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Sept. 8, 2020 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
51:58
Trump Gives Himself A Military Industrial Complex

Donald Trump reacted to being caught disrespecting the military by...invoking the military industrial complex and disrespecting the military? Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman make sense of the nonsensical, discuss the implications, and welcome Federico Finchelstein, author of A Brief History of Fascist Lies to discuss the fascist urge to control reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everybody, it's Jared Yates Sexton.
We're about ready to get to the new episode of the Monkrig podcast.
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And it's a disgrace.
Who would say a thing like that?
Only an animal would say a thing like that.
There's nobody that has more respect for, not only our military, but for people that gave their lives in the military.
There's nobody, and I think John Kelly knows that.
I think he would know that.
I think he knows that from me.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm your host Jared Yates Sexton.
As always, I'm here with my loyal co-host Nick Halseman.
We have a real treat today.
We are going to be joined later on by author and expert in fascism and authoritarianism Federico Finkelstein, the author of A Brief History of Fascist Lies.
I got to talk with him earlier and It's a really, really great interview and I hope you enjoy it and I hope you end up picking up that book.
It's fantastic.
We're sitting here today on Labor Day.
The President of the United States has just finished up a little bit ago with a press conference in which he is apparently responding to talk that
He criticizes soldiers as losers and suckers by now saying that there is a divide between military commanders in our armed forces and the military and that the military loves him and the commanders don't because they are using the military to start wars to funnel money to army contractors and missile contractors and defense contractors
And the thing is, there's truth in that, but it's still just absolute and utter madness.
How are you feeling, Nick?
You know, if you had asked me if we had ever thought that Trump would echo Eisenhower, I would probably tell you absolutely insane.
I mean, how is this possible that he is giving us the military-industrial complex speech amidst all the other corruption that he's involved in?
It's pretty amazing.
And he's not wrong.
That's the thing here, is the grift for so long, one of the biggest By the way, Donald Trump is not at all innocent in that.
that America has ever seen, if not in the history of America, has been the movement of public funds to military contractors who were kept in business by hegemony and eternal conflict.
By the way, Donald Trump is not at all innocent in that.
Let's just throw that out.
He isn't particularly interested in reigning in the military industrial complex.
That's not what this is about, right?
What he's doing right now is he is throwing overboard, which by the way we have to talk about a bunch of Trump boats sinking in a lake at some point or another, so forgive my on-the-nose metaphor.
He is throwing overboard the orthodoxy of the Republican Party as he does so often to try and save himself.
It is, um, When you think you have this guy pressed down, it's like one of those viscous things.
It just moves in a direction that you never could have imagined.
Well, you know, it's him trying to, I guess, it's lashing out, right?
I don't even know if it's any kind of a plan that he might have that could be effective in terms of rhetoric or political values or something like that.
It's just simply, this is a terrible article that's going to really hurt him.
It should really hurt him, certainly amongst veterans and people in the military.
And he's just going to lash out and, you know, the elephant in the room here is John Kelly, Who is probably part of the reporting to the Atlantic.
I'd even made a point on Twitter where, you know, you can't print a article like that without it being true.
Because it is so explosive that you need to have every source lined up and have multiple people corroborating what they're saying.
Lockdown without, you know, you couldn't afford to do that because then you would get sued and you would get in trouble for that.
You know so I that's the point being that this is true John Kelly is probably one of the guys who's contributing to the information in the background and And he's just sort of lashing out at this and it's really It shouldn't help him at all You know what I'm saying?
This should be such a loser for him because he's trying to triumph, you know Trumpet how you know how supportive he is of the troops so it'll be interesting to see what that's going to do to his polls as we move into the next few days and Well, so much of what you said is just... We have to understand this.
So Jeffrey Goldberger wrote the article, is an editor at The Atlantic.
What would happen if it came out that he fabricated this article?
I mean, he just would be destroyed.
Everything would be destroyed.
He would just be destroyed.
His career would be over.
By the way, one of the reasons that he was able to write this story is because he has relationships within the national security apparatus.
What would happen with his relationships with the people that he relies on for his reporting and his writing if he lied about all this?
Yeah, he wouldn't get one more quote in the rest of his life.
