Fascism Isn’t Just a German Problem

Fascism Isn’t Just a German Problem

Refuse Fascism Episode 195

Sun, Mar 24, 2024 12:19PM • 34:52

Ece Temelkuran 00:00

It is so amorphous, the new fascism, and it has so many tentacles. We have been told the centrist liberal democracy will save us all; it will be heavenly if everybody has the liberal democracy with a nice capitalistic economy and so on. But then we’ve seen that exactly this system is pregnant with fascism. This abstract trust in the institutions prolongs too long, and then people realize too late that actually those institutions are not serving them.

Sam Goldman 00:50

Welcome to Episode 195 of the Refuse Fascism podcast, a podcast brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show, Refuse Fascism exposes analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in the United States.

We like to clarify right upfront, Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies, it is a qualitative change in how society is governed. What’s crucial to understand is that once in power and fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. I want to welcome new listeners, and thank you to everyone who shares the show to help reach more people during the year when refusing fascism — let’s get real — is needed more than ever. So after you listen to the show, be sure to share it with others. Click the Share button in your app to send this episode to a friend or ten, or let the whole world know why you listen by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice. Today we’re sharing an interview with Turkish writer and political thinker, Ece Temelkuran.

But first, just a couple thoughts on some of the events from this past week and next week as they relate to the accelerating Republi-fascist threat that are not covered in the interview today. First to speak on new developments surrounding Texas is the next step and criminalizing and dehumanizing immigrants, Texas Senate Bill 4, SB4 for short, which now has copycat bills passed in Iowa and advancing through six other state governments. Here is Coco Das, frequent guest and guest host.

Coco Das 02:49

The Texas fascist law, SB4, has been volleying back and forth in the courts this week, and was even allowed to go into effect for a few hours by the Supreme Court before a federal appeals court halted it again. What is SB4? This law empowers any cop, anywhere in Texas, to detain people they suspect of entering the state illegally in the last two years. Anyone who can’t prove their documented status can be charged with illegal entry and illegal re-entry, carrying jail sentences of up to 10 to 20 years. It’s not hard to imagine what might lead to suspicion of illegal entry.

This law is a huge leap in the already brutal repression coming down on immigrants, along with all non-white Texans being increasingly subjected to racial profiling and harassment. It’s a blatant and unconstitutional power grab, further undermining federal authority over the border and immigration policy. And the Republic fascist governor of Texas Greg Abbott just said that they’ll continue to arrest people coming across the razor wire barrier, even if SB4 is blocked. In other words, they don’t give a fuck about the norms or the Constitution. All this is part of an ugly escalation in immigrant scapegoating and violent fascist rhetoric. Just a few days ago, Trump gave a speech in Dayton, Ohio calling immigrants animals, not people.

Now listen, some good people are wasting their breath calling on Abbott and Trump to find their humanity, talk to Jesus, find some common decency. This is a waste of time. These fascists have made clear their intent to radically escalate their racist attacks on immigrants and their drive to consolidate all out fascism on a national level. And they’ve told you they don’t even see migrants as human beings. Others think we can just leave this to be fought out in the courts relying on the courts to resolve this, including the Supreme Court which allowed Texas is illegal six weeks abortion ban to stand before they overturned Roe v. Wade, is also a ridiculous and deadly strategy.

While decent people are waiting, masses of people are being led to think in the same way as these fascists, joining in the demonizing and scapegoating of immigrants. And despite their claims that Biden will just let anybody in, Biden has deported more immigrants than any other president, and is talking about eliminating asylum and shutting down the border. Neither the Republicans or Democrats have an answer to mass migration, except more terror and brutality against masses of humanity. Think about this: Right now a major crisis in Haiti, which has already displaced 350,000 people, created by this system of capitalism/imperialism, will certainly send more desperate migrants here, who will be met with brutality, detention, deportation, and terror.

This will continue to happen as people flee war, poverty, climate change, and other horrors caused by this dog-eat-dog system. No human being is illegal. Refusing fascism means denouncing and resisting the racist attacks on immigrants. We call on you to stand with and defend immigrants and spread the slogans: We don’t have an immigration problem. We have an imperialism problem. Stop the Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border. In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America.

Sam Goldman 06:40

Speaking of gifts, the Supreme Court is handing out to fascists in Texas, last week, they allowed the administration of a public state school, West Texas A&M University, to immediately ban all drag performances on campus for the time being, while students and their supporters continue to challenge this ban through the courts.

