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April 16, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:05:47
WHO ARE THE FASCISTS? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 70
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We see growing trends of centralization, suppression, censorship in America today.
Are we devolving toward some kind of tyranny, fascism, civil war?
In this special episode, I bring on one of the world's leading authorities on fascism, Professor Stanley Payne, to discuss these issues, not just historically, but also apply them to America today.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We see very disturbing trends all around us.
These are trends, by the way, that Conservatives warned about before the election.
We said very emphatically that bad things would happen if Biden was elected.
Bad things would happen if the Democrats maintained a grip on both houses of Congress.
That what we would see is not merely an expansion of the centralized state, not just economic confiscation, higher tax rates, more regulation, a kind of stifling of the economy.
But we would see encroachment into civil liberties, greater and greater threats to basic rights, free speech, freedom of religion, now even due process.
We would also begin to see an attack on our basic institutions, an effort to weaken institutions that provide any kind of resistance to the state.
And coordinate the other institutions of the state, of society, the media, academia, Hollywood, but even an effort to whip the corporate sector into line, sports teams into line.
The aggression of the left seems to know no bounds.
You'd think they would be content with saying, well, listen, you know, we got the universities, we got Hollywood, what do we care about the NFL, right?
Or the skating team.
But they do care. They want to establish this harmony across the whole society.
Now, the Nazis had a term for this, Gleichschaltung, coordination.
And we see, I think, in the left today, some strong hints of...
Not Nazism, but fascism.
Fascism. And yet that term is so highly contested.
We've got this group Antifa, anti-fascists, who are branding themselves as fighting fascism, and yet you have to look around there.
Where are the fascists that they are fighting?
So what do these terms even mean?
What is fascism?
Now, when I get into this with various pundits on social media, you have people like the historian Kevin Cruz.
You don't understand fascism at all.
Well, this is a guy who's written a book about white flight in Atlanta, busing patterns in Atlanta.
What does he know about fascism?
Not a lot. And so I figured, why not bring on the podcast someone who is a preeminent authority on fascism, And also, as it happens, a preeminent authority on the Spanish Civil War.
That's the second issue that's really important today.
Is the dividedness of America going to be healed?
Or is it going to continue?
Is it going to get worse?
And how much worse?
Is the radicalization of the left going to lead to a radicalization on the right?
Are both sides going to become increasingly intemperate, violent?
Are both sides going to try to do to each other?
The same sorts of things that they shut the other side down, shut them up, contract or compress their civil liberties.
Now, Professor Stanley Payne is now retired.
He's the Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he taught from 1968 till he retired in 2005.
He's written a number of really important books.
I have one right here that I brought with me.
It's called A History of Fascism, 1914 to 19...
just one of several books on fascism.
And he's written a whole bunch of books on the Spanish Civil War.
So here's a guy who really knows what he's talking about, who has sort of, you may say, lived through it, seen it up close, and has had a career of writing about these things in a way that has brought him worldwide recognition.
So I'm delighted to invite Stanley Payne to come on this podcast and speak for the whole hour.
In which we get into some of the basic concepts of fascism, national socialism first, but then I'm going to ask him to apply those concepts directly to what we see in America, the rising tide of censorship.
The mobilization of the woke corporations, the physical violence that we see on the streets, the amassing of a centralized sort of Leviathan state, the mobilization of police agencies of government against opponents.
All of these are very disturbing trends, but what do they mean and where are they leading?
I think it's going to be a great show.
I'm looking forward to it.
When we come back, I'll be joined by Professor Stanley Payne, an authority on civil war and an authority on fascism.
Welcome, Professor Stanley Payne, to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.
You have devoted your career to studying both the topic of fascism and the Spanish Civil War.
Let me start by asking, how did you develop an interest in these topics?
By serendipity, that is, I simply began in a normal way as an American graduate student deciding to specialize in Spanish history because at that time in the mid-20th century, it simply was not being studied in the United States.
And then I had to come up with a dissertation topic for the PhD, and my advisor suggested the figure of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder and leader of the Spanish Fascist Party.
And so I developed that into a dissertation and a book, which was quite successful.
And rather grandiosely, I subtitled it History of Spanish Fascism, though I thought I could identify the movement as a fascist-type movement.
But on the other hand, I knew very little about fascism, as almost anyone knew very little about fascism in general in those days.
And this developed an interest in the broader phenomenon, which I worked on for a period of 20 years before I finally wrote my first book about fascism itself, because the phenomenon was bewildering at that point in history, probably still is.
