Originally invented in Milan in the year 1919 by Benito Mussolini as FasciItaliani di Combattimento, fascism is making a comeback in the 21st century. One recent sign are Germany’s Neo-Nazisholding a rally of about 8,000 in Chemnitz (East Germany) in August 2018. With that, Germany’s newish crypto-Nazi party, the AfD, seems to getcloser to the ‘fascist turn’ it has proclaimed for so long. The Neo-Nazi march in Chemnitz was applauded and cheered by ‘ordinary people’ as violent Neo-Nazis attacked anyone not too German looking. As always, fascism searched for scapegoats. It directs attentions away from the crisis of capitalism. From Germany in 1933 to Chile, to Turkey, to Poland, Hungary and the USA, increasingly capitalist regimes become openly terroristic. In these systems, fascism becomes a mass movement that offers an escape route out of the looming capitalist, neoliberal and environmental crisis.
In Germany, the impact of a more recent economic crisis was handed downwards resulting in severe cuts to welfare provisions. This occurred under a Green and social-democratic coalition government that adjusted Germany’s once mighty welfare state downwards to the ideological dictate of neoliberalism. True to neoliberalism’s main ideology of increasing competition, this shift also reinforced worker against worker competition, spiked with an ‘aggression against the losers of the economic crisis’. Rising fascism is not a break with neoliberalism. Instead, it is a continuation of a ‘gradual down sliding into barbarity’.
Link: https://countercurrents.org/2018/11/03/germanys-fascism-for-the-21st-century/