Education / Public service alert:
Matthew critically reviews six books that define fascist eras and recount how they have been opposed. A kind of “here we are, now what?” episode that hopefully interrupts the doomscroll with the sobriety of some practical considerations.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)
Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
Paul Mason, How to Fight Fascism (2018)
Mark Bray, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook (2017)
Curzio Malaparte: Technique de Coup d’Etat (1931)
Spencer Sunshine: 40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists (2021)
Formats range from popular nonfiction to academic history to pragmatic field guide. Politics range from liberal to anarchist. More feminist and non-white sources to be reviewed soon.
Show Notes
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder’s Bad History | City Journal
Robert O. Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Is It Fascism? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind. - The New York Times
How to Stop Fascism
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
Curzio Malaparte - The Technique Of Revolution
40 Ways to Fight Fascists: Street-Legal Tactics for Community Activists — Spencer Sunshine
Joyful Militancy | The Anarchist Library
Let This Radicalize You | HaymarketBooks.org
Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life — Natasha Lennard
DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM Aime Cesaire Translated by Joan Pinkham
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Hello, everybody.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism, i.e.
your daily news feed at this point.
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And the podcast itself is on Instagram and Threads.
And please support our Patreon.
Now, today I've got a public service educational resource-type brief for you called Anti-Fascist Woodshed, in which I'll be reviewing six books that define fascist eras and recount how they have been opposed.
This is a kind of here-we-are-now-what episode that hopefully interrupts the doom scroll with the sobriety of some practical considerations.
So I'll be looking at, in order, Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny from 2017. Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism from 2004. Paul Mason's How to Fight Fascism 2018. Mark Bray's Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook from 2017. Curzio Malaparte's Technique de coup d'etat from 1931. And then also...
40 Ways to Fight Fascists, Street Legal Tactics for Community Activists by Spencer Sunshine, published in 2021. Now, these books range from popular nonfiction to academic history to pragmatic field guide style, and their politics range from liberal to anarchist.
And here's a mea culpa off the top.
The positionality is not diverse here.
At least not yet.
I don't have feminist or non-white writers on this list, and that's because I'm still reading them, and I wanted to get this episode out earlier rather than later, but I will return with another of these next month, I think, looking at books like Joyful Militancy by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariam Kaba, and Being Numerous by Natasha Leonard.
Now, on this...
Politics and positionality note, I'm not going to pretend I approach this topic with the view from nowhere.
There are two basic political approaches to this literature.
Broadly, perhaps crudely put, the defenders of liberalism view fascism as an aberration of human nature that can be fought against through the reassertion of institutions and a return to rational and regulated capitalism.
This is a focus on manners, for the most part.
But leftists view fascism as an inevitable acceleration of the capitalist and colonial machine that can't be avoided or repaired without a structural reorganization of wealth and resources.
Now I'm firmly in the latter group.
I won't apologize for that.
I don't think this is a moment to pine for the Obama era or any fiction of American exceptionalism.
And further, related to the mandate of this podcast, I believe that the encouragement to believe in a wholesome and functioning America under capitalism inevitably leads to disillusionment and cynicism and therefore the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
Resonates strongly with the observation of Aimé Césaire.
He's the Martinique poet, author, and politician who was a key figure in the Negritude movement in francophone literature.
In his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, he concluded that, quote, Europe is indefensible.
And what he was doing was dissing the commentariat class who positioned the Holocaust and the rise of fascism as an unfortunate spiral into madness that betrayed the glory of the Enlightenment.
Césaire was like, nah, it's not that.
And after quoting Césaire, anti-fascist historian Mark Bray, whose book is in today's pile, writes that, quote, The only long-term solution to the fascist menace is to undermine its pillars of strength in society grounded not only in white supremacy but also in ableism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, nationalism, transphobia, class rule, and many others.
This long-term goal points to the tensions that exist in defining anti-fascism because at a certain point, destroying fascism is really about promoting a revolutionary socialist alternative.
In my opinion, one that has anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchical qualities to a world of crisis, poverty, famine, and war that breeds fascist reaction.
So that's Mark Bray.
So we'll get to him.
So these are my biases.
But all that said, I also grapple honestly with Paul Mason's view.
I'm looking at his book today, too.
That in tough times, leftists and centrists really should think hard about compromise and collaboration.
And I think that we do that here on Conspirituality Podcast.
It's hard work.
It's not always clear how much friction an alliance will benefit or suffer from.
