#177 Paul Mason: "The return of fascism is a symptom of the breakdown of neoliberal ideology"

00:00:00: Fascism is a fear of Freedom triggered by a glimpse of people achieving freedom.

00:00:08: Shouldn't really have freedom the idea that migration is a form of genocide against white people.

00:00:15: The perpetrator of the genocide is liberalism because liberalism allowed the migrants in and feminism depressed the white birth rate

00:00:24: and it drives the people who it radicalizes towards violent ends the idea of a violent world ending insurrection.

00:00:33: And of the left it demands action it demands that we focus and prioritize we need an alliance of liberalism and the left to defend democracy

00:00:41: any leftist who tells you that we can't know just ignore them they are going to lead you to the same disaster that they LED you to in the 1930s

00:00:49: they don't realize that this battle is the battle for Western Civilization.

00:00:54: Music.

00:01:02: Thank you so much guys for tuning in to this week's episode of the distance podcast I'm your host Lucas ondreka.

00:01:08: And I'm honored to be joined by Paul Mason activist and writer his latest book how to stop fascism has just been translated into German.

00:01:16: And Paul was so kind to join me here on the show to talk about resisting and defeating the new far right.

00:01:22: Paul the last decade we've seen the far right on the rise so much is evident but I think what's not that well understood is actually what are the reasons for the return of fascism yep so why do you think fascism is on the rise again.

00:01:33: I think we're living through a period of breakdown and not just the breakdown of an economic model

00:01:42: what we call neoliberalism which blew up in the global financial crisis of 2008 far more importantly for me

00:01:50: is the breakdown of the neoliberal ideology

00:01:53: because the neoliberal ideology was a kind of economic doctrine that explained everything in fact there's a great quote from my friend and colleague Will Davis who works at goldsmiths University and he calls me a liberal is mmm

00:02:08: the disenchantment of politics by economics so you could almost say.

00:02:13: The conversion of politics into economics and so neoliberalism said to two generations of people as long as you obey the market you will be okay the market is like an all-knowing intelligent machine

00:02:27: which can think better than you I mean I grew up in the 1960s and the ideology I grew up with we could describe as Keynesian

00:02:35: as the Keynesian world the welfare state the idea that the state will look after you but it wasn't an all-encompassing ideology it didn't claim to explain everything neoliberalism claimed

00:02:47: everything and so when it blows up and no longer

00:02:51: explains the world the market no longer delivers benign outcomes and the pursuit of individualism no longer

00:02:59: delivers benign outcomes people begin to ask the question what other ideologies are there because we kept a kind of zombie neoliberal economic system alive through quantitative easing through Central Bank

00:03:13: money creation but you can't keep an ideology alive that way because the human brain demands coherence and so

00:03:20: I was very influenced by the work of Karl Mannheim in the 1920s Mannheim is trying to understand why the vine mile Republic doesn't work and why people are rushing

00:03:31: to the extremes of politics Nazism and the car payday and manheim's explanation is this in normal times there is ideology.

00:03:40: On the ideology is kind of a common sense and it works because it's reinforced by everyday experience but in abnormal times

00:03:48: the ideology breaks down and people seek Utopias what I think we're seeing with the rise of the far right this time even though the far right are small

00:03:58: in terms of political parties and voting share we're seeing a mass search for a Utopia a utopian solution.

00:04:07: To the problem that the economy is busted and the reigning ideology no longer makes sense it's did it's very different we should discuss the differences between now and the 1930s but that one similarity of.

00:04:20: The breakdown of the ideology is the key to understanding why people are rushing to the extremes.

00:04:26: Again we certainly going to talk more about the breakdown of neoliberal ideology how the new far rights trying to fill that political vacuum and what we're going to do to stop them but first I briefly want to take a look

00:04:37: back away we ended up here because Paul I think there was for a long time the belief that fascism is a thing of the past

00:04:43: a human progress and capitalist globalization would lead us to more peaceful societies and make us sort of immune to Fascism and now for the last couple of years we actually see fascist ideology on the rise again and we see I think dangerous connection between fascism on the one end

00:04:58: and right-wing populist and authoritarians on the other hand such as Trump ball scenario and Putin.

00:05:04: Have we been the eve to assume that our democracies would be immune to the rise of fascism what do you think Paul.