I can’t say it any better than Amanda Marcotte, who wrote for Salon: “All this legal maneuvering sends a signal to Texas and red states: The Supreme Court is sympathetic to their white nationalist and theocratic impulses. Even when they can’t by law, uphold the authoritarian yearnings of Republican state leaders, they will do everything they can to help those politicians grasp as much power as possible. This also suggests, as with Dobbs, that the court will stretch the definition of ‘constitutional’ to its breaking point to allow Republicans to attack basic human rights.”

Since the Supreme Court is now the only federal governing body doing anything besides committing genocide, we have more Supreme Court news. This upcoming week, Tuesday in fact, they will be hearing arguments in their first abortion case since they overturned Roe, FDA vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. At stake is access to unavailability of mifepristone, a safe and effective abortion medication. With abortion bans engulfing the country, medication abortions account for 63% of abortions in this country. This is the case, you may recall, that was conceived of the unholy union of Christian fascist doctors and Texas Christian fascist judge Matt Kasmaryk, and carried to term by Clarence Thomas acolytes in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The questions that this case asks are some hard hitters such as: Are women human beings? Does the Federal Drug Administration have the authority to authorize… drugs? Does empirical science matter? Will zombie 19th century obscenity law be brought back into force? Do courts have to follow any rules? Tune in next week to find out. In the meantime, I recommend listening to some episodes that we did on this topic — they’re linked in the show notes.

Before fascist Trump is up for election again in November, two other elections reflect growing and strengthening fascism across the globe. The continent-wide elections to the Parliament of the European Union, widely known as the European elections, will be held from June 6 – 9. As it stands, fascist and fascist adjacent parties are on track to win nine countries’ votes outright, with similar parties set to come in second or third place in nine other countries.

While tensions are rising among the fascist bloc — disagreeing over support for Ukraine and some other major questions — they are united in their goals of turbocharging climate change, leaving, weakening or even abolishing the E.U. altogether, restricting immigration, making life miserable for already arrived immigrants and beginning to dip toward non citizens, and even some citizens, en masse. They are far more united in their xenophobic patriarchal nationalist visions than their electoral opponents; “center” and “left” blocks, hopelessly entangled in the status quo of parasitism, austerity and submission to a liberal U.S. dominated world order, itself in great peril.

Meanwhile, in India, the months-long national election process, often touted as the largest exercise in democracy anywhere in the world, is set to begin in April. Over the past two decades, and especially since becoming Prime Minister in 2014, Modi and his BJP have transformed the country and largely consolidated fascist rule, with influential dissenters languishing in prison as Modi promises even much worse to come from Muslims, women, LGBTQ people, and all oppressed and exploited people across the country in their push for absolute Hindu supremacy.

Most of the support base of the American fascists couldn’t care less about these international developments. But the leadership of the American fascist movement is extremely tuned in and keen on the prospect of international support for their promised second coming in November, and any decent person should be taking note. This is an extremely dangerous situation the world over, and with all this talk about elections, I think it’s necessary to underscore and emphasize that elections both here and abroad, are not some divine gift to the people. They do not spring forth from an existential entity entity to allow each of us [to] determine the fate of our nation or our world.

My take on it: They are mechanisms of the system that rules such countries, which in all these countries at this moment in history is capitalism/imperialism. It is not some abstract principle of ethics and morality that determine the options we are presented with in the voting booth, but instead the dynamics of that capitalist imperialist system, which choose the choices on offer. And our power to even affect those choices, let alone make radically different choices, that power exist in us every day, far outside of the electoral paradigm. In regards to today’s interview topic, in Germany, millions have repeatedly taken to the streets in anti-AfD, Germany’s increasingly powerful fascist party, protests since mid January. The spark was a secret meeting between AfD officials and explicit Nazis discussing the mass deportation of immigrants including those with German citizenship — clear throwbacks to the Wansi conference when the Nazis agreed to the so-called “final solution.”

In a situation that holds lessons for the U.S., the growing fascist movement — if the elections were held today, the AfD would be the second largest party, according to the polls — ot being ignored, wished away or even encouraged by liberal opportunists. Instead, people have been mobilized into the streets as part of an effort to oppose the AfD as what it is, and erode support for fascism. Whether they confront and resist, or accommodate and advance to rising fascism certainly has lessons for us here. With that, here is Coco Das’ interview with Ece.

