Trump French National Front leaer Marine Le Pen
First let me apologize to all readers about yesterday’s blog post. It was written on a system very hastily with no system that I could access for spell check. Since then, new and bad news has come in. While some were commenting on the Paris Climate Change Conference, which of course is an attempt to address one of the central issues facing the whole world, the National Front, founded by Vichy supporter Jean Marie Le Pen and today led by his daughter, which Europeans for decades have regarded as a neo fascist party, won the first round in the French regional elections. Le Pen’s daughter has changed the party’s focus, eschewing anti-Semitism (and even expelling her father and some of his old supporters) and emphasizing anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant ideology, as European parties long considered fascist are now doing. The Socialist Party, which is the governing party and has gone along with economic austerity policies, ran third, Now it is withdrawing its candidates and telling its supporters to vote for the traditional conservatives against the National Front, much like the German Social Democrats in 1932 in the German presidential elections called upon their supporters to vote for the incumbent rightwing conservative, Field Marshall von Hindenburg against Hitler. Hindenburg won but the depression crisis was not addressed by the existing conservative government and Hindenburg, with the support of rightwing conservatives subsequently named Hitler Chancellor.
Below is the corrected and updated version
Let's start as Marxists telling it like it is. Donald Trump is not simply a "hate monger." People hate various things, both personal and political. Trump is a racist and a fascist, and the two go hand in hand.
"Muslims" are for Trump what "Jews" were for Hitler, a "problem", a "subversive force," an "enemy within."
Throughout Europe and North America, as anyone with an understanding of history can see, Anti-Muslim bigotry is becoming for the right the new “Anti-Semitism."
Parties that Europeans have traditionally considered fascist, like the National Front in France, have soft-pedaled their traditional anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial for anti-Muslim bigotry, And the danger of a fascist victory in a major industrialized nation and military nuclear power must now be taken seriously
Some have even come to support Israel as a defender of "Western civilization" in the Middle East" from the barbaric “Muslim" hordes, much as Hitler proclaimed his Japanese allies "honorary Aryans" because they represented the worship of military power and leaders that characterized the "superior races" defending civilization from the barbaric hordes (in reality because they were his allies, as the Israelis are the allies of the U.S./NAT0 bloc in the Middle East Although some of his most vocal supporters are neo Nazis and rabid anti-Semites, Trump has found it convenient to identify with the ultra-right Netanyahu government of Israel and his responded to charges of anti-Semitism that he is the only candidate with Jewish grandchildren(as if that is in any way connected to the issue)
Trump builds upon conventional racist and xenophobic views, which frankly have also played a significant role in U.S. history locked in conflict with anti-racist, egalitarian, cultural pluralist views,
But Trump takes them a step further, like Hitler and his many imitators through the world in the period between the two world wars.
Trump has called for a "ban" on all Muslims entering the U.S., something resembling the "oriental exclusion" policies of the U.S. government from the 1890s on. And to compound the demagoguery, Trump has thrown in the internment of over 120,000 Japanese during WWII, a policy repudiated in the courts in 1983 and by Congress in 1988, with an apology and limited reparations to survivors---which no one for many decades has openly defended on any level for decades. Of course, Trump has dodged the question of whether he would have "voted" to intern the Japanese at the time, saying only that war is tough and that America today is soft and no longer wins wars
So Hitler's "Asiatic Hordes" led by Judeo-Bolshevism" marching from the Russian Steppes to conquer and destroy European civilization becomes for Trump, Muslim infiltrators come to use murder Americans as part of their global holy war.
Does it pay to tell Trump that WWII was won against the Axis alliance, whose core ideology he imitates? Probably not?
Does it pay to tell Trump that the court decision overturning an earlier Supreme Court decision(1944) upholding the internment stated clearly that lawyers defending the decision before the court with-held from the judges the facts the the government new that the Japanese constituted no real security threat? Probably not.
Does it pay to tell Trump that WWII that the Allies included the U.S., Britain, the USSR, and millions of partisan fighters in Yugoslavia, Greece, the Soviet Union, China, Indochina, the Philippines, and that the Soviet Union made the largest contribution to victory by engaging nearly 90 percent of all European Axis forces between 1941 and 1944? Probably not? Many of those people probably be on his exclusion list?