Welcome to my show!
Fascism really began as a national phenomenon in Italy.
It came to Germany only much later, a decade later.
The nucleus that eventually founded fascism in Italy, you say, did not stem from the right-wing nationalists, but from a transformation of...
On the part of the revolutionary left.
Now, this may come as a surprise to people that fascism emerges in Italy from the left, that Mussolini, the leading figure of Italian fascism, came out of the Marxist tradition.
So what happened on the left that gave birth to this kind of new hybrid called fascism?
Well, it was a phenomenon of World War I, a process of nationalization of a minority of the revolutionary left in Italy, particularly the sectors that call themselves revolutionary syndicalists, that is, trade unionists or oriented for trade unionism of a revolutionary sort.
And revolutionary syndicalism morphed into what they called national syndicalism.
And that became probably the main theoretical and organizational basis of fascism in the very first moments.
Would it be fair to say that part of what inspired Mussolini was the desire to fuse the concept of nationalism or attachment to your country with classic Marxian socialism?
And so putting the two together, you get national socialism.
Now, I don't believe Mussolini liked the term national socialism because it became associated later, of course, with Hitler.
But wasn't it a fact that Mussolini was, in a sense, marrying the Nationalism and socialism to create this new thing that was called fascism.
He was bearing nationalism with radicalism and with the concept of politics embracing a modern entity than the merely political sphere that it had to organize the nation and the society and economy.
And, of course, that was a form of corporatism.
As you say, they never used that term, national socialism.
It was national corporatism and didn't have quite the same structure, you might find.
National socialism proper was a central European idea that developed first in Austria and in Czech Bohemia and to a certain extent Germany.
But this is, using the most commonly identifiable terms, this is the general idea.
We have a short clip that I want to play.
This is from one of my earlier films, Death of a Nation, where you can see Mussolini, who became the paradigmatic figure of early fascism.
Listen. Mussolini was responding to what historians call the crisis of Marxism.
I refer in the clip, Professor Payne, to the crisis of Marxism that sort of had an influence in giving rise to early fascism.
Now, you write in The History of Fascism that in some ways a lot of the classic elements that we associate with fascism were actually developed by Lenin.
I just want to read. You talk about the idea of the coup d'etat, seizing power with armed force, one-party dictatorship, the effort at total control of all institutions, the notion of personality and charismatic leadership, and then later, even concentration camps, large-scale forced labor, the liquidation or elimination of whole classes of people.
We think of this as fascist as associated with Hitler, but you're saying in a way that Lenin Invented the system.
Are there links or similarities?
How would you describe the link between Leninism on the one hand and fascism on the other?
The fascist movement in Italy was a project to nationalize leftist radicalism, and also in some ways to partially domesticate it, and was conceived as a kind of revolutionary rivalry with Leninism.
The problem with Leninism from the Mussolini point of view was the fact that it was internationalist, was not a national movement, And in Italy, therefore, could not be an Italianist movement.
So it was conceived as a revolutionary rivalry.
And the relationship with Leninism had to do of course with fascism as the main opponent of Leninism to create a different kind of revolution.
But of course the fascist revolution was really ultimately of a different sort from the socialist revolution proper because it was a kind of anthropological revolution.
When we come back, I want to ask Professor Payne more about what he means by anthropological revolution.
I also want to dive into one of the leading theoreticians of fascism, the Italian thinker Giovanni Gentile.
All of this, of course, relevant to our discussions today about whether there are, and we'll ask Professor Payne about this, fascist strains in American politics today.
We'll be right back.
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Back with Professor Stanley Payne.
Professor Payne, you had used this interesting term that the fascist revolution in Italy was anthropological.
And do you mean by that that it was an effort to create a sort of a new man, but maybe a new man different from the one that Lenin sought to create?
That's exactly the idea.
All fascist movements, if they belonged to the species of politics that we call fascism or generic fascism, aimed at the new man.
That was the title, for example, of the newspaper of the strong fascist movement in Romania.
And they all had the same idea, though they expressed it in somewhat different ways in different countries, Human nature, so to speak, to create a different kind of human culture, different kind of society, not just in solving economic problems.
Fascism was supposed to deal with the economic problems that created socialism or the desire for socialism, but beyond that, to go well beyond solving economic problems, not by simply centralizing all ownership in the hands of the state, but rather by creating a new kind of human being, Who would form a new society, a different psychology.
He would be the new man, a different and superior kind of human being.
