The following is an
adaptation of my remarks given at “How to
Survive Fascism,” a recent teach-in at the
Rutgers School of Communication and
Information in New Brunswick, NJ on April
9, 2025.
1. The role of the
enemy/dominant superior race
Fascist regimes need an enemy, the
personification of society’s problems, and
they must eliminate the scapegoat. People
are whipped into a frenzy to eliminate the
source of their problems. And these regimes
are preoccupied with crime and punishment.
Umberto Eco called it “an appeal against
the intruders,” a fear of difference. Also,
fascists view themselves as a dominant race
as a way of asserting state power.
In Nazi Germany, the enemies were LGBTQ
people, trans books, Jews, political
dissidents and others. Today in the U.S.,
there is the war on DEI (code for Black
people), white replacement theory and the
centering of white hetero cisgender
Christian men. The enemies are banned books,
Latin American “gangs,” pro-Palestinian
students and faculty activists.
A White supremacist government under
Trump is weaponizing antisemitism and
criminalizing pro-Palestinian speech on the
pretext of protecting Jewish people, all
toward the goal of eliminating democracy and
higher education. It won’t stop with
the scapegoats or low hanging fruit. Soon
they will be deporting citizens, not just
permanent residents, green card holders and
undocumented people.
Pastor Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran
pastor who spoke out against Nazi Germany
and was thrown into the death camps and
survived, wrote a poem called First They Came. This poem captures how no one is
safe under a fascist government:
First they came for the
Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a
Communist
Then they came for the
Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a
Socialist
Then they came for the
trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a
trade unionist
Then they came for the
Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one
left
To speak out for me
2. The role of
capitalism
Corporate power is protected under
fascism, but labor rights and power, democracy
and the rule of law, equal rights and human
rights are suppressed. The wealthy put the
fascists into power. There is rampant cronyism, corruption and fraudulent elections.
Today it is Elon Musk and Tesla, a
cabinet of billionaires and a techbroligarchy
that has signed up for the fascism in the name
of profits, deregulation and tax cuts. Hitler
had Henry Ford. The Ford Motor Company used
slave labor in Germany to build military
vehicles for the Third Reich.
Fascists appeal to a frustrated middle
class, and capitalize on an economic crisis or
a sense of humiliation or victimhood.
Today we see law firms, universities,
liberal institutions, media companies and
others trying to appease and comply with
fascists and maintain their power and profits.
Martin Luther King spoke in “Letter from
Birmingham Jail” of white moderates who hinder
social progress more than the Ku Klux Klan and
care more about maintaining order than
justice.
3. Imperial boomerang
Aimé Césaire in Discourse on
Colonialism (1950) wrote of a “terrific
boomerang” to explain the origins of European
fascism in first half of the 20th century.
Similarly, Hanna Arendt spoke of the “boomerang effect” in The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951). Nazi Germany was the
barbarism of colonization of non-Europeans
turning inward on Europe. In other words, the
West gets a taste of the way they treat the
Global South, colonized Black and Brown
people.
4. The fascism that
always existed in America against
marginalized people in America
Fascism always existed for Black, Brown
and indigenous people in this country, the
internally colonized people, and now it is
being visited upon white people.
People claim we are better than this,
that this is not who we are. But we have BEEN
like this since day one.
Consider the genocide of Native Americans
and abduction and placement of children into
torture centers known as boarding schools,
where thousands died and were raped, beaten,
starved, murdered and buried.
Black people were enslaved, then after
the Civil War there was a real promise of
democracy and voting rights. During
Reconstruction, there were 2,000 Black elected
officials, a governor, senators, members of
Congress, and Black majorities in the
Mississippi and South Carolina legislatures.
When the federal troops that were protecting
Black people were removed from the South,
white lynch mobs and the Klan were able to
take it all back. They assassinated Black
elected officials, lynched, destroyed Black
communities and rewrote state constitutions
banning Black folks from voting.
There was a mass deportation of 1.8
million Mexican Americans during Great
Depression, stemming from anti-immigrant
sentiment and the belief they were taking jobs
from white people. During World War 2, America
interned 120,000 Japanese Americans in
concentration camps.
Further, Nazi Germany was inspired by the
U.S. when it enacted its Nuremberg laws that
segregated Jews from Aryan Germans, using the
Jim Crow segregation laws and American
genocide of Indigenous people as a guide.
5. Universities in an
authoritarian regime
Keep in mind that authoritarian regimes
do not have liberal arts colleges. There is a
disdain of culture and the arts and
intellectuals.
Fascism looks down on education, critical
thinking, and any challenges to the leader’s
power. You can’t have people thinking for
themselves, and can’t have people learning
about ethnic studies, queer studies or women’s
studies lest they get ideas about challenging
the status quo and disrupting the social
hierarchy, thinking about revolution, and the
like.