But there's also deep value in working with what you have, as you have to do in, let's say, a family.
That said...
Let me start with my most critical review.
This is of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.
And hopefully this will model the best of uneasy alliance making.
Okay, so the prose.
This is a short pamphlet.
It's 78 pages.
And I think it'll get you warmed up into thinking about an unfamiliar political reality.
It's kind of like calisthenics.
Feel like it has some good psychosocial tips.
Do not obey in advance is the one that everybody remembers from about a thousand Facebook posts, but I'll come back to that one.
He says, you know, make eye contact and small talk with your neighbors to foster community.
Use corporeal politics, as in gather publicly, but also keep your private life private and develop courage.
All great points.
All very sensible, too, including, you know, a general feeling of you must defend institutions that you shouldn't fold on your professional ethics.
You know, as in, if the executive order says don't treat trans children with gender-affirming care, but you know that it's not yet a law, you know what to do.
Okay, so some good points there.
Here are the cons involved in Snyder's book from my point of view.
And I'll just say, you know, right off the top that there's a reason that this pamphlet is really popular.
It's simple.
And unfortunately, that means it's simple to the point of simplistic.
It's aphoristic.
It's purpose-built for social media.
And I would say Rachel Maddow-type op-eds.
And as a rule of thumb, I'd also say that the measure of how popular an analysis is on resistance liberal Facebook is also a measure of how thin and easy its message is and how little it will actually challenge the assumptions of the Democrat mainstream.
Now, since 2017, Snyder has been a favorite commentator on big networks like MSNBC. And I would say this is another sign of how hemmed in his analysis might be.
But my main hesitation with Snyder comes from reading the academic criticism of his main work, such as the book Bloodlands from 2010, in which he equates Stalin-era mass death from political murders and resource mismanagement with Nazi genocide, which he reduced to the notion of, quote, ecological panic, unquote.
Now, all of this is in the persuasive but contested style of Hannah Arendt, with the focus being on totalitarianism as such, as opposed to the ideas and mechanics of fascism versus state communism.
And this commits Snyder to a highbrow brand of horseshoe theory.
Hitler and Stalin are the same, and their regimes were equally horrible.
Twinned totalitarianisms is his phrase.
And this has been a standard liberal trope for 75 years.
And along with Red Scare rhetoric on the far right, it's been effective at silencing the richness of leftist philosophy and of leftist opposition to Stalin and other oppressive regimes.
And sure enough, his book does not contain the word capitalism at all, which is incredible.
Here's a key sentence that betrays some of these weaknesses.
Quote, Now, globalization as a term is doing a ton of laundering work, replacing capitalist exploitation and colonial abuse.
I also love perceived inequalities and the implication that Russia had a functioning democracy in 1917.
And if keywords mean anything to you, here are some more you will not find in this book.
Racism, patriarchy, sexism, and colonialism.
Now, not every book has to be about everything, but come on, these seem to be basic themes you might want to shout out from your office at Yale.
And without these broader contexts, there is a reduction to psychology in this book that might be detectable in that first lesson.
Don't obey in advance.
This is useful advice if ICE comes to your door without the proper court orders.
But as a psychological take, if you have not been questioning the fundamental logic and morality of capitalism in your daily life so far, I'm sorry to say you might already be in a state of obeying in advance.
Does this inside baseball matter if it helps shake people awake from complacency?
No.
But I will say that it probably won't get you beyond a warm-up stage.
And if you stay there, I don't think you'll figure out who has actionable theories and analyses.
That will take you beyond the present crisis.
So forgive me here for saying it, but I don't think there's a lot of incentive for liberal pundits to really go beyond micromanaging present crises and their psychological implications with more than suggestions for self-soothing.
Because commenting in favor of a more just capitalism keeps a certain amount of drama going.
And there are mainstream liberal rewards for being the good guy, but not so much for being the cranky guy who says, let's look in the mirror here.
So, next book.
Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism from 2004. Robert Paxton isn't so much of a look-in-the-mirror guy either, but he is a solid distiller and sorter of fascist history.
This book is longer.
It's more difficult than Snyder's book, but it's absolutely worth the effort, in my opinion.
Paxton is 93 years old.
He's been doing this for a long time.
And in Anatomy of Fascism, he's able to examine more than a century of fascist movements.
And he's really good at showing how every emergence of fascism is slightly different and that we shouldn't be distracted by aesthetics or whether the ideologies line up perfectly.
