The Anti-Fascists Who Cried Wolf
If you want to fight fascism, you have to define the ideology properly and seek to understand the worldview of your enemies
Amin al-Husseini, former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By American Colony (Jerusalem), Photo Dept., photographer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14676417
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Aesop was a slave who lived in ancient Greece and was famed as a storyteller. Hundreds of years after his death, a collection of fables of diverse origin were gathered together and attributed to him. One of the most famous is The Boy Who Cried Wolf, about a shepherd boy, who repeatedly runs into town pretending a wolf was attacking his flock to alleviate his boredom. When a wolf finally arrives, the villagers think it is a trick and ignore the shepherd.
There is great wisdom in this fable. I saw a modern version with my own eyes as Spain’s populist left, which began to boom between 2008 and 2012 as the country struggled to cope with a depression, repeatedly made alarmist calls about its critics being fascists or maybe fascist-adjacent.
In my opinion, the big underlying problem was that the Spanish slang word for fascist, “facha,” is roughly equivalent to “gammon” in English. It refers to a certain type of person, normally a middle-aged man, who is excessively angry about some of the excesses of the progressive movement. The stereotype in Spain is of a man who always wears a bracelet showing the Spanish flag.
As we often see in Sharpen Your Axe, reality will always be a little more complicated than any black-and-white stereotype. Fascism is a destructive ideology which has taken different forms over the decades; and you can’t guess who is or isn’t a fascist just by looking at someone (unless they happen to be wearing a fascist uniform or giving a Nazi salute). We need to be a little more analytical if we want to identify fascism and combat the ideology. The first step is to define it rather than just leaving the identification of fascists to cliché.
Scholars have come up with many definitions of fascism over the last 100 years or so. The central difficulty is that although fascism is a right-wing authoritarian movement, not all right-wing authoritarians are fascists. Many of the definitions describe fascism as an offshoot of nationalism. One of the pithier examples comes from historian Robert Griffin, who describes the ideology as “a revolutionary form of nationalism,” which is populist, as well as anti-liberal and anti-conservative.
Political scientist Robert Paxton has a particularly clear-sighted definition of fascism:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Spain’s populist left has often claimed that the centre-right Popular Party (PP) is either outright fascist or has fascistic tendencies. The conservative party was founded in 1989, 11 years after the country’s adoption of a democratic constitution. The fact that some of its founders had been ministers under authoritarian dictator Francisco Franco (who died in 1975) does much of the heavy lifting for this view. As we have discussed before, though, the PP is a Christian democrat-led party that is both institutionalist and part of the European mainstream, even though some very right-wing voices have at times found a home on its fringes.
Many of the PP’s most right-wing supporters grew sick of being ignored by the party’s leadership and split in 2013 to form hard-right party Vox. The PP and Vox have sometimes formed uneasy coalitions in recent years, despite their mutual distrust.
The links with Franco can be over-stated in painting people on the right as fascists. Paxton says that the dictator “is often considered fascist,” largely because of the overt support of Italy and Germany for the nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s. When Franco’s side won, he unleaded a bloody repression, which may have led to up to 200,000 deaths.
However, Franco proved reluctant to join the Axis powers in World War II. “After the terrible bloodletting of 1936-39, Franco wanted order and quiet; fascist dynamism fit badly with his reserved temperament,” Paxton says. The dictator gave the Falange (the only legal party, which had fascist roots) a ceremonial role, but it had no say in policy-making of administration. He then submerged it within an umbrella organisation, which also included monarchists and other traditionalists.
The Falange’s leader was arrested in 1937. “The domestication of the Falange made it easier for Franco to give his dictatorship the traditional form, with a minimum of fascist excitement, that was clearly his preference, certainly after 1942, and probably before,” Paxton said. Franco’s regime gradually became an authoritarian one “with almost no visible fascist coloration” by the 1970s, he argues.
The populist-left cliché-based approach to identifying fascists falls apart if we take Paxton’s analysis seriously. Please note, though, that calling Franco a brutal authoritarian dictator, who flirted with fascism during the Civil War, should not be taken as an endorsement!
