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Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

OUL Note: We don’t agree with much of this MR interview, especially its one-sided attack on the Frankfurt School, but it does contain historical items of interest.

Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939) by David Alfaro Siqueiros

by Gabriel Rockhill and Zhao Dingqi

Monthly Review

(Dec 01, 2023)

Gabriel Rockhill is executive director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique and professor of philosophy at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. He is currently completing his fifth single-author book, The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry (Monthly Review Press, forthcoming). Zhao Dingqi is an assistant researcher at the Institute of Marxism, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the editor of World Socialism Studies.

This interview was originally published in Chinese in the eleventh volume of World Socialism Studies in 2023. It has been lightly edited for MR.

Zhao Dingqi: During the Cold War, how did the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conduct the “Cultural Cold War”? What activities did the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom carry out, and what impact did it have?

Gabriel Rockhill: The CIA undertook, along with other state agencies and the foundations of major capitalist enterprises, a multifaceted cultural cold war aimed at containing—and ultimately rolling back and destroying—communism. This propaganda war was international in scope and had many different aspects, only a few of which I touch on below. It is important to note at the outset, however, that in spite of its extensive reach and the ample resources dedicated to it, many battles have been lost throughout this war.

To take but one recent example that demonstrates how this conflict continues today, Raúl Antonio Capote revealed in his 2015 book that he worked for the CIA for years in its destabilization campaigns in Cuba targeting intellectuals, writers, artists, and students. Unbeknownst to the governmental agency known as “the Company,” however, the Cuban university professor it had slyly honey-potted into promoting its dirty tricks was actually pulling one over on the cocksure master spies: he was working undercover for Cuban intelligence.1 This is but one sign among many others that the CIA, in spite of its various victories, is ultimately fighting a war that proves hard to win: it is attempting to impose a world order that is inimical to the overwhelming majority of the globe’s population.

One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front.2 Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world.3 Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The CCF had offices in thirty-five countries, mobilized an army of around 280 employees, published or supported some fifty prestigious journals around the world, and organized numerous art and cultural exhibitions, as well as international concerts and festivals. During its lifetime, it also planned or sponsored some 135 international conferences and seminars, working with a minimum of 38 institutions, and it published at least 170 books. Its press service, Forum Service, broadcast, free of charge and all over the world, reports from its venal intellectuals in twelve languages, which reached six hundred newspapers and five million readers. This vast global network was what its director, Michael Josselson, called—in an expression reminiscent of the Mafia—“our big family.” From its Paris headquarters, the CCF had at its disposal an international echo chamber to amplify the voice of anticommunist intellectuals, artists, and writers. Its budget in 1966 was $2,070,500, which corresponds to $19.5 million in 2023.

Josselson’s “big family” was, however, just a small part of what Frank Wisner of the CIA called his “mighty Wurlitzer”: the international jukebox of media and cultural programming controlled by the Company. To take but a few examples of this gargantuan framework for psychological warfare, Carl Bernstein marshaled ample evidence to demonstrate that at least four hundred U.S. journalists worked surreptitiously for the CIA between 1952 and 1977.4 Following these revelations, the New York Times undertook a three-month investigation and concluded that the CIA “embraced more than eight hundred news and public information organizations and individuals.”5 These two exposés were published in establishment venues by journalists who themselves operated in the same networks they were analyzing, so these estimates were likely low.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the director of the New York Times from 1935 to 1961, worked so closely with the Agency that he signed a confidentiality agreement (the highest level of collaboration). William S. Paley’s Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was unquestionably the CIA’s greatest asset in the field of audiovisual broadcasting. It worked so intimately with the Company that it installed a direct phone line to CIA headquarters that was not routed through its central operator. Henry Luce’s Time Inc. was its most powerful collaborator in the weekly and monthly arena (including Time—where Bernstein later published—Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated). Luce agreed to hire CIA operatives as journalists, which became a very common cover. As we know from the Task Force on Greater CIA Openness, convened by CIA Director Robert Gates in 1991, these types of practices continued unabated after the revelations mentioned above: “PAO (Public Affairs Office) [of the CIA] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation.… In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories.”6

The CIA also gained control of the American Newspaper Guild, and it became the owner of press services, magazines, and newspapers that it used as cover for its agents.7 It has placed officers in other press services, such as LATIN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and United Press International. William Schaap, an expert on governmental disinformation, testified that the CIA “owned or controlled some 2,500 media entities all over the world. In addition, it had its people, ranging from stringers to highly visible journalists and editors, in virtually every major media organization.”8 “We ‘had’ at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time,” one CIA man told journalist John Crewdson. Furthermore, the source related, “those that the agency did not own outright or subsidize heavily it infiltrated with paid agents or staff officers who could have stories printed that were useful to the agency and not print those it found detrimental.”9 In the digital age, this process has of course continued. Yasha Levine, Alan MacLeod, and other scholars and journalists have detailed the extensive involvement of the U.S. national security state in the realms of big tech and social media. They have demonstrated, among other things, that major intelligence operators occupy key positions at Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, and Google.10

The CIA has also deeply infiltrated the professional intelligentsia. When the Church Committee released its 1975 report on the U.S. intelligence community, the Agency admitted that it was in contact with “many thousands” of academics in “hundreds” of institutions (and no reform since has prevented it from pursuing or expanding this practice, as confirmed by the 1991 Gates Memo mentioned above).11 The Russian Institutes at Harvard and Columbia, like the Hoover Institute at Stanford and the Center for International Studies at MIT, were developed with direct support and oversight by the CIA.12 

A researcher at the New School for Social Research recently brought to my attention a series of documents confirming that the CIA’s heinous MKULTRA project engaged in research at forty-four colleges and universities (at least), and we know that a minimum of fourteen universities participated in the infamous Operation Paperclip, which brought some 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States.13 MKULTRA, for those unfamiliar with it, was one of the Agency’s programs that engaged in sadistic brainwashing and torture experiments in which subjects were administered—without their consent—high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals in combination with electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.

The CIA has also been deeply involved in the art world. For instance, it promoted U.S. American art, particularly Abstract Expressionism and the New York art scene, over and against Socialist Realism.14 It funded art exhibits, musical and theatrical performances, international art festivals, and more in a bid to disseminate what was touted as the free art of the West. The Company has worked closely with major art institutions in these endeavors. To take but a single telling example, one of the major CIA officers involved in the cultural cold war, Thomas W. Braden, was the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) executive secretary before joining the Agency. MoMA’s presidents have included Nelson Rockefeller, who became the super-coordinator for clandestine intelligence operations and allowed the Rockefeller Fund to be used as a conduit for CIA money. Among MoMA’s directors, we find René d’Harnoncourt, who had worked for Rockefeller’s wartime intelligence agency for Latin America. John Hay Whitney of the eponymous museum and Julius Fleischmann sat on MoMA’s board of trustees. The former had worked for the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and allowed his charity to be used as a conduit for CIA money. The latter served as the president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. William S. Paley, the president of CBS and one of the major figures in U.S. psychological warfare programs, including those of the CIA, was on the members’ board of MoMA’s International Program. As this web of relations indicates, the capitalist ruling class works closely with the U.S. national security state in order to tightly control the cultural apparatus.

Many books have been written on the U.S. state’s involvement with the entertainment industry. Matthew Alford and Tom Secker have documented that the Department of Defense has been involved in supporting—with complete and absolute censorship rights—a minimum of 814 movies, with the CIA clocking in at a minimum of 37 and the FBI 22.15 Regarding TV shows, some of which have been very long running, the Department of Defense totals 1,133, the CIA 22, and the FBI 10. Above and beyond these quantifiable cases, there is, of course, the qualitative relationship between the national security state and Tinseltown. John Rizzo explained as much in 2014: “The CIA has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.”16 Having served as the Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA for the first nine years of the war on terror, during which time he was intimately involved in overseeing the global rendition, torture, and drone-assassination programs, Rizzo was well placed to understand how the culture industry could provide cover for imperial butchery.

These activities and many more reveal one of the primary features of the U.S. empire: it is a veritable empire of spectacles. One of its principal focal points has been the war for hearts and minds. To this end, it has established an expansive global infrastructure in order to engage in international psychological warfare. The near absolute control it exercises over mainstream media has been clearly visible in the recent drive to garner support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The same is true for its virulent 24/7 anti-China propaganda. Nevertheless, thanks to the work of so many valiant activists and the fact that it is working against reality itself, the empire of spectacles is incapable of completely controlling the narrative.17

ZD: You mention in one of your articles that CIA agents were keen on reading the French critical theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. What is the reason for this phenomenon? How would you rate French Critical Theory?

GR: One important front in the cultural war on communism has been the intellectual world war, which is the topic of a book that I am currently completing for Monthly Review Press. The CIA has played a very significant role, but so have other governmental agencies and the foundations of the capitalist ruling class. The overall objective has been to discredit Marxism and undermine support for anti-imperialist struggles, as well as actually existing socialism.