00:05:09: We are certainly not immune to it what I argue in the book is that fascism it's no clear that fascism is a recurrent feature of capitalist breakdown

00:05:18: it was fair to assume after the second world war that it could have been a one-off that it was the result of specific features of Germany and Italy and Spain and specific problems of economic breakdown

00:05:31: it was fair to assume that and indeed my parents generation did assume it.

00:05:36: My mother is half was half Jewish and you know she assumed it she assumed that that world had gone there was no need to revisit the imagery of it

00:05:45: and it was better to forget it so when I was first active in the anti-fascist movement in the late 1970s we used to chant

00:05:53: never again at the Nazi skinheads almost as a victory slogan like you never again can you strut around the world

00:06:02: seeking laban's around you know and we thought there were just a joke but now it's now clear that never again was only an aspiration and unfortunately it's a failed aspiration and I think that a lot of the reasons I wanted to write this book is because.

00:06:16: Neither the liberal theory of fascism nor academic.

00:06:20: Theories of fascism nor indeed the Marxist theory of fascism fully explains why we are seeing the recurrence.

00:06:29: Of the phenomenon in a different form and you know it's a very different question why did fascism happen to

00:06:35: why is it happening again I think that it's proven by the emergence know you mentioned Trump you mentioned also narrow you mentioned Putin and we should talk about Putin these are not fascist politicians

00:06:48: they are I would argue right-wing nationalist.

00:06:51: And in some cases ethno-nationalism politicians who very clearly belong in the category right-wing populism the problem is

00:07:02: political science having spent 20 or 30 years establishing separate categories like authoritarian conservative

00:07:09: right-wing populist fascist the problem is all of these strands of politics

00:07:16: parts of conservatism all of populism all of fascism are no structured around the same thought architecture the same logic

00:07:25: that's what's changed because you could argue in the 1990s when right-wing populism emerged

00:07:31: the average right-wing populist was saying to you things like I don't like

00:07:35: migrants I don't like the smell of foreign people's food I don't like the fact that nobody asked me whether or not they're there should be more migration know their thought is structured around feminism being a form of suppression of men.

00:07:52: Liberalism being a form of Oppression of white people they have a fully theorized

00:07:57: view of the world that is fascist and the fascist ideologues Dugan is a great example Dugan I think has become more and more relevant in light of the invasion of Ukraine but Dugan is one Cavalli always another there are numerous

00:08:12: fascist ideology just who's Clear Vision of the world of large ethnically pure States at war with each other.

00:08:22: That Vision has begun to structure the thinking of the small-town small-time prejudiced person who used to only worry about halal food.

00:08:31: That's what's changed.

00:08:34: I think it would be a good time now to talk about what modern Fascism and fascist ideology actually look like because ya contemporary fascism shares a lot with this historical processes

00:08:44: but it also is quite different especially when it comes to strategies tactics and communication.

00:08:49: So Paul tell us a bit about what's at the core of the fascist belief system and fascist politics today.

00:08:55: The first thing to say is that the new form of fascist belief system structures the way they do their politics and in turn their new.

00:09:04: Belief system is structured by

00:09:07: the problem of imperialism the specific form of imperialism we're living through so for me there are five parts to the thought architecture of modern fascism I will list them number one the great replacement Theory the idea.

00:09:20: Migration is a form of genocide against white people point to.

00:09:25: The perpetrator of the genocide is liberalism because liberalism allowed the migrants in and feminism depressed the white birth rate.

00:09:34: So that's kind of point to a to be anti-liberal anti-feminist .3 beneath it all.

00:09:41: There is cultural Marxism this is not an accident in fact for fascist

00:09:45: both in the 30s and today nothing can be an accident everything has to be planned by somebody and the people planning it are the cultural Marxist the Frankfurt School Herbert marcuse

00:09:56: and their followers and they have decided to destroy the West.

00:10:01: Through cultural liberalism and social liberalism at gay rights Etc and it's very interesting in this sense that in the 30s if you look at the relationship between bolshevism.

00:10:13: And jewishness in Nazi ideology then Jews are often depicted as the so-called carriers

00:10:20: of bolshevism you know like a rat carries plague this was a common

00:10:24: theme and Nazism so what you know see is that liberals and feminists are inadvertent carriers of cultural Marxism that's the structure so we get two point three cultural Marxism points for.

