The masses against the masses

Sat 3 Oct 202

JVL Introduction

Richard Seymour writes insightfully about fascism in the earlier part of the C20th and suggests parallels with developments today.

To understand fascism’s rise we need to see that its ideological groundswell had been present well before 1914, when millions were infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideas.

What the Nazis added to this, suggests Seymour, aside from a “socialist” rhetoric which was swiftly abandoned, was the tactic of stormtrooper terror, which had the effect of radicalising the state repressive apparatus itself

Civil society was terrorised, yes, but it was also an instrument in terror. The masses were deployed against the masses. The left was fragmented and divided.

What about today? Seymour chronicles “the several vectors of right-wing politicisation congealing at the moment, with global consequences: militias, QAnon, far-right parties in government, paramilitaries and hit squads linked to various states, anti-lockdown and anti-mask protests, anti-abortion activism, anti-trans activism, MRAs, and so on.”

It feels, he says, like counterrevolution without revolution, “as if the political rupture building over the last few years had already been hegemonised by a hardline nationalist right…”

__________

“It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” — Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In 1932, the twilight of Weimar, Daniel Guérin went hiking across Germany, hoping to find evidence of revolutionary contestation. He was shaken, and demoralised, to find instead the ferment of Nazism. In The Brown Plague, collecting the dispatches he wrote for the French socialist press, he described towns and villages absolutely alive with passion, devoured by desire for the “saviour”, Hitler. They believed that Hitler was going to lead a revolution.

Though the Communists still had their dedicated supporters, they were destroying themselves with Moscow-induced sectarian idiocy. (Arthur Rosenberg, a former member of the Communist Party, was blunt: “the official KPD was totally useless”). The ‘bonzes’ (big shots) of social democracy and the trade unions were complacent, aloof and hiding out in luxury. Meanwhile, the swastika was plastered on schools and town halls. Tens of thousands marched in uniform, tens of thousands watched and cheered. The Horst Wessel song rang out where from loudspeakers. Hitler’s portrait stared down from the walls. There were “deeply disturbing sexual components” in Hitlerism. There was not a huge gap between the “Wild-frei” gangs, with their Dionysian sexual rituals – many of whom would join the Nazis – and the insolent SS boys who loved to strut about in their leather, and the girls who went into paroxysms of excitement when the stormtroopers showed up.

That millions found a thrill of liberation in this revolutionary-despotic movement was palpably obvious. What Trotsky wrote of the Black Hundreds could just as well apply to the fanatical torturers and murderers of the stormtroopers, among whom the unemployed, the declassed, the criminalised, and a sizeable number of workers, could elevate their status with methods learned from hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches:

Now this man without shoes has become king. An hour ago he was a trembling slave hounded by the police and by hunger. Now he feels like an absolute despot, he can do anything he likes, everything will pass, he is master of life and death. If he feels the urge to do so, he throws an old woman from the window of the third floor to the pavements below, he smashes the skull of a baby with a chair, he rapes a small girl in front of a crowd of people.

Fascism, Guérin concluded after returning to Germany the following year, “surged forth from the depths of the German people. It’s because of its popular appeal that it was irresistible, that it swept everything else away; that the workers’ parties, divided among themselves, couldn’t form a front against it; that the old reactionary and feudal Germany had to reluctantly make way for it.” Somehow the masses had come to desire fascism. This conclusion, and the vivid descriptions supporting it, led many of his readers to suspect he had lost his marbles. Surely it wasn’t as bad as he was saying? And yet, how could it not be? Between 1928 and 1933, the Nazis had added 16.5 million votes to their support. Of those, over seven million came from the old parties of the Right, eight and a half million were totally new voters, and at least one million had come from the parties of the Left.

The truly mass character of fascism was verified by Arthur Rosenberg in his analysis of “Fascism as a Mass-Movement” in the year after Hitler took power. It was not sufficient, he argued, to characterise fascism as a conspiracy of imperialist capital, or as a movement of the petty bourgeoisie. Neither had the political strength to accomplish what the Nazis had. To understand the rise of fascism, one had to see that its ideological groundswell had been present well before 1914. Millions were infected by volkisch, racial-nationalist ideas, long before Hitler was even a clamorous, minatory nuisance in the fringes of the German Right. White-collar workers, academics, students, state employees, had all been anti-republican, anti-democratic and thoroughly racist before Germany’s humiliating defeat in the First World War. What the Nazis added to this, aside from their ‘socialist’ rhetoric – which assumed enormous importance in the Depression, in a way that such language never did for Mussolini – was the tactic of stormtrooper terror. Just as the squadristis had in Italy, the stormtroopers leveraged the division and paralysis of the Left while emboldening the repressive wing of the state, giving immense cheer to sections of capital who were turning against democracy, and attracting workers who were long demoralised by the ‘bonzes’ and the failures of the Left.