Coco Das 13:31

I’m pleased to be speaking with Ece Temelkuran, novelist and a political thinker. Her recent works are How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, and Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World, and she is currently based in Berlin as a Robert Bosch Academy fellow, we are going to be mainly getting into her article that appeared in prospect magazine on February 13, called Fascism isn’t just a German problem. We will link this in the show notes, and definitely all of our listeners should go and read it if you have not already. Welcome Ece, thank you for being here.

Ece Temelkuran 14:17

Hi, Coco. Thank you for having me. Thanks a lot for talking about the article as well.

Coco Das 14:22

I appreciated so much about the article and how you talk about fascism and mass resistance to fascism in ways that I rarely, if ever, see in the media, especially in mainstream media, so I’m really excited to get into this with you. First, I wanted to start with some basic information for our listeners who may not have been following the story. In January there were mass protests in Germany in response to leaked transcripts of a secret meeting of members of Alternative for Germany, a far right organization and Christian Democrats and some businessmen, which is my understanding. You wrote that in every German city following this leaked transcript, people filled the public squares. Can you walk us through the situation? What is Alternative for Germany? and what was in the transcripts that brought so many people into the streets?

Ece Temelkuran 15:23

Alternative for Deutschland is a far right party. It has fascist inclinations, and it has been a hot topic since a few years, because their support has been on the rise. It is not much different from the other far right parties that are showing up on political stages in other European countries or in United States, but of course, when it happens in Germany, it inevitably makes us remember other things that we saw in black and white documentaries: the Holocaust, antisemitism, racism, Hitler, and whatnot. And, in Germany, interestingly though, one easily forgets that Germany has been so far the first and only country that people went on to the streets before a right wing party came to power.

So I find it very hopeful and very positive, but still, it is very serious, the rise of far right. The numbers are changing quickly, so I cannot give you a percentage, but it has been already dangerous, and now, coming elections, many experts already told that several regions, several cities will be taken over by Alternative for Deutschland, the far right party. Even more alarming thing is that these Potsdam secret meetings were attended by CDU, Christian Democrats, some Christian Democrats, and some medium size businessmen. There has been a discomfort in the society. Due to the immigration, those emotions were stirred by alternative for Deutschland, and now Germans for Democracy. They are concerned that alternative for Deutschland will get a concrete ground in politics and it will never be marginalized — it will be more than a marginal party.

Coco Das 17:20

Was it the content of the meetings or just the fact that these three forces were sitting down to meet together?

Ece Temelkuran 17:28

No, the content is re-immigration. This is a very special word in Germany, because it was used during the Nazi era. It means, actually, de facto deportation of immigrants and people with immigration background who are not assimilated enough — and what is enough is always arbitrary, as you know, and it will be defined by far right if they come to power. This was the plan, the secret plan, so to speak — so Germans, that’s why they pour to the streets, and they said: We are against fascism, we are against racism.

Coco Das 18:04

When the January protests started in Germany, you wrote that you found them to be strangely placid or very calm. Your exact words were: “When the crowd finally gathered before the Bundestag, there was no electric air of urgency, no sense of pushing against something. Instead, it had more a sense of calm composure, or fulfilling a duty.” What contributed to that? And why doesn’t that sort of protest measure up to the danger?

Ece Temelkuran 18:35

To be honest, I come from Turkey, where emotions are very dramatic, especially political emotions. German composure, although it feels a little bit strange, it’s also assuring that these people are serious, not like passing by enthusiasm. However, I think it’s not about Germany, but in general, when we come together against fascism in the public sphere, as a political body, we don’t know where to go in towards what or against what. It is so amorphous, the new fascism, and it has so many tentacles, that we don’t have an exact target, so to speak.

We are in — as I told in The Prospect article — we are in some sort of a cul de sac, some political paralysis; we know that we have to do something, that’s why we go on streets to show that as a physical body, we are there, and we are many and so on, and hoping that we are many enough, but then, after that, this next step, let’s say, is not clear to any of us. We know that fascists are building movements and they are very agile, and also very energetic. Also they are going into international collaborations, cooperations and so on, but we are weaker, we feel defeated or maybe we lost our faith in politics — the current form of politics.