It's interesting. You're talking about fascism in different countries.
A lot of people associate fascism either just with Germany or maybe Germany and Italy.
But there was fascism in France.
There was fascism in Belgium.
There was fascism even in England.
And it's very interesting.
It seems to me when you look at some of the key figures...
In British fascism, of course, Oswald Mosley, who was a member of the British Labour Party, and therefore on the left.
In France, I think of Jean Alleman, who was associated with the Dreyfus case, Marcel Dier, Jacques Doriot, who was a member of the French Communist Party.
The point I'm trying to get at is that it appears like many of the leading figures of fascism were or came from the left, That may be a surprise to many people that fascism originated from figures who were seen as leftist, not as on the right.
You could make a kind of division between most of Western Europe and Central and East Central Europe.
Fascism in Western Europe tended to originate on the left, with the partial exception of Spain.
But in Germany and in East Central Europe, fascism came more out of the right than out of the left.
The truth of the matter, of course, is you have fascists from both extremes and from the middle as well.
And the aspiration of fascism, the fascists said, was to synthesize the left and the right, to take the best of both the left and the right, and the Italians said also liberalism, and created an entirely new Political composition,
a new form and expression that would have the best of all the worlds, but operate as a more dynamic, more unified, more vital and creative force than one could find from any leftist revolutionary movement or from the old liberalism and conservatism.
Now, when you say that fascism, in a sense, mobilized both from the left and the right, are you referring specifically to the European right?
And what I mean by that is that when we use the term right in America and in Europe, we typically mean something a little bit different, right?
The American right is anchored in a classical liberalism because, of course, its roots are in the American founding.
And so, for example, the The European right, not quite so, right?
The European right has been, to some degree, statist, just like the European left.
So, would it be important, do you think, to make a distinction here between the European right and the American right?
And am I right in thinking that fascism was anti-liberal, anti-free market, and anti-capitalist?
Absolutely. This was essential to fascism.
To regulate the market, that was the idea of national socialism in the Central European countries, and that was also the idea of fascist corporatism.
Your basic point is correct.
The United States has no right in the European sense What is called the right in the United States really refers to people who are to the right of the left, but they are indeed, in most cases, classical liberals.
Very hard to find a European-style rightist in the United States.
In Europe, there was a hard right coming out of monarchism in the first place, the old-style monarchist, traditionalist, and authoritarian right, Though not nearly as authoritarian as 20th century radicalism.
And then there developed, by the end of the 19th century, new forms of the radical right in Europe.
A kind of authoritarian nationalism with a different sort of program.
But there was no counterpart to that in the United States at all, then or now.
When we come back, I want to delve into the essential character of fascism and also talk about some important similarities, but also differences between fascism in Italy and in Germany, the fascism that Hitler called National Socialism.
We'll be right back.
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We're back with Professor Stanley Payne.
Professor Payne, I want to talk to you about the man who has been sometimes called the philosopher of fascism, certainly of Italian fascism.
This is Giovanni Gentile, and the reason I want to talk It seems that what you have here in Gentile is a fully developed statist ideology.
Gentile begins by saying that the whole Lockean idea that we're individuals who make a social compact and come together as a society, he goes, that's not how it is.
Human beings are inherently communal.
Human beings are inherently groupish.
And so the state reflects, if you will, the perfection of the personality of the individual writ large.
Gentile goes on to talk about the concept of totalitarianism, which for him, by the way, is not really a bad thing.
What he really means is that the state, reflecting, if you will, the collective will of individuals, supervises over the whole society and dominates decision-making throughout the society.
Isn't this in a way the philosophical apparatus of fascism, the idea of a strong centralized state?
And if so, isn't that something that today we would associate certainly in America with the left rather than with the right?
That point is absolutely correct, very well taken.
Regarding Gentile, he was not an intellectual who lived at a Garrett.
He was Italy's leading academic philosophy professor.
He dominated the profession in the Italian universities.
And he was a philosopher of idealism, but developed his own kind of idealism, which he called actualism.
That is that idealism is not going to be of any consequence unless you carry it out in practice and really make it predominant in society.
And therefore the way to do this was through what he called lo stato etico, the ethical state.
The strong centralized state, the fascist state, would be the ethical state, because it would carry out the highest ideals, infuse the educational system with them, and make them the dominant goals of Italian government and of Italian society.
This was Gentile's approach to fascism, not what people normally think of, of course, as fascism.