The Nazis never received a majority in a free election. However, it is clear that by March 1933, amid a campaign of stormtrooper terror against the Left, there was a broad popular consensus favouring core elements of the fascist agenda. Though the Left held on to a third of the vote in this desperate situation, the Nazis had a clear plurality in all but two constituencies. Moreover, it’s clear that on top of the Nazis’ 44 per cent of the vote, millions of centrist and conservative voters were willing to accept a dictatorship against the Left. Adolf Hitler himself was wildly popular, more so than the Nazis. If fascism truly was an ‘anti-mass’ phenomenon, as Ishay Landa argues, it was a mass ‘anti-mass’ phenomenon.

The question is, what happens to the mass once fascism takes power? After all, as the Left fully expected, the Nazis did nothing to fulfil the ‘socialist’ rhetoric they espoused. It cannot even be said that they showed favouritism toward their base. They formed an open alliance with sectors of large industry. Whence the ‘revolution’? In the classical theory of ‘totalitarianism’, it doesn’t matter what the masses think once civil society has been crushed. The masses only exist in what Sartre called ‘manipulated seriality’: they all have the common experience of hearing the leader’s radio broadcasts and reading the party’s newspapers, for example, but they have no organisation among themselves. Therefore, there can be no ‘public opinion’, and no meaningful consent or dissent. At most, it would appear, fascism legitimised itself with superficial, plebiscitary ‘consultations’, but in so doing it didn’t measure public opinion, but the extent of its terroristic grip on the population. This version of events hasn’t been tenable for a long time.

There are two major resources on popular opinion in the Third Reich. The first is the reports of the Nazi secret police, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which kept close track of public opinion from every feasible angle. The second is the reports smuggled out through the SPD’s exile organisation, Sopade. These documents clearly convey that popular opinion existed and was expressed (however covertly), was heterogeneous rather than uniform, and broadly supported the regime. There were grievances over specific policies. Most disliked the brutality and corruption of lower Nazi officialdom. Christians resented the Nazis treatment of the churches. Many were appalled to discover that the Nazis were murdering the mentally ill. And there is no evidence that the third or so of voters who backed the Left really changed their minds. But the evidence is that a large majority accepted the regime, and masses were enthusiastic for it. As a Sopade report explained in 1935, the frenzy far exceeded that spirit of 1914 and ‘Augusterlebnis’. “People can be compelled to sing,” it said, “but not forced to sing with such enthusiasm. . . . Hitler has again gained extraordinary ground among the people. He is loved by many.”

Perhaps most disturbing is the role that a large, radicalised minority played in catalysing the regime’s offensive against Jews. The latter findings, documented by Otto Dov Kulka, show that in the run up to the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938), the Nazi leadership was being pressured to act by violent demonstrations and pogroms. The riots erupting before Nuremberg were largely driven by mass hysteria about Jewish “race defilers” (Jewish men having sex with “Aryan” women), which even a member of the Gestapo described as a kind of “psychosis”. The Nazis had every intention of destroying German Jews, and it was often Nazi party members who instigated such actions. However, some of this turmoil was potentially precipitous for the regime. In the first years of the regime, statements about Jews were, as Robert Gellately puts it, “notable by their absence”. The majority were, if not necessarily supportive of the Jewish minority, not radical antisemites. Moreover, the tumult, in which cops were frequently called “Jewish lackeys” if they intervened, risked causing a rift with police who had thus far been smoothly integrated into the Third Reich. Local authorities, under popular pressure, were acting on their own initiative to prevent marriage between Jews and “Aryans”, arrest “race defilers” and forbid Jews from flying the German flag. The same pattern of agitation occurs before and during Kristallnacht. The regime radicalised its base with intense propaganda, who in turn catalysed and consolidated the regime’s agenda.

