In the middle of the 2016 US presidential campaign, Edgar Madison Welch, a middle-aged man from South Carolina, showed up at a Washington pizzeria brandishing a gun. His intention was to deal with the owners and free the alleged sex slaves. Welch believed that it was in this pizzeria that children were trafficked for the sexual enjoyment of Democratic congressmen.
It will turn out to be one of the successfully marketed conspiracy theories, known as Pizzagate, so cleverly designed that the unfortunate Welch rightly believed that a certain Washington pizzeria was engaged in trafficking, and that for the needs of the Democratic Party.
This bizarre detail is the duo of Jason Stanley's book "How Fascism Works", subtitled "Us vs Them Politics".
This book can also be significant for Montenegro because the term "fascism" is often used in public discourse, mainly through the labeling of personalities, some events or phenomena, without clear criteria of what it entails and how it is recognized.
Analyzing actually not fascism itself, but the emerging forms of fascist tactics as mechanisms of coming to power, Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, warns at the very beginning that a certain type of ultra-right nationalism has begun to prevail in recent years. The author includes Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey and the USA in his list of countries where this trend is noticeable.
Nevertheless, this book is also very important for the rest of the world because, as Stanley emphasizes, the context of fascist policies in each country is special and that is why, wanting to avoid generalizations, he decided to label "fascism" as a certain type of ultranationalism (ethnic, religious, cultural) in which the nation is represented by an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf.
Fascist politics, according to Stanley, includes several clearly discernible strategies: mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimization, law and order, sexual anxiety, appeal to rural areas, abolition of social services and breaking unity.
Dealing in detail with each of the fascist strategies, the author starts from the mythical past, emphasizing that it serves to help change the present. What this means practically, Stanley illustrates with several examples. Analyzing the Hungarian constitution adopted in 2011, a year after Orbán's coming to power, he believes that the goal of that constitution was stated at its very beginning, in the "National Oath". The oath begins with the glorification of the founder of the Hungarian state, St. Stephen, who "made our country (Hungary) a part of Christian Europe a thousand years ago." The "National Oath" ends with a promise to pave the way for new generations of Hungarians to "make Hungary great again".
By way of comparison, the book cites the words of Benito Mussolini, spoken in 1922, at the fascist congress in Naples:
"We created our own myth. That myth is faith, passion. It is not necessary for it to be reality... Our myth is our nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to that myth, to that greatness, which we want to turn into a complete reality, we subordinate everything".
"The fascist mythic past exists to help change the present," concludes Stanley.
The role of political propaganda is to hide the obviously problematic goals of politicians or political movements by wrapping them in wafers of generally accepted ideals.
US President Richard Nixon's "war on crime" is a good example of masking problematic goals with high moral goals. Nixon realized that direct and systematic crime control could effectively hide racist intentions from the domestic politics of his administration. Nixon's rhetoric of "law and order" served to hide a racist political agenda, otherwise perfectly explicit behind the walls of the White House.
Hiding corruption under the guise of anti-corruption is a strategy that is the main feature of fascist propaganda. In this strategy, fascist states focus on abolishing the rule of law in order to replace it with the dictates of individual rulers or party bosses. A standard phenomenon in fascist politics is harsh criticism of the independent judiciary in the form of accusations of bias and some kind of corruption, and these criticisms are then used to replace independent judges with those who will cynically use the law as a means of protecting the interests of the ruling party, emphasizes Jason Stanley.
"Conspiracy theories not only have the power to influence the perception of reality, but can also shape the course of real events," writes Stanley, and explains that "when the news is turned into a sport, the autocrat reaches a certain popularity, under the conditions of fascist politics the news from channels for the transmission of information and argumentative debates turn into a spectacle in which the autocrat is the main star".
Stanley also elaborates on the other strategies of fascist politics, from hierarchy, victimization, law and order, sexual anxiety, rural appeals, the abolition of social services, to the breakdown of unity, revealing, as David Kay Johnston observes, that human liberties collapse when voters accept politicians who promote political divisions between "us" and "them".
Serbs and victimization
In the section on victimization, Serbia is mentioned the only time in the book. Noting that nationalism driven by the desire for equality can suddenly turn oppressive, Jason Stanley writes that Serbs were undeniably oppressed in the past. In order to find examples of oppression, as the author believes, one should not go back as far as the Kosovo color "from which the Serbs draw a huge part of their national anger and identity". It is enough to go back to the Second World War, when Serbs were killed en masse in concentration camps.
The author notes that today's Serbs come from families where the memory of those persecutions is still very vivid. Serbian nationalists use this background to justify the persecution of less powerful and marginalized Muslim groups.
The book then cites the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1986, "which is generally considered to have laid down the principles of toxic Serbian nationalism that led to great bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia." The document uses a dramatically exaggerated narrative about the victimization of Serbia, with which it calls for a re-solidification of ranks in defense of ethnic Serbs, as well as traditional Serbian history and culture, the author says.
Referring to Slobodan Milosevic, Jason Stanley claims that the narrative of Serb victimization brought him political victory. With victimization, Milosevic justified a series of cruel wars, including the one in Kosovo, after which he ended up before the International Tribunal in The Hague, where he was accused of genocide, Stanley points out.
"Recent Serbian history under the rule of demagogic nationalists shows how fascist politics can use a past marked by oppression for military mobilization against phantom enemies," concludes the author of the section on Serbia.
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