Western Europe has been a particularly important battleground. The United States had emerged from the Second World War as the dominant imperial power. In order to try and exercise global hegemony, it was intent on enrolling the former leading imperialist powers in Western Europe as junior partners (as well as Japan in the East). However, this proved to be particularly difficult in countries like France and Italy, which had robust and vibrant communist parties. The U.S. national security state therefore launched a multipronged assault to infiltrate political parties, unions, organizations of civil society, and major news and information outlets.18 It even set up secret stay-behind armies, which it stocked with fascists, and made plans for military coups if the communists ever came to power through the ballot box (these armies were later activated in the post-1968 strategy of tension: they committed terrorist attacks against the civilian population that were blamed on communists).19

On the more explicitly intellectual front, the U.S. power elite supported the establishment of new educational institutions and international networks of knowledge production that were decidedly anticommunist in the hopes of discrediting Marxism. It provided uplift—meaning promotion and visibility—to intellectuals who were openly hostile to historical and dialectical materialism, while simultaneously running heinous slander campaigns against figures like Sartre and Beauvoir.20

It is within this precise context that French theory needs to be understood, at least partially, as a product of U.S. cultural imperialism. The thinkers affiliated with this label—Foucault, Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and many more—were associated in various ways with the structuralist movement, which largely defined itself in opposition to the most prominent philosopher of the preceding generation: Sartre.21 The latter’s Marxian orientation from the mid-1940s onward was generally rejected, and anti-Hegelianism—a shibboleth for anti-Marxism—became the order of the day. Foucault, to take but one telling example, condemned Sartre as “the last Marxist” and claimed that he was a man of the nineteenth century who was out of step with the (anti-Marxist) times, represented by Foucault and other theorists of his ilk.22

While some of these thinkers gained significant notoriety within France, it was their promotion in the United States that catapulted them into the international limelight and made them into required reading for the global intelligentsia. In a recent article in Monthly Review, I detailed some of the political and economic forces at work behind the event that is widely recognized as having inaugurated the era of French theory: the 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which brought together many of these thinkers for the first time.23 The Ford Foundation, which had been cofunding the CCF with the CIA and had many intimate ties to the Agency’s propaganda endeavors, funded the conference and other subsequent activities to the tune of $36,000 ($339,000 today). This is a truly extraordinary amount of money for a university conference, not to mention the fact that press coverage of the event was assured by Time and Newsweek, which is virtually unheard of in academic settings like these.24

The capitalist foundations, the CIA, and other governmental agencies were interested in promoting radically chic work that could serve as an ersatz for Marxism. Since they could not simply destroy the latter, they sought to foster new forms of theory that could be marketed as cutting edge and critical—though devoid of any revolutionary substance—in order to bury Marxism as passé. As we now know from a 1985 CIA research paper on the topic, the Agency was delighted with the contributions of French structuralism, as well as the Annales School and the group known as the Nouveaux Philosophes (New Philosophers). Citing in particular the structuralism affiliated with Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as the methodology of the Annales School, the paper draws the following conclusion: “we believe their critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences is likely to endure as a profound contribution to modern scholarship.”25

Regarding my own evaluation of French theory, I would say that it is important to recognize it for what it is: a product—at least in part—of U.S. cultural imperialism, which seeks to displace Marxism by an anticommunist theoretical practice that indulges in bourgeois cultural eclecticism and mobilizes discursive pyrotechnics in order to create imagined revolutions in discourse that change nothing in reality. French theory rehabilitates and promotes, moreover, the work of anticommunists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, thereby attempting discreetly to redefine radical as radically reactionary.

Continue reading “Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism”

How Black Americans Kept Reconstruction Alive

The federal government abandoned Reconstruction in 1877, but Black people didn’t give up on the moment’s promise.

By Peniel E. Joseph
The Atlantic, December 2023

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

The civil war produced two competing narratives, each an attempt to make sense of a conflict that had eradicated the pestilence of slavery.

Black Americans who believed in multiracial democracy extolled the emancipationist legacy of the war. These Reconstructionists envisioned a new America finally capable of safeguarding Black dignity and claims of citizenship. Black women and men created new civic, religious, political, educational, and economic institutions. They built thriving towns and districts, churches and schools. In so doing, they helped reimagine the purpose and promise of American democracy.

For a time after the war, Black Reconstructionists also shaped the American government. They found allies in the Republican Party, where white abolitionists hoped to honor freedpeople’s demands and to create a progressive country in which all workers earned wages. Republicans in Congress pushed through amendments abolishing slavery, granting citizenship, and giving Black men the ballot. Congress also created the Freedmen’s Bureau, which offered provisions, clothing, fuel, and medical assistance to the formerly enslaved, and negotiated contracts to protect their newly won rights. With backing from the Union army, millions of Black people in the South received education, performed paid labor, voted in presidential elections, and held some of the highest offices in the country—all for the first time.

Black Reconstructionists told the country a new story about itself. These were people who believed in freedom beyond emancipation. They shared an expansive vision of a compassionate nation with a true democratic ethos.

Those who longed for the days of antebellum slavery felt differently. Advocates of the Lost Cause—who believed that the South’s defeat did nothing to diminish its moral superiority—sought to “redeem” their fellow white citizens from the scourge of “Negro rule.” Redemptionists did more than offer a different story about the nation. They demanded that their point of view be sanctified with blood. They threatened the nation’s infrastructure and institutions, and backed up their threats with violence.

In a sense, the work of Reconstruction never ended, because the goal of a multiracial democracy has never been fully realized.

The Redemption campaign was astoundingly successful. Intimidation and lynchings of Black voters and politicians quickly reversed gains in turnout. Reprisals against any white person who supported Black civil rights largely silenced dissent. This second rebellion hastened the national retreat from Reconstruction. Federal troops effectively withdrew from the Confederate states in 1877. White southerners soon dominated state legislatures once again, and passed Jim Crow laws designed to subjugate Black people and destroy their political power.

The official Reconstruction timeline usually ends there, in 1877. But this implies that the Reconstructionist vision of American democracy ceased to exist, or went dormant, without the backing of federal troops. Instead, we should consider a long Reconstruction—one that stretches well beyond 1877, and offers a view that transcends false binaries of political failure and success.

This view allows us to follow the travails of the Black activists and ordinary citizens who kept the struggle for freedom and dignity alive long after the Republican Party and white abolitionists had abandoned it. Black institutions, including the church, the schoolhouse, and the press, kept public vigil over promises made, broken, and, in some instances, renewed during the long march toward liberation. Their stories show that freedom’s flame, once boldly lit, could not be extinguished by the specter of white violence.

The concept of a long Reconstruction recognizes that a nation can be two things at once. After 1877, freedom and repression journeyed along parallel paths. Black Americans preserved a vision of a truly free nation in an archipelago of communities and institutions. Many of them exist today, and continue their work. This, perhaps, is the most important reason to resist the idea that Reconstruction ended when the North withdrew from the South: In a sense, the work of Reconstruction never ended, because the goal of a multiracial democracy has never been fully realized. And America has made its greatest gains toward that goal when it has rejected the Redemptionist narrative.

That the work of Reconstruction continued well after 1877 is illustrated by the life of Ida B. Wells, a woman who witnessed the death of slavery and fought against the beginning of Jim Crow. Wells kept alive the radical ideals of the Reconstructionists and punctured, through her journalism, the virulent mythology peddled by the Redemptionists. When Wells was born—in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862—her parents, Jim and Lizzie Wells, were enslaved. Later that year, the Union army took control of the town while staging an attack on Vicksburg. As they did elsewhere across the dying Confederacy, enslaved people in and around Holly Springs fled plantations for Union lines and emancipated themselves. But freedom proved contingent. Even when Union General Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters in the town, Black refugees feared reprisals from their former enslavers. Their vulnerability to white violence, even under the watch of Union troops, foreshadowed the coming era.

After the war, Jim and Lizzie Wells chose to stay in Holly Springs. Jim joined the local Union League, which supported Republican Party politics and was committed to advancing Black male suffrage. In fall 1867, when Ida was 5 years old, her father cast his first ballot. Ida remembered her mother as an exemplar of domestic rectitude whose achievements were reflected in her children’s perfect Sunday-school attendance and good manners.

Ida grew up in a Mississippi full of miraculous change. She attended the first “colored” school in Holly Springs, a remarkable opportunity in a state that had been considered the most inhospitable to Black education and aspiration in the entire Confederacy. As a young girl, Ida read the newspaper aloud to her father’s admiring friends; just a few years earlier, it would have been illegal in Mississippi to teach her the alphabet.

In 1874, when Wells was 12, 69 Black men were serving in the Mississippi legislature, and a white governor, Adelbert Ames—placed in office partly by the votes of the formerly enslaved—promised to commit the state to equality for all. Around that time, Mississippi’s secretary of state, superintendent of education, and speaker of the House were all Black men.

The world around Ida was full of fiercely independent and economically prosperous Black citizens. These attainments buoyed her optimism for the rest of her life.

But the idyll of her childhood was brief. Redemptionist forces in Mississippi struck back against Black political power with naked racist terror. In December 1874, a white mob in Vicksburg killed as many as 300 Black citizens after forcing the elected Black sheriff, Peter Crosby, to resign. Massacres and lynchings continued unabated across the state through 1875. By 1876, the number of Black men in the state legislature had fallen by more than half. Following the contested election that year, the new president, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, ordered the remaining active northern troops in the South to return to their barracks. Without the protection of federal troops, and with the symbolic abandonment by the president, Black people were on their own, completely vulnerable to voting restrictions, economic reprisals, and racial violence.

For Wells, the collapse of Reconstruction came at a moment of profound personal struggles. In 1878, her parents and one of her brothers died in a yellow-fever outbreak that killed hundreds in Holly Springs, leaving her, at 16, to care for five siblings, including her disabled sister, Eugenia. After Eugenia died, Wells moved to Memphis at the invitation of an aunt.

Wells’s escape from Mississippi did not protect her from the indignities of racism. In 1883, after a visit to Holly Springs, Wells purchased a train ticket back to Memphis, riding first class on a segregated train. She moved to the first-class car for white ladies after being bothered by another passenger’s smoking, and refused to go back to Black first class. Though barely five feet tall, Wells stood her ground until the white conductor physically removed her. She promptly filed suit and, initially at least, won $700 in damages before her two cases were reversed on appeal by the Tennessee State Supreme Court.