00:10:38: He's what do you do about it you do meta politics you win an ideological argument you repeat

00:10:44: and ideological argument through memes through gestures and and again and again through symbolic violence so you're not trying to seize power

00:10:54: there is no march on Rome there is no be a hole punch in the current iteration of fascism because what you need to do is to create a community of people ready for .5

00:11:06: I'm point five is what we called a x it's the Deluge Armageddon when a mass outbreak of racial violence engulfs the world.

00:11:16: Whether it's the Civil War in America whether it's what we're seeing now with Russia's invasion of Ukraine which I argue is a pure example of an ethnic and nationalist War

00:11:25: the fascists of today

00:11:28: fantasize about a great break down out of which emerges this world once imagined by Carl Schmitt the Nazi ideology just you know

00:11:37: large space is ruled by single governments and societies which are homogeneous which cannot tolerate heterogeneity that's the vision so if you think that's coming

00:11:47: and climate change tells you that you have a good chance to of indeed the world collapsing into large ethnically defined mono States and indeed

00:11:56: the Russell Ukrainian War tells you what that might look like.

00:12:01: And the genocide in shinjang against the uyghur people tells you what that might look like you can wait if there is a finality to history coming

00:12:10: and it's a different kind of end of History than the one imagined by Pookie ah Mo and fukuyama imagine the nietzschean end of History this is the Triumph of the will

00:12:21: but is coming and if you think it's coming then you wait and you don't in fact what you do is you live inside the counterculture

00:12:27: if these five things structure fascism then

00:12:31: want it then structures is a form of behavior and the behavior is primarily meta political it's constantly telling stories Gathering recruits it's a quasi religious conversion experience and it's why I've gone back in the book to some of the earliest theorists of

00:12:49: political religions the theory of little religions is not the theory I work in but I think it holds great

00:12:55: in sight until the specific form of far-right politics and we're seeing no although I wonder if you could talk a bit more about what role does genocide

00:13:05: play in the thinking of more than fascists yeah because I mean modern fascist hide behind pseudo-intellectual terms like ethno-nationalism but if you would put that into effect it would actually mean rounding up people that don't fit into the image of your pure society and we've seen with historical fascism what that looks like

00:13:22: so how big of a theme is genocide within fascism today.

00:13:26: Yeah he is where we have a problem because you could argue that in the 1930s and 40s the genocide illogic of fascism.

00:13:34: Was played out in action only in extreme circumstances

00:13:39: and it was a result of improvisation there is an argument as you know and I think your listeners will know within German history a boat.

00:13:48: How much of the Holocaust was the result of top-down centralized planning.

00:13:53: And how much of it was improvised by middle-level bureaucrats according to an ideology that they had learned 20 years ago in the early Nazi movement I'm not dogmatic on this I think there is evidence of both but you could argue

00:14:07: got you know there was no real

00:14:09: genocide illogic to Mussolini's fascism at the beginning certainly not against Jews he had Jews inside the black shirt movement today genocide is front and center because if you look at who are their intellectual Heroes

00:14:23: it is Schmidt himself it is Dugan and Neil reactionaries like Guam Faye show is Renaud Camus

00:14:33: the author of The Great replacement is playing with themes of genocide and then we are fortunate because we have this Rich history know for example

00:14:42: all the storm of Thailand all police interrogations of letters from prison this kind of thing you can see they hate Jews but they don't know what a genocide looks like

00:14:52: You could argue that the suit vest namibian genocide of the hair arrows had given some Germans a taste of what

00:14:59: wiping out an entire people looks like but it wasn't an industrial scale modern genocide in that respect you could argue The Armenian Genocide gave an example but if you go in the Discord channels.

00:15:11: Today

00:15:12: all young fall right activists genocide is a big theme first of all because they believe they are the victims of genocide white genocide genocide through migration and intermarriage but also because they are fascinated by it.

00:15:27: In the writing of the book you know I visited the majdanek death camp and looked into the gas chamber which still has.

00:15:34: The blue stains of the zyklon-b chemical on the war and it occurred to me that not only do they want to do that again but if they did it they will probably use the same places just to make the point

00:15:45: that's why we have to stop it so we are seeing big organic movements where the far right.

00:15:51: The extreme right and the populist right are moving into.

00:15:56: Percentages like 30 and like low 40% in some European countries and indeed in America so the alarm Bell should ring.

00:16:05: And I think what's also important is to see the connection between modern fascist ideology on the one hand and radical conservatism and right-wing populism on the other hand Yeah you mentioned the United States and I think Trump is a good example because he plays into

00:16:19: themes like the great replacement and anti feminism.