There wouldn't be a person who called him, right?
The idea that somehow or another, through some political maneuvering or propaganda, that he would not only lie about this, but that he would put out in public that the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, had said this about veterans.
It would be the end of his career on so many fronts.
Right.
I mean, he would become a pariah.
And by the way, it's been confirmed by multiple outlets.
Let's put this out there.
Including Fox News.
Fox News actually has gone out of their way to try and contradict their main national security reporter saying that this is absolutely true and not fabricated.
What we need to talk about is what you just said, which is the instincts of Trump.
And I'm really happy, by the way, that Federico Finkelstein is joining us later because I think it's really important that we talk about this.
It is when a leader gets desperate and starts doing things to try and save themselves, they throw everybody overboard that they possibly can.
They throw people under the bus constantly, right?
That's what they do.
In this case, you have a leader like, I don't know, let's say for instance, I don't know, somebody in Germany in the 30s and the 40s, just somebody who speaks with a very heavy German accent and screams about, you know, people being viruses and such.
You actually see with him that he would decide on a win that somebody was like a traitor.
You know what I mean?
And you actually saw, like we're all so familiar with the SS, right?
That group that he had around him.
He threw over the SA, which was a group, a military branch, of the Nazi machine.
And he did it because he was making people compete for one another, and his instincts led him in a certain direction where you actually throw people overboard.
I want to talk about the, probably the unintended consequences of something like this.
Trump is telling people in the armed services, people in the armed services, That their commanders and leaders don't respect them, don't treat them well, and are using them for nefarious reasons.
He also, while doing it, he's also criticizing Republicans and Democrats.
Who's that leave?
Him.
It leaves...
Him.
He is the sole arbiter of the truth.
And by the way, do not get me wrong, the Democrats and the Republicans have both engaged in the military-industrial complex.
It has been an ongoing problem since our good friend General Eisenhower spoke about it.
He's telling the truth, but he's not telling the truth because he's interested in stopping it.
He's telling the truth in this case because he's interested in creating a political cleavage.
He's trying to lead to a point where he can say, I'm with the soldiers, I'm not with the commanders.
And what happens when that occurs?
You start to see people who go into business for themselves.
These are soldiers who were told during the BLM protest, like, remember your oaths to the country.
You don't have to follow Trump's orders if he violates the Constitution.
Is Trump sending out a signal to people who might violate the Constitution in different situations?
Maybe.
Does he think that's what he's doing?
Probably not, but that is what he's doing, right?
This is a really bizarre thing that he has done, and it's going to have consequences.
Interestingly enough, I kind of feel like I just watched Greyhound last night, this Tom Hanks movie, where in World War II they're fighting the German U-boats.
And you do get the sense that at the localized level of majors and generals, I don't think necessarily they're itching to fight as much as certainly the picture painted back in the early, like during the Cold War.
So, I'm not so sure they're so excited about sending their guys in, you know, to harm's way that could potentially be killed.
So, you know, it's the Halliburton's and those companies are the ones who really want the war, but they really just want the war so they can make the stuff.
Or they can gin up the threat of war so they can make the stuff, so they don't actually have to deal with any of the casualties.
Wait, would that include mercenary forces that are at the helm and the command of people who are related to the Secretary of Education, particularly Erik Prince?
Would that include those guys?
There's a distinct lack of reporting about Erik Prince that makes me very concerned.
And I don't know how he's been able to do that and hide in the shadows because we've sensed that there is a lot of stuff going on in the background with him and deals that he's been making and making money.
And I don't know why.
It's not out there in the mainstream reporting.
But what happens, Nick, when you're President of the United States of America and you don't trust your military?
Do you find a military you do trust?
Well, you just described, you know, what happened a while back with that guy whose name was, like, rhymed with Schittler.
So, that's what you're describing.
He just basically purged the army of the people who didn't believe in him as the Fuhrer.
And that's exactly what it sounds like he's doing.
Even if you want to call it just lashing out at his little child and whatever his neuroses are, that kind of thing, it gets the same result.
It's not intentional.
That's the whole thing about this.
It's the whole ball of wax.
It's his instinctual thing.