Yeah, I have here actually a copy of a slim volume.
It's called The Origins and Doctrine of Fascism by Gentile.
And I'm really struck by these resounding statements that he makes.
I'm going to quote one here. He goes, For fascism, the state and the individual are one.
And then he goes on to say, The legitimate will of citizens is that will that corresponds to the will of the state.
So what you have here is, I think to a degree that goes even beyond anything we hear from the left in this country...
The notion that the state is this sort of moral being that embodies the society as a whole, and that the individual, in a sense, is lost and has no real identity, not even any real freedom, outside of the collective power of the state.
Would that be an accurate summary, do you think, of what he believes?
Yes, that is a correct definition and summary of Gentilianism.
Now, Italian fascism is very protean.
There are all kinds of cultural and intellectual currents.
And different people defined things in different ways.
But the idea of this unified ethical idealist state was the essence of Gentilianism.
And beyond that, you can say that Italian fascism made the concept of the state as a unified national actor, integrating the people, more central as far as the state itself was concerned, conceptually and philosophically, than any other radical movement of 20th century Europe.
More than the Nazis, more than the communists, because the communists emphasized the party, especially the party and the working class.
The state was merely the instrument of the party and the working class.
In Italian fascism, the state was an entity in and of itself.
Let's turn for a moment, if we will, to Germany and to German National Socialism.
It's often said, I often see, particularly on social media now in America today, that when the Germans used, when the Nazis used the phrase National Socialism, which was actually the name of their party, That they didn't really mean it.
That they weren't really socialists at all.
That they were maybe using it in the same way that the Iranian Republic calls themselves a republic even though they're not really a republic.
Or the old German Democratic Republic, the communist East Germany called themselves a Democratic Republic.
but the name was really meaningless.
Is it the case that the name Nazi or National Socialist was just some kind of a ruse?
Or did the Nazis really think they were National Socialists?
The Nazis really believed they were National Socialists. And it's important to understand that National Socialism was a developed political-economic concept in Central Europe that developed in the 1870s and 80s.
more than a generation prior to the rise of the Nazis, in fact beginning nearly two generations before, and was a coherent concept in and of itself because it emphasized a kind of limited socialism in which the government took the initiative In helping to organize the economy,
but leaving most property in private hands, subordinating the entire economy and productive system, not to the profit of the capitalists, but the well-being of the entire nation.
The capitalists would still own most property, but it would be organized and given different priorities and serve different ends.
This was a coherent concept of national socialism, not total state socialism, as in the Soviet Union, but national socialism.
And this was what the Nazis put into practice.
And they were, of course, in the peacetime years before the war began, very successful in their economic policies.
Let me ask you this, and of course, we've got to put in the caveat that at no time are we suggesting or am I suggesting any kind of direct analogy between America and Nazism.
But I do notice, Professor Payne, in American politics today, to a remarkable degree, we have this phenomenon of the woke revolution.
Or politically active corporation.
Literally hundreds of corporations jumping into political causes, signing statements, declaring that they will divest from, let's say, the state of Georgia.
They will not do business with places.
So what I'm getting at is this notion of trying to coordinate the private corporate sector, including, by the way, digital media, on behalf of state objectives.
Do you see some...
I mean, I came to America in the late 1970s.
I've never seen so much politicization of corporate America on behalf of state objectives as I see now.
Do you see that trend in America?
And are you a little troubled by it?
Oh, yes. I think this is the difference between the 20th century American left and the old left wing, say, of the Democratic Party in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rise of what you might call the proto-totalitarian left, which tries to mobilize all different kinds of institutions and different sectors of society and economy, all for political ends.
And not rely primarily on the political sphere, which is the primary expression of politics, but to use other parts of the society to coordinate to the same end.
This is a new concept of politics, a kind of proto-totalitarian approach, which is quite different from the old instrumentalist approach, even of the left wing of American politics back in the 20th century.
The Nazis had a word for this.
It was Gleichschaltung. When we come back, I'm going to ask Professor Payne what that means so we can explore how the Nazis did it.
And then also look to see if we're seeing some hints of Gleichschaltung in America today.
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Back with Professor Stanley Payne.
The academic sphere, the media, the movie industry, the business sphere, all in line so that it would, you may almost say, march in lockstep with the political sphere.
Is that a correct description of the Nazi phrase Gleitschaltung?
Yes. The term Gleitschaltung arose in German electrical engineering.
And meant the coordination of all parts of electrical circuits into one general grid.
And that was the idea.