The defeat spurred Wells to find another means of fighting Jim Crow. She longed to attend Fisk University, and took summer classes there. By the end of the decade, she had become the editor and a co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper founded by the Beale Street Church pastor Taylor Nightingale.

Wells took over editorial duties amid a surge of anti-Black violence, which had remained a feature of the South even after the Redemptionists achieved their goal of removing federal troops from the region. In the 1880s, the incidents began to intensify. In 1886, at least 13 Black citizens were lynched in a Mississippi courthouse, where free Black men were testifying against a white lawyer accused of assault. Attacks on Reconstructionists continued from there. The more that Black men and women engaged in political self-determination—choosing to own homes and businesses, to defend their families—the more thunderbolts of violence struck them. The bloodshed of Redemption was intended to touch the lives of all Black people in the South.

On March 9, 1892, that violence came to Wells’s life, when a mob of 75 white men in Memphis kidnapped three Black men: Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart. Moss was an owner of the People’s Grocery, an upstart Black cooperative that competed with the local grocery owned by William Barrett, who was white. The rivalry between the stores had escalated into a larger racial conflict, and Moss, McDowell, and Stewart had been sent to jail after guns were fired at a white mob that had attacked the People’s Grocery. Wells knew Moss and his wife, Betty, whom she considered one of her best friends. She was godmother to their daughter Maurine.

Moss, McDowell, and Stewart were given no due process or trial. Another mob took the men from jail and shot each to death, refusing Moss’s plea to spare his life for the sake of his daughter and pregnant wife. Their bodies were left in the Chesapeake & Ohio rail yard. The white-owned Memphis Appeal-Avalanche documented the horrors as fair justice for the troublesome Black men who had dared to fight white men.

In the Free Speech, Wells wrote a series of editorials decrying the killings and the constant threat of violence that Black Americans faced in the South, and urged northerners to renew their support for full Black citizenship. In one of those editorials, Wells called out the “threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” which was the justification for many lynchings. She filed the editorial shortly before a trip to the North. While she was gone, a group of men went to the Free Speech’s offices and destroyed the printing press, leaving a note warning that “anyone trying to publish the paper again would be punished with death.” She chose not to return to Memphis, and continued her campaign from New York.

That June, Wells wrote an essay, “The Truth About Lynching,” in the influential Black newspaper The New York Age. Wells reasoned that most anti-Black violence claimed its roots in economic competition, personal jealousy, and white supremacy. She also dispelled, again, the myth of Black-male sexual violence against white women. Wells pointed instead to the number of mixed-race children in the old Confederacy—evidence of the sexual violence that white men had inflicted on Black women.

Wells’s activism was more than a crusade to end lynching. She traveled the country and Great Britain to describe her vision of multiracial democracy. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and become the foremost civil-rights activist and journalist of the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, admired Wells and characterized her contributions as a “service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”

Wells first met Douglass in the summer of 1892, when he was 74; Douglass had written a letter to her saying he was inspired by her courage. The two developed a close friendship. “There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” Douglass wrote of Southern Horrors, a pamphlet Wells published in 1892 based on her groundbreaking anti-lynching essay. The pair corresponded and worked together for the rest of Douglass’s life. With his death, in 1895, a torch was passed.

Wells’s efforts, in a period of racial fatigue among white audiences, helped continue the central political struggle of Reconstruction. She delivered hundreds of speeches, organized anti-lynching campaigns, and worked to galvanize the public against the Redemptionists. Wells told America a story it needed, but did not want, to hear.

Wells’s work also intersected with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, the scholar, journalist, and civil-rights activist who took a forceful stand against lynching. Their relationship was sometimes collegial, sometimes contentious; Wells never found with Du Bois the same rapport she’d had with Douglass. But she supported Du Bois’s then-radical view of the importance of Black liberal-arts education, and Du Bois was shaped by Wells’s advocacy and critiques.

Du Bois viewed the legacy of Reconstruction as crucial to understanding America. At the behest of another Black intellectual and scholar, Anna Julia Cooper, he published in 1935 his monumental Black Reconstruction. The book traced the origins of the violence that Wells denounced. He wrote that “inter-racial sex jealousy and accompanying sadism” were the main basis of lynching, and echoed Wells’s argument that white men’s violence against Black women had been the true scourge of the South. Du Bois also wrote that the Reconstructionists were engaged in “abolition-democracy,” which he defined as a broader movement for social equality that went beyond political rights.

Du Bois’s scholarship paved the way for a reconsideration of the era. He challenged the Redemptionist narrative of venal corruption and Black men who were either in over their head or merely served white northern puppet masters and southern race traitors.

Du Bois’s work is a starting point for contemporary histories. Eric Foner’s magisterial Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, published more than half a century after Black Reconstruction, added texture to the story of the period, then largely untold. Foner’s work reframed the era as an unfinished experiment in multiracial democracy.

In this tradition of expansion, the historian Steven Hahn’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Nation Under Our Feet, published in 2003, widens earlier historical frameworks by looking beyond Reconstruction’s constitutional reforms. Hahn sought out the Black men and women who shaped Reconstruction at the state and local levels. More recently, the historian Kidada E. Williams’s I Saw Death Coming focuses on the daily lives of Black men and women during Reconstruction—witnesses to the violence of Redemption.

All of these works expand our conception of what Reconstruction was, and challenge the notion that the era came to an abrupt ending in 1877. They portray the era as a contested epic, where parallel movements for Reconstruction and Redemption rise, fall, and are recovered.

I first learned about Reconstruction from my late mother, Germaine Joseph, a Haitian immigrant turned American citizen whose love of history could be gauged by the crammed bookcases in our home in Queens, New York. My first lesson on Reconstruction came in the form of a story about Haiti’s revolution. Mom proudly informed me that Haiti had been the key to unlocking freedom for Black Americans: The Haitian Revolution, she explained, led to revolts of the enslaved, frightened so-called masters, and inspired Frederick Douglass.

Later, I found my way back to Reconstruction through an interest in the Black radical tradition, especially post–World War II movements for racial justice and equality. My mentor, the late historian Manning Marable, described the civil-rights movement, and the age of Black Power that followed, as a second Reconstruction. During this time, with a renewed interest in slavery and its aftermath, scholars rediscovered Du Bois’s work.

My research and writing of late has revolved around interpreting the past 15 years of American history, from Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House in 2008, to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election, to the events that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. In my 2022 book, The Third Reconstruction, I argued that we might be living through another era filled with the kind of dizzying possibility and intense backlash that whipsawed the South during Wells’s life.

Today’s Reconstructionists have a vision for multiracial democracy that might astonish even Douglass, Wells, and Du Bois. Black women, queer folk, poor people, disabled people, prisoners, and formerly incarcerated people have adopted the term abolition from Du Bois’s idea of abolition-democracy, and now use it to refer to a broad movement to dismantle interlocking systems of oppression—many of which originated in Redemption policy. They have achieved important victories in taking down Confederate monuments; sharing a more accurate telling of America’s origin story and its relationship to slavery; and questioning systems of punishment, surveillance, and poverty.

But today’s Redemptionists have had their victories as well. Their apocalyptic story of the present, one in which crime and moral decay threaten to destroy America, rationalizes a return to a past America and aims to dismantle the Reconstruction amendments that underpin fundamental civil rights. Redemptionists promote a regime of education that reverses the gains historians have made since the revival of Black Reconstruction.

The health of American democracy continues to rest upon whether we believe the Reconstructionist or Redemptionist version of history. Reconstruction, as a belief, as an ideal, outlasted the federal government’s political commitments by decades. Black people, the country’s most improbable architects, continued to make and shape history by preserving this rich legacy, and bequeathing it to their children. Their story has remained the heart of the American experiment both when the country has acknowledged them—and, most especially, when it has not.

Dilemmas Of Non-Ruling Socialist/Communist Parties: The Case Of The SACP

by Mphutlane wa Bofelo
Amandla.org

Aug 28, 2023 – In his examination of why despite their meagre results at the polls, nine non-ruling communist parties in Europe continue to have sporadic participation in multi-party coalitions in government, Sidney Tarrow indicates that communist parties enter governments during perceived socioeconomic or political crises or as a left-wing of a multi-party coalition in which the communist parties occupy a central position within the left coalition while the centrist parties and republicans holds a centre stage within the opposite conservative pole. (Tarrow, 1982).

Tarrow (1982) delineates the motivation for the participation of communist parties in such coalition governments or alliance politics as the perception of the communist parties that a crisis situation prevails and a fear of being absent during a critical period. He concludes that the need not to be isolated or marginalised within the political arena cause communist parties to actively or passively support moderate policies and to form alliances with normally anti-communist elements. This implies the belief that communist parties have the theoretical and practical acumen that can take the country out of a crisis but either lack the courage, will and capacity to take the reins of political power or believe that the balance of forces don’t allow them to do so on their own.

The observations of Tarrow (1982) correlates with the proposition that though the political cooperation between the African National Congress (ANC), Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the South African National Civics Organization (SANCO) has historical and ideological roots, their alliance in the post-1990 dispensation is a product of coincidence of political interests. (O’ Malley, 2000). On the eve of the first national democratic elections in 1994, the ANC sought organizational skills, material support, membership and votes or electoral support from COSATU, SACP and SANCO. On other hand, COSATU and SANCO needed a political organization that can win elections, hold political power, and advance a progressive agenda and safe-guards labour and civil society interests in parliament.

At the same time, the ANC had the need to enlist seasoned strategists, tacticians, organizers and campaigners from its alliance partners. Its electoral prospects depend highly on the numbers that the constituencies of its alliance partners added to its membership and support base. Furthermore, the reputable political militancy, organizational skills and ideological insights of the SACP gave it a powerful base within the constituency of both the ANC and COSATU. However, the SACP did not have enough popular support to be a political force on its own in parliamentary politics where numbers are important. Therefore, the SACP had to remain a partner of ANC to try to get the ANC to incorporate its social objectives and agendas. (O’Malley, 2000).