I mean, it was like when Trump came into power, immediately he went after the intelligence organizations and betrayed them, by the way, in Helsinki when he sat there with Vladimir Putin.
Why is he against the intelligence groups?
Because they said, oh, Trump is crooked and he has these weird relationships, you know?
And he's like, no, they're no good.
We need somebody else.
By the way, Eric Prince is more than happy to do that if you have the money to give him and if you want to move some money in that direction.
Because you're exactly right.
What has happened during the military-industrial complex is it's not about the military.
It's about the private contractors.
It's about the private companies that started taking over the project of American hegemony, right?
Because They kept, you know, large parts of the army, but they needed to be ready for future conflicts.
So America always needed to be ready for whatever the next war was and whatever ended up happening.
And it became very profitable.
And by the way, a lot of Americans kind of, you know, participated in that.
They got military bases in their towns.
They got naval bases in their towns.
They got all this stuff and eventually everyone got addicted to it and it kept growing and growing and growing until America's first action was to go to war.
Until, by the way, people stopped volunteering.
People stopped going into the military.
All of a sudden you don't get the people that you necessarily want.
So you have to bring in mercenaries.
You have to start bringing in people like Halliburton to do the jobs that soldiers used to do.
So watching Greyhound, by the way, I actually turned to my wife and I said, you know, maybe we need the draft again.
Maybe we need to be able to compel people to service so they understand that we're all part of a community of sacrifice and we believe in each other.
But then you start to realize that that is also just a whole bunch of propaganda.
And it's always been that way because they're trying to instill this national pride in you that you may or may not have, But that doesn't necessarily create a society that I'm looking for.
That is, you know, where everyone believes in each other and wants to help each other.
I don't think that the army would do that as much.
The Greatest Generation has a reputation because they did serve, they did sacrifice, and that's what made America great.
But that is an interesting question because when you're talking about the propaganda of things and how you're trying to create a history of the country, it's the exact same thing that they're doing with the 1619 project by rejecting, not allowing schools to do this.
And by saying that, I'm saying they're going to pull funding from schools that want to use this as a touchstone or as a reference to teaching about that part of our history, which basically is tantamount to like, you know, making the school just disappear without funding.
Imagine that.
And John Harwood just reported what Trump said about this when they asked him about why he's so upset about the 1619 Project.
Trump says, quote, We grew up with a certain history, and now they're trying to change our history.
And that is a really frightening thing.
And it's called, I don't know, what's the subject of your interview coming up in a little bit?
What are you guys talking about in that one?
Fascism.
Yes, fascism.
That's what it's called.
We're talking about literal fascism and lying that leads to fascism.
Right.
And the cultivating of myth that leads to fascism.
And it's time to stop beating around the bush at this point, or saying, oh, it can't happen here, or it's too far, it's too extreme.
When you start rewriting history the way they do, in this sort of nationalistic pride thing, where we lose track of what we really were about, how we can progress from there, that is fascism with a capital F.
Yeah, and I want to talk about the reality of the thing, because literally fascism is about controlling both the perception of reality and the reality that we live in, right?
So, like, when Trump is out there talking about the militaries during these wars, was his next thing, maybe we should take some money away from the military and reinvest it in our communities and education and infrastructure and healthcare?
Of course it's not!
That would make too much sense, because what Trump needs, and what every politician needs, is an artificial state of austerity.
Where we hate each other and we are competing for scraps.
Our lives are stripped of dignity.
Just leave us alone in our own houses.
We're going to watch Network for our bonus episode.
Just leave me alone in my own house and that'll be fine.
That's all that I need.
I don't need anything else.
I don't need quality of life.
Just leave me alone in my own house.
That's the truth of it.
It needs to be an artificial reality where everything is controlled, which is the essence of fascism.
And Finkelstein says an interesting thing in this interview.
It's about where reason and unreason come together, and in the middle is violence.
Which means the fascist wants to control reality, and if you don't agree with their reality, they will react with violence until you agree with their reality.
Until, like Orwell says, you believe 2 plus 2 equals 5.
You relent.
Fine.
That is what you want.
You're willing to hurt me.
That's fine.
This whole thing that they're doing, and I love that you got that quote there.
Can you read that to me one more time?