After the 1954 Pact of Madrid between Spain and the US, Franco pivoted even further from fascism. He let technocrats from the Roman Catholic lay organisation Opus Dei liberalise the economy, which led to the “Spanish miracle” of 1959 to 1974. During these years, the economy boomed as some cities like Bilbao and Barcelona industrialised. The country as a whole became much less rural during these years as working-class families from the countryside moved to big cities in search of factory jobs and a better life.
Although Franco purged Spanish liberals in the aftermath of the Civil War and always hated the idea of liberal constitutions, based on the rule of law, many members of the populist left associated economic liberalisation with his dictatorship and the socially conservative Opus Dei. Many have misunderstood economic liberalism as a result, seeing it (rather bizarrely) as a branch of fascism.
A centrist party called Citizens (Ciudadanos) was founded in Barcelona in 2006 to fight Catalan nationalism. Over the next decade, it gradually pivoted to liberalism, joining the European umbrella party for liberals in 2016. Around the same time, Spain’s populist left were regularly smearing the party, its leaders and its supporters as fascists. This made no sense whatsoever to those of us who are interested in ideas and their consequences, even though a full-blooded defence got a little harder after the party’s leaders became interested in Spanish civic nationalism from 2018.
The populist left’s suspicions that Vox is a fascist party are on more solid ground. The party openly defends Spanish ethno-nationalism and has drawn a number of its leaders from neo-fascist party Falange. The party does, at least, pay lip-service to the Spanish Constitution of 1978, despite wanting to completely rewrite it. I normally describe it as “hard right” or “populist right.”
Paxton shows us that there is a clear border between the hard right and fascism. He said that he hesitated to call former US President Donald Trump a fascist between 2015 and 2020. That changed in 2021, though. “Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”
Following this logic, we will be able to call Vox a fascist party if (when?) it openly calls for Spanish constitutional democracy to be overturned. It is certainly flirting with the idea of abandoning the constitutional order, as we all saw when it invited former President Trump to an event in Madrid in 2022.
The scorecard for Spain’s populist left when it comes to identifying fascists hasn’t been great so far. Franco is assumed to be a straightforward fascist instead of an authoritarian and traditionalist nationalist; the PP is the object of a smear campaign; and economic liberals are misunderstood. It does better with Vox and Trump, though.
The fuzziness of the populist left’s avowed anti-fascism is made worse by its choice of allies in Spain. If we assume that Franco is a a straightforward fascist, that the liberalisation of the economy in the 1960s was fascistic and that the PP is borderline fascist, then obviously it makes sense to seek common ground with Catalan nationalists and Basque nationalists, who hold similar views. Unfortunately, there are serious risks to this approach, as discussed here.
The Catalan independence movement has often been characterised by “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood,” particularly between its peak between 2012 and 2018. Spanish-speaking immigrants from poor rural areas and their descendants are routinely smeared as being a corruptive influence on the territory, while the movement draws support from the Catalan-speaking minority with deep roots in the region. During the most dangerous years, 2015 to 2018, the movement’s leaders and supporters emphasised “unity, energy, and purity.” We certainly saw “a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites” in Barcelona.
Although the abandonment of the Constitution for a populist referendum without democratic guarantees was extremely worrying, we can be thankful that the movement mostly stopped short of “redemptive violence.” There were exceptions, though, including riots and a mob attack on Barcelona airport. Shockingly, when radical separatists were caught red-handed with explosives, Catalan nationalist leaders protested that the national police shouldn’t have the right to investigate. The bomb-makers are now likely to benefit from a controversial amnesty law promoted by the populist left and the formerly mainstream Socialist Party, much to the disgust of many moderate voters.
In Aesop’s fable about the shepherd boy, when the wolf finally arrived, he had already burnt up all his goodwill with too many false alarms. We can see something similar with Spain’s populist left. After calling so many non-fascists fascists and failing to spot the fascistic tendencies of some of its own allies, the movement has made a terrible mistake with the Palestinian nationalist movement, which it supports almost unconditionally.