The SACP did foresee that once the ANC is in political office ,it would be tall order to mediate and harmonise the latter’s multi-class and centrist politics with the former’s professed working-class and leftist politics. In lieu of this eventuality, the SACP opted to use as its key tactical device the notion of its members and that of COSATU and SANCO swelling the ranks of the ANC with the aim of populating ANC spaces and platforms with communist ideas and the party-line.

The other tactical devices it utilised are (1) intensifying efforts to influence the political perspective of COSATU unions and education and research labour service organizations such as Ditsela and the Workers College of South Africa, (2) deploying some of its seasoned cadres to take up leadership and influential positions within COSATU and the labour service organization, (3) lobbying and campaigning for the leading activists of SACP, Cosatu and SANCO to have fair representation in the parliamentary and ministerial list of the ANC, and (4) pushing for extensive consultation and engagement of alliance partners on significant policy and programmatic issues relating to both the ANC and the government.

The unintended and negative consequences of this strategy was a brain drain within the leftist component of the alliance (i.e COSATU, SACP and COSATU) as the result of an exodus of its seasoned leaders and activists to government. This also created the problematic situation where these members found themselves bound by both the oath of office and ANC processes. This compelled them to implement policies and programmes of the ANC even when they were at odds with their own personal values and the principles of COSATU, SACP and SANCO. The other challenge that this arrangement created is the political careerism tendency whereby individuals perceive and use their positions of leadership and influence within COSATU, SACP and SANCO as a social currency and stepping ladder to access deployment into government or business with the government.

This opened the allies of the ANC prone to being enmeshed in internal factional divisions of the ANC as they had to be in the good books of whatever faction of the ANC that would become victorious in the contest for control of the government. This is reflected by how the SACP and COSATU threatened to pull out of the alliance in 2006 but backtracked after former President Jacob Zuma emerged victorious at the Polokwane conference, and religiously defended Jacob Zuma throughout the so-called nine wasted years until the dying hours of the second term of Zuma in office.

As for the ANC, its enlistment of leading and experienced activists of its alliance partners in its election list and subsequently the legislature and the executive, and various provincial and local government structures meant that it hit three birds with one stone: ( 1) acquire the votes of constituencies of its alliance partners, (2) acquire the political and technical skills of the leadership and activists of these alliance partners, and (3) put them in a situation where they are obliged to implement co-opt them to neoliberal -capitalist policies and programmes. The ANC has realised that the fact that it is the de facto leader of the alliance and that leaders and activists of its partners are deployed in government or to the business sector on its ticket , reduces their capacity to deviate from ANC policies or to shape its social policy and political economy trajectory.

As soon as serious differences on policy occurred, the ANC flexed its muscles and openly told the alliance partners that if they want to pursue a socialist, communist or social democratic agenda , they must do so on their own and not expect the ANC to do so on their behalf. A telling example is when the late President Mandela read the riot act to COSATU at its own congress, telling them that they can’t dictate ANC policies. Mandela rebuffed COSATU’s opposition to GEAR with a resonant declaration that GEAR is and shall remain ANC policy. Another example is the statement of the former President Thabo Mbeki when he ejected SACP leading activist, Madlala- Routledge from his executive for daring to challenge government policies. Mbeki remarked that as member of the executive Madlala-Routledge was bound to the policies and programmes of the ruling party and that she cannot serve in the executive whilst criticising government policies. Read More

AMILCAR CABRAL IN THE AGE OF ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’

BY BILL FLETCHER, JR.
Real News Network, SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

On the occasion of the republication of ‘Return to the Source’ by Monthly Review Press, a panel of long-serving Pan-Africanists reflect on the life of Amilcar Cabral and the relevance of his teachings to current liberation movements.

Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973), Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean political revolutionary, the founder and president of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, and leader in the war of independence in Guinea-Bissau. at P.A.I.G.C. headquarters, Algiers, February 1967

During his life, Bissau-Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral co-founded the PAIGC and dedicated his life to the liberation of his native Guinea and Cape Verde from Portuguese colonialism and capitalism-imperialism. One of his most celebrated works, Return to the Source, has recently been republished by Monthly Review Press. To mark this occasion, Bill Fletcher Jr., a member of The Real News Board of Directors, hosts a panel on the life and teachings of Cabral and his relevance to political movements today.

Polly Gaster began to work for the Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO, in Dar-es-Salaam in 1967. She organized and ran the Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea from her home in the UK. Since Mozambique’s independence in 1975, she has lived and worked there in a variety of sectors

Craig Howard has more than 25 years of nonprofit experience, most of them in workforce and community economic development, designing and implementing replicable programs that create jobs and opportunities for disadvantaged people in the U.S. and abroad. Until his retirement, he served as a program director for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rozell “Prexy” Nesbitt was born and raised on Chicago’s West Side. A lifetime activist and intellectual, Nesbitt has lectured both in the United States and abroad, and has written extensively, publishing a book and articles in more than twenty international journals. Over the course of his career, Nesbitt made more than seventy trips to Africa, including trips taken in secret to apartheid torn South Africa; his work has garnered him numerous awards throughout his career.

Stephanie Urdang was born in South Africa and immigrated to the United States at the end of the 1960s. She became active in the anti-apartheid and solidarity movements in the late 1960’s onwards. She is a journalist, author of several books, and the co-founder of the NGO Rwanda Gift for Life.

Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Bill Fletcher Jr.:

Hey, I’m Bill Fletcher and welcome to the Real News Network. We have a wonderful panel here. A panel constituted to commemorate the republication of a major book Return to the Source, a book of selected writings of the late Amilcar Cabral. Before we get into that, the morning, early morning, October 15th, 1972, I and a guy named Steve Pitts jumped into a Volkswagen Bug in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were both students at Harvard, and we had heard that Amilcar Cabral was going to be speaking at Lincoln University. There was actually a group of us that were going to go down, but one person after another dropped by the wayside. And so it was left to me and Steve to drive all night to see Cabral. Which we did that afternoon, when he addressed a very large audience in a very hot room, delivering his presentation where he was receiving an honorary doctorate. None of us could have conceived of the idea that we were going to be among the last people to see Cabral alive, because in early 1973 he was murdered.

Cabral had a very, very important significance throughout the world, throughout the global left, in the movements of people of African descent. And this book, Return to the Source, when it came out, was very, very important in helping a broad audience get an appreciation of Cabral’s significance. Well, we’re going to talk about that today, and we have an opportunity with four wonderful guests. So we have joining us, Stephanie Urdang, who’s a South African-American. She was active in the US anti-apartheid movement and has worked for over two decades as a gender specialist for the United Nations. As a freelance journalist, she has published three books with Monthly Review Press, which is the publisher of this new edition, the most recent of hers being a memoir, Mapping My Way Home: Activism, Nostalgia, and the Downfall of Apartheid South Africa.

Also, joining us is Craig Howard, recently retired as program director at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Earlier in his career, Craig was a member of the African Information Service in New York. Also, Prexy Nesbitt is a college professor and former union organizer. He was active in the anti-apartheid movement and African solidarity movement on several continents, and comes from Chicago.

Finally, in an unplanned way, Polly Gaster started to work with the Mozambique Liberation Front, FRELIMO, in Dar es Salaam in 1967. Back in the United Kingdom, she organized and ran the Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea, during which time she met Amilcar Cabral. Since Mozambique’s independence in 1975, she has lived and worked there, mainly in various sectors of information and communication. And I want to welcome our guests and welcome you, the viewers. So I want to start with a question for all of you, and just think about this as a sort of living room discussion. Who was Amilcar Cabral, and why does he continue to have significance? And in answering this question, I’d like you to answer it as if you were speaking to someone who’s in their 20s or 30s, who may not be as well versed in the liberation struggles as we are. So who would like to start with this?

Polly Gaster:

Okay. Can I?

Bill Fletcher Jr.:

Please.

Polly Gaster:

Let’s see. Well, Amilcar Cabral described himself in the quote on the cover of the book, least if it’s still there, which is something to the effect of, “I am a simple African man doing my duty in the context of my time.” And I think that is a good starting point because from that starting point, he became a leader of the liberation movement for the country that he was born in and grew up in and studied in, mostly. Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Cape Verde is an archipelago of islands, just off Guinea-Bissau on the West Coast of Africa. And he had a big advantage, I think, because he was an agronomist and he worked firstly in agronomy, he worked in a big colonial administration. And of course, both of those countries, both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau were Portuguese colonies at the time, when he was a young man and beginning to work.

And from there he moved, through discussions and learning and enjoying and learning about resistance in Portugal and reading, he and some comrades established the Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Liberation Movement, PAIGC, and developed it. I think maybe I have just said enough. And he became a very well known leader, and he was part of a staggeringly good generation of African independence leaders in the Portuguese colonies, in Ghana and in Tanzania and other countries. And it was a generation that Africa was very lucky to have.

Bill Fletcher Jr.:

Prexy, same question.

Stephanie Urdang:

Okay.

Bill Fletcher Jr.:

No, Prexy.

Prexy Nesbitt:

If I jump into this, I was really lucky, because I’d seen and met Cabral, at the very sad occasion of Eduardo Mondlane’s funeral in Dar es Salaam. And I think that was in February of ’69. And I met him there, I then think I saw him after that, if my memory serves me correctly, at the big conference that was held in Rome to support the peoples of the Portuguese colonies. And I was there and working and volunteering. And much to my surprise, I arrived the same day he showed up. And as he walked into the room, he saw me and he said, “Hello, Prexy.” And I was just shocked, that this man would even remember me at all. So that was something that I learned was a very powerful aspect of him. And then finally, just to kick this off and show what a human being he was, maybe Craig remembers this too, we met him at the airport to drive him to the Lincoln speech in Lincoln, Pennsylvania.