Yeah, sure.
It is, um, we grew up with a certain history, and now they're trying to change our history.
I love that quote because sometimes, and it goes back to what Trump was saying, sometimes Trump, because he's so undisciplined and because he's so incompetent, occasionally he will stumble and he will say something very, very profound.
We did grow up with a certain history.
That's exactly right.
It doesn't mean it's actual history.
It's a weaponized propaganda.
History.
It's the idea that America has been perfect and all this stuff and you can't even question it because if you question it, you're actually guilty of the crime of heresy, right?
Because it's a religion.
It's where religion and nationalism and statism come together, which by the way is kind of what happens with fascism.
What he says is exactly right.
It is a certain kind of history and people do want to change it because they want to actually deal with history.
And people react violently because when you start actually teaching real history, people understand how they've been misled and how they've been manipulated and how they've been exploited.
And they start getting pissed off and they want to change things.
That's exactly why they want to do things like take out the 1619 Project or why people have reacted so angrily about like the book I have coming out about American history.
Because they don't want to talk about the real history because then they have to talk about facts.
They can't live in the alternate reality where they can win elections and steal everything.
Well, imagine how they felt when Colin Kaepernick was kneeling, and that was an affront to the troops, and to the flag, and to the anthem.
But then, five years later, as this has really become a movement with Black Lives Matter, now people are really starting to understand what Kaepernick was really talking about.
And now it's becoming accepted and the approval ratings of BLM have gone up.
They've gone down a little bit but they're up much higher than they were.
That must freak out Trump.
Maybe not even Trump because he doesn't really care about anything.
But that whole section of the political alignment would be so threatened by that That there's no question that they'd have to do anything they could to crush this.
And you know, you've seen, I don't know if maybe you didn't, Bill Barr was quoted as saying, I believe that they're going to start to investigate.
It wasn't Bill Barr, it was somebody else, he'll tell me, Chad Wolf maybe.
They're going to start investigating Black Lives Matter.
And that's where you start getting worried because we've heard this with the Nixon and all their dirty tricks where they start to fabricate stuff in order to prosecute citizens.
You know, we heard that with the Black Panthers where they would plant things on them and make it look like they were guilty of violence.
That's a really concerning thing.
The thing about network, by the way, that they tapped into was the anger that existed in the country.
Out of Vietnam and out of Watergate and the stagflation.
There was a lot of anger bubbling up that was not incited by certainly Gerald Ford at the time.
But now that you have Trump who is inciting it, it's like a tornado mixed with sharks or whatever they call that.
And it's a really serious situation on steroids.
Yeah, it's a real Sharknado situation, is what it is.
And that's the damnedest thing about it, is if you actually sit down with real history, because here's the problem, right?
Let's boil it down to its basest, like, level.
If you sit down with an actual history book that tells you the history of America, you start asking a question, which is, I'm sorry, President Trump, when was America great?
Because you want to make it great again, right?
Like, your whole idea is that you want to re-establish a great period in America.
Well, when is that?
When is this period of American greatness?
And immediately, by the way, if Trump had any concept of history, which he does not, right?
Because for Trump, history is only his story, right?
It's literally the word broken up into two.
It's his story and how he got to where he's at.
But people around him, the Republican Party particularly, in that era that you were talking about, they would always answer the 1950s, right?
The immediate post-war era, right before civil rights.
And then all of a sudden you're like, oh yeah, right, this is a white supremacist project.
And they're like, oh, no, no, no, this is about America, and we're not racist at all.
And it's like, no, actually, that's what Reagan said with colorblind laws when they were actually going after African Americans, and Atwater completely, like, spilled the beans on that.
And it's like, well, no, no, actually, it's not that.
And it's like, no, no, it really is.
And this is why.
And the Republicans have won on this level.
And I was talking about this last night on my Bourbon Talk.
Like, if you actually look at the history of this stuff, the history books that are in schools, They are propaganda, man.
And there are teachers who are doing their damnedest to try and make this thing work.
If you want to make a change, go to your school board meetings.
Go get elected to your school board.
Be in the offices asking why these things are being taught the way they are.
Because it is completely weaponized.
History is not...
History is not necessarily objective.