By saying “current form of politics,” I mean, party politics; representative democracy and so on. We know that these current tools of democracy, current political mechanisms, will not cut it. We haven’t so far come up with the new form of politics. I think what we are trying to do when we come together in these public spheres is to understand how can we gather all these variety of political demands together to turn them into a political body that acts as one? As the other countries, Germany does not know the answer yet. I am hoping that Germany will come up with the answer because one expects Germans to do the job, for they have this massive experience with fascism, they have the early alarm already.

I started living in this country one and a half years ago, so I’m not an expert in German politics, but fortunately, I know how fascism works — the new form of fascism works — I know how it comes to the power in seven easy steps, and I know that countries are completely different from each other with different completely different dynamics, but, unfortunately, new fascism operates exactly the same way in every country, despite the differences. I’m hoping that Germany will surprise us by coming up with this genius, political engineering.

Sam Goldman 19:02

Well, I think it’s really important — the importance of mass movement from below in defeating fascism. Fascism comes to power through the electoral channels through the normal channels, through the center, as you talk about in your article, but without a mass movement from below, and with the kinds of protests that happened in Germany. This was part of the founding mission of Refuse Fascism, not protest, as usual, but protest that will really drive out a fascist movement and a fascist regime.

Ece Temelkuran 21:33

Absolutely. These protests are more than anything to shake the center a little bit, because we have been told since the Cold War, let’s say, or during the Cold War, even, that liberal democracy — the centrist liberal democracy — will save us all. Everything will be fine. It will be heavenly if everybody has the liberal democracy with a nice capitalistic economy and so on. But then we’ve seen that exactly this system is pregnant with fascism.

This is the new perspective that we have to get used to. It’s not easy to break the taboos of the Cold War, they are still persistent, especially in dominant political discourse, and in mainstream media and so on. But then, in order to… let me put it this way: The center, one, it’s fragile, and second, I think through many countries in Europe, we have seen that center cannot be trusted in the face of new fascism. It bends very quickly. It compromises more than enough. These public demonstrations, I think, is more than anything to tell the center: Uh-uh, don’t.

Coco Das 23:12

I think another thing that you point out that’s very important to understanding Fascism, is fascism reaches into sort of the founding injustices of a society. You point out that Germany is the only country, as opposed to all these other imperialist countries, that has been kind of forced to account for its crimes. I want to go back to the title of your piece, that fascism isn’t just a German problem, what is the problem with people around the world seeing fascism as a sort of a German brand? What kinds of errors stem from that understanding?

Ece Temelkuran 23:50

This was part of the Cold War propaganda, that there was once this evil thing called fascism, it came with this funny man with a funny mustache called Hitler, so we killed him during the Second World War — or he killed himself, actually — we have beaten fascism, and it’s now buried in the battlefields of the Second World War — done, we are clean now. Nothing can contaminate neoliberal systems and our liberal democracies. We actually arrived at the last frontier of human history, which was a very popular discourse, by the way, during 80s and 90s; end of history, end of ideology, and so on.

This discourse, this narrative, made us think that: Oh, it was in Germany, and it’s gone. So it helped several other countries to forget about their own fascism, their own imperialism, their own concentration camps, indeed. So it was an easy, convenient way to go. Germans thanks that their guilt, which was a legitimate guilt, they took on the job, I think — this: Yeah, it was our brand, we suffered from it. However I remember the beginning of 2000s, or second decade of 2000s, people started talking about right wing populism, rising authoritarianism, and so on so forth. It took us like ten years, until 2020, to acknowledge the fact that: Oh, no, this is a new form of fascism, it’s not just the political passing by fancy like right wing populism — and we’re going to fix here and there the entire political mechanism, and everything will be back to business as usual.

When you are doing that, when you are trying to change the discourse into criticism of neoliberalism as part of a resistance to fascism, the most interesting reaction comes from those who think themselves as Democrats, and who think themselves as against right wing populism. This is very interesting to me. Recently, like in the last ten years, several people started talking about fascism as a phenomenon that is inherent to now liberalism. I think that perspective, which I think is the right perspective, is gaining power, gaining ground at the moment, which I think is very healthy politically, because that is why, by the way, I keep talking about the urgency of the situation. I think we spent enough time to arrive at this analysis. So now we can do something else, like, we can go to the next step.

Coco Das 26:30

Why do you think it’s important to rise up before fascistd come to power? You point out that Germany is the only place where this is happened. What is important about that timing and not waiting?