Nationalize the economy, yes, in the sense of coordinating to a common goal and purpose, not nationalize in the sense of not requiring state ownership.
The great bulk of the German economy under the Nazis remained technically under private ownership.
But in fact, at the same time, The private owners were not free just to do whatever they wanted to do with their factories.
They had to produce more and more according to state dictates for the kind of production that the government wanted to see.
And isn't it also the case that the Nazis targeted what we would call the cultural sphere?
They wanted the universities to conform.
I think of the role played by the philosopher Martin Heidegger in establishing national socialism at his university.
So the idea here was that If universities went out of line, the Nazis would not hesitate to brutalize professors, terrorize students.
The idea was to whip everybody into shape and make sure that they sung out of the same Nazi hymn book.
Isn't that right? Yes, the fundamental revolution is neither the political nor the economic revolution, but the cultural revolution.
Nazis and the fascists were very clear on that, and they emphasized the cultural revolution.
And of course, we're very strong in universities.
When I was teaching, I would sometimes ask my students, which sector of German society do you think most strongly favored Nazism In terms of proportionate support, And they would say, well, they were not sure.
I said, it was the sector just like yourselves, the university students and the universities generally, so that, in fact, the proportion of Nazi following was higher in the universities than in any other single identifiable sector of German society.
And would it be accurate to say that, in a sense, Nazi doctrine was baked in the university and then metastasized into the larger culture?
No, that would not be correct.
Nazi doctrine was developed by a kind of a radical intelligentsia, kind of the same way that Bolshevik doctrine was developed in Russia, but it infiltrated the universities more and more.
Universities that were basically quite conservative in Germany during that period, though not all sectors of them were.
And the Nazi movement was able to take over the universities, but it came from outside.
In that sense, fascism was quite different from the American Cultural Revolution.
The American Cultural Revolution was developed especially in the universities and then applied to the educational system as a whole, and that is specifically American.
That is different from the process of radicalization in European fascism or in European communism, at least in the original stages.
Let me ask you about the media, which ties into all this, because it seemed like in the Nazi case, you had a propaganda minister, Goebbels, and he was, in a sense, the face of Nazi propaganda.
Of course, you had Lenny Reifenstahl and others making movies that glamorized and dramatized the Nazi idea of the will.
But But in America today, we have something quite different, which is we have a free press.
We've got innumerable organs of journalism, and yet there seems to be something of the same lockstep quality to it, but you don't have Goebbels directing the process.
How do you explain this peculiarity where, for example, controversial stories, I think off the top of my head, of the Hunter Biden story, Just go unreported, but thousands of journalists are making an independent decision.
We're not going to cover this one.
So how do you achieve Gleicksholtung in America without a Goebbels to call the music?
Basically because of the success of the Cultural Revolution in the United States by the early 21st century.
The fact that a process that began in the universities was successful in taking over the educational system and American culture so that there was created from within the cultural institutions themselves, not because of the slightest imposition from the outside, But within those institutions themselves, a kind of system of one-party media.
And here the key philosopher is not any fascist or any classical communist, but one of the major figures in Italian communist theory, Antonio Gramsci, who said that socialism and communism had failed in Italy in the 1920s,
Because it was too weak in the culture and that you could only succeed in radical politics if first of all you developed a very broad basis in the general culture itself and particularly in the elite institutions of culture if you carried out the Cultural Revolution before you attempted the Political Revolution.
That was the essence of Gramscianism and the American New Left It essentially followed a Gramscian tactic after the failure of its terrorist turn at the beginning of the 1970s.
By the mid-1970s, the American New Left had basically turned to Gramscianism as a revolutionary tactic to develop its influence in broader American institutions, and it has worked very well.
When we come back, I want to talk to Professor Payne about the landscape of America today, the dividedness of American society, and pivot a little bit from fascism also toward his work on civil war, specifically the civil war in Spain, and what lessons we might draw for American society from that.
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Back with Professor Stanley Payne.
Professor Payne, before we pivot away from fascism per se, I gotta ask you about Antifa, because we've got an organization, which I guess has its roots that go back half a century or so, this idea of an organization mobilized against fascism.
Except when I see them looting businesses and attacking courthouses and shouting at people who are Republicans and conservatives, I don't see any fascists on the other side.
What's the deal with Antifa and is this positioning of them as being anti-fascist something of a tactic?
It's absolutely a tactic.
Anti-fascism without fascism, which has been a growing phenomenon among the left in the Western world ever since the 1950s.