MAGA doesn't goose-step.
And as much as RFK Jr. would want everyone to look like extras in Lenny Riefenstahl music videos, these are not defining features of fascism per se.
Fascism is really about behavior.
And Paxton points out that only a few fascist movements are successful, often generally on organization and political opportunity and tactics.
His opinion in our time is important, I think, because with all of his scholarship on board, he was at first skeptical about whether the Trump era really fit the profile of the fascist movements that provoked the Second World War.
But after Trump's mob attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, Paxton basically said, yeah, this is a fascist movement.
Now, he's also white and male, like Snyder, and he's old enough to expect blind spots.
His focus on racism and politics in places like the Global South is pretty limited.
He doesn't have a strong focus on how fascism overlaps with patriarchy or misogyny.
But check this out for definitional concision.
Paxton says that fascism—this is a definition that I read out into the record on last Thursday's episode.
I'm just going to repeat it here because it's so good.
He says, That fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints.
Now, the whole book just unpacks these very dense and precise phrases.
His focus is on social behavior, and that encourages readers to look broadly, not necessarily psychologically.
But he also examines the fragility of fascist obsessions and why that makes them so volatile.
He roots these movements in a raw anxiety over loss and humiliation and the urgent need to restore an imperiled glory.
But that's shared amongst the group.
Now, he does have an ambivalent take on the relationship between capitalism and fascism by pointing out that fascism will often pay lip service to anti-capitalist sentiments before it attains power, but then it will cozy up to the capitalist elite as things get real.
My final points of appreciation here are that Paxton leans nicely into the fact that liberals and centrists often tolerate fascists taking control because that's easier than accommodating actual leftist reforms.
Also, he pushes back strongly against the psychologization of fascism, which in my view, now this isn't his point, it's mine.
It often serves the liberal agenda of pretending that fascism is somehow mainly a fever dream and an aberration, but he's really firm on it being dangerous to conclude that fascism is a form of, you know, mental disturbance or delusion because that provides an alibi for the so-called normal.
Fascists, the leaders and militants who were once ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
Also, he points out the obvious that no one had real access to Hitler except Dr. Morell, and no one really knows what's going on in Trump's head, do they?
And Paxton points out that the notion that fascists are repressed sex freaks really doesn't track unless you want to pretend that sexuality in England or France was somehow more healthy in 1930. Let's turn now to Paul Mason's How to Stop Fascism from 2021. This is a rich,
populist, and muscular read from an eclectic Northern English journalist activist with a broad range of experiences in anti-fascist organizing and a keen sense of the value of collaboration and compromise, as I noted at the top.
Now, this guy's done everything from street defense against white supremacist boneheads to We're currently gunning for a labor seat with a bout of what might be pragmatic or necessary deference paid to Keir Starmer, which I have some questions about.
But overall, Mason does a great job in summarizing the dialectic of fascist and anti-fascist history well beyond where Paxton leaves off.
He follows strange new iterations of fascist grievance and impulse into the dank online world and then into the mainstream that we're suffering today.
And as an old street fighter, he's particularly good at detailing how both real and symbolic violence is essential to the atmosphere of fear and intimidation in which the liberal mindset struggles to respond.
Now, he's really persuasive on this point, which some academic historians are mixed on, that when liberals and the left fail to compromise and collaborate in the face of rising fascism, the consequences are really bad.
The fighting of liberals and socialists in Italy, for example, left the door open to Il Duce, and in Germany, the socialists and communists sometimes hated each other more than they hated the fascists, which might sound familiar to you.
When liberals and leftists are split, the cops side with the liberals, if not the fascists outright.
Now, all of these failures, Mason says, can lead to depression, despair, doomscrolling.
Sound familiar?
And then what happens when one movement provides a shining, aggressive, and triumphant vision?
Mason touts the valuable lessons of liberal left alliances in times gone by, while not idealizing them too much, I think.
The Popular Front in 1930s France didn't just represent a political alliance, in Mason's view.
But a cultural movement that reclaimed symbols appropriated by the right, like Joan of Arc and the tricolor.
The communists had denounced the tricolor.
They refused to sing the Marseillaise, but they got on board and they sang their lungs out in the fight against fascism.
And this movement also attracted artists and thinkers, and it fostered a minor boom in literature and film.
And it makes me want to ask Mason about Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl show because I think this is the kind of culture making he's actually talking about.
