The word “fascist” is back on everyone’s lips. To talk about the world in which we now live, is it still appropriate? Many are those who increasingly see in the present situation correspondences with the successive crises that plagued the 1930s. Is it anachronistic to think that a past can come back to haunt us in a recomposed form?
Over time, the “fascist” label peeled off the bottle where too many different political realities were mixed together. Today, those who are most likely to get the evil genies out of this bottle refuse the label. They know it infamous, that is to say, likely to bring them into disrepute in society.
It would be naive to believe that fascism died with Hitler in a bunker or on the butcher’s hook where Mussolini’s body was hung. The war was not over when many worshipers of the radical right—who did not always have the Duce and the Führer as models—were already trying to revive it, planting its old deleterious ideas in new soil.
George Orwell warned that fascism would return to the public square wearing a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella under his arm, as the image of the respectable man of his time. In Canada, the fascist leader Adrien Arcand gave him a certain reason. Shaved heads, uniforms and shows of force were a thing of the past, Arcand said after the war. The future of the far right now depended on its ability to adorn itself with the appearance of respectability, he warned. To this end, it was necessary to present her with a tie, then find ways to invest the media to assert herself in her Sunday best.
The ridiculousness and the naivety of the anti-fascists, claimed Pier Paolo Pasolini, was to continue to hunt down the extreme right in its old forms. Fascism had mutated as the consumer society grew, he rightly argued.
As ridicule does not kill more on one side or the other of the political spectrum, the most radical right-wingers today demand to be exonerated from the label of fascist, on the pretext that they have changed suit. They do not specify that they have indeed preserved, in the hollow of their pockets and in the lining of their jackets, the same fund of ideas.
Orban’s Hungary, accustomed to trampling on democratic rights, is enthusiastic about the advances of Georgia Meloni, the new head of the Italian radical right with an avowed fascist past. Vincenzo Sofo, one of the strong figures of Fratelli d’Italia, Meloni’s party, is the husband of Marion Maréchal, the muse of the French far right, also granddaughter of the founder of the National Front. His aunt, Marine Le Pen, has in the past multiplied the bows of his party, the National Rally, towards the authoritarian regime of Putin. In Sweden, against all expectations, the extreme right has rebuilt its nest. In Bolsonaro’s Brazil, the dictatorship of the military and its executioners are celebrated. All these fine people were delighted with the anti-democratic pirouettes proposed by Trump. These movements provide mutual assistance, in a kind of fraternity of ideas which has no need of duly constituted organizations to be recognized.
The neofascists present themselves as valiant non-conformists defying the elites. In fact, they still and always defend the same old social hierarchy. Inequalities, they take them for granted, like a simple reflection of individual merit. In their brutal and Darwinian universe, where the law of the strongest reigns, everyone is at the mercy of their own misfortunes. And all are sold on the illusion that you have to fight against each other to survive.
These regimes of ideas which want to put an end, once and for all, to the models of social democracy, promote taxation to the advantage of the powerful, by taking immigrants as scapegoats. Before the screen of a doctrinaire nationalism, the obsession with immigration is brought back to the fore, as in the darkest hours of the 1930s. the most obscene xenophobia, as if to divert attention from the catastrophic progressive dismantling of public services and far deeper planetary threats.
The ayatollahs of identity nationalism constantly have the words “culture” and “civilization” in their mouths. Never, however, do we hear them talk for more than five seconds about literature, theatre, dance, cinema, heritage, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of artisans in these spheres are opposed to their square thoughts. We never hear them reminded that this civilization, certainly Christian, Western and aristocratic, was so cosmopolitan, that it produced critical thought, that its history was crossed by powerful calls for equality, justice, democracy , humanism, tolerance. This side leaves them indifferent.
In the name of a popular resentment against the elites who happily plunder the earth, the neofascists seduce. However, they play a double game. With one hand, they stroke the goat’s neck while, with the other, they water the cabbage. Their surface rebellion, which blows on the embers of a general discontent, never challenges the economic system and serves the authority of those who are already its masters.
The neofascists make sure to take over the established order, promising to push it further. By allowing themselves to be brought to power in this way, at the mercy of fear and resentment, they intend to manage in turn to steer an already hegemonic neoliberal system, offering it at most an extra soul with its opportunistic appeals to the nation. , the only form of brotherhood that moves them. And by wanting to go down this old path better, they lead us straight to a renewal of the worst.