00:16:22: And you can see that all over the world that fascist ideas are creeping into the political Center the so-called political Center

00:16:29: yes I wanted to ask you could you elaborate a bit more about the relationship between the new far right on the one hand and radical conservatism and right-wing populism on the other hand because one could argue on the one hand we have to be careful not to.

00:16:43: To Broad with the term of fascism yep to say for example Trump is a fascist

00:16:47: but at the other hand there lies a danger in missing similarities and connections so how do you think about that relationship yeah I think the importance of having the separate categories is indeed I mean above all in a place like Germany where there is this law

00:17:01: which says that there is a political police which must suppress Fascism and indeed all anti-constitutional extremism then it's not a abstruse academic argument which is fascist which is right-wing populist it's really important so

00:17:16: the first thing to say is the most important thing is the convergence of all three

00:17:20: right-wing conservatism populism and fascism around a similar intellectual structure is the new thing however

00:17:28: what's the main difference the fascists yes they fantasize about the collapse of the world and they fantasize about ethnic Civil War and genocide and.

00:17:37: Their activity is structured to bring it about so if you look at Sea on January the 6th the Capitol Hill uprising

00:17:45: the fascist so we see the probe boys and The Oath Keepers militia who I would classify both as fascist groups it of different kinds The Advocate and practice insurrectionary violence

00:17:57: Trump at the other end of the mall is on his platform he is inciting insurrectionary violence but he wants to do it for a

00:18:06: more political reason in background he has and we know realize this he has a plan he has lawyers working on a case he has pressure on Mike Pence and the hole

00:18:17: aim of this is to for spends to enact a constitutional coup a presidential coup against the election

00:18:24: we know this in far greater detail we had the hunch on the afternoon itself but we know know this in complete detail so the relationship is well understood.

00:18:33: Right-wing populist Trump wants to use the insurrectionary violence to achieve an authoritarian coup and overturn an election result and that in itself.

00:18:43: It's not fascism but it's a very very dangerous thing to be attempting in the biggest democracy and the nuclear-armed Democracy in the world

00:18:52: what does traditional right-wing conservatism do you know it facilitates it it stands back and applauds it says hey that was fine and then when the prosecution's begin in Congress it obstructs

00:19:05: the prosecution so we have a perfect worked example of how three of them work together here's the danger and the danger was well understood from.

00:19:13: The relationship between hugenberg 's day and vape a the by my Republic and the Nazis

00:19:20: hugenberg thought he could use Hitler to create an authoritarian reactionary conservative or Target.

00:19:29: German project that is so Germany must have an Empire it must have room to live in Eastern Europe it must repudiate its debts

00:19:39: and become a notar kick Imperial study economy I think until the period of Schleicher until December 1932 most people.

00:19:49: I would put money on the outcome being the German right-wing industrialists will be in charge.

00:19:55: Hitler will be their puppet even if you comes Chancellor he's their puppet and instead what happens

00:20:01: is Hitler becomes Chancellor he made Chancellor and in a series of coups between January 30th and the summer of 1933

00:20:11: it becomes a fascist state so

00:20:13: you know the danger is that modern fascism even if it is quite different to the old fashioned it's leaderless it's networked it's quite internationalist it Still Remains possible what would we see we would see in America

00:20:28: Goku you know the suspension of large parts of the Constitution the Supreme Court either turned into.

00:20:36: A form of government or Sidelines from by the executive you would see that you would see states begin to enact fascist Style

00:20:45: repression arresting leftists illegal izing anti-fascism grounding people up the apparatus by the way for that is there in the modern State I mean the Gestapo

00:20:54: the SS would look at most modern riot police even in Democratic countries and say that's amazing that's amazing that you've actually been able to assemble miniature armies to repress your own people if only we could get our hands on that

00:21:09: then we can turn it into something much darker so that's where I think the difference is lie and where the danger lies in a period of Chaos

00:21:18: fascist start doing things so I point out in the book one of the case studies is about when.

00:21:23: More or less the whole European route far-right went down to the Greek Turkish Border in 2020 to do a little miniature bit of.

00:21:30: Of symbolic violence rounding up refugees who are crossing the river and confiscating their shoes and holding them at gunpoint.

00:21:40: While the Greek state did nothing well that will start happening All Over America in the kind of future Trump and his followers envisage.

00:21:49: So I want your listeners to understand we're talking about the threat is within a decade the threat is not like in the mid century the threat is this decade.