Would it even pay to inform him that those who win wars are really the ones who suffer the least casualties and end up in the best position in terms of economic power? The U.S. was in that position after the two world wars, but the cold war of course was very different. The U.S. paid the most for the NAT0 alliance and then of the major, discounting China in both its revolutionary civil war and the Korean War (before it really took off with the development of its Socialist Market Economy) suffered the most dead and wounded? Probably not. Trump’s idea of war seems to come from John Wayne movies and contemporary video games.
The Marxist-Leninist definition of fascism, avoided by some but still in my opinion the most valuable, is that fascism is the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary sectors of the capitalist class in the service of finance capital. In the U.S. today, that would mean at the elite level the powerful oil, coal and natural gas corporate leaders, the military contractors, the investors in the prison industrial complex. At the mass level it would mean most white men and women frustrated by their failures to advance in society in terms of status and money, ready to blame their situation on minorities and the poor given special benefits by government, and by foreign powers stepping on a weak United States.
But how do you fight fascism? The one thing you don’t do is first ignore and then appease it
Fascists are successful when they enter the political mainstream and their enemies on the left are either divided or marginalized. Fascists create whether they come to power or not create a poisoned political climate, unless the left and the center form a united front against them. A united front doesn’t mean the left become the center, cheerleading for its policies and apologies for its retreats?
If history is any judge, conservatives cannot fight fascists since their lives are spent fighting the moderate and militant left.
Those centrists, old and new versions of cold war liberals, who today are counterpoising Trump on the right with Bernie Sanders on the Left, like their predecessors who did the same thing with Hitler and Stalin before WWII under the totalitarian concept, won’t fight fascists like Trump because their real aim is to protect the status quo from militants like Sanders (if and when a leader like Sanders becomes president, they will then fight)
And those who laugh at politicians like Trump or smugly believe that he will simply divide the right and lead the Republicans to defeat can’t really fight the fascism that Trump is peddling today.
Both Republican and Democratic politicians are issuing statements criticizing Trump's statements in varying degrees as representing either "hate"(Clinton) or a distortion of "conservativism" and "true American values"(some of the Republicans). Bernie Sanders has answered Trump directly and clearly in the following with the following words below the words I have pasted a short video clip from Bernie Sanders appearance on the Tonight Show in response to Trump
“Demagogues throughout our history have attempted to divide us based on race, gender, sexual orientation or country of origin. Now, Trump and others want us to hate all Muslims. The United States is a great nation when we stand together. We are a weak nation when we allow racism and xenophobia to divide us.”
Read more at
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Unity with content, not merely a phantom "unity" to defeat "the ultra-right" by supporting lesser of two evils candidates without purpose or a plan has in the past been the only way to prevent fascists from coming to power political. The French Popular Front and the U.S. New Deal coalition, in which Communists played a major role, kept fascists from coming to power with concrete programs that improved the conditions of life for working people and gave them hope for the future and making it clear to those in the capitalist ruling classes who were ready to fund fascist demagogues and use them against the working class that the risks of doing that were too great. Both of those people’s front coalitions were based on mobilizing working people to make clear and tangible gains, to end conservative austerity policies and also, in the case of the early New Deal, policies that primarily aided the corporations and the banks and agribusiness, with limited provisions to have them trickle down that aid to the people
Right now, the Sanders campaign offers the best hope for fighting what Donald Trump is peddling in U.S. Politics. Our commercial capitalist media understands that which is why they have given Trump such an abundance of publicity. Time Magazine, true to the mindset of its founder, Henry Luce, who preached the doctrine of an "American Century" during WWII, understands that, since they apparently have made Trump one of their 8 finalists for 2015 "person of the year" and snubbed Bernie Sanders.
We on the left should realize that and work for the Sanders campaign as the basis in the U.S. for the kind of peoples front campaign that will not only defeat Trump but will regain control of the federal government and begin to enact that policies that will advance the interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans, who are working class people, and thus eliminate the conditions that the Trumps feed upon