Populism is often treated by media as a scary word, and that’s understandable. What corporation wouldn’t be terrified of democracy? It’s a method of management that’s the entire opposite of CEOs and board meetings.
Imagine if public input could actually change media. If media was accountable beyond paper thin regulations often resulting in minor slaps on the wrist.
Even as I write this on medium, they could censor all my works and shut me down at the stroke of a key, because without them, I have no access to an audience. I am of course grateful that they put up with my many ramblings, but they could if they wanted to, and beyond going to another company, I have very few options.
My ability to meaningfully exercise free expression must, in some way or another, meet the passive approval of a corporate institution. As people who don’t quite understand what free speech is would say: That is their right as a corporation.
Which is true, and literally the basis of most common criticism regarding modern day censorship.
Here in Europe, Populism has become synonymous with fascists. Not conservatives, not the right wing, not idiots who read cheap tabloids and think it’s all true, not your horrible uncle on Facebook, but actual bald headed armband wearing fascists.
So I will now discuss some of this history in relation to populism, based on the excellent book “Blackshirts and Reds” by Yale prof. Michael Parenti:
Because fascists are not actually very populist. In fact, they hated a lot of popular things. They distrusted the people, they censored and burned European literature, they destroyed libraries, and academic archives. They vulgarised Christianity into a religion of war and hate.
They were on a quest to break the European population and turn them into a cheap caricature of themselves. Into slaves for a system that worshipped some postmodern iteration of their great leader, in what Nazis called the Fuhrer principle.
Nazis were not defending European culture, they were at war with European culture, and have been ever since. They revise, erase, censor and malform European culture to suit their own creation mythology, in which Europe has been in some kind of disjointed struggle with the eternal Jew.
But where is this eternal Jew? The answer it would seem that he is hiding in conspiracy theories, in rumours, in stereotypes and in falsehoods. Supposedly the eternal Jew is invisible and all-knowing. But the only eternal Jew I can think of with such qualities is Jesus Christ, and I do not believe he is the cause of all of Europe’s problems.
So supposedly the populists burned and enslaved the people on behalf of the people if you listen to pundits and politicians.
Rather the real source of populism is one that begins in Rome, with the Populares. The most famous of whom is Julius Caesar, not to be mistaken for his usurper: Caesar Augustus.
Caesar implemented many popular reforms, including rent moratoriums, constitutional law, elected representatives and reductions in slave labour. This is hardly the habit of a Nazi.
Things were far from perfect in Rome, but to point the finger at populism is to ignore the many oligarchs and landlords who spent centuries fighting its influences using everything from social doctrines to death squads and assassins.
Julius Caesar was assassinated by his own senators, who then proceeded to kill hundreds of other populists in a city-wide purge.
And it also ignores the origins of the fascists. Because there is a myth that the fascists were elected. But this ignores the blackshirts and the SA, who carried out acts of terrorism. It also ignores the night of long knives, during which the fascists murdered their opposition. It ignores the blatant collusion between the fascists and the coal and automotive industries, which supplied their party organisers with unprecedented amounts of funding, and even access to thousands of personal automobiles.
During the great depression, the Nazi party could use cars to travel all around the country, whilst the opposition was stuck doing legwork. They had elaborate demonstrations and ceremonies, and unlike other political parties, they could pay people salaries. So while everyone else was volunteering on their free time, Nazis had paid employees who dedicated their entire workweek to forwarding Nazi influence.
Mussolini, similarly, made his ends through strikebreaking, and received millions of lire from the Italian industrialists. These men were basically running their own mercenary companies, and were employed by factories and business owners to break heads on the picketline. Police would look the other way, and would frequently dismiss serious criminal charges against them because of their high status among Germany and Italy’s oligarchs.
Furthermore, upon being elected, the first thing Mussolini and Hitler did was to carve up the state and sell it off piece by piece, as national industries were given to their many sponsors, and in turn bankrupting the people.
They also came up with funding schemes, not just labour camps and similar horrors, but also investment scams, fake lotto campaigns, exploitative labour practices and a bunch of other things. Germany’s military budget at this time was the highest one in history, and the people were expected to pony up for it.
Now I will discuss a few things from another source, namely Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, so I’m just giving you the title here.
Because if we look at Weimar, we see a different reality from the idyllic propaganda posters of smiling faces and well defined jawlines. We see how those things did not happen to the people. How more often than not when we look at those photos, it’s German military officers, and higher levels of the German state. It’s the aristocrats who are sunbathing and playing volley ball.
The people lived in absolute squalor. There was hard poverty, crime, a lot of people became sex workers out of desperation, there was domestic violence and drug abuse.