And I remember his getting into the car, and he was sitting directly in front of me. I was in the back, Bob Van Lupe was driving. And he went to get a cigarette, and he didn’t have his seatbelt on and the alarm went off. And Cabral jumped and he said, “What? What’s happening? What’s happening?” And we said, “You have to have your seatbelt on.” He said, “You all are in slavery. In this country, every aspect of you is in some kind of slavery all the time.” But what I found just wonderful about him, and would later have this borne out when my sister goes to hear him speak in New York at Jennifer Davis’s house, and I asked her to follow him to every speech he gave, and he finally noticed her writing with this weird handwriting she had. And this wonderful characteristic he had, of noticing people and remembering details about them, I think was one of the sources of his greatness.

Bill Fletcher Jr.:

Thank you. Stephanie, same question.

Stephanie Urdang:

I mean, he was a great leader, as Polly said. For me, one of his strengths, or one of his number of strengths that I want to point to, was his ease in turning complex ideology and political analysis into simple words. So there wasn’t the sort of sense that you had to understand the great Marx’s analysis or something, you just really understood. And some of the things he would refer to was, “People are not fighting for ideas, they’re fighting for material benefit and we’ve got to be able to provide that, otherwise the revolution fails.” He also was not essentially a violent man. He did not think that violence was something that the revolution should follow, except that it had to, because of the violence of the Portuguese colonialism. I mean, as far as I know, there were no blowing ups of cafes or buses in Lisbon or Portugal. READ More

Woodrow Wilson Was Even Worse Than You Think

It’s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson’s presidency that sealed the victory.

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, served two four-year terms from 1913-1921. Among his accomplishments was the establishment of the Federal Reserve banking system and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission. He declared war on Germany in 1917, during World War I, and attended the Versailles Peace Conference ending the war. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his Fourteen Point peace plan and his work toward establishing the League of Nations. (Photo by Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, served two four-year terms from 1913-1921. Among his accomplishments was the establishment of the Federal Reserve banking system and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission. He declared war on Germany in 1917, during World War I, and attended the Versailles Peace Conference ending the war. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his Fourteen Point peace plan and his work toward establishing the League of Nations. (Photo by Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
An incorrigible white supremacist, Wilson’s racism was fundamental even to his “idealistic” plans for a peaceful post-WWI world order.

By Colin Woodard

Taking Points Memo

June 29, 2020 – This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

Princeton University’s decision this weekend to strike the name of its former president — and ours — from its public policy school for his “racist thinking and policies” was long overdue. Woodrow Wilson was in wide company in being a white supremacist at the turn of the 20th century, but he stands apart in having overseen the triumph of this ideology at home and abroad.

Son of the Confederacy’s leading cleric, apologist for the Klan, friend of the country’s most prominent racist demagogues, and architect and defender of an apartheid international racial order, the amazing thing is that Wilson’s name was ever associated with idealism or respectable statesmanship. In fact, delving deeply into his life to write “Union” — a book on the battle over whether the United States was to be defined by adherence to “natural rights” ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence, or to Anglo-Saxon bloodlines — I came away wondering how any institution would have wanted to be associated with his name at all, even in the 1920s or 1940s.

Wilson was raised in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy who made his name through the publication of his popular sermon arguing for the Biblical sanction of slavery. After the war the slaves who served the Wilson family in the Rectory became wage laborers, but little else changed until the elder Wilson relocated the family to South Carolina’s capital, Columbia, a city that remained half-ruined after a fire spread during General Sherman’s advance five years earlier. Under the protection of the U.S. Army, South Carolina’s African-American majority had sent a 78–46 Black majority to the lower chamber of the State House, just four blocks from the Wilson’s Greek Revival home, and ten to the 21-seat senate, where Republicans — then still very much the party of Lincoln — also enjoyed a majority. As an academic and president, Wilson would later reveal just what he thought of these developments.

After dropping out of Davidson College (he had a “cold”) and loafing about his parents’ home for a year, Wilson’s father enrolled him at another Presbyterian, Southern-friendly college in Princeton, New Jersey which, unlike Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or Brown, refused to admit African-Americans. Two thirds of Princeton’s students came from the former Confederacy, but Wilson was confronted with non-Southerners for the first time, an experience that bolstered his reactionary politics and Southern identity. He took up the secessionist side in debates with classmates, and nearly came to blows with some Northern students during the contested 1876 election. He fumed over Rutherford B. Hayes’s ascension to the presidency — “How much happier we would be now if [we] had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a Republic” — and was outraged by the prospect of universal male suffrage, which he called “the foundation of every evil in this country.”

He graduated from Princeton, but dropped out of University of Virginia’s law school after a year, again alleging a cold, and spent another sixteen months at his parents’ home, writing articles nobody would publish. “The determination of the Saxon race of the South that the negro race shall never again rule over them is, then, not unnatural and it is necessarily unalterable,” one concluded, arguing that Southern whites must maintain “united resistance to the domination of an ignorant race.”

He eventually wound up at Johns Hopkins University to study history, but was soon annoyed by his professors’ insistence that he do archival research, “digging … into dusty records” and “other rummaging work of a dry kind, which seemed very tiresome in comparison with the grand excursions amongst imperial policies which I had planned for myself,” as he put it to his fiancée. He made friends with a fellow Southerner, Thomas Dixon Jr., and wrote a book about the “living reality” of U.S. government without once visiting D.C., a short train excursion south of Baltimore, and then dropped out, believing he did not need a doctorate to pursue an academic career. Discovering otherwise, he convinced his former mentors to let him submit his book as his dissertation and stand for oral exams specially devised to ensure his success. In June 1886, he was awarded a PhD he hadn’t really earned.”

He condemned Reconstruction — the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South — and said allowing Blacks to vote was a ‘carnival of public crime.’ “

He ultimately taught at Princeton, where he made his mark with a compact textbook, “Division and Reunion,” about the Civil War and postwar reconciliation. Contained within was an outline of the post-Confederate vision of a nation reunited based on shared Anglo-Saxon interests. He declared the “charges of moral guilt” leveled against Southern slave lords were unjust because slaves “were almost uniformly dealt with indulgently and even affectionately by their masters,” who themselves were the beneficiaries of “the sensibility and breeding of entitlement.” He condemned Reconstruction — the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South — and said allowing Blacks to vote was a “carnival of public crime.” The mass slaughter of Black people by white terrorists in Hamburg, Vicksburg, Colfax, New Orleans and other cities went unmentioned, as did attacks occurring in dozens of South Carolina towns right under Wilson’s nose the whole time he was coming of age.

“Division and Reunion” was met with mixed reviews, but was a commercial success, as it embraced an account that let white Americans put the Civil War and civil rights behind them. And it inspired Wilson to write “A History of the American People,” a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902. (“A disappointment after the pleasure of examining the pictures is past,” a leading journal wrote of it.) It furthered the white supremacist arguments in “Division and Reunion,” calling freed slaves “dupes” and the KKK a group formed “for the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement” whose members accidentally discovered they could create “comic fear” in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer “of the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe” but contained “multitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland” and Chinese people, “with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,” who seemed “hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits” and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.

Then he went into politics, swapping the presidency of Princeton for the governorship of New Jersey by convincing the Democratic Party bosses of that state that he would be their puppet, but backstabbing them once he achieved power. After his 1911 inauguration, he did little governing, as he was soon laying groundwork for a presidential campaign. With the Republican vote split between incumbent William Howard Taft and the third party candidacy of former president Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson won the 1912 election with less than 42 percent of the vote, becoming the first Deep Southerner to hold the presidency.

It’s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson’s presidency that sealed the victory. Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal government, with Black civil servants directed to use only certain bathrooms and to eat their lunches there too so as to not sully the cafeterias. At the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, makeshift partitions were erected in offices so white clerks would not have to see their Black counterparts. Dozens of prominent African-American officials were replaced with whites, which came as a shock to many African American leaders who’d supported Wilson because he’d promised to treat Blacks “fairly.” When the (white) head of the NAACP, erstwhile Wilson ally Oswald Garrison Villard, begged the president to reverse course, Wilson told him it was all being done “in the interest of the negroes.” The president famously ejected Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter from the Oval Office for having temerity to tell him that his delegation came to him not as “wards” but as “full-fledged American citizens” demanding equality of citizenship.”

Wilson has been described as ‘idealistic’ because of his efforts to create an international governing order at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. But his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. “

The first Hollywood blockbuster was released in 1915, “The Birth of a Nation,” an epic film celebrating the KKK’s reign of terror against African-Americans in the South Carolina of Wilson’s adolescence and denigrating the black majority legislature that convened in his hometown with crude racial stereotypes. Co-produced by Wilson’s friend from Johns Hopkins, Thomas Dixon Jr., who wrote the novel it was based on, it contained numerous quotes from Wilson’s “History of the American People” substantiating its point of view. Massive protests broke out in cities across the country, seeking to have it censored, a common occurrence in the years before the Supreme Court ruled that artistic productions were protected speech. Threatened with bankruptcy, Dixon turned to his old friend to intervene. Wilson screened the film in the White House for his Cabinet, and the following day Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White — whose statues in Louisiana and the U.S. Capitol are also subject of current protests — agreed to show it to the other justices and congressional leaders because he himself had been in the Klan and loved the film’s message. These tacit endorsements from the highest levels of power turned the tide and the film went on to be a massive financial success and was until very recently celebrated as a great work of art.