Fascism as an empty signifier, what the left calls an empty signifier, is the perfect foil.
And anti-fascism, for that matter, was invented really as a general slogan, as a general process outside of Italy, throughout Europe, by the Communist International in 1923.
It was fundamental, except during the years of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
Antifa stems first from a communist organization in Germany in 1932 called Antifascist Action, and then was revived among the European and British left over 40 or 50 years ago.
And in more recent years has become a major organization in the United States to combat fascism.
Since fascism doesn't exist, it has to be invented, caricatured, and defined artificially as the enemy of a radical movement which has goals of its own, merely instrumentalizing the use of a kind of anti-fascism to achieve these revolutionary goals.
And wouldn't it be fair to say that, I mean, they would, the anti-Antifa types regarded Trump as the quintessential fascist, but in the way that we've been talking about fascism, the devotion to an all-powerful centralized state, the idea of fascism being anti-market and anti-capitalist and anti-liberal, would it be fair to say that Trump is in no regard of whatever you think of Trump?
He's not a fascist.
And this was part of their strategic caricature to create a fascism where no fascism existed.
Yes, that was fundamental from the 2016 campaign on.
I did a whole series of interviews with various journalists in 2016, revolving around the question, is Donald Trump a fascist?
And in fact, he had few of the characteristics of fascism, and his presidency was completely unfascist.
Because he had never to reduce the size of the central government, and he avoided military activity whenever he could, with only a few strategic exceptions, so it was a very unfascist presidency.
Not to mention, Professor Payne, I mean, I never saw any signs that Trump was trying to, you know, shut down CNN. I mean, his critics would flay him on every platform every second of every day, and Trump didn't do anything about it.
Wouldn't Mussolini or Hitler have stepped right in and shut those people up overnight?
Oh, of course. They both had censorship systems.
There is a censorship system now in the United States, but it's a censorship system by the left.
Particularly by big tech to close out any kind of expression of which the leaders and owners of big tech disapprove.
The whole game about inventing fascism out of whole cloth is a political tactic to demonize the opposition.
It's a form of stigmatization.
Stigmatization is the name of the game and depends on the identification of fascist characteristics.
All political movements have certain characteristics in common.
That doesn't mean they should be confused for each other.
All radical movements particularly have more characteristics in common, whether left or right.
The fact that Trump was a strong leader and strong leadership was characteristic of fascism.
Ergo meant, in this peculiar kind of magical thinking, Trump had to be a fascist.
A strong leader on the left, of course, was not a fascist because these definitions, the use of them, are entirely arbitrary.
I also think of the way that people would say that Trump is a fascist because he's a nationalist.
But of course, right when they said that, I would think of people like Gandhi in India or Mandela in South Africa or even Fidel Castro in Cuba.
These were all dedicated nationalists, but no one would dream of calling them fascists per se.
Well, of course, there are all kinds of nationalists, from the most statist revolutionary nationalists on the left all the way across the political spectrum.
Nationalism has become overall the most universal movement probably of modern times, so that you can do any kind of hyphenate nationalism.
Fascist nationalism is merely one of the 17 different varieties of nationalism.
I want to ask you about the concept of Big Brother, but first I want to play a very short clip from an earlier film of mine, I believe, Death of a Nation, or is it, no, Trump card, I believe, in which we have a clip of George Orwell.
Listen. The British writer George Orwell, himself a man of the left, recognized that all forms of socialism become totalitarian.
In his dystopian novel 1984, lies pass for truth, freedom is defined as slavery, and the main character, Winston, is ground into dust by the all-powerful state, Big Brother.
Professor Payne, in the clip we introduced the concept of Big Brother.
I think what's interesting is that Orwell was, I think for all of his life, a man of the left, and yet he observed a tyrannical strain in the left that he foresaw could extend to becoming a kind of horrifying, well, the dystopia that he describes in 1984, where Would it be accurate to say that America, in the last couple of decades, is moving more in that direction?
I'm not saying we have total control or we are living 1984, but it seems to me we're moving more in that direction, aren't we?
It's clear that the direction of American politics on the left is toward a kind of proto-totalitarianism with huger And ever larger government, centralized government,
massive state expenditure, more and more government interference in control of the economy, and of course the national integration of information and media to a greater extent, and therefore with the centralization of communications through big tech, The imposition of a kind of national censorship, the sort of thing that has never existed in America before.
And it's a phenomenon that has appeared only in the 21st century.