This dialectic gets closer to the truth of a fascist regime than the picture of totalitarian conformity. The problem was not the absence of civil society. Civil society was terrorised, yes, but it was also an instrument in terror. The masses were deployed against the masses. It must also be said that the consensus behind the Nazi regime did not fall apart, according to Ian Kershaw, until the middle of the war when it became clear that Hitler was leading Germany to disaster. Even after the war, surveys of those who had lived during the regime showed half had positive memories of it. This can be contrasted with the very different state of affairs in Italy where, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, the Fascist regime quickly and irreversibly lost all public enthusiasm. By the end of the 1930s, it had little support beyond its middle-class core, and was subject to a lot of contempt. In part, the difference can be explained by the fact that, while living standards in Italy fell, in Germany they rose. Nonetheless, even in Germany, the average worker was consuming significantly less in 1938 than in 1928. The Nazis restored industrial profitability far more than they restored living standards.

In truth, as Richard Grunberg suggests, the “psychological improvement was outpacing the material advantage”. To what did that psychological improvement correspond if not to the regime’s efficient selection and destruction of enemies? This is what we need to think about in our present situation. As we’ve seen, fascism percolated away in the mass of the population long before it was institutionalised. The attitudes, the practices, the ‘microfascisms’, the ‘molecules’ of fascism that eventually bond into a molar fascist dictatorship, pre-dated even the name ‘fascism’. We have also seen that fascism does not, in the first instance, derive its strength from overt state support. Its use of the stormtrooper tactic has, rather, strengthened and given confidence to the repressive part of the state. Moreover, it was never a ‘public relations’ problem for the fascists. To the contrary, it suggested the allure of omnipotence, the erotic glamour of organised violence. It was part of the popularity of fascism. And the core commitment of fascism to race war, to cataclysm, to terror, commanded sufficient popular support that its evident abandonment of conjuncturally important rhetoric against capitalism did not weaken the regime one bit. Nor did its open, escalating war against various ‘deviants’, ‘traitors’ and political enemies. To the contrary, once established, the regime and its base were propelled forward in a dialectic of mutual radicalisation.

This is what we need to think about, particularly given the distributed nature of the current far-right. There seem to be several vectors of right-wing politicisation congealing at the moment, with global consequences: militias, QAnon, far-right parties in government, paramilitaries and hit squads linked to various states, anti-lockdown and anti-mask protests, anti-abortion activism, anti-trans activism, MRAs, and so on. If we can speak of anticommunism without communism, this feels like counterrevolution without revolution. I have written before as if the political rupture building over the last few years had already been hegemonised by a hardline nationalist right. It now feels as though, given the global crunch in living standards that is afoot, the rupture has only just begun. And, very soon, if the balance of forces doesn’t abruptly change, many of us will face genuine physical danger.

https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/the-masses-against-the-masses/

 

A second Trump term would be 'game over' for the climate, says top scientist

Donald Trump in California last month. Another four years of his leadership would make averting further disaster ‘essentially impossible’, Mann says. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Michael Mann, one of the world’s most eminent climate experts, says Earth’s future ‘is in the hands of American citizens’

Supported by

Mark Hertsgaard

Fri 2 Oct 2020 11.00 BST

This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of 400-plus news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The Guardian is the lead partner of CCN.

Michael Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be “essentially impossible” if Donald Trump is re-elected.

A professor at Penn State University, Mann, 54, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers, testified numerous times before Congress and appeared frequently in the news media. He is also active on Twitter, where earlier this year he declared: “A second Trump term is game over for the climate – really!”, a statement he reaffirmed in an interview with the Guardian and Covering Climate Now.

“If we are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit,” Mann said. “Another four years of what we’ve seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible.”

None of Mann’s 200-plus scientific papers is more famous than the so-called “hockey stick study”, which Nature published on Earth Day of 1998. With two co-authors, Mann demonstrated that global temperature had been trending downward for the previous one thousand years. Graphed, this line was the long handle of the hockey stick, which surged abruptly upwards in about 1950 – represented by the blade of the stick – to make the 1990s the warmest decade in “at least the last millennium”.

