Call fascism by its name

(Top) Photo credit: LM Otero / Associated Press)

There is trouble ahead. No doubt about it. There has never been a time without it.

What changes is the nature of the trouble and the temperature. The boundaries of the world are pushing outward past the lifetimes of the men and women who were the warriors, liberators, survivors and participants of the Second World War. These events are rapidly slipping into history, past the line of lived and shared human experience. They will soon no longer exist as memory, but rather purely history. There will be no one alive who remembers the events – and that will be significant for the first generations freed from the lived memory of humanity’s greatest trial and most dangerous hours.

Viktor Orban’s Dallas speech was a fascist obscenity. Fascist is precisely the correct word. Fascism was invented by Benito Mussolini, and Orban gave a speech celebrating his invention. Mussolini was correct when declaring that since he created fascism, he was the person who got to determine what a fascist was.

CPAC is not “Woodstock.” CPAC is not Davos. The Associated Press compared it to both. Why? What don’t they get? What is the disconnect? What are the qualifications for leadership atop a global news organization? It seems that they might be as shallow and brittle as those around US Senators and the political class.

CPAC is the American Bund. The main difference is an aesthetic one. CPAC dropped the torches and parades for fascist kitsch and Ripley’s Believe it or Not-level freakery. The high-water mark for the American Bund was the night in 1939 when they filled Madison Square Garden with 22,000 Nazis for what the marquee billed as a “patriotic evening.” A George Washington banner was hung behind the podium and flanked by swastikas. Fritz Kuhn, the American Führer, began his speech almost precisely like Orban. Orban attacked the media with his Dracula-like accent and his crocodile tears around the villainous haze that surrounds him, caused by his words spoken out loud and then reported by the media. This is a standard fascist trope. Hitler opened his speech to the German industrialists he was trying to win over in 1932 in Düsseldorf exactly this way.  Victimization, conspiracy, pseudoscience, lies, bunk and ego are the foundation of all political fascism.

None of this information is classified. All of it is basic 20th century history, and yet the American press seems almost uniformly unable to explain, contextualize or make any sense of what is happening in front of their eyes. There seems to be no ability to connect causal events by way of explaining the totality of unfolding events that are the crisis of our time that no one notices – yet. Everyone will eventually if the menace isn’t confronted and defeated. For example, how much of the coverage of Orban’s speech mentioned Tucker Carlson’s pilgrimage to Budapest and the Fox News hand in elevating the Central European autocrat to an icon among extremist America?

Adolf Hitler was among the most important human beings of the 20th century. He was the greatest monster in a century of them. His madness was an idea. His idea fueled a political movement. His political movement called itself “national socialism.” National socialism helped kill 100 million human beings. Its legacy is the Holocaust and industrial-scale murder. All of it was built on a foundation of racial purity and a promise of peace, prosperity and order.

Viktor Orban is a man of the 21st century who has embraced the most twisted idea of the 20th century. He has embraced Hitlerism, and unfortunately, too few know enough about Adolf Hitler in the American media to recognize that for what it is. There is a Hitler allergy in America because the real man has been turned into Voldemort. His name is not to be spoken. Perhaps this is the wrong approach given his death occurred just 77 years ago. Perhaps understanding how the Third Reich happened matters.

The extremist crowd in Dallas was cheering Hitlerism and a foreign leader who was quite open about his desire to see America torn apart in his twisted vision of culture war. He wants to wreck American freedom, American institutions, and American democracy. Viktor Orban sees himself as “Putin light,” for now, and he smells an audience. The CPAC audience is that crowd, and it is as un-American as their Bund, Klan, neo-Nazi, movements with which it has merged.

Viktor Orban is likely disoriented by his proximity to a radical crowd of fellow travelers. He may think they represent America. They don’t. Here is an American story that Viktor Orban would not have heard at CPAC. It is a story about where the type of Jew hatred Orban winks and nods about leads. It is where the racial purity insanity leads. Antisemitism is more subtle in 2022. The term “Jew” has been replaced by code words like “globalist.” Jewish conspiracy libels have been short-handed to “Soros.”  

The language is understandable and clear. 

Hitler’s 1000-year Reich was nearing its end in December of 1944. The Nazis were desperately and simultaneously killing and covering up their genocide and finishing the work they had set upon. 

The 442nd Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division arrived at the front on December 14, 1944. Among the replacements arriving at the front was 26-year-old Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds from Knoxville, Tennessee. 