It's written by people.
And with an explicit, you know, rhetorical goal.
And in this case, it's to continue the white supremacist project and continue papering over it.
That's why they're so afraid of this stuff.
Because they know that if they get exposed, the entire deal is off.
It's all shot to shit.
I will offer this up I don't know if you know but I taught high school for four years and each year as I was assistant basketball coach they gave me a long-term sub assignment so I got different subjects each year for the whole year and I know I taught English one year and like there was like curriculum but it was so loose and fast I could do whatever I wanted and And I wonder at the very local level in these schools, you're talking about, I didn't teach history, unfortunately, I would have loved to.
I really wonder just how much control the administrations have in this, in terms of what you're teaching in the classroom.
It might end up leaking out.
A kid's gonna say, oh, so-and-so is saying this, whatever, and then it might get up to, you know, somebody in the principal or beyond.
But I do wonder that.
If the control that we talk about is as ironclad as we think, Especially in the context of knowing like there's this couple in Texas that seems to have controlled the entire You know curriculum of like of you know science and how we believe in evolution or not like and that that seems powerful But I also do wonder if like in the actual classroom and the teachers are there if they are completely and rigorously Following whatever those guidelines that are being shoved in their face
Well, one of the things that we're seeing happen, and this has occurred a lot, and there are moments in history where there's such whiplash effect from how fast things can change.
And we've talked a little bit on the podcast and off the podcast about us protesting the Iraq War in 2003.
Right?
Which seems like forever ago.
It is.
But if you somehow or another stepped out of line and criticized the country in 2003, you were considered a traitor.
Like you were in danger.
You know what I mean?
Like you could be ostracized by society and your family.
What we've seen in the past few years is we're starting to actually start to reckon with What has actually occurred in this country?
Like, for instance, the book I just wrote, American Rule, it's something that wouldn't probably have gotten published a few years ago.
You know what I mean?
An actual reckoning with this type of stuff.
It would have been soundly rejected and that would have been the end of it.
What we're watching now is we're starting to see an opening up, a reconsideration, because you're exactly right.
The control over these textbooks, in some places, it's very strong.
Like, so for instance, in Texas, if you look at their textbooks, the way that they treat things like the Civil War and civil rights is insanity.
I mean, it is radicalizing stuff, right?
It's total, total propaganda.
And if you actually look at, I don't know, things like banned books you brought up at English class, well, why would a book like 1984 by Georgia Orwell, why would that possibly ever be banned anywhere?
Oh, that's right, because it gives you a roadmap of propaganda and that brainwashing that societies do to create nationalism and continue these authoritarian projects.
What we're dealing with here is a group of people in Trump and the people around him who are in a position of power right now, but they also understand that their grip on power is slipping.
You know what I mean?
Like, they know that they can't win elections anymore, and when you stop, if a power group stops winning elections, they will destroy democratic institutions until there's absolutely nothing left because they're desperate.
And that's who Trump is, and that's who the people around him are.
You know, my daughter's high school, which is, you know, probably considers themselves very progressive, is dealing with racist culture accusations.
They banned the Kill a Mockingbird.
They're not going to teach that anymore.
And in some respects, I, you know, I suppose I get it because they have to use the N word is being spoken there.
But in other respects, it's almost like now you're going to erase that part of our history.
And you're going to lose one of the touchstones, one of the finest written novels I think we've had in America that encapsulated all those things, where we can learn from it.
And they're not going to even allow those students to learn anything from that at all.
It kind of is frightening.
But again, if you don't think this is a fascistic movement that we are, take it over.
It's there.
OK, we have attack on the army.
And he's basically trying to erode the trust in generals and the leadership there.
We have attack on history.
We got the trifecta, Jared, because there's an attack on science.
It is a trifecta of fascism, and what's so startling to me there is how many people are simply willing to accept that.
Perhaps they had a shitty science teacher or something, like in high school, they hate science.
That must be what they're channeling or something, you know?
Because I like science.
I did physics in college.
It was, you know, fun.
It wasn't fun, but it was interesting.
At least I recognized that there was value and there was truth.
This is really where we're in trouble because it's a willingness to embrace the anti-science of what's going on with COVID that can really open the floodgates to letting Trump take over.
