Frozen in the face of fascism
The French far-right leader Jordan Bardella on Friday morning cancelled a scheduled speech at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, after Donald Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon flashed an apparent fascist-style salute there hours before.
Bannon, who helped Trump win office in 2016 and is now a popular rightwing podcast show host, finished his CPAC speech on Thursday with an outstretched arm, fingers pointed and palm down – a sign that echoed both the Nazi salute and a controversial gesture made by the tech billionaire Elon Musk at the US president’s second inauguration in January.
Bardella, of the hard-right National Rally party in France, pulled out of CPAC citing Bannon’s allusion to “Nazi ideology”.
The salute during Bannon’s speech brought cheers from the audience at the US gathering. [Continue reading…]
JD Vance’s decision, while in Germany, to meet the far-right AfD leader, Alice Weidel, yet decline a meeting with the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, would have caused more alarm, I feel, if it hadn’t come accompanied by so much other signalling. The vice-president of a nation engaged in tearing down its own institutions lectured the whole of Europe on its project to “destroy democracy”, which is absolutely textbook: he’s describing black as white, openly turning observable reality on its head. It’s unsettling, for sure, but that’s because it’s audacious, not because it’s complicated. It’s the simplest move of statecraft ever – show the world who you are, dare them to call you on it.
Meeting Weidel was the second simplest move – show the world who your allies are, dare them to mention it, or see if instead they turn themselves in knots trying to bring the AfD back into the fold, rather than accept that the postwar consensus has folded.
Like many people, I often feel as if I grew up with the Michael Rosen poem that starts: “I sometimes fear that / people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress.” In fact, it was written in 2014, but it was such a neat distillation that it instantly joined the canon of words that had always existed, right up there with clouds being lonely and parents fucking you up. Obviously, fascism arrives as your friend. How else would it arrive?
What I did not anticipate, when thinking that the whole suite of behaviours, from Nazi saluting to upturning reality, belonged well and truly to the past, was the sense of paralysis that would settle when fascism finally put its fancy dress on.
I’m not talking about other world leaders, and the sufficiency or otherwise of their response. I’m honestly just talking about the guy in the street, the spectator, myself. You’re dumbstruck for ages, not wanting to call the thing what it is. [Continue reading…]