It's clearly revolutionary and reclamatory and genius, but it's also pulled off at the very center of the American empire using all of the levers of capital with Trump looking on and Samuel L. Jackson playing an ex-Black Panther Uncle Sam with 16 stars on his vest.
The leftist who's unwilling to compromise does not get to wrap on that stage and captivate the world with something astonishing.
Now, in these alliances, are there internal conflicts?
Yes.
Do hardcore leftists have to defer and delay?
Yes.
Do liberals stab their left flank in the back?
Yes.
Do alliances fall apart?
Yes.
But Mason argues that each attempt and failure offers lessons and promises.
And in today's world, there are more immediate collaborative opportunities through online culture if we can break through filter bubbles and echo chambers.
This brings me to Mark Bray's Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook, 2017.
Now, six books on this list...
I think this is my top recommendation because Bray knows current anti-fascist action from the inside out.
He interviewed over 70 activists from around the world about what they actually do.
And he found a transnational movement with intergenerational strategies of collective self-defense against far-right violence, all of which is aimed at preventing fascists from establishing a pathway to state power.
Now, he's really great at summarizing the lessons that anti-fascists hold dear.
I'm going to do a mixture of quoting and paraphrasing here.
One point is that fascist revolutions have never succeeded because fascists have always gained power legally.
And this fact alone casts doubt on the liberal formula for opposing fascism, which is based on reasoned debate and police intervention.
Because historically, fascism has gained entry to power by convincing the gatekeepers to open the gates.
And we have to ask, why do they want to open the gates?
Another key point is that fascism merely brought the imperialism and genocide that Europe had exported around the world home.
These things are connected.
You can't separate them out.
Next point.
Anti-fascism is both an analysis...
And a moral appeal.
It thinks about where fascism comes from so that it can carefully respond to it and also change its response over time.
But it also seeks to build the rhetorical power of the term fascist as a slur because Bray says that the moral register of anti-fascism understands how fascism itself as a term has become a moral signifier that the vulnerable have utilized to highlight.
How ferocious their foes are.
Next point.
It doesn't take that many fascists to make a big fucking mess.
In 1919, Mussolini's party had a hundred members.
And when he ascended to the prime ministerial ship in 1922...
Only less than 8% of the Italian population belonged to this party.
The German Workers' Party had 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting after the First World War, and when he was appointed chancellor in 1933, only 1.3% of the population belonged to the NSDAP. The tragic irony of modern antifascism is that when it works,
the more people question its necessity.
What happens when you can't see the fascists that the antifascists ran out of town?
Anti-fascism can be the victim of its own success.
Now, also, I want to say that Bray is just a pretty amazing scholar and frontman for this material.
This book came out in 2017, just a few weeks after the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and that sent him into a firestorm of press coverage in which everyone wanted to smear and gotcha him with all kinds of conspiratorial BS about Antifa and ask endless questions about face masks But if you watch interviews from that time, he's completely unflappable.
Here he is on a C-SPAN call-in show.
This is actually a moderate call-in from a listener.
Let's go now to Keith calling from Oldsmar, Florida.
Keith is an independent.
Good morning.
Yes, I have a comment or two, one for C-SPAN and one for your guest.
Yes, I would agree with you, Mr. Bray, that the neo-Nazis are racist and all that.
But the left wing, in their historical perspective, such as Russia, killed as many Jews as Germany did.
During World War II, it just took him a longer period of time.
Stalin was very anti-Jewish, very racist in his country.
So leftists have no moral ground, high ground, on whatever you say.
So, another thing is, during the campaign for the presidency of this election cycle, that would be Trump versus Hillary, the Democrats put people in Trump's crowd to cause a disturbance that's directly out of the fascist handbook from the Democrats put people in Trump's crowd to cause a disturbance that's directly out of the fascist handbook
The leftists and the rightists have no moral high ground, and that will include you in your book.
So, a couple things to address.
First, I am very clearly...
In all my writings, anti-Stalinist.
I make no efforts to defend Stalin.
Number two, the question of whether or not...
No platforming a fascist group is therefore a fascist action.
Certainly it is an illiberal action.
It differs from the sort of classical liberal notion of solving social problems through the alleged free market of ideas.
But to say that all illiberal politics are essentially the same through the kind of mode of extremism that is very popular is to essentially normalize the center and equate ISIS with anarchists, which is really ahistorical and lacking in any sort of content.
The notion that...
What defines fascism as disrupting speeches is really missing the point of fascism as an authoritarian, violent, hierarchical...