Wilson has been described as “idealistic” because of his efforts to create an international governing order at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. But his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. He promoted the principles of democracy and national self-determination, but only for European nations and Anglo-Saxon settler countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs deserved their own national states, African, Arab, Indian, and Pacific Island peoples did not. Those living in the Axis powers’ former colonial possessions were sorted into a racial hierarchy of League mandates — Class A, B, and C — based on the level of tutelage they required.

Japan, an allied power in the war, introduced a measure to include the principle of racial equality in the League’s mandate. Wilson opposed it because it would have compelled the U.S. to ensure equal treatment to Japanese, Haitian, or Liberian citizens in hotels, restaurants, and transport across the Jim Crow South. The measure passed anyway, 11-5, but Wilson, who chaired the proceedings, unilaterally and arbitrarily declared the measure had failed because it was not unanimous. He also refused to meet Trotter, who had arrived with a petition for African-American equal rights, and a 29-year-old Vietnamese man seeking self-determination for his French-ruled people, who would later take matters into his own hand under his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh.

Princeton’s school of public service was reorganized in 1948, eighteen years after its creation, to add graduate education and a new emphasis on training the governmental experts the U.S. was thought to need to win the developing Cold War. “Many problems must be solved at home if our democratic institutions are to flourish,” the New York Times paraphrased Princeton president Harold Dodds as saying at the time. Having named his institution for someone opposed to the ideals of human equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence seems a straightforward problem for Princeton to have finally solved.

Colin Woodard is the author of six books including “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood” and “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.”

Quantum Hype: A Review of Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku

By Ivan Handler

Special to the OUL

June 16, 2023 – There has been a continuous stream of extremely impressive technical advances in the world ever since the closing days of WWII. The invention of the computer was in many ways the most significant since almost every other advance has depended on the computer and its amazing evolution post war. But add to the computer, nuclear weapons, the transistor, the discovery of DNA, the Internet, CRISPR and you see how completely scientific discoveries have profoundly impacted society.

It looks like quantum computers are going to be the latest advance with many far flung applications that are just starting to appear.

But along with new technology comes a lot of speculation and especially hype. Hype plays a special role since it takes lots of resources to develop technology which means investors need to be convinced of its profitability and government agencies need to be brought onboard the bandwagon. Hype generates excitement, and in the US, excitement appears to have magical powers over investors. For example, remember “Pets R Us” and the thousands of failed, ridiculous internet startups in the late 90s.

The new book, Quantum Supremacy, fits into this scenario neatly. It is written by a prominent physicist who is an excellent expositor of both the technical details behind quantum computing as well as someone with broad knowledge of many areas of science and engineering. This allows him skillfully to hype the implications of quantum computing (QC) to the public, especially potential investors.

First of all, despite the hype, a reader will learn a lot about quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and many other areas of science when reading the book. The writing is clear, concise, and enjoyable. It is worth reading for those reasons alone. Kaku isn’t that clear about how these computers function because, at this point, you need to know a lot about quantum mechanics to understand much more. That really shouldn’t be a problem for the average reader.

The problems I have with the book are with Kaku’s unfortunate ignorance of what is happening in agriculture and the relationship with many of the technologies and projects related there, such as the invention of fertilizer and the green revolution. It is significant that Kaku mentions global warming and a bunch of possible technical approaches to reducing greenhouse gasses and ignores the crisis in biodiversity[1] which includes warming and much more and is far more serious.

In general, there is a difference between what we can do with technology and what we should do. Kaku is high on the former and human survival depends on the latter.

Chapter 1

Kaku starts with some announcements of quantum computers that have accomplished remarkable results: Google’s ‘Sycamore’ quantum computer could solve a mathematical problem in 200 seconds that would take 10,000 years on the world’s fastest supercomputer. The Quantum Innovation Institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences went even further. They claimed their quantum computer was 100 trillion faster than an ordinary supercomputer.”

This chapter touches on the themes in the book without much detail. While Kaku mentions that quantum computers are not like the current programmable ones, he gives the reader the impression that quantum computers will replace current computers because of their computational abilities. This is not true. So far, quantum computers are attacking many problems. But it is not at all clear that there aren’t many problems that can’t be solved by quantum computers that are solvable by traditional ones. This is an aspect of the hype that continues throughout the book.

The heroes of this chapter are Big Tech: Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Rigetti and Honeywell. This excites Wall Street and someof its projections: “… that the market for quantum computers should reach hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2020s and tens of billions of dollars in the 2030s.”

He does mention on page 6 that: “Despite the impressive technical achievements made by Google and others in recent years, a workable quantum computer that can solve real-world problems is still many years in the future.” Kaku probably should have put this disclaimer in each subsequent chapter.

He then mentions that Richard Feynman, a Nobel Laureate, wrote a groundbreaking paper in 1959 that directly led to quantum computing. He then sketches the idea of a qubit and how it replaces the ‘bit.’ The ‘bit’ in standard computing has a value of ‘one’ or ‘zero,’ the basis of binary coding. The qubit, drawing on the varying states of atoms and their electrons, can have vastly more values than ‘one’ or ‘zero’ on the quantum level. Hence the ‘q’ is added to ‘bit,’ making the qubit. Thus, the phenomena of numerous superpositions on the atomic level make using qubits in calculations quite powerful. The rest of the chapter previews how Kaku sees quantum computing impacting other areas of society. Each description of a fantastic outcome comes with little else than his enthusiasm.

On the other hand, on page 18, under his Feeding the Planet headline, he lauds the green revolution as well as Microsoft’s attempts to improve fertilizers with quantum computing. This is quite sad since the green revolution did more to feed dogs and cats than it ever did to feed people – see How The Other Half Dies by Susan George published in 1977. The environmental damage done by fertilizers is well known and is one of the main reasons people turn to organic agricultural practices.

Chapter 2

Here Kaku does a great job recounting the development of computing technology from the Ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism (and the thinking behind its calculations) through the work of Alan Turing on the formalization of computing. Even here, there is a certain amount of hype. “While the Antikythera represents the beginning of computer technology, the quantum computer may represent the highest stage of its evolution” Too bad he didn’t add the word ‘today’ at the end of that quote. It should be clear reading this chapter that the quantum computer, for whatever its promises and perils, is just another step down the road of scientific innovation. (CONTINUED)

Global Post-Fascism and the War in Ukraine

After the Russian invasion in Ukraine, life in both countries will never be the same. But to be able to live and act further we need to find answers to some crucial questions. Why did this war begin? Why is it so hard to stop? What will the future look like after the war?
Posle (‘after’ in Russian) is an attempt to answer these questions. As a community of like-minded authors, we condemn the war, which has unleashed a humanitarian disaster, wrought colossal destruction, and resulted in the massacre of civilians in Ukraine. This same war has provoked a wave of repression and censorship in Russia. As part of the left, we cannot view this war separately from the immense social inequality and powerlessness of the working majority. Naturally, we also cannot look past an imperialist ideology that strives to keep the status quo intact and feeds on the militarist discourse, xenophobia, and bigotry. 
Our platform sets out to examine the structure of these problems and imagine the way out. Posle welcomes and is open to scholars, journalists, activists, and eyewitnesses – everyone, who seeks to understand the present and to think through the future.  

Here is the first piece in the “Unordinary Fascism” series: a conversation between Ilya Budraitskis and historian Enzo Traverso about the global rise of post-fascism, Putin’s Russia, and the war in Ukraine

Ilya Budraitskis: A few years ago, you wrote The New Faces of Fascism, where you defined post-fascism as a new threat that is simultaneously similar to and different from classical fascism of the 20th century. Post-fascism, as you describe, grows out of the fundamentally new soil of neoliberal capitalism, in which labor movements and forms of social solidarity have been attacked. You emphasize that post-fascism grew out of post-politics as a reaction to technocratic governments that ignore democratic legitimacy. At the same time, your analysis is limited mainly to the European Union and the United States, where fascism results from liberal democracy. Can this approach be expanded to the transformation of authoritarian regimes like the one in Russia, especially after the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine? In Russia, the regime in the first decade of its existence in the early 2000s also presented itself as a technocratic post-political government. It was based on mass depoliticization and lack of political participation in Russian society.

Enzo Traverso: Well, it’s important to emphasize that “post-fascism” is an unconventional analytical category. It’s not a canonical concept like liberalism, communism, or fascism. It’s rather a transitional phenomenon that has not yet crystallized or clearly defined its nature. It can evolve in different directions. Nevertheless, the starting point of this definition is that fascism is trans-historical, transcending the historically framed experience of the 1930s. Fascism is a category that can be useful to define political experiences, systems of power, and regimes that take place after the period between the two world wars. It’s common to speak about Latin American fascism during the military dictatorships of the 1960s and the 1970s. 

“Global post-fascism is a heterogeneous constellation in which we can find shared tendencies: nationalism, authoritarianism, and a specific idea of ‘national regeneration’”

That said, when we speak of democracy, it is worth noticing that although Germany, Italy, the United States, and Argentina share this label of liberal democracy, this does not mean that their institutional systems are the same. Nor does it mean that they correspond with Pericles’ democracy in Ancient Athens. So, fascism is a generic term that takes a trans-historical dimension. You are right to say that my book on post-fascism primarily focuses on the European Union, the United States, and some Latin American countries. When I wrote it, Bolsonaro had not yet come to power in Brazil. However, I also wrote that post-fascism could be considered a global category, which tendentially includes authoritarian political regimes such as Putin’s Russia or Bolsonaro’s Brazil. I am not sure that this category can be used to define Xi Jinping’s China, simply because this regime was created by the communist revolution of 1949 (I similarly do not think we could describe Stalin’s Russia as “fascist”). Maybe this category can be used to depict some tendencies that shape Modi’s India or Erdogan’s Turkey and raise legitimate worries. But I do not suggest extending or transposing my analysis of Western Europe to other continents and political systems; I would rather say that Western European post-fascism can be located into a global post-fascist tendency, including regimes with entirely different historical trajectories and pasts. Otherwise, it would be a very problematic way of creating for the umpteenth time a Eurocentric paradigm of fascism, which is not my approach.