That might be what's gnawing at my brain right now and making me so concerned when you hear someone like Nate Silver say that he's got the same chance as he did in 2016, which basically means he'll win.
He does have the same chance he probably had in 2016.
He'll probably have less people show up to vote for him.
I assume the popular vote will at least swing quite a bit.
But I want to point this out because this is something that Federico Finkelstein and I talk about a little bit in our interview.
Authoritarians don't like science.
They can't control it.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's no fungibility with science.
Like, we all deal with science and we're like, okay, like, we should at least agree on that.
The objectivity of empirically proved science, right?
And then we go from there.
Authoritarians don't want that.
They don't want things that they can't control.
They want to control science.
They want to control reality.
They want to control history.
They want to control the conversation, which is the problem.
Is somebody like Donald Trump, it's like a black hole.
He just has so much gravity that all of this stuff, you know, all of our conversation, all of our focus, always ends up on him.
And then he just always He determines the tone in the conversation.
Like right now one of the things that's probably going to happen over the next like 24 hours... So he said this about the military-industrial complex without saying military-industrial complex, right?
The left is gonna come out right now in favor of military commanders and being like there's no such thing as the military-industrial complex.
Which by the way used to be one of the standing arguments of the left.
Right?
I mean, I don't know how you felt, but like, after Trump's election, watching the left start to embrace the FBI and CIA as saviors, I was like, what in the hell is going on here?
This is madness.
He can change every conversation based on a whim.
He just moves ideology wherever it needs to be.
And when you have that much of a control over reality, you control everything that stems from reality.
It's one of the craziest things that is imaginable, but he has managed to do it.
And it's simply because the lack of shame, the narcissistic gravity, and just who he instinctually is.
All right.
On that note, I can't think of a better way to transition over to this conversation with Federico Finkelstein, the author of A Brief History of Fascist Lies.
This is an important conversation, an important book, so we're going to head over that.
We'll be back in just a second.
Hey, everybody.
We are here, luckily, with Federico Finkelstein, who is a professor of history at the New School for Social Research in Eugene Lane College in New York City.
We're really lucky to have him here.
He is the author of a book called A Brief History of Fascist Lies, and I think this is one of the More illuminating books that I've read in a long time on the subject of fascism and the malleability of truth and what that means and how it's used for power and oppression.
And we are so happy to have you.
Thank you for being here, Federico.
Oh, my pleasure.
Thank you.
All right.
So unfortunately, we have to talk about this subject and we have to get into the roots of it.
And I have to say that one of the things that really attracted me to this book and this line of thought
is I think over the past couple of years we have started to have to come to terms as a society with not just the continued presence of fascism or neo-fascism or whatever we want to call it but also the malleability of truth which I think is something that a lot of people for a long time took for granted that truth was objective or that it couldn't necessarily be manipulated by people but I feel like
We're getting a crash course into the idea of relativism and how that is used for power and oppression.
Yes, and I think this crash course explains why so many people somehow want to analyze the experience of fascism in order to understand how propaganda works.
Because in the history of politics, certainly fascist liars like Hitler and Mussolini were at the top of the rankings.
And we thought, I mean, as historians, that this was over, and yet we see a return of so much that is connected to all that.
I mean, lying in politics has existed since, well, basically politics.
So it's very ancient in that sense.
But the idea that politicians believe in their lies, I mean, that is a more, let's say, recent idea.
And that is certainly related to fascism, meaning you have people that actually not only are lying, but somehow believe that either their lies are the truth or even...
Even when they recognize that this might not be truthful, they believe that even small lies are at the service of larger truth.
The result of that is propaganda, which basically takes us back to Nazi propaganda.
That's why there are so many connections.
Yeah, and you know, one of the stranger things about it, and I didn't actually understand this until I started doing research on my new book, because Americans, particularly in the post-war era, are brought up to sort of believe that fascists, yes, were they evil and were they oppressive and dangerous and murderous, yes, were they evil and were they oppressive and dangerous Absolutely they were.
But because of the American tradition, we're sort of brought up to believe that they were that way because they They told the truth, right?
They told what they believed to be the truth and that they stood by it.