The Battle of the Bulge is history’s name for the last gasp of Nazi Germany. Hitler threw what was left of the SS and Wehrmacht at the Allied Expeditionary Force under the command of Dwight Eisenhower. The Nazi counteroffensive exploded through the American lines, causing chaos. Edmonds was captured in the battle on December 29th and taken with nearly 1,300 other American soldiers to a POW Camp. It was at Stalag IX A that a German Nazi and Master Sergeant Edmonds came face to face. The Nazi commander held a gun to his head and demanded that Edmonds order the Jews among the American ranks to fall out and identify themselves to the Germans. 

Edmonds had the gun to his head because he was in charge. Remarkably, the camp contained no officers. The 26-year-old master sergeant was in command. What did he do? He ordered every American to step forward at once and told the enraged Nazi commander that “we are all Jews”. 

He advised the Nazi commander that he could shoot every American, but that it wouldn’t change his answer. He advised the Nazi that his murders would be recorded and he would be prosecuted as a war criminal. He gave his name, rank and serial number.

This is what is celebrated and honored in America. The greatness of the United States is its ability to face and transcend its hypocrisies and shortcomings. Freedom is an expanding tide in America. Viktor Orban is a snake oil salesman like Matt Schlapp, the transactional DC hustler who has found fascism to be a more lucrative grift than lobbying and selling pardons. He fancies himself as an international statesman in a growing global movement. It is two-parts delusional and one-part dangerous. When danger and delusion combust with politics, the results have been the greatest tragedies in recorded history. That is what is developing at CPAC. That is what is forming. 

Perhaps such talk is alarmist, but perhaps not. Maybe the people who dismiss such talk are ignorant of history. The drama unfolding is unwritten, but when looking ahead, it keeps bending in predictable ways. Always for the worse it seems. It seems the menace grows in direct proportion to the apathy in the soil in which it is planted. The one thing about which everyone agrees --  including the fascists – is no one wants what they are directly selling. They are counting on opposition. They just want it to be the type that opposes with submission and apathy, not conviction and resistance. 

The fascist movement and Trump’s imminent return as a presidential candidate is dependent on their faith: that the exhausted majority is too exhausted to care about vandalism being done to the cause of freedom in the selfish interests of a few who want power, not to build, but take. 

Political coalitions are defined by their lowest common denominator. The MAGA movement is in open coalition and alliance with a sordid mix of extreme groups, from violent Proud Boys to uniformed Nazis. Orban is the brains. He is the substance. It is the idea that is the cause, not Trump at CPAC. The idea is “national conservatism.” It is little different from “national socialism.”

The crimes of the Nazis were the outcome of their rule. The national conservatives aspire to rule. If they do, their crimes will be their own. Our collective shame will be the inability to recognize the presence of the idea 25 years after “Saving Private Ryan.” Appalling isn’t the word. 

America is a nation of 329 million people spread across a continent. The number of people who are attempting to instigate civil war, foment violence, end democracy and the rule of law is relatively small. They are, however, large enough to deserve some consideration as a group.

Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan and the bottom feeders of Congress are all stars at CPAC. Why?

An assemblage of racists, neo-Nazis, Jew haters, seditionists and conspiracy loons are all drawn to CPAC. Why?

An assemblage of some of the most cynical politicians in American history are all drawn to CPAC. Why?

The national media comes to CPAC, but covers it like a Grateful Dead show instead of the largest gathering of political extremism and fascism on the North American continent. Why?

CPAC is un-American. CPAC is ground zero and home base for a gang of hustlers and extremists who want power.

Listen to them. They are confident and assertive. They believe that they are going to win. They believe that they are on the right side of history.

I’m old enough to remember when it was dogma that all this evil was on the ash heap of history. It turns out that none of it was.

These sick ideas are a pestilence. They are being embraced and renewed by a combination of cynicism, belief and growing fanaticism. The ideas are sprouting in the open and the media observing them doesn’t understand the snake it is handling is a highly venomous one.

Democracy is a fancy word for how society organizes itself in a way where the people are protected from the tyranny of a small group of power-hungry hustlers who have an ambition for tyranny. What they require is power. The only way they can ever get power is if the people give it to them. The national conservatives have been quite clear, as were their national socialist cousins. They don’t intend to give power back once they get it. The stakes will be too high for that. The defense of civilization will be too important for that. After all, they will need to keep the bloodlines pure.

What was Viktor Orban doing in Dallas? He was meeting his disciples and spreading his gospel. It is an unholy one and the inability to recognize it as such is inexcusable.

CPAC was a gathering of wolves. They look at all the rest of us as sheep. That is how fascists think. Americans are not sheep. Maybe it’s just that fascists can’t learn.