When we come back, I want to ask Professor Payne more about what is happening to our civil liberties and whether or not America is devolving toward more civil strife and perhaps even civil war.
We'll be right back. We're good to go.
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Back with Professor Stanley Payne.
Professor Payne, I think Reagan, it was Reagan in a perhaps somewhat jocular moment, but maybe not entirely so, said that if fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism.
Now, I don't think Reagan meant classical liberalism.
I think he meant the very left that you've been referring to.
And the question I want to ask is that when I came to America a generation ago, the left and the right were arguing about the economy, but they weren't arguing about basic civil liberties.
This was not an America in which, let's say, the First Amendment was controversial or the idea of due process of law.
But we seem to live in a society now when there are people who say things like, Why are we even having a trial over this Derek Chauvin business and George Floyd?
Let's just lock the guys straight up.
Or people who say things like, free speech is overrated, free speech should take a backseat to hate speech, in other words, to the enforcement of regulation of hate speech.
What do you make of all these disturbing attacks on basic civil liberties that were not that long ago completely taken for granted across the political spectrum?
Well, again, we come back to the fact this is the effect of the Cultural Revolution, which simply does not respect classical liberalism in any way.
The limitation of government, the protection of civil liberties, the genuine concern for civil rights.
A lot of talk about civil rights.
The most basic civil right, probably, is freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and that is progressively denied.
And as a result of the educational system, we find now that on American university campuses, about half the students who are polled say they don't really believe in complete free speech, depending on circumstances.
So this has become quite successful to challenge the Constitution, to challenge American institutions, to challenge American political practices.
All of the inherited freedoms on which the United States It was founded and then developed.
All of these things are progressively being repudiated.
This is the rise of proto-totalitarianism, the proto-totalitarian left.
And it's kind of comical that, say, Republicans still refer to the Democratic left as the more liberal.
No, they're the most anti-liberal.
As far as the quotation you cited was concerned, this was originally Huey Long in 1935.
Huey in fact said, just before he was assassinated in 1935, that fascism would come to the United States, but we'll call it anti-fascism.
This is the most classic quotation from Huey Long, and it's something to keep in mind.
You have written your whole career, Professor Payne, about civil war, and you've been talking about the rise of a totalitarian left.
Doesn't it seem logical that this will, it must, breed a certain reaction from the right?
And the question I'm asking is, if you look at the example of Spain, do we see any parallels between the conditions in Spain that produced civil war in the 1930s and And the situation facing America today.
Talk a little bit about the dividedness of America and whether or not you might see a pull to the extremes.
We already see hints of that in media and places like that.
But what about the risk of all-out civil strife?
Well, first of all, the difference is rather the similarities.
Spain was a very fragmented country, so that even under the government of the left initially in Spain, there was not a strong central state.
Whereas at the present time in the United States, the society is very divided.
But on the other hand, when people sometimes talk about civil war, I raise the question, who is going to conduct civil war?
The left in the United States has emphasized and is developing a kind of Leviathan state, a stronger and stronger central state.
Against which direct organized resistance might soon become impossible.
Under those conditions, you can't have a civil war because to have genuine civil war, you have to have enough strength to rebel against the existing system.
Whereas we're headed toward a circumstance In the United States, in which the only alternative is simply going to become the Benedict option, individual withdrawal into privatism.
And the individual withdrawal into privatism at first will be welcomed, in fact, by the left, because that will take people out of the direct political sphere.
I don't think we have the circumstances in the United States which would make actual civil war possible.
This is not 1861.
This is not very fragmented Spain in 1936.
It's highly divided.
But division and fragmentation of power are two different things.
And we don't have in the United States fragmentation of power.
Power is not fragmented.
The society is profoundly divided.
But these are two different circumstances.
Is part of what you're saying, for example, and this actually may be the motive for why the left, right after the election, mobilized this massive apparatus of fences and military presence in D.C. and so on...
As a way of saying, hey, listen, we are in charge.
We have the government.
We have the guns.
Don't you dare think of doing anything because we are firm.
Wasn't that kind of the message, it seems?
The militarization of D.C. as a way of telling the American people, back off.
Absolutely. That was the message.
And with it very firm and loud and clear.
We'll be back with Professor Payne for a concluding segment in which we sum up.
We'll be right back. We're good to go.
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We're back with Professor Stanley Payne.
Professor Payne, in the recent issue of First Things, May 2021, you have an article called The Politics of Memory in which you describe, I think, an almost chilling project that is being promoted in Spain.