In 1999, Mann became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he was targeted by the climate denier crowd, an experience detailed in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. He received death threats, he says, and had emails stolen. Virginia’s former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a hard-right Republican, subpoenaed documents related to Mann’s research funding in an effort to prove fraud. A Washington Post editorial blasted Cuccinelli for “mis[using] state funds in his own personal war against climate science”. In 2014, affirming a lower court’s decision, the supreme court of Virginia ruled against Cuccinelli, who now serves as a top official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

Mann denies that it’s a partisan statement to say that four more years of Trump would mean “game over” for the climate.

Michael Mann, seen in March. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

“It is a political statement, because it speaks to the need to enact policies to deal with climate change,” he says. “But it isn’t partisan to say that we should act on this crisis.”

It’s also a scientific statement, Mann adds. Two years ago this month, scientists with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark study, Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees, which found that humanity had to cut heat-trapping emissions roughly by half by 2030 to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. Headlines warned we had “12 years to save the planet”. Those 12 years are now 10.

Except more than two years have been lost, because in that time, the Trump administration has prevented the world’s biggest economy from making “the dramatic reductions that were necessary to keep us on that path” of halving emissions by 2030, Mann says. “So now the incline is steeper. It’s no longer 5% [reductions] a year for the next 10 years. It’s more like seven and a half percent.” (As a comparison, 7% is how much global carbon emissions are projected to fall in 2020 due to the Covid-19 economic lockdowns that shrank driving, flying and other carbon-intensive activities.)

This is a Tolkienesque battle between good and evil, and Sauron needs to be defeated on election day

Michael Mann

The numbers get unrealistically challenging if Trump gains another four years as president.

“Four more years of relative inaction, of flat emissions, means that four years from now that number might be closer to 15% [emissions reductions] a year,” Mann says. “And that may be, although not physically impossible, societally impossible. The rate at which we shift away from a fossil-fuel-driven infrastructure, it just may not be economically possible or socially viable to do it that [fast].”

‘Our destiny is determined by our behavior’

Fortunately, there is encouraging news about climate science as well. It was long thought that Earth’s climate system carried a substantial lag effect, mainly because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for many decades after being emitted. Even if all CO2 emissions were halted overnight, global temperatures would keep rising and heat waves, droughts, storms and other impacts would keep intensifying “for about 25 to 30 years”, Sir David King, the former chief science advisor to the British government, said in 2006.

Mann says research over the last decade has overturned this interpretation.

Using new, more elaborate computer models equipped with an interactive carbon cycle, “what we now understand is that if you stop emitting carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly,” Mann says. Such ocean storage of CO2 “mostly” offsets the warming effect of the CO2 that still remains in the atmosphere. Thus, the actual lag between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise is not 25 to 30 years, he explains, but “more like three to five years”.

This is “a dramatic change in our understanding” of the climate system that gives humans “more agency,” says Mann. Rather than being locked into decades of inexorably rising temperatures, humans can turn down the heat almost immediately by slashing emissions promptly. “Our destiny is determined by our behavior,” says Mann, a fact he finds “empowering”.

A polar bear leaps over melting ice, Svalbard Archipelago, Norway. Photograph: Paulette Sinclair/Alamy Stock Photo

This reprieve will not necessarily spare polar ice sheets or evade tipping points that cannot be recrossed, the scientist cautions, and earth is already experiencing “much more extreme weather … than we expected 10 years ago”. Greenland and Arctic ice is already melting after the current temperature rise of 1C, or 2.7F, above preindustrial levels, and it will continue melting even without further warming. The resulting possibility of “massive sea level rise” is one example of why Mann says that humanity is “walking out on to a minefield” of tipping points: “The more we warm the planet, the more of those unwelcome surprises we might encounter.”

In the face of this urgency, Mann broadly supports implementing a Green New Deal. This he defines as a vast government effort that deploys both regulations – for example, no more coal plants – and market mechanisms like carbon pricing to transition away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. In the coming weeks, he adds, there is no more important way for US citizens to exercise agency than to vote – vote for candidates who support such a transition, such as Joe Biden, and against Donald Trump and other Republicans who obstruct it.

“The future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens,” he says. “It’s up to us. The way we end this national and global nightmare is by coming out and voting for optimism over pessimism, for hope and justice and progress over fear and malice and superstition. This is a Tolkienesque battle between good and evil, and Sauron needs to be defeated on election day here in the United States.”

• Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for The Nation, has covered climate change since 1990 for leading outlets around the world and in books including Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

• https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/02/donald-trump-climate-change-michael-mann-interview
  

Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'

 

Trump 2016 campaign 'targeted 3.5m black Americans to deter them from voting'

Secret effort allegedly focused on 16 swing states, several narrowly won by Trump after the black Democrat vote collapsed

Dan Sabbagh

Mon 28 Sep 2020 18.24 BST

Donald Trump during a 2016 debate. The Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade black Americans from backing Hillary Clinton by targeting them with ‘dark adverts’ on their Facebook feeds. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential election campaign has been accused of actively seeking to deter 3.5 million black Americans in battleground states from voting by deliberately targeting them with negative Hillary Clinton ads on Facebook.

The secret effort concentrated on 16 swing states, several narrowly won by Trump after the black Democrat vote collapsed.

The claims have come from an investigation by Channel 4 News, which was leaked a copy of a vast election database it says was used by the Trump campaign in 2016.

Comprising the records of 198 million Americans, and containing details about their domestic and economic status acquired from market research firms, the investigation claimed voters were segmented into eight categories.

One was marked “deterrence”. Those placed in the special category – voters thought likely to vote for Clinton or not at all – were disproportionately black.

According to the investigation, the Trump campaign’s goal was to dissuade them from backing the Democrat entirely by targeting them with “dark adverts” on their Facebook feeds, which heavily attacked Clinton and, in some cases, argued she lacked sympathy with African Americans.

The effort is said to have been devised in part by Cambridge Analytica, the notorious election consultant that ceased trading last year following revelations that it used dirty tricks to help win elections around the world and had gained unauthorised access to tens of millions of Facebook profiles.

In Michigan, a state that Trump won by 10,000 votes, 15% of voters are black. But they represented 33% of the special deterrence category in the secret database, meaning black voters were apparently disproportionately targeted by anti-Clinton ads.

In Wisconsin, where the Republicans won by 30,000, 5.4% of voters are black, but 17% of the deterrence group. According the Channel 4, that amounted to more than a third of black voters in the state overall, all placed in the group to be sent anti-Clinton material on their Facebook feeds.

Attacks ads that were used by Trump’s digital campaign included one known as the “super-predator” commercial, featuring a video clip of controversial remarks made by Clinton in 1996, which the Republicans claimed referred to African Americans.

Arguing that it was necessary “to have an organised effort against gangs”, and their members Clinton said: “They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators – no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”

The Democrat apologised for using those words shortly after being confronted by Black Lives Matter activists about them in February 2016, but the language was picked up by Trump during the campaign and heavily recycled online.

Another attack ad reportedly came from a political action committee also run by Cambridge Analytica. It features a young black woman who appears to be a Clinton supporter abandoning her script to say: “I just don’t believe what I’m saying.”

When reminded that she is an actor, she replies that she is “not that good” of an actor

Jamal Watkins, the vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said it was shocking and troubling that there was a covert attempt to suppress the black vote in 2016.

“So, we use data – similar to voter file data – but it’s to motivate, persuade and encourage folks to participate. We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home. That just seems, fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy,” Watkins told Channel 4.

It is estimated that 2 million black voters across the US who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 did not turn out for Hillary Clinton. In Wisconsin, Trump’s vote matched Mitt Romney’s in 2012, but Clinton lost because her vote collapsed. The Democrat polled 230,000 votes fewer than Obama.

Key to the Trump victory was putting off black voters in cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In one city ward, where 80% of its 1,440 voters were black, almost half or 44% of the ward was marked as for deterrence, a total of 636 people, 90% of whom were black.

Many other factors accounted for Clinton’s defeat, including legislation that was accused of suppressing the black vote.

Again, in Wisconsin, the Republican-run state has introduced measures requiring citizens to produce valid voter identification, which it was argued disproportionately affected poor and black voters.

The Trump campaign spent $44m (£34m) on Facebook advertising and generated 6m adverts overall. But the passage of time has meant that only a handful of the attack ads used by the Trump campaign have been recorded, and Facebook will not say how many or which ads were used at the time.

The company said that “since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook – what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today”. It added that it now has “rules prohibiting voter suppression” and was “running the largest voter information campaign in American history”.

The Trump campaign, the Republican national committee and the White House all declined to comment.

A senior official in the the Trump campaign has previously denied any targeted campaigns against individual groups.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/trump-2016-campaign-targeted-35m-black-americans-to-deter-them-from-voting