In fact the fascists really liked drugs. They didn’t like psychedelics or marijuana, but they really liked stimulants. Amphetamines and cocaine especially. They liked how it made people work harder, and they liked how it made soldiers fight really aggressively. The word “Blitzkrieg” comes from this, and just how rapidly the Wehrmacht forces moved in and took France.
And it had another benefit too: Because it created productive workers, who made twice as much productivity on the same hourly wage, and then when they became burnouts and addicts, you could put them into a concentration camp for “rehabilitation”, and exploit them even harder as penal labour.
And when you examine all of these things put together, I ask: Where exactly is the populism? I’m not saying that the Aryans, as it were, did not benefit from the segregation and plunder and later on genocide of the Jews, in many ways they did. While the rest of Europe was at war, they lived in safety. They didn’t have to deal with widespread famine, or disease, or terrible atrocities, but they certainly weren’t happy.
They existed in the middle of things. And it is precisely because of this conflict of interest that they became inert. It wasn’t just terror, because terror doesn’t work.
Look at the Jews of Belarus who lost everything, the survivors of the massacres and the slaughters, who had their homes burned, saw their family and neighbors get killed and only survived themselves because of some lucky coincidence. Those people became partisans. Those people were happy to fight. Those people would kill by piano wire in the day, and rifle by night.
Jewish partisans are often understated in history, but it was a very real and very frequent thing. German partisans on the other hand numbered in the thousands, relative to a population of millions.
And why is this? Part of the reason why is because their families were still living, they still had things left to lose.
In fact there is a very good film about Jewish partisans called Defiance. In it there is a scene where they catch a German soldier, and the soldier immediately pleads for his life.
“Please! I have children!”
“So did we.”
He did not survive.
And I enjoy how this scene is a perfect representation of how fascism simply created two distinct ways in which to be miserable. The German is miserable in his inhumanity as a functionary of tyranny, in his captivity of self-preservation. The Jews are miserable in their oppression, and how they are subjected to terrible violence.
Obviously the German had it a lot easier, his problems cannot compare to those of the Jews, but the fundamentally radical content is that no one was happy. Luxury, contentment, safety, physical welfare, oppression can produce all these things for its benefactors, but it cannot make them happy.
This is why they were subdued by drugs, and gestapo police terror, and constant indoctrination. Because fascism cannot produce authentic happiness to its population, it can only distract people from their misery.
Because even with the benefits given to them by the government, they were at the end of the day a resource to be used by their rulers. As soldiers, functionaries and workers.
This is hardly comforting words to a holocaust survivor, but in fairness to myself: It is not intended as such, it is merely intended to discredit the promises made by tyrants.
A similar example is also in the US during the Jim Crow era. Undeniably, white households had far more wealth and property than black households. But look at these segregated white suburban communities:
They are communities in name only. Neighbors do not trust one another, and constantly compete and gossip and regard one another with disdain. They point fingers at eachother and accuse one another of being communists. Women sit at churches and whisper and gossip behind eachothers backs, pretending to be friends. Homeowners associations crop up to harass and bicker over petty and spiteful things.
People drink hard liquor on the weekdays, they take pills, they carry out domestic violence, there is no community. The only time they experience unity is when they look outwardly at black people. They have no community based on caring for one another, only one of shared hostility towards this other.
Their entire identities are hollowed out to make room for the US government and its corporate benefactors. And while in economic terms they are prospering, in cultural and social terms, they are reduced to animals.
And once again: I do not equate this suffering with lynching or slavery, I do not think it is comforting words for a slave, but once more I simply wish to discredit the promises made by fascism.
And this is a universal principle in any place with first class and second class citizens, because nobody wants to be a second class citizen.
There is always a Harriet Tubman, there is always a Paul Robeson, there is always a Martin Luther King Jr, there is always a Malcolm X, there is always a Huey P. Newton. There is not one generation of black Americans who did not thrive culturally and intellectually even during the worst of times, who did not produce books, music, poetry and art which has become admired by people all around the world.
Obviously it goes without saying that they could have made these great achievements without racism, we should not attribute it to such a thing, it would be foolish and not to mention reactionary. But it is to say that they were able to do great things even when they had everything taken from them, and it is to say how no matter how hard you oppress someone, they are still a risk to you.
And that is why you must fortify oppression with some kind of first class citizen, who becomes a functionary of such an oppression.
White people did of course resist, and participate in civil rights, and fought racism. But they weren’t supposed to. They were not brought up to do this. They were not educated and socialised with this purpose in mind. It is something they did in spite of what society demanded of them.
So the populism here was never the Ku Klux Klan, with its police collusion, millions in funding, and government insiders. The populism was on the other side, it was the civil rights movement, it was the black liberationist movement, it was the black nationalist movement.