But what we actually see is a constant malleable project in which the truth can change depending upon the hour, which I don't think is something that we've sort of had to recognize until the last few years, obviously, where we have a president who not only lies, but lies so often and lies so unabashedly that it's not even deniable that there is a constant manipulation of the truth.
Yes, and again, if we go back to the experience of fascism, and we focus in, for example, in the Holocaust, which is the most extreme example of fascist lies converted into somehow a sort of truth, we see how terrible this which is the most extreme example of fascist lies converted into Because we see how terrible this is.
I mean, for example, in the Holocaust, Nazis were lying about Jews were, you know, being dirty and communicating disease.
Of course, this is a total lie.
And yet they created conditions in concentration camps and ghettos where Jews were not given, you know, food, they were not provided with, you know, basic sanitary and eventually they were spreading disease.
So a Nazi would say, see, this is what we said from the very beginning, Jews were dirty and spread disease.
But that was only the case because they wanted to turn propaganda and lies into a sort of truth.
So this is where manipulation provides and produces, let's say, reality effects.
But all that is based on lies.
In that sense, we see, you know, the different ideas being provided in the present and the result of that is violence and death.
Yeah, and I want to get into some of these concepts because, you know, to actually start to grasp what we're talking about here, we have to get into sort of the ideology of the fascist or how the fascist deals with truth and lies.
And I was wondering if you could start by talking a little bit about the relationship between a fascist and the idea of personal truth as opposed to a societal or an objective truth.
Right.
I mean, fascists will basically say that... I mean, to put it very simply, what the fascists believe is the truth.
The rest of us will believe it's a lie.
And basically, the difference, let's say, between the fascists and the rest of us will be that, whereas we believe in truth as being the result of what we can observe, in other words, what can be empirically demonstrated, fascists and Nazis would say basically that they believe in a truth that goes beyond empirical demonstration and a truth that can sustain itself even when it is contradicted by empirical demonstration.
And that is, of course, a truth which is not based on proof, but a truth that is based on faith.
And that's why we talk about fascism being an extreme political religion, because at the end of the day, truth as they saw it was an absolute truth, a matter of, let's say, a matter of dogma and religion, which was entirely based in the faith in the leader.
So, So if it's not raining, let's say, but the fascist leader says it's raining, a fascist will believe that it's raining even though it's not actually raining.
So you see how problematic this is.
And this denial of reality, which they presented as a result of their truth, can lead and eventually lead to violence and destruction.
And a lot of people dying because of that.
Yeah, I thought one of the things that you, because sometimes it's really hard to put into words exactly what is happening with this and sort of the methods that are being used, because there's so much fungibility with this stuff.
But I thought you nailed this on a really good phrase, which is that fascism and society sort of overlap between the idea of reason and unreason, and what happens in the middle is violence, which is The personal truth of the fascist is defended by violence and oppression.
So either you will believe the fascist truth, that personal held truth, or you will be met with violence or death until you do or you're not a problem anymore.
Exactly.
And even we can talk about this today in the sense that, you know, the denial of science, the denial of what's going on with disease produces more death and people die because of these lies.
They die in Brazil and other countries where you have these kind of leaders which are so much connected to the fascist way of life.
So basically, the problem is that this kind of follow the leader mentality, this kind of cult, you know, which is based upon the idea that truth emanates from the leader rather than from empirical observation, has terrible results for all of us.
I mean, and death and violence being a result of that.
So, I mean, if you want to go for other examples, there are lies, and this is a typical fascist lie.
There are lies that there is a kind of a complot against the nation.
There are lies that people want to destroy the world as it is, and as a response to those lies, what basically fascists provide is repression and violence.
Yeah, and you know, I didn't understand it completely until I read one of the original treaties on fascism by Menino Mussolini.
And there's an interesting thing that he does at the beginning of it where he says everyone thinks that society will always move forward and it will always move towards progress and liberal democracy.
But we actually seek to roll back time, more or less.
And one of the major, I would say, enemies or opponents of fascism is the idea of not just liberal democracy, but the enlightenment and believing in facts and science and logic.