The problem of how to define post-fascism, however, still remains after these considerations. Global post-fascism is a heterogeneous constellation in which we can find shared features and tendencies. They are nationalism, authoritarianism, and a specific idea of “national regeneration.” Within this constellation, these tendencies might appear differently combined and in varying degrees. For instance, Putin’s Russia is much more authoritarian than Meloni’s Italy. In Italy, we have a chief of government who proudly claims the fascist past (her own and that of her country), but Italy’s dissident voices are not censured, persecuted, or put to jail like in Russia. There are no Italians who are exiled because their lives are threatened in Italy. This is a significant qualitative difference. Another relevant difference is the relationship to violence. We are speaking about Russia, which is a country involved in a war. The violence displayed by this variety of post-fascist regimes cannot be compared.  

There are a lot of relevant discrepancies distinguishing all these forms of post-fascism from classical fascism. Their ideologies and their ways of mobilizing the masses are not the same… The utopian dimension, for instance, which characterizes classical fascism, is utterly absent from current fascism, which is very conservative. We could mention other cleavages.

“Italian post-fascists do not wish to install a dictatorship or to dissolve the parliament, but emotionally and culturally they remain fascist”

Ilya: I would like to go through these features of post-fascism. If I understand you correctly, after reading the book and some of your interviews, you stress that post-fascism came from the crisis of democracy. Democracy not as a normative term, but electoral politics, to be more precise. The difference between classical fascism and post-fascism is that the latter does not challenge democracy. Classical fascism had the task of overthrowing democracy. Post-fascism still tries to use electoral mechanisms. The transformation towards an openly fascist dictatorship should take place through legal institutions. I am interested, in particular, in this moment of transition. You also write in your book that post-fascism can be understood as a stage for the new quality of political regimes with authoritarian or dictatorial features. How do you think this transition differs in different regions? I believe that in Russia fascist tendencies developed from the top. Twenty years ago, elements of the authoritarian regime were already installed, and since then Russia has been transformed into some kind of fascist dictatorship.

Enzo: A straightforward historical overview shows that many authoritarian regimes with fascist features have appeared without mass movements, but were introduced through a military coup, for instance Franco’s regime in Spain or Latin American regimes in the 1960s and the 1970s. They were not supported by a mass movement unlike the canonical examples of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Both Mussolini and Hitler were appointed to power by the King (of the Italian monarchy) and by the President (of the Weimar Republic) respectively, according to their constitutional prerogatives. I don’t think that we can create a compelling or normative fascist paradigm. It is a large category including different ideologies and forms of power.

“Post-fascists win elections because they oppose neoliberalism, but when they come to power, they apply neoliberal policies”

An enormous difference that separates post-fascism from classical fascism is the huge transformation that has taken place in the public sphere. At the time of classical fascism,  charismatic leaders had an almost physical contact with their community of followers. Fascist rallies were liturgical moments that celebrated this emotional communion between the leader and its disciples. Today this connection has been replaced by the media, which create a completely different kind of charismatic leadership, at the same time more extended and pervasive, but also more fragile. Nonetheless, we cannot avoid the fundamental question: What does fascism mean in the twenty-first century? All observers constantly face this question: Is Trump/Putin/Bolsonaro/Le Pen/Meloni/Orban fascist? The simple fact of putting this question means that for us it is impossible to analyze all these leaders or regimes without comparing them to classical fascism. On the one hand, they are not fascist tout court; on the other hand, they cannot be defined without being compared with fascism. They are something between fascism and democracy, oscillating between these two poles according to the changing circumstances.  

There are also contradictory dynamics. Russian nationalism is going through a process of radicalization, reinforcing these post-fascist tendencies. In Western Europe, the Italian case is emblematic of the opposite tendency. Until very recent times, Georgia Meloni was the only political leader who shamelessly claimed her fascist identity in the Italian parliament. In this she differed from other far-rights in Europe, for example Marine Le Pen, who had explicitly abandoned the ideological and political models of her father by changing the name of her movement (Rassemblement National replacing Front National). Marine Le Pen claimed her belief in democracy, affirming her support to the institutions of the French Republic, and so on, when Meloni celebrated the accomplishments of Mussolini’s Italy. The latter won the elections — thanks to a favorable electoral system and the division of the center-left — not because of her ideological references but rather because she appeared as the only and most coherent adversary of Mario Draghi, the chief of a governmental coalition supported by the European Union. 

However, since she came to power, Meloni is conducting the same policies of her predecessor and no longer criticizes the EU institutions. As chief of government, she celebrated the anniversary of the Liberation, the anniversary of the triumph of democracy over fascism that took place on April 25, 1945. Meloni reminds me of those paradoxical figures that, in the 1920s, were called in Germany Vernunftrepublikaner (“republicans by reason”). After the collapse of Wilhelm’s Empire at the end of 1918, they had accepted — by reason — the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic, but their heart still beat for the empire. Italian post-fascists are a similar case, one century later. They do not wish to install a dictatorship or to dissolve the parliament, but emotionally and culturally speaking they remain fascist. Their fascism requires many adjustments to a changed historical context.

There is also the case of Trump. In 2016, he was a worrying and enigmatic political innovation. During his presidency, and particularly on January 6, 2021, we experienced a significant political turn that revealed a clear fascistic dynamic. Today I am not sure that the Republican Party, that was one of the pillars of the US establishment, can be defined any more as one of components of the American democracy. It is a political party in which very strong post-fascist or even neofascist tendencies have become hegemonic, a political party that puts into question the state of law and the most elementary principle of democracy: the alternation of power through elections.

Ilya: I hypothesize that in countries with a limitation of political power because of oppositional political movements or various state institutions which reduce the power of the president or prime minister, the transformation towards an authoritarian state is more complicated. Whereas in Russia, all the political institutions have lost any source of independence (no parliament, no court, no serious political opposition), and there are no limitations to the actions of the president, the only sovereign. In countries like the US, the president has many obstacles to his independent decision-making and setting of policies, and the president’s decisions are not totally decisive. 

Enzo: I agree with you. I am far from idealizing liberal democracy and market society, but there is undoubtedly a difference between the United States, where democracy has existed for two and a half centuries, and Russia, where it has almost never existed. We do not need to mobilize Tocqueville to explain this. In Russia, democracy is the legacy of a few years of Glasnost and Perestroika, at the end of the USSR, as well as a byproduct of the resistance of civil society against an oligarchic power that managed the transition to capitalism three decades ago.

“Post-fascism is reactionary, and as such it is a reaction to neoliberalism”

However, there remains a cleavage between the new radical right and classical fascism that should also be considered: the relationship of post-fascism with neoliberalism, as you said at the beginning of our conversation. My book suggests that one of the keys to understanding the post-fascist wave in Western Europe is its opposition to neoliberalism. Of course, as the case of Meloni proves, it is a very contradictory opposition. They win elections because they oppose neoliberalism, but when they come to power, they apply neoliberal policies. Italy is a great example. Neoliberalism is embodied in Western Europe by the European Union, the European Commission, the Central European Bank, etc. Those institutions are trusted interlocutors for the financial elites, who can (also?) find a compromise with Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni or Victor Orban, without trusting them completely. Emmanuel Macron, Mario Draghi, and Mark Rutte are much more reliable and trusted leaders.

In the US, one key to understanding the Trump election in 2016 was his opposition to the establishment. Hilary Clinton embodied the establishment much more than Trump did, despite the obvious fact that a powerful section of American capitalism supports the Republican Party. Nonetheless, there is an evident tension between Trump — sometimes an opposition — and the most significant elements of neoliberalism. Think of the very bad relationship between Trump and California’s multinational companies, new technologies, and so on. There is also an almost “ontological” or constitutive discrepancy between neoliberalism, which works through the global market, and post-fascism, which is deeply nationalist. Post-fascists demand state interventions and protectionist tendencies that contradict the logic of financial capitalism. 

Ilya: My next question is related to what you just said about current capitalism’s neoliberal transformation. You mention in your book that one of the differences between post-fascism and classical fascism is the lack of a project for the future. While classical fascism was a modernist project with a vision of another society (opposite to any emancipatory socialist perspective), post-fascism has no consistent project, only a no-horizon view. There’s an idea that we have to go back to some beautiful past without any vision of the future. This reminds me of one of the main features of neoliberalism. There’s no future, no alternative. Capitalist realism is dominant, as Mark Fischer once pointed out. Another feature is the temporal experience of the post-fascist leaders. People like Putin and Trump are older people. Classical fascism was mostly the movement of the young. Do you think this lack of the future and retrospective, nostalgic element of post-fascism somehow relates to the neoliberal lack of view on the future?

Enzo: You point out some relevant issues. Classical fascism possessed a powerful utopian dimension. It wanted to be an alternative to both liberalism and communism, but it even strived to be a new civilization, something related to a different conception of existence itself. They launched very ambitious projections of society: the myth of the new man, the myth of the “thousand-year Reich,” and so on. This utopian dimension was rooted in the depth of the European and international crisis of capitalism. It does not exist today because capitalism in its neoliberal form appears as an insuperable and indestructible framework. Between the two world wars, there was an alternative to capitalism, created by the Russian Revolution, and communism as a utopian project was able to mobilize millions of human beings. This is a huge difference. Contemporary post-fascist currents are extremely conservative. They wish to save traditional values. They want to return to the traditional idea of a nation, conceived as a cultural, religious, and ethnically homogeneous community. They wish to restore the Christian values on which the history of Europe was built. They want to defend national communities against the invasion of Islam, immigration, etc. They wish to protect national sovereignty against globalism. This does not remind us of the fascist utopianism or Nazi Germany, much more of the German “cultural despair” (Kulturpessimismus) of the end of the nineteenth century.

