On Fascism

It is a time of Darkness? Fascism is on the rise?

Where was this concern, this plague of sorrow and grief, all my life? Now the brutal lawless activity of the executive matters? And never an American crisis without a huckster to the rescue. In this case a one time scholar who wants now to be a World Moral Leader, to give slow impassioned talks about Dark and Light, Good and Evil, and, the Bad Men, over there.

When?

Here, in the nick of time, is the Yale-bound Serious Man, Timothy Snyder, who lives in and espouses these terms. He posts pictures of himself and Vladimir Zelensky sitting at a table -- the errand boy of Ukrainian oligarchs dressed up like their personal trainer. They’re going to push for the burn together. Tim knows that Russia is Evil, such a deep and controversial thought, as though the Cold War hadn’t perverted the post-War period of American life and the world with its distortions and lies.

Tim claimed in 2023 about Joe Biden, “Credit where due. Biden warned of the Russian invasion. He reacted wisely and flexibly. And now he has gone to Kyiv to give hope. We haven’t had a statesman like this in a long time.” The Egyptian mummy we had as president? Installed merely to block the very mild socialist policies of Bernie Sanders which threatened the donors of the DNC? Biden who handed that office back to Trump on a platter just one year after Tim’s insight?

He is so convinced of American virtue, he wrote recently that one of the things that must happen, to forestall Trump’s fascism, is, “Big business should support democracy.”

I’ll call them. If I could reach the late railroad magnate Jay Gould, he might reply with his famous quip, “The great thing about America is that I can pay one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Now, I don’t think Tim wrote that about Big Business hysterically laughing when he got another check for being vigilant in his fight against “Fascism”. When Tim says, “Fascism!”, he is calling to the source of his career to declare his loyalty. He is almost unemployable if he doesn’t moan about Putin and Trump. Serve power or serve nachos. Go ahead and tell the truth about American Empire, but “for his money” as the expression goes, he’s staying on the right side of New Haven (like all urban areas in America, it has extensive slums -- probably Putin’s fault.).

Tim stopped being a scholar a while back. He preens and poses and declaims his moral insights now. None of his statements place the crimes of American Empire at the center of our various crises, none center the accusations of villainy on the Atlantacist or American elite. It is always, and this is how you know a moral leader, a courageous voice: someone else’s fault. Maybe you need to stand up to that Other, and join Tim on the rampart, but you know, ‘cause he tells you, it’s not you.

Fascism? If it has a meaning at all -- endlessly abused as a term by these hustlers who, remember, do not care enough to examine their own prejudices, ever -- we know as the common practice of the endless bureaucracies of the United States of America and its formal, if highly symbolic, democratically elected government.

It is unfair to Tim. He is just an Imperial Pervert. He is passionate about what he says. But he has abandoned common sense or elementary morality to be the great tribune of American Empire.

Elites assume that they must control the masses, else chaos. But they forget that the masses can now listen to their plans. Tim Snyder would have lived, and been influential, in exactly the same way as his predecessors, the nightmare McBundy brothers and Walt Rostow (servants of the Democratic Party only because they didn’t know enough Mandarin to get in with Mao), but the internet puts him out there. You can see his position and bent of his interests. Tim cries out: The Other is evil, and must be hated: War is Virtuous, Victory is Necessary, Hail Raytheon, God Bless General Dynamics.

For those of you who don’t know, those who little Timmy has gotten to perhaps, let me explain what happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump. The Clintons thought that there was no chance that their hold on African American voters could slip. For sixty years, the Democratic Party polled around 90 percent of the Black vote. So they thought: they can only vote for us. And the Clintons’ had experience: In 1996, several moribund trade unions, still choking on NAFTA, said they would not vote for Bill Clinton. He replied, “Good for you. Vote for Bob Dole.” And the unions backed down. So given their idea of captive voters, they pursued this strategy: the future of the Democratic Party is white suburban Republican women. And the Campaign, so in touch with reality, went for it. Who didn’t? African Americans didn’t turn out in Philadelphia, and Detroit and Milwaukee. That was it. Trump was in.

A Michigan Democrat congressman said that December, “She didn’t do any labor-specific events that I’m aware of.” Lots of those black people that didn’t go out to vote? Some current, many more former: union workers! Hillary ran no ads in Michigan, zero, until the last few weeks of the campaign. This is a Party which has run on a platform for decades as one Black academic, who used to work at Yale, described as offering, “Hard times and bubblegum, and we’re fresh out of bubblegum.” Another Black man, commenting in Detroit said of the choice between Clinton and Trump, “When there’s nothin’ on the menu, nobody eats.”

This is all very mundane. It would take a miracle not to understand it. Hilary tried to blame Russia, which is hilarious. She counted on the American middle class having been so well propagandized from 1945-1994 that she could just say that, and avoid any critical examination of herself and the interests she represents. And you bought it. And now I have to hear Tim Snyder, some craven Chautauqua clown, intone about fascism.

To make people really stupid, you have to focus them on abstractions, concepts without definite boundaries. In America for many decades, Identity performed that miracle. When it fails in its mission to captivate and discipline the American population, you hear things about Russia, as though the Cold War had never ended. And since 2014, the new “two-fer”, Do you know how gay people are treated in Russia?! Exactly what they said to sell Iraq, “Do you know how Arab men treat women?!” It is just to sell and use weapons, which makes a lot of money.

Ignore Tim Snyder, and his profound truths about Evil, and reacquaint yourself with reality, which almost never includes a person from Yale saying anything wise.