To see why this is problematic, we need to take a look at the role of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (pictured above), in developing the ideology of Palestinian nationalism. Journalist and author Jake Wallis Simons describes how Jews fled from Nazi Germany and other European countries into Palestine from the 1930s. By 1939, there were around half a million Jews in the region, along with twice as many Arabs. Jerusalem had long had a Jewish majority. By 1941, the German army was moving from North Africa towards the Middle East. Adolf Hitler’s strategists began to ponder how they could use antisemitic smears to turn the local Arabs against their Jewish neighbours and the British.
Hitler’s planners recruited local Islamists to collaborate with Nazi propagandists. Husseini was the main protagonist. A man who claimed to be descended from the prophet himself, he had made a proclamation of war against Palestine’s Jews in 1937 and later led a gangster war against Arab moderates. German diplomat Erwin Ettel was his handler between 1939 and 1941. The Mufti was granted an audience with Hitler himself in November 1941.
Haj Amin al-Husseini meeting with Adolf Hitler (28 November 1941). By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483348
In the meeting, Husseini lobbied to rule Palestine, Syria and Iraq. In return, Hitler said that they had enemies in common, which he described as the “two citadels of Jewish power,” Britain and the Soviet Union. He also told the Mufti about his genocidal plans for Europe’s Jews.
In his memoirs, written much later, Husseini said that he continued to support Nazi aims. He recalled with pleasure Heinrich Himmler, telling him about the murder of more than 3m Jews in 1943. Photographs discovered after the Mufti’s death showed him visiting a German concentration camp during World War II. He was also placed on the Nazi payroll during the war and began making up disinformation about the Jews of Palestine. He was captured by the Allies after the War, but was seen as too minor a figure to be included in the Nuremberg trials.
The Mufti led Palestinian opposition to the creation of the state of Israel in 1947-8, calling for its annihilation. The Palestinians and their Arab allies lost the resulting genocidal war, as we all know. Husseini was later given political asylum in Egypt, where he published a series of newspaper articles in 1954 about his “battle with World Jewry.” These were later turned into a book.
The Nazi influence on Palestinian nationalism continues to this day. The Hamas Charter, composed in 1988, includes references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery alleging to show a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, which was enthusiastically promoted by the Nazis. There is a direct line between antisemitic fascist ideology and Hamas’ atrocities last year.
Why does Spain’s allegedly anti-fascist populist left cheer on such a fascistic programme? The answer lies in the Soviet Union. Communist dictator Joseph Stalin’s attitudes to the Jews veered from support to mass purges (including setting up a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia’s far east). Under the leadership of his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union began to support the Arabs of the Middle East instead of Israel. Its leaders were alarmed by the Six Day War of 1967, when Soviet-armed Arab armies were destroyed by the resilient Jewish state.
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1503909
The Soviet Union started churning out anti-Israel propaganda from 1967. It claimed the country was “the expression of a fabulously funded, international Jewish plot that controlled politics, media and financial markets across the world,” in Simon’s words. The communist conspiracy theories shared many similarities with those propagated by fascists. Indeed, both Marxism and fascism share common roots in German ethnic nationalism, as we discussed here. Anyone who wants to explore this territory further should read Hannah Arendt, who exhaustively studied the conspiratorial commonalities between communism and fascism.
Returning to Spain, we can now understand why someone like Yolanda Díaz, the paid-up member of the Communist Party and leader of the hard left, who is the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, has a blind spot about the fascistic roots of Hamas. Although she condemned the group’s atrocities last year, she also said that Palestine should be given a state immediately. More moderate voices can only wonder what Hamas would do next if it were given a state and allowed to raise an army without abandoning its fascistic goal of driving the Jews from the Middle East.
Díaz and other members of Spain’s populist left can also be too slow to criticise Russia’s fascistic dictator Vladimir Putin. A sloppy anti-imperialism and a residual sympathy for Russia are probably at the roots of this particular blind spot.
As we have seen, claiming to be an anti-fascist without defining fascism first can be a slippery slope. A previous discussion on a strange conversation with a self-defined anarchist, who became an internet fanboy for Syria’s murderous Russian-backed dictator, now makes more sense. This confused position is the end-point of sloppy and conspiratorial thinking without pausing to define terms.
Populists, fascists and nationalists are all very annoying on the internet. The comments are closed. See you next week!
Further Reading
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton
Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What to Do About It by Jake Wallis Simons
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