of Netanyahu and his government. From the very beginning, the state of Israel tied its long-term survival to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, complete erasure of the Palestinian identity, and the oppression of Palestinians who remained on their lands.  Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that “There is no such thing as Palestinians” in 1969, decades before the beginning of Netanyahu’s reign.

… Settlers began stealing Palestinians’ lands, homes and lives long before Netanyahu became relevant in Israeli politics. Palestinians have been stuck in open-air prisons since long before he was prime minister. The Israeli military did not start abusing, harassing, maiming and killing Palestinians when Netanyahu became their commander. The problem is not Netanyahu or any other Israeli politician or general. The problem is Israel’s occupation. The problem is the settler colony whose very security and long-term viability are reliant on a system of apartheid and the never-ending occupation, oppression and mass killing of an Indigenous population. This is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s genocide.’

Ibsais notes that the most Israelis support the genocide Israel has carried out in Gaza over the last five months and that Israel’s longstanding oppression and torture of the Palestinian people was not at issue when Netanyahu faced mass Israeli protests against his authoritarian power grabs in 2022 and 2023.

Listening to liberals and even some progressives these days, you’d think all of the United States’ problems and most specifically its drift towards a right-wing authoritarian, really fascist politics and state can be explained by the evil of one man who is supposed to represent a great aberrant anomaly for the nation’s noble democratic history – Donald Trump.

A liberal Democrat I know actually posted this on so-called social media a couple weeks ago: “248 years of progress as a great, free, and democratic nation is being flushed down the toilet by one sick orange bastard!”

How idiotic. The sixth chapter of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America is titled “America Was Never Great: On ‘The Soul of This Nation.’” It was a response to  the 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s claim that the first fascist Trump presidency was an “aberrant moment” contrary to “the character of this nation – [to] who we are.”  It provides a soul-chilling and fact-filled introduction to the horrific genocidal, racist, oppressive, exploitative, patriarchal, nativist, repressive, imperialist, eco-cidal, and mass-murderous record of the capitalist-imperialist United States from its colonial origins through the present. It’s a bloody story, to say the least, one the includes: two and a half centuries of ghastly Black chattel slavery; the near total physical and cultural elimination of North America’s original inhabitants; the brutal theft of the southwestern US and California from Mexico in the ridiculous name of “Manifest Destiny;” cold-blooded political executions at home (the Haymarket Martyrs, Frank Little, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and members of the Black radical group MOVE among others) and abroad (Lumumba, Allende, etc.); the direct (as in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq) and indirect (as in Indonesia, East Timor, and much of Latin America) US slaughter of millions upon millions of mostly nonwhite people abroad. 

The Revcoms’ catchy slogan is dead on correct: “one, two, three, four, slavery, genocide, and war; five, six, seven, eight, America was never great.” As the Black civil rights attorney Michael Coard told Refuse Fascism in December of 2020, “Trump is America and America is Trump!”

The deeply racist and torture-based slave system, preservation of which was a major motive behind the nation’s 1776 founding/independence (“revolution”), provided the initial material/economic/profits base for “democratic” America’s emergence as a significant player in the world of nations by the 1850s. See Edward Baptist’s exceptional study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism for the facts and story on how slavery made America “great.”

Another book I highly recommend to those who foolishly think that Trump and Trumpism are outside the American historical experience is Adam Hochschild,  American Midnight:The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (New York: Mariner, 2022). Fascism can’t happen here?  It kinda did between 1917 and 1921, when the First World War and the Russian Bolshevik (socialist) Revolution provided “patriotic” pretext for American federal, state, and local government and right-wing anti-labor, anti-radical, and racist vigilantes to arrest, terrorize, beat, incarcerate, torture, and murder US pacifists, leftists, feminists, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, civil libertarians, and trade unionists from coast to coast. As Hochschild shows in his remarkable volume, the nation teetered on the brink of a proto-fascist dictatorship during and after the war. Armed white mobs torched Black churches and business and levelled whole Black communities, killing hundreds of African Americans.  The federal 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act and state-level versions of these draconian bills were used by prosecutors and judges to throw thousands into prison for voicing real or perceived opposition to the war. The US Army joined state militias, local gendarmes, vigilantes, and private detectives in bloodily repressing labor strikes driven by wartime inflation and labor demand.  Local police red squads and a new federal police state including a new Military Intelligence bureaucracy and the Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the notorious anti-radical Federal Bureau of Investigations [FBI]) and a censorial US Post Office combined with white nationalist outfits like the American Protective League and the American Legion to decimate the once radical US Left,  including the Industrial Workers of the World  and the Socialist Party. The US Departments of Justice Department and Immigration Bureau deported hundreds accused of leftist and antiwar sentiments.

It was neither the first nor the last repressive Red Scare in American history. Mentored by Joe McCarthy’s vicious red-baiting attorney Roy Cohn, Trump is channeling not just Hitler but America during and after WWI and during the nativist 1950s Red Scare by promising to undertake the biggest deportation campaign in US history and to “root out Marxist, socialist, and communis vermin” from the nation.

The seventh and final chapter of This Happened Here explains how neoliberal capitalist, racist, and patriarchal America hatched the first Trump administration. It wasn’t about the sick orange sack of fascist shit having some kind of God -like power to single-handedly unravel “248 years of freedom and democracy.” And it wasn’t about Vladimir Putin’s supposed magical ability to determine US presidential election outcomes from the banks of the Moskva River. It was about the relentless cancelation and delegitimization of meaningful popular sovereignty by the interrelated and ongoing historical structures, ideologies, practices, polices, politics and power of American capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, nationalism, and nativism. It was a bipartisan production to which the dismal demobilizing and dollar-drenched neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats richly contributed in many ways, opening the door to far-right takeover. And it happened thanks in no small part to an archaic slaveowners’ Constitution that tilts American presidential (and lesser) elections to the right of the popular majority.

The production continues, unabated by the possibly (likely?)  temporary removal of the wannabe fascist dictator-for-life Trump from the White House.  The underlying forces that gave birth to a vast mass of Americans in high and low places who are ready, willing, and able to overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral, parliamentary, and rule of law democracy are still very much in place and the smart money right now is on the noxious capitalist-imperialist American System putting the orange fascist monster back in power to fuck the nation and world up like never before.

Ibsais makes an interesting analogy regarding US politics:

‘Of course, Sanders, Warren and all the others pushing this line know well that the “conflict” in Israel-Palestine would not magically disappear and Palestinians would not immediately achieve liberation and justice if Netanyahu were gone. After all, they’ve seen a similar scenario play out in the US only a few years ago. People had said if only Trump was removed from the White House, problems that he fueled and provoked would disappear. The American democracy would be saved and everything would be just fine.

But did that happen? It has been almost four years since the eventful end of Trump’s presidency, but we can still see rampant racism, inequality, gun violence and poverty across the country. These problems have not been magically fixed after Trump’s presidency, because they were not created by Trump. These were never “Trump” problems, but American ones. Furthermore, there is a very real chance that Trump will return to the White House next year because millions of Americans support him and his agenda.’

There’s a lot more to say about America’s “problems” and their cause than Ibsais captures there but it’s a useful parallel that he suggests. It isn’t Netanyahu’s genocide, it’s Israel’s.  And it isn’t Trump’s fascism, it’s America’s fascism.