This article about renascent neo-Nazi parties in a reunified Germany could not be more clear and persuasive. Consider the following passages, which are merely representative.
“Today’s far-right extremism in Germany cannot be understood without reunification,” said Matthias Quent, a far-right extremism expert and director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society in the eastern state of Thuringia. “It liberated the neo-Nazis in the East from their underground existence, and it gave the far-right in the West access to a pool of new recruits and whole swathes of territory in which to move without too much oversight.”
The location of the neo-Nazi revival is located in East Germany. On this, all parties agree.
Nationalism and xenophobia are more ingrained in the former East, where the murderous history of World War II was never confronted as deeply on a societal level as it was in the former West. The AfD’s vote share is twice as high in the eastern states, where the number of far-right hate crimes is higher than in western ones.
We’re obligated to ignore the non-explanation explanation that the Holocaust was somehow not confronted in the former Soviet bloc — but why then the persistence of fascism in the East?
But a potent neo-Nazi movement was growing underground. In 1987, Bernd Wagner, a young police officer in East Berlin, estimated that there were 15,000 “homegrown” violent neo-Nazis, of whom 1,000 were repeat offenders. His report was swiftly locked away.
Two years later, as tens of thousands took to the streets in anti-communist protests that eventually brought down the regime, the pro-democracy activists were not the only marchers.
“The skinheads were marching, too,” Mr. Wagner recalled.
This is of course the enduring mystery of the New York Times, and of liberal thought with which it is identical. The article is entirely persuasive and no less entirely unaware of its conclusions. The Times can successfully produce all the necessary evidence and then some, and still fail to arrive at the inescapable understanding: anticommunism and fascism are continuous political phenomena.
The implications of that for the United States are as obvious today as they have ever been. But ever been is the key. This continuity has endured not just under hysterical authoritarians like the current president but under normative liberal regimes as well, and this knowledge is intolerable to liberal thought: anticommunism is a form of fascist desire, and vice versa (here I do not mean by “anticommunism” a principled rejection of Stalinism, of the murderers of Kronstadt, of the soviet revolution’s having stopped short of its object — rather the accurate recognition that communism is the historical antithesis of capitalism and the capitalist state).
If you want to know if someone harbors within them a fascist, just wait for the anticommunist anxiety to come leaking out.
This sheds some illumination on the recent efforts to brand the George Floyd Uprising as a communist (or “Marxist” or “socialist” — it’s all the same to the ignorant classes) struggle. On the one hand, by imposing via association what is generally thought to be a white European tradition (never mind the communism of Africa or the Arab world or the Southern Cone or of nonwhite Europeans) is obscures the vital particulars of a Black-oriented movement in the United States, even as it recognizes the class character of the uprising. On the other, it seeks desperately to associate that movement with liberalism’s, uhhh, bête noire in order to draw in to the party of order those liberals otherwise sympathetic to racial liberation struggles. The point being: all of this recoding action toward an agreeable anticommunism is intrinsically and intransigently fascist. Kyle Rittenhouse, 2020’s most well-know brown shirt, is not the opposite number of the liberal anticommunist but their weapon.
It is in some sense good news that the Black-oriented struggle of a multiracial proletariat is forced to wear the red badge of communism, as a central question of that struggle is the extent to which it will emerge over time as broadly anticapitalist. At the same time it is useful as well to return this figure — the Janus-faced figure of anticommunism and fascism — to the international context. As the same article cited above continues,
The battle cry of those anti-communist protests — “We are the people” — later became the battle cry for the far right at anti-Muslim Pegida marches during the 2015 refugee crisis, far-right riots in Chemnitz in 2018, and again at the current anti-coronavirus protests.
At a global level, the racialized figure that fascism/anticommunism must destroy or expel is the Muslim; violent anti-Muslim politics provide a planetary ordering for fascism on the march. If we go back to Donald Trump’s earliest actions as president we can see this particular obsession already in motion, the fascist desire already set loose by the inauguration.