And so a lot of the fascists see those things as standing in their way because, like you said, it is the fascist who holds the ultimate truth and any objective thing outside of them or empirical thing outside of them is actually an opponent towards them consolidating power.
Yes, and in the case of fascism, as you rightly said, if there is something that fascism is against, it's against democracy and freedom.
And yet they will lie their way as presenting that, let's say, position against the legacy of enlightenment, the American and the French revolutions.
They will present that as true freedom.
But that freedom, as they conceived it, meant oppression.
So here you see a kind of turning the world in a way upside down, where truth is turning to lies and lies are turning to truth.
Because a fascist would insist that their extremely repressive dictatorship was much more democratic than democracy.
Or they would say that in fascism you have more freedom than in democracy.
But that was hard to prove.
The opposite was the case.
And yet they were saying that and people believed that.
So typically, you know, typically fascists who say that they are against tyranny would actually represent tyranny and so on and so forth.
So basically it's also another element there of, you know, projection in the sense that sometimes in order to understand what they really mean, you have to think that what they mean is exactly the opposite of what they say.
Which is particularly dangerous considering in a post-fascist, post-Nazi world, politicians who share the fascistic ideology or that totalitarian ideology, you know, continually hide behind the opposite rhetoric, right?
They dress themselves in populistic clothes.
They say, you know, we're anti-fascist and meanwhile are carrying out the exact same thing.
there's this crypto-fascism that's at play ever since those regimes were taken down.
Yes, I mean, basically, two things happened in the world.
I mean, well, of course, many things, but vis-à-vis fascism, two things at least happened in the world after 1945, that is to say, when the fascists were defeated.
After 1945, you no longer had fascist regimes.
And yet, this didn't mean that fascism disappeared.
In fact, a thinker like Hannah Arendt would say, well, fascism would present itself in other robes, but it's not over.
Now, what happened is that some fascists remained fascists.
I mean, and basically, they did not reform themselves.
And they were, you know, and still are, neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.
Now, there were other fascists and people that were into dictatorships or had been dictators before 1945 that decided to leave some elements of fascism behind.
And they created modern populist regimes.
And this first happened in Latin America with people like Juan Perón in Argentina or Getulio Vargas in Brazil.
These people were dictators.
They, I mean, Perón had been a fascist.
And yet they did the opposite of what fascism did.
As you know, fascism often, or uncertain in the cases of Germany and Italy, destroys democracy from within.
So they use democratic, you know, rules of the game in order to destroy the game itself.
Now, Perón was a dictator that after 1945 decided to do the opposite.
He destroyed dictatorship from within in order to create a democracy.
Now, the result of that, this modern populism that emerged after 1945 was a mix between democracy and fascism.
In my previous book, From Fascism to Populism in History, I call this the reformulation of fascism in a democratic key.
And that's somehow meant that that was no longer fascism.
Because you cannot have fascism without dictatorship.
Now, I will say this.
These early populists, they left four elements of fascism behind.
And I think this is important because it is exactly to those elements that people like Trump or Bolsonaro are returning.
But bear with me one second.
If you don't mind, I would like to talk a little bit about what they left behind in order to present the distinction between fascism and populism.
Basically, they left four elements which were central to fascism.
One element is racism.
I mean, populists generally are not that racist, or at least until recent.
So, the idea that racism is at the center of politics, that it's the main part of one's own politics, that was more fascist than populist.
So actually populists believe that that, in addition to that, the violence and the glorification of violence and dictatorship were toxic elements within a democracy.
So they left dictatorship, violence and racism behind.
And the fourth element that they left behind is lying like the fascists did.
They basically were lying like other, let's say, traditions.
I mean, of course, in liberalism and communism and all other political traditions, conservatism and so on and so forth, you have lying.
But populists, they kind of lie like other politicians in the sense that they were lying, but they did not exactly believe in their lies or were trying to turn those lies into reality as the fascists did.
Now, those are the four elements that populism left behind, and to some extent those four elements were not central to populists, I mean, in the left, let's say Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or in the right, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and other predecessors of The Trump is of today.
Now, what happened with Trump and Bolsonaro and other politicians is that what we have is these post-fascist populists that seem to be returning to some of the elements that earlier populists left behind.
So, if we remember the launching of the first