It was the people who took to the streets, while their enemies took to the shadows. The people who walked in the daylight, instead of coming out at sundown. These were the people who introduced social programmes to alleviate poverty, who strengthened the labour movement, who introduced culture and art for the everyman. While stuffy petit-bourgeois fanatics were tapping their toes to Pat Boone, workers of all stripes played the brass at New Orleans.
And even if times were painful, and sorrowful, and unforgivably cruel, there were in fact moments of authentic happiness. There were great achievements that should be celebrated, and great moments of solidarity. This does not disqualify or diminish the horrors people struggled against, but this pursuit of happiness shows the substance of populism.
And it shows precisely how powerful it was. How people were willing to get their heads cracked by nightsticks, how they were willing to go to jail, how they were willing to face volleys of gunfire, how they were willing to risk death from vigilantes and even the FBI, simply to find those moments of liberation, and justice, and joy in an otherwise brutal and unforgiving order.
This is the struggle of the people. Sometimes because of race, sometimes because of religion, sometimes because of poverty, but it is precisely this thing which motivates all of us, this pursuit of humanity. And when all these various categories join hands, that’s when resistance becomes revolution. That’s when the people outnumber their masters. That’s when history gets made.
And people have tried to do this using simple rationality. A good example is intersectionalism, which uses a kind of points system to figure out who the most radical minority is, and it’s just a joke. It becomes completely world denying, because all it does is to play with statistics. To an individual person it makes no sense.
Malcolm X was healthy, educated, resourceful, and also black. As a result, the Ku Klux Klan burned down his family home twice, and he was brutally murdered in what was likely an assassination arranged by the FBI.
He would not have scored a lot of points on the intersectionalism card, in fact according to the points system, the two things which motivated people to kill him would’ve split even: He was black and educated.
Because being educated in his situation is not just a blessing, it’s also a curse. That’s when you get a target painted on your back. So you can’t just examine it through some abstract scope wherein we are all variables in a calculation.
In fact, another good example is James Baldwin. James Baldwin was black, educated and also a homosexual. According to minority bingo, he’d be far worse off than Malcolm X, and yet he had a very successful life, and lived considerably longer, even if he did die tragically of cancer.
So it’s a fun little way for academia to pit minorities against another, and turn oppression into some kind of weird competition. It gives hardship a kind of prestige and excitement, but obviously in reality it’s just misery. You don’t want it, and it says nothing about who you are or what your life is going to be like.
Moreover it’s fundamentally based on John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, which is a very reactionary idea of morality. Because intersectionalism looks at pure causality, like discrimination, aggression, hostility, and so on. It boils down lived experiences into a series of events, and paints these as problematic.
And that is the harm principle, which says that harm to others is only ever permitted when someone seeks to do you harm, or have caused you harm. Violence in this case being defense, retaliation, perhaps some kind of admonishment or even punishment. It doesn’t have to be physical.
As such, it is a fundamentally a debt-based model of harm. The trick is to always be owed something, because then you get to control people through the use of punishments and retaliation.
As you can imagine: This philosophy, which founded the British colonies in what is now the United States, has been a disaster. Because anyone can, with enough creative reasoning, figure out a way in which someone else has wronged them.
Reality of the matter is precisely that: Reality. You cannot merely dilute the experiences of discrimination, abuse, oppression, exploitation and similar things to a series of morally evaluated interactions. It ignores both the cause and the effect of these interactions.
For instance racism isn’t just something that affects you when you experience it, it also affects you in all the situations where you are cautious of it. It affects you by fear, distrust, alienation and otherness. Each time you want to trust someone, you have to risk being vulnerable to a system that is rigged in the favor of the other person. The other person might be a perfectly kind and decent human being, but you have to take a risk to figure that out.
Same is true about misogyny, same is true about homophobia, same is true about poverty and whatever else. Because these systems of social hierarchies are not grounded in just active events, but also in exposure. To be constantly exposed. To live in a circumstance of precarity. Wherein large numbers of people that you encounter every single day, have the capacity to screw you over.
And the harm principle is useless there, because it turns the whole world into a score you have to settle. You can’t point to a single person and say “This is the source of my alienation, this is the person who makes me feel exposed!” All you can do is point to society, and from there you have no recourse.
Instead success comes from rejecting the intersectional consciousness. From understanding that it is a false one, that you do not score too low on the minority bingo card and that you won’t find out your true potential unless you try. How yes, things will hold you back, but there’s no actual way of predicting how. How people exceed the minority bingo card each and every day, and how this is the path forward.
From breaking these boundaries, from thriving in spite of being exposed. To actually take those risks, and connect with people, and find this authenticity and community that is only made possible from courage in the face of tyranny.
Because all it takes is one person to do it, and suddenly they have doubled forces. Suddenly they have doubled their capacity to double forces.
This is how one man becomes a million, and how populism becomes democracy.