00:21:58: And I think it's also helpful for us anti-fascists to think in processes of fascism option rather than getting stuck in Endless debates whether this and that regime is strictly fascist or this and that actor is strictly fascist yeah because that actually puts us in a better place to see the interconnections between certain lines of thoughts

00:22:17: and to fight fascism from the get-go.

00:22:20: Yeah and indeed one of the historians of fascism who influenced me most was ZF Stern hell the Israeli left

00:22:27: Wing historian mainly of French fascism Stern held it in an interview towards the end of his life opened it by saying there are worse things than fascism.

00:22:36: And he listed

00:22:38: it was possible to live in Mussolini's Italy until the Nuremberg Laws it was possible Purdue's to survive in Nazi Germany substernal points out that fascism isn't the worst thing that Humanity has ever created

00:22:51: and I think that we must focus a little bit of course the book

00:22:54: came up well before even the preparations for the Ukrainian War Began but what we've seen with Putin the Putin

00:23:02: obviously has occasionally relied on far-right movements within Russia.

00:23:08: And he using certainly encouraged far-right movements inside Europe and America but Putin himself is not a fascist politician in the sense that he is a

00:23:17: a right-wing authoritarian who doesn't even need populism because he can rig any election he wants and Kush

00:23:24: and he'll position he wants he is the classic dictator and he's become a dictator what we didn't realize I think we will find out once this is over.

00:23:34: That Putin was radicalized while in power and has become very wedded to ethanol nationalist ideology and the Ukraine war its Kansas Burleigh is that Ukraine exist.

00:23:47: That's that's simply what he says Ukraine is an anti Russia that should not exist it's National ideology it's not its language its National Consciousness is an affront to Russian nurse and therefore we are going to wipe it out

00:23:59: and we're seeing no Putin has to justify the war and indeed some of the defeat that have been inflicted on him militarily

00:24:07: if you watch Russian State TV it's wall-to-wall fascism so that's something that I didn't expect

00:24:15: it's not something I anticipated in the book but it's yet another confirmation that what we're up against you know I took part in a project called the Great regression actually

00:24:23: that title is a great underestimation of what is really going on this is not a regression it's not a sort of conservative swing in Western Society it's a radicalization is the breakdown of neoliberalismus

00:24:36: neoliberalismus and it

00:24:38: urgently demands two things from us well it demands of liberalism to decide which side are you on are you going to carry on repressing the left you're going to take part in anti-muslim rhetoric or are you going to side

00:24:50: with the Progressive Majority of society that wants to resist this drift too far right ideology and fascism and of the left

00:24:58: demands action it demands that we focus and prioritize and as I argue in the book we must learn the lessons of the 30s.

00:25:06: Way too many leftists are stuck in the world of class against class

00:25:10: they're still fighting the ECB they're still fighting fun delaying their still they still want to fight the battles of 2015 they don't realize

00:25:19: this battle is the battle for Western Civilization we are fighting for the enlightenment we could see a you know Dugan

00:25:26: Dugan says if we can reverse from communism to capitalism in Russia why can't we reverse to a hunter-gatherer Society that's the scale of radicalism we're up against.

00:25:37: Yeah I think every leftist should be aware of the difference between Democratic and revolutionary anti-fascism and they both have the right to be there

00:25:45: because I think capitalist inequalities are breathing pool for Fascism and we're going to push for better for more free more equal Society

00:25:52: so I think class against class is still a thing but that fight should not make us blind for the threat to democracy itself and that we have to Ally with liberals to defend the good that we have.

00:26:02: So that kind of brings me to the question of what kind of theory of fascism we need in order to fight it in your book you dissect three positions the liberal the academic and the marxian perspective.

00:26:14: So when the pole if you could talk a bit more about what are the weaknesses and what is the modern theory of fascism that we need.

00:26:21: The first thing is is that liberalism just doesn't want to talk about fascism.

00:26:25: It's finds it very difficult to rationalize why it's back because liberalism doesn't have a theory of the world if you talk to

00:26:32: I don't mean just liberal politicians I don't mean the fdp in Germany I mean also social Democrats they're not have a theory of the world they don't the theory that capitalism blew up neoliberalism blew up partly because it'll have an alternative to it that's their problem.

00:26:47: The academic theories what will the reasons I wrote this bouquet so I was seeing young anti-fascist trying to juggle different academic definitions of fascism.