Ece Temelkuran 26:44

Because many people in several western countries have this abstract trust in political institutions and judicial institutions. All these political mechanisms stand upon a very fragile consensus, the consensus being: We’re going to be a liberal democracy with a free market. But then, free market doesn’t care about which political regime the country is run by, as long as it survives.

This abstract trust in the institutions prolongs too long, and then people realize too late that actually those institutions are not serving them nor the democracy anymore. We’ve seen that happening in several countries, my country included — one of the pioneers in that sense. That abstract trust, I saw in many countries that caused us to lose time, a lot of time. United States, for instance, lost a lot of time by thinking that Trump is a clown. I remember 2016, 17, people were talking: Oh, he won’t last the year. Now we’re talking about him coming to power for the second time.

Coco Das 27:52

Yeah, and during that, he transformed the courts, so women lost their right to abortion because of what he was able to do with power with the Supreme Court. I really think what you’re saying is important, about the urgency of rising up before you know, somebody like Trump comes back to power. The article ends with a note of optimism on the possibility of growing protests with more defiant energy. You mention that in the last weekend in January, almost a million people join these protests. Can you give us sort of an update on what’s happening now, and what is the one lesson you think that we in the United States should take from this example, in Germany?

Ece Temelkuran 28:40

Germany has a unique historical feature, because of the Holocaust, there’s this German guilt. And being a post immigrant society, Germany has a difficulty right now to talk about genocide in Palestine, and so on. There is a, let’s say, crack in the front among the people who should come together to stand against fascism. Immigrants on one side and the Germans on one side — because immigrants can certainly talk about Gaza shout slogans about Gaza. They’re kind of separate. They’re trying to come together, but it’s really not easy for German society for several reasons. It’s a very complicated matter.

Then this makes me think about something else, which is exactly the same in every country. Fascism, when it’s coming to power, it doesn’t really propose a political program. It doesn’t promise anything necessarily. It just pokes into the vulnerabilities of the progressives, of the Democrats, of the leftist and so on. And then once it starts poking into these vulnerabilities of these fragile consensuses, let’s say, things start happening already and the fascists just take the side and sit in their couch and then they enjoy the spectacle while we are beating each other up.

The fragile consensus of a country, fragile consensus of progressives, leftists, anti-fascists, this is where I think we lose every time. This is where we have to be very careful. It’s not easy to go beyond them. It’s not easy to remedy these fragile consensuses and divide and so on, I know, but then whatever kind of fascist evil comes to a country, it comes through this.

Coco Das 30:30

I really want to thank you for sharing your expertise, and especially this peice with the world. I urge everyone, again, to look at our show notes and read it. There are a lot of lessons about the nature of fascism, the nature of what kind of urgency has to be inherent in the resistance to fascism. Is there anything else you would like to leave us with before you go?

Ece Temelkuran 30:55

I’m coming to Washington, last week of April. There’ll be a global dialogue, six days long conference, and six thinkers from the South will be talking to our American counterparts to tell our experience about fascism to them. I think such interactions, such encounters, should be more so that we can explain our experience and tell the Americans that our experience is not unique; that everybody’s going through the same thing. Such encounters being global south and Western countries, should be urgently organized.

Coco Das 31:32

We can link to that in the show notes as well. How can we continue to follow you and your writing?

Ece Temelkuran 31:39

Currently, I’m working on a book. I’m not writing much in periodicals, but I’m on social media, on Twitter, and on Instagram, and on Facebook. So whenever I write something I post it, so that would be the best way.

Coco Das 31:53

Well, thank you so much Ece. It was nice talking to you.

Ece Temelkuran 31:56

Thank you, Coco. It was lovely meeting you. Bye.

Sam Goldman 31:59

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. Got thoughts or questions off this episode? We want to hear ’em! Ideas for topics or guests? Yes, please. Send them to us. Have a skill you think could help? We want to know all about it. Connect with us on social media. Find us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, all @RefuseFascism. Or, let us hear your beautiful voice — leave us a voicemail — the link to leave a message is in those show notes. You can reach me personally at the Twitter @SamBGoldman, or drop me a line at [email protected], or over on on that TikTok thing @SamGoldmanRF. And we are on YouTube — Refuse Fascism is — at Refuse_Fascism. So subscribe if YouTube is your jam, and be sure to comment on our videos and whatever else people do on YouTube.

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Thanks to Coco Das, Richie Marini, Lina Thorne and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this episode. Thanks to incredible volunteers, we have transcripts available for each show, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox. Until next Sunday, In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!