Fascism in the Plural

Letters

Vol. 17 No. 19 · 5 October 1995

From Keith Flett

Alan Ryan’s search for the big idea behind Fascism (LRB, 21 September) is a complete failure because Fascism is an irrational set of beliefs tailored to suit the moment. What Fascism does is easier to determine. It smashes trade unions and the Left and it sends Jews, lesbians and gays, disabled people and socialists to concentration camps in their millions. Somehow Ryan doesn’t quite get around to this awkward reality, which may be why he ends up by deciding that modern Fascists from the British BNP to Fini in Italy and Le Pen in France don’t amount to much. They do, of course, and everyone follows the traditional Fascist practice of sharp suits and a respectable image for election times, and boots and knives for when they hope no one is looking. There was one person who came up with an idea about how to stop such people – namely, to confront them physically on the streets and stop their marches while at the same time developing a socialist alternative to the despair which Fascism breeds on. That person was Leon Trotsky.

Keith Flett
London N17

Vol. 17 No. 23 · 30 November 1995

From Wendy Hammond

Alan Ryan’s understandably bemused attempt to get to the bottom of the meaning of Fascism (LRB, 21 September) underestimates, I think, the character and potential of the US millenarian movement in such statements as ‘most have simple, devout Christian attachments, completely at odds with the secular mythology of Fascism,’ and ‘it is religious separatism that provokes the bulk of such outrages’ as the Oklahoma bombing. This makes these groups sound more like Amish or Baptist cells gone awry than the frightening and powerful forces they actually are. David Koresh’s Branch Davidians saw themselves as an ‘end-time church’to gather up the righteous before Armageddon, but many of the militias have no problem with the ‘secularmythology of Fascism’. The Oklahoma bomber invoked the talismanic name of Waco but was neither acting in the name of religion nor avenging the FBI’s carnage alone. Most of the visitors to Waco are not religious zealots, but ‘constitutional activists’. According to an article by Peter Boyer in the New Yorker they are ‘members of that portion of the American extreme fringe which believes the FBI raid on the Davidian compound exemplified a government at war with its citizens’.

The militias may find common cause with religious groups like the Christian Coalition, which advocates a curious blend of anarchism and constitutional reform, but also with MIA conspiracy theorists and small farmers who faced bankruptcy in the Seventies. All the terms Ryan uses to characterise Fascist movements apply to these groups – ‘defensive ultra-nationalism’, racism, domestic illiberalism, belief in the superiority of action over thought, will over intellect and blood rather than brain. To write that these ‘elements of classical Fascism’ will be ‘less visible when conservative governments are in power’ is fatuous when the mainstream Republican Party is now firmly in the millenarians’ camp.

Many people in the US found the FBI’s tactics at Waco ill-advised and brutal, but to the paranoid fringe they revealed the designs of a ‘rotten’ and adversarial government. ‘Sceptical’ about government rescuing them? The government is the enemy. The militias brandish rifles, or grenade-launchers, instead of fasces, but do not lack social radicalism, nor Eat-well’s ‘form of thought which preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic national radical Third Way’ (Ryan’s italics). Why is Ryan so sure that ‘whatever inspires Neo-Fascists it is not the desire for a radical third way’? That is precisely the platform of the apocalyptic fringe in the US. The very name of one of the groups, ‘Aryan Nation’, gives the lie to Ryan’s comforting assertion that the militias mostly ‘want to preserve a chosen remnant rather than reconstitute a nation’.

Wendy Hammond
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

Vol. 18 No. 2 · 25 January 1996

From Alan Ryan

I don’t, of course, deny Wendy Hammond’s assertion (Letters, 30 November 1995) that there are a great many dangerous people in the USA, including Bo Gritz and the members of the Aryan Nation. Nor do I deny that they hold many of the views that the supporters of prewar Fascism held. What I deny is that they have any influence on national politics, as distinct from the pleasure of living in rural Idaho. Even in local politics, it is worth noting that when Christian Coalition members get onto school boards, they are kicked off as soon as they try to change curricula to reflect their views. The public hankers after centrist good sense, not loopiness. As for the Republican Party, it is in the usual hands, not of millenarians, but of tobacco companies, oil companies, agri-business, property developers and doctors bent on making lots of money. The rest is decoration.

Alan Ryan
Princeton University, New Jersey