00:26:57: Without realizing that these academic definitions I'll just research hypotheses they're not a product of struggle they're not owned by movements they just owned by increasingly abstruse

00:27:08: post-structuralist historians and sociologists

00:27:11: For Whom the study of words and signs and symbols is more important than the study of reality and I wanted to say you know I want to shake people and say look whatever definition of fascism we come up with it has to be over movement

00:27:24: all the process of contradiction and it's like

00:27:28: how do you define water how do you define a stream don't waste your time trying to hold down to two sentences understand the process understand

00:27:38: but reality and its movement and its contradiction and in that sense the Marxist definition is the one we need to

00:27:47: begin from because the Marxist definition as inherited from the comintern is rubbish it was rubbish then at least equally rubbish no the idea

00:27:56: but it's the military wing of Finance capitalism brought about by mass unemployment well you know the finance capitalism today are some of the most

00:28:04: liberal people in the world for me the key to understanding this from a Marxist from a materialist point of view is to understand it as.

00:28:13: I am a psychological phenomenon and that's why two of the greatest Marxist from and Reich are the people we need to begin from and G she.

00:28:22: The greatest theoretical Conquest G she made about fascism was in 1921 when he admitted it's only partly a class phenomenon.

00:28:32: It's only a party fits in to our understanding of class struggle it's got to be something different and I think it is in his prison Diaries he does Explorer.

00:28:42: Why fascism in Italy particularly took the form it did but I don't think.

00:28:48: He ever came to any defensible theoretical conclusions it is Reich and from who come to the conclusions fascism is a fear of freedom

00:28:57: triggered by a glimpse of people achieving Freedom who shouldn't really have freedom

00:29:03: whether it's liberated women in the volume our Republic whether it's peasant socialists in Liberal Italy and it drives the people.

00:29:13: Who it radicalizes towards violent ends the idea of a violent world ending insurrection.

00:29:20: Yeah I think it's super important in order to fight fascism we have to understand what makes people susceptible for fascism and how they get radicalized and there are kind of two explanations out there the one stresses socio-economic reasons and the other one

00:29:34: more cultural reasons and you and your book you write yourself the return of fascism is a symptom of a system failure within capitalism yeah

00:29:43: but at the other hand you stressed cultural Dimensions when people are triggered by

00:29:49: The Liberation Battle of black people of people of color women of queer people and I think these two dimensions are too often put against each other where we should see the connectedness so

00:30:00: how can we think about the connection between the socio-economic dimensions of the rise of fascism and the cultural dimensions.

00:30:08: Just let me give you a concrete example I went Undercover on a demo which was called to protect the statue of Winston Churchill against black.

00:30:17: Lives matter okay so the people who went on it were largely elderly football fans men in their 50s drunk White.

00:30:27: There was some young people and there was some ex-soldiers so what made them get out of bed get drunk stand in the middle of London.

00:30:36: Fight the police

00:30:37: Shout at the police why aren't you arresting them they kept asking why aren't you arresting the black people by the way there were no black people around black lives matter had no intention of attacking Churchill statue what made them do this was

00:30:52: the site of black lives matter on the street it just.

00:30:56: Triggered something in them that said this should not be happening that should not be Mass demonstrations of black people

00:31:03: in my country where they the police can't control them the police don't arrest them they don't stop and search them they don't put them in the back of a van and beat them or they are allowing them.

00:31:12: To March through the streets saying that their lives matter.

00:31:17: By implication more than my white life so that was a perfect example to me of the fear of Freedom triggered by the glimpse of Freedom the freedom.

00:31:27: A multi-ethnic society precisely a society where black people don't get randomly stopped in the street and I was on the black lives matter demos and they were beautiful demos there are expressions of huge solidarity and positivity

00:31:40: so these guys okay they have live through 20 or 30 years of seeing the society they come from small term Britain X industrial Britain

00:31:50: decline this drove them more and more to the right it drove them to be anti migration anti-feminist but I don't think it until we saw.

00:32:00: The movement of black people that said you know we're not going to just become lawyers we're not just going to become politicians we're going to actually go on the street and see the police don't have the right to shoot.

00:32:11: Black people dead when they saw that in America and when they saw their own type of people go on the streets like this guy Kyle Kyle written hose with a gun and shoot people.

00:32:22: It triggered something in their minds and so that's what I mean by fear of Freedom triggered by the glimpse of Freedom it happens because after 30 years of neoliberalismus.

00:32:31: Poverty.

