Today's Neo-fascists States
Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)
I argue that fascism-nationalist socialism has proven far more resilient than ever imagined.
It is no stretch of the imagination to say that today at least a dozen countries or more are what can best be described as neo-fascist.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
A better question is: How can anyone in America or the United Kingdom or Australia grasp the concept at all?
The English-speaking world never came to grips with the true political reality (and danger) of fascism-nationalist socialism.
When it “flowered” in the first half of the 20th century, we English-speakers never evolved beyond a one-dimensional Second World War caricature and subsequently were so consumed by the Cold War that we never adequately reflected on why and how it rose to power during the interwar years.
Several generations later, we still see it as little more than wartime propaganda – a cartoon scene of warmonger dictators, silly uniformed followers making odd arm gestures and racist killers of Jews.
We yet are in denial that it was embraced seriously in Europe, Asia and South America by tens of millions and none, save Germany, resorted to the horrific insanity of genocide – but all gripped bloody tyranny ever firmly.
And therein lies not just the rub, but also the peril.
Until we discard our simplistic "racist vision" we will never be safe.
In the aftermath of the horror of The Great War, absolute or even quasi-absolute monarchies were discarded with relief.
Absurdly, liberal free market liberal democracies were dismissed as failing states soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history.
The two utopian illusions that emerged from the ashes were communism and fascism-nationalist socialism. For the indulgent intelligentsia, that was the future.
Fascism emerged as a dreadfully appealing dream of a society built upon beneficial and classless socialism that put the workers first and governed by a single party in control of a powerful centralized state that defined and enforced collective national unity and conformity.
Fascism-nationalist socialism enticingly offered a comforting state-sponsored cocoon immersed in Orwellian "goodthink."
Once you wash away the terrors of the Second World War and look objectively at the interwar era, you see how fascism-nationalist socialism gained favor...and why it still appeals.
More chillingly, you see that the collapse of communism in the 1990s did not auger in a new era – one of inevitable evolution towards democratic free-market liberalism.
Instead we entered a twisted return to the 1920s absent communism with two competing visions: Neo-fascism (without the racism and genocide) versus Liberal Democracy.
Unfortunately, even I would not outwardly label these countries as fascist or neo-fascist because the of the 20th century stigma...but nonetheless, they are neo-fascist in everything but name.
That explains Venezuela, Nicaragua, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, Angola, Nepal, and a number of others.