But I can see something like this coming to America.
The idea here is to establish a National Council of Memory.
And this Council of Memory becomes a kind of adjudication force...
That tells you how to think about events in Spanish history and specifically the Spanish Civil War.
Everybody who is on the left side or the Republican side of that conflict is treated as a victim and a champion of democracy.
Everybody who is on the right side of the aisle is a Francoite or a fascist.
So some of the same polarization we see in America, not to mention the promiscuous abuse of the term fascism, It's all here in your article.
It seems to be all happening in Spain.
Can you tell us a little bit about what this project is about in Spain?
And then I'd like to ask you whether we might see something like this in America?
The politicization of memory became important in Spain, particularly from about the turn of the century.
A motivation here was that by the end of the 20th century, the old propagandistic and motivational factors of the left Political-economic socialism had lost their strength and the left had to find other means of support and emphasized much more than before the importance of the Cultural Revolution and of psychology and of feeling and of attitudes.
And here the approach to history was very significant.
In Spain, the revival of memories of the Civil War.
Not because they were concerned about the history of the Civil War.
They're opposed to history, but rather the manipulation of what they call memory.
Memory, of course, being totally subjective and very fallible, even in the most well-meaning individuals.
This is to use history in a very biased, very selective way to enforce political conformity in the present.
That is the purpose of memory.
The politics of memory is not history in the past.
It is the present and the current state of politics and the current instrumentation of political power.
And that's what the politics of memory is about in Spain.
So in this politics of memory, the authoritarianism is solely on the Franco side, and the Franco faction are the people who massacre people.
But on the other side, you only have Democrats and victims.
And you point out in this article that that wasn't the reality on the ground at all.
In fact, there were lots of people on the left side who were fighting against Franco, who are by no means Democrats.
They were by no means...
Unwilling to massacre people and there were plenty of atrocities on both sides of the Spanish Civil War.
Absolutely. The original victimizers were the left who began the revolutionary process, began the first Republican insurrection in 1930 with three summary executions when they started out in their very first hours and sustained the revolutionary process all the way through.
During the Civil War, the revolutionaries executed 55,000 people Essentially in cold blood, which was approximately the same number of people as those killed by the other side.
The revolutionaries were victimizers as much or more than they were victims.
But, of course, all of this is totally distorted in the politics of so-called memory, which no one remembers, of course.
Those people were all dead in Spain.
What they mean is the politicized approach to history.
And isn't exactly the same thing happening right now in America, Professor Payne, in the sense that we don't have a national organization of collective memory.
But, for example, in San Francisco, the school board makes a decision.
We don't want to have Ben Franklin's name on a school and no more Abraham Lincoln.
And I think even Robert Louis Stevenson, the poet, got dethroned because of one line in a poem where he misused or mispronounced the word Japanese and called it Japanese.
And they were like, that's racist.
He's got to go. So don't you see right now in America the similar political weaponization of history?
And it's being done very consciously.
You say this is not a project of ignorance.
The people who know this know what they're doing.
They're not ignorant. They're just excessively partisan.
That is correct.
The process in Spain is not really a Spanish invention.
It's simply the most extreme individual expression of what is a very general tendency throughout the Western world.
This is a cultural revolution developed and applied to politics that's above all in the Western world and is also active in the United States.
It has not gone In some ways it's gone further in the United States, in other ways not quite as far.
The idea is to stigmatize entire groups of people simply because of their basic identity.
That's the essence of identity politics.
Certain identities are victimizers.
Certain other identities are victims.
The facts of history, the facts of society make no difference.
Everything is distorted, politicized, and redefined simply as victimizers and victims by what are termed racial or identity categories.
So in other words, even if you're, let's just say, a white guy in Pennsylvania, and you have a direct lineage to a guy who fought on the Union side of the Civil War and died on the battlefield of Gettysburg, you still are a member of the victimizing group being white, and therefore, let's just say, you owe reparations, even though your ancestor actually paid the dearest price that could be paid to secure emancipation and secure freedom.
That is the case.
Identity politics means imputed identities.
It is a form of racialism or racism.
And therefore, if you're a member of the stigmatized race, there is no distinction to be made.
The fact that slavery was ended by white men and not by any other category of men is irrelevant To the argument of the contemporary left because their concern is to stigmatize white men and therefore the facts and realities of history are completely irrelevant.
Professor Payne, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. Thank you.
My pleasure. Bye.
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