“While post-fascism opposes neoliberalism, it is simultaneously rooted in its social structure”

Post-fascism is reactionary, and as such it is a reaction to neoliberalism, which does not wish to come back to national borders and sovereignties. Neoliberal historical temporality is “presentist,” not reactionary. It posits an eternal present that absorbs both past and future: our lives and society must run and can be destroyed if they don’t fit the compelling rules of capital development, according to a temporality rhythmed by the stock exchange, but the general framework of capitalism is immutable. Capitalism was “naturalized,” and this is probably the major achievement of neoliberalism. Post-fascism is an illusory alternative to neoliberalism,  just as fascism often depicted itself as “anti-capitalist”; but the difference is that today the ruling classes do not choose this fake alternative. Their institutions are not so deeply unsettled to accept such an option. 

The same can be said about its expansionism. Italian fascism wished to conquer new colonies; Nazi Germany wanted to conquer the entire continental Europe. Today’s post-fascism is very xenophobic and racist, but its xenophobia and racism are defensive. They say: we must protect ourselves against the threat embodied by the “invasion” of non-white and non-European immigrants. We are not going to conquer Ethiopia; we are going to protect ourselves from Ethiopian immigration. The comparison between Putin’s aggression of Ukraine and the fascist or Nazi conquests in Europe does not work because Putin’s expansionism wishes to recreate the Russian Empire in Central Europe by reintegrating a country that Russian nationalism has always considered its own vital space, culturally belonging to Russian history. But the Ukrainian war, if we can make a counterfactual comparison, is as if the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 had been stopped in two weeks and the Wehrmacht had to give up occupying Warsaw. 

Ilya: I agree that Hitler was much more successful than Putin.

Enzo:The nature of expansion is not the same. The Nazi aggression against Poland was imperialistic and expansionist; the Russian aggression of Ukraine is revanchist and “defensive,” especially considering Kiev’s goal of joining NATO. There are also some relevant demographic differences. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany had, like Russia today, suffered a significant loss of territories and population, but its population was dramatically growing. As for Italy, its population grew despite a structural emigration that weakened its economy. If today Putin embodies an illusory nationalist response to the collapse of 1990, it is also because his defensive expansionism is not supported by a powerful demographic dynamic. Russia is declining and struggling to preserve its status as a superpower. Of course, it has some advantages: nuclear weapons and so on. But economically and demographically speaking, its radicalized nationalism is defensive. 

But let me add a last consideration on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not only a set of economic policies: free market, deregulation, global economy. It is also an anthropological model, a conduct of life. It is a philosophy and a lifestyle based on competition, individualism, and a particular way of conceiving human relations. In the twenty-first century, this anthropological paradigm has been imposed on a global scale. This means that all post-fascist movements are rooted in this anthropological background. This explains why there are so many significant changes compared with classical fascism. First, we have powerful post-fascist movements led by women. This would have been inconceivable in the 1930s. Second, the movements must accept certain forms of individualism, individual rights, and freedoms. Their Islamophobia, for instance, is sometimes formulated as a defense of Western values against Islamic obscurantism. This way, while post-fascism opposes neoliberalism, it is simultaneously rooted in its social structure. 

“The Ukrainian Resistance is conducting a national liberation war that is forcefully plural and heterogeneous”

Ilya: You have mentioned that one of the primary emotions of post-fascism is the defensive line. 

In fact, the whole war in Russia was presented by the official propaganda as a defense not just against NATO but also fake values, especially the infiltration of LGBT and gender politics. In this sense, one can say that in this kind of regime, the borders between international politics and domestic politics are blurring. However, we can also see that the neoliberal mindset you have just talked about dominates all explanations of the international situation. Of course, Putin is very much preoccupied in his political imagination with the role of Russia in the global arena. Still, Putin and other Russian officials explain that international relations are a kind of market where you have competition, where the same self-interest paradigm is defining the position of states, where the multipolar world that they advertise instead of American hegemony is the true free market against monopoly. They see the world as the US’s monopoly, which should be challenged by true, honest, fair competition of multiple strong players. How do you see these relations?

Enzo: I am not well equipped to answer this question satisfactorily. Of course, the tenacious and admirable resistance of Ukraine against Russian invasion deserves to be supported, both politically and militarily. I don’t agree with the currents of Western left that denounce Russian aggression and simultaneously refuse to send weapons to Kiev. This seems to me a hypocritical stance. The Ukrainian Resistance is conducting a national liberation war that is forcefully plural and heterogeneous. Like all Resistance movements in Europe during the Second World War, it includes right- and left-wing currents, nationalist and cosmopolitan sensitivities, authoritarian and democratic tendencies. Between 1943 and 1945, the Italian Resistance gathered a large spectrum of forces, going from the communists (the hegemonic tendency) to the monarchists (a small minority), and passing through social-democrats, liberals, and Catholics. In France, Resistance had two souls — De Gaulle and the communists — beside which there were also fighting Catholics, Trotskyists, and a constellation of small (but very effective) organizations of anti-fascist immigrants from Central Europe, Italy, Spain, Turkish Armenia, etc. This diversity is inevitable in a national resistance movement.  

Having said that, I am quite pessimistic about the outcome of this conflict. If Putin wins, which is improbable but not impossible (particularly in case of an involvement of China on his side), this will have tragic consequences not only for Russia and Ukraine but also on a global scale. Fascist and authoritarian tendencies will be reinforced in Russia; post-fascist tendencies in Europe and internationally will strengthen equally. On the other hand, a Russian defeat, which is desirable, would mean not only the affirmation of a free and independent Ukraine but also, very probably, an extension of NATO and the US hegemony, which is much less attractive.

The Ukrainian war is often depicted as an entanglement of conflicts: a Russian invasion which is an inacceptable aggression; a self-defense war of Ukraine which wants to be supported; and a Western indirect military intervention which the US aims at transforming into a NATO proxy war. Ten years ago, there was a civil war in Ukraine, which created some premises for the current conflict. This is a very complex situation, in which the left needs to be nuanced. Whereas in Russia we must struggle against Putin and in Ukraine we must struggle against the Russian invasion; in the US and the EU countries we cannot support an extension of NATO or the increase of our military budgets.

 “The Western left should prove that it is possible to fight against the neoliberal order without being the friends of Putin”

This situation is not completely new. During the Second World War, the Resistance movements and the Allied armies fought together against the Axis powers, but their convergence was limited, and they did not share the same final goals. This became evident in Greece, where the collapse of German occupation threw the country into a civil war in which the British army helped to repress the communist Resistance. Tito and Eisenhower struggled together against Hitler, but their objectives were not the same. Today, we are in this whirl of contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, we must support the Ukrainian Resistance, as well as the dissident voices in Russia; on the other, we must be able to say that a neoliberal order is not the only alternative to post-fascism. The left should be able to speak to the non-Western countries that did not condemn this invasion. The Western left should prove that it is possible to fight against the neoliberal order without being the friends of Putin.    

Ilya: My last question is about anti-fascism. You wrote that anti-fascism as a tradition and a view, was lost in recent years, and you believe that the re-establishment of the anti-fascist tradition could be the only proper answer to the rise of fascism. However, this also means that the anti-fascist tradition should be reinvented, it cannot be the same movement it was in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course, there are a lot of difficulties with this tradition. For instance, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was also labeled as anti-fascist (against the Ukrainian “Nazis”) by Russian official propaganda. Of course, the idea of anti-fascism was devalued from various sides. What can this reinvention of anti-fascism look like? 

Enzo: Again, it is difficult to answer this question. I depicted post-fascism as a global phenomenon, but I am not sure we can speak of global anti-fascism. It depends on contingent circumstances. Of course, we can say that fascism is bad everywhere at any time, but anti-fascism does not have the same meaning and political potentialities everywhere at any time. I do not know how anti-fascism can be perceived today in Russia, India, or the Philippines. Different countries have different historical trajectories, and anti-fascism cannot be understood and mobilized in the same way everywhere. In Western Europe, anti-fascism means a specific historical memory. In Italy, France, Germany, Spain or Portugal, in countries that experienced fascism, with shared collective memories, it is impossible to defend democracy without claiming an anti-fascist legacy. In India, for instance, the relationship between the struggle for independence and anti-fascism is much more complex. During the Second World War, being anti-fascist meant renouncing, at least for a while, to the struggle for independence. In Russia, Putin endorses a demagogic rhetoric by depicting the invasion of Ukraine as the final stage of the Great Patriotic War. Of course, demystifying this lying propaganda and re-establishing the true significance of anti-fascism is crucial for Russian democrats and dissidents. In Ukraine, things are more complicated because the fight against Russian oppression is older than anti-fascism and was not always anti-fascist. The history of Ukrainian nationalism includes a fascist and right-wing component which cannot be forgotten. At the same time, the memory of anti-fascism is that of an anti-Nazi war — as epic and heroic as it was tragic — that Ukrainians fought as part of the USSR. Therefore, being anti-fascist means claiming a tradition that is not consensual in Ukrainian history. It means to defend a certain political identity within a plural Resistance movement. Things are incredibly complicated. Roughly speaking, we could say that anti-fascism means a free and independent Ukraine not opposed to but rather allied with a democratic Russia. Unfortunately, this will not happen tomorrow.

https://posle.media/language/en/global-post-fascism-and-the-war-in-ukraine/