Okay, so this super calm correction is key because it gets to the heart of that horseshoe theory confusion, which is really a fetishization of manners.
Anti-fascism is not polite.
It rejects that Evelyn Beatrice Hall line of I disapprove of what you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it because that doesn't protect the vulnerable in society.
The point is to destroy fascism and protect the vulnerable even if it means violating the free speech of fascists.
Now another point of illiberalism is not shying away from defensive force.
In his book, Bray quotes an activist named Murray from the Baltimore Association of Anti-Racist Action.
You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don't have to fight them with fists.
You fight them with fists so you don't have to fight them with knives.
You fight them with knives so you don't have to fight them with guns.
You fight them with guns so you don't have to fight them with tanks.
What Murray is rejecting here is a purely passive or pacifist approach But Bray's also really good at calmly explaining
that contra Alex Jones and now the entire Trump government, Antifascist groups are not focused on violence at all.
They can organize direct confrontational action to face down fascist or white supremacist rallies and protect neighborhoods, but the vast majority of antifascist activity is mutual aid, reading groups, community gardens, online surveillance of the far right.
There's also labor organizing, environmental activism, migrant solidarity work, and the constant building of societal taboos against racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-trans bigotry.
For the last two books, I'll be brief because this Monday, so in two days on Patreon, I'll be going into both more deeply in a further discussion of how certain liberal beliefs in rational argument or persuasion can fail to recognize the reality of a moment.
That episode is going to be called Manners, the Machine, and Malaparte's Technique de Coup d'État.
And that's the book that I'll talk about now.
So, Malaparte was an Italian World War I vet.
And one-time fascist whose empirical and personal experience analysis of how successful coups happen, I think it puts to bed the question of what is going on this minute in Washington, because it completely pivots away from all of the political and aesthetic questions that Snyder, Paxton, and Mason wrestle with, and it focuses on the raw tactics of coups, no matter who is running them and for what purposes.
Now, this book, written in 1931, summarizes Malaparte's studies of both successful and unsuccessful revolutions, dating back over the half-century prior to his writing.
The successes he talks about involve or include the Bolsheviks in October of 1917, led by Trotsky, the tactician, not Lenin, the ideologue, and also Mussolini's coup in 1922, in which Malaparte himself took part.
His core observation is that for both Trotsky and Mussolini, ideology and aesthetics were important for culture building, for creating the permission structure of what was to come, for drumming up the perception of popular support.
But ultimately, he said, the success of both came down to tactics.
When small, trained cadres of technical experts can seize control of technical assets, they can flip the switch of the state into autocracy mode.
So what are we talking about here?
In that era, we're talking about assets like power lines, communications, radio, railways, water mains, the postal service, bridges, roads, banks, resource stockpiles.
In these days, we're talking about data servers.
An authoritarian movement might have spent years cultivating popular support, but what pushes the autocrat into the throne room is not mass mobilization and physical force.
Trotsky basically hacked the city of Petrograd, and Kerensky, the government leader at the time, was helpless because he couldn't turn the lights on and he couldn't send a telegram.
Does this sound familiar?
Lastly, 40 Ways to Fight Fascists, Street Legal Tactics for Community Activists by Spencer Sunshine.
This book is exactly what it sounds like.
Again, I'm going to talk more about it.
On the Monday Patreon bonus, this is a short book.
It's to the point.
It's accessible.
And it's about as far away from Timothy Snyder on MSNBC as you can get.
And to that point, let me just read the opening graphs.
Quote, Alt-right leader Richard Spencer was punched in the face during a demonstration, and the video of the incident went viral.
It led to a heated public discussion over whether it was okay to punch a Nazi.
And this debate has raged off and on since, prompted by events such as the murder of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, by a neo-Nazi in August 2017, and the punching of far-right provocateur Andy Ngo at a June 2019 event in Portland, Oregon.
Later that year, In reality, the vast majority of the work involved in countering the far right is perfectly legal.
However...
Thank you.
Thank you.
Regardless of which side of the Nazi-punching debate you fall on, this guide will walk you through 40 legal, practical, grassroots actions that you can take to act against fascism and the far right.
These actions, the majority of which are available to people of all backgrounds, identities, and skill levels, will help to contain far-right organizing and prevent or mediate the damage it inflicts on our communities.
They present a diversity of tactics intended to raise the cost of participation in far-right politics.
So there you go.
That PDF and all other links to all other resources are there in the show notes.