00:32:33: And 10 years of neoliberal breakdown where there is no guiding coherent politics coming from the center these guys are just had enough

00:32:42: and I don't know where they go if you can suppress them sometimes they just repeat Retreat back to the corner of the pub muttering insults about.

00:32:51: Migrants but sometimes they go online and they become more radicalized.

00:32:56: Just One Last Question Paul if we look at all that you said so far about the modern fascist belief system.

00:33:03: The escalating crisis is within capitalism that could make people more susceptible to Fascism and also the psychology behind people getting radicalized

00:33:12: saying I don't want to see freedom for people that don't look like me so what does all that mean for the left what do we need to do to fight the new far right.

00:33:21: For the left it means and Daniel garam spells this out in his boot the brown plague written in the first year of the vine more Republic

00:33:29: we only a living breathing alternative can stop the rise of fascism

00:33:34: of course we are trying to defend democracy we're trying to defend Democratic institutions but we are not there to defend is the economic status quo the left must argue for a radical transformation and we saw in the first iteration of Jeremy corbyn

00:33:49: the politics of Corbin ISM in Britain we saw how that could work we saw that it could.

00:33:55: Mobilize people who are just sick of the present they sick of the way things are.

00:34:00: In the second iteration of Corbin ISM it just didn't work when we were up against a radical right-wing government and we could discuss the reasons for that but there are other

00:34:08: example Bernie Sanders movement we've got to have our own goal that's number one.

00:34:14: Then beyond that there are the anti-fascist tactics and in the book I list them they are three their well-known first we need an anti-fascist ethos we need a cultural movement that says we are proud to be anti-fascists anti-fascism is a thing anti-fascism is what gave us

00:34:27: Picasso's Guernica it's what gives us the movie Casablanca it's what gives us the Jean renoir's movies.

00:34:35: We need an anti-fascist ethos that's number one number two we need a popular front we need an alliance of liberalism and the left to defend democracy any left is to tells you this

00:34:44: that we can't no just ignore them they are going to lead you to the same disaster that they LED you to in the 1930s and the third thing is.

00:34:52: We need militant democracy we need legal structures that through which to defend democracy against fascism and in Germany there is one

00:35:00: you know the state has the right to repress fascist parties and it's just been used against the IFD I totally support that there are

00:35:07: problems with it it needs a strong policing of the police and the Armed Forces themselves.

00:35:12: But I think more democracies are going to have to introduce such laws and what does that mean

00:35:17: it means that the most fragile democracy is United States where such laws would be unconstitutional the first amendment gives you the right to call for genocide the second amendment gives you the right to

00:35:28: assemble the weapons to perpetrate genocide that's the two first amendments to the American Constitution and the rest isn't much better

00:35:35: either as a defense against what what is coming in America.

00:35:39: One of those pit Paul what is it stake when we fail in our anti-fascist battle and the radical Utopia that we need to implement as leftist.

00:35:47: The radical Utopia is not urgent we need to fight for it we need to fight for in Greener and more democratic and a more tolerant and more equal capitalism that means radical change in itself but

00:36:01: the Urgent thing is to begin decarbonization

00:36:04: and to defend democracy those two things are like the tasks of know of today when you stop listening to this podcast those things are the urgent things what's at stake if we don't do those things are

00:36:18: climate chaos will form the perfect backdrop for what the fascist want which is global ethnic Civil War

00:36:25: and if we lose democracy you know we know have three basically large imperialism's the West Russia and China You could argue for.

00:36:34: The USA European Union Russia China however you want to split it Russia and China just signed a pact to destroy the world order

00:36:43: 4th of February the Xi Jinping Putin joint declaration basically says the rules-based order is over there are now multiple modernities multiple definitions of democracy and human rights and if you don't like it.

00:36:54: You know that's your problem America as I've said is probably the most fragile of Western democracies.

00:37:00: But you can survive Europe can call here and I think the Strategic autonomy of Europe is more and more important.

00:37:07: But what's the steak you don't have to look into in the history books anymore you just have to look at what happened in the Kiev suburb of pooka masculine.

00:37:16: Rape as a weapon of War ethno-nationalism ideology pumped out 24 hours a day by the state media leading to low level.

00:37:26: Maybe even self-initiated certainly crimes against humanity and it's not a future problem it's a no problem.

00:37:34: Pause thank you so much for making time for my listeners thank you it's been brilliant thank you.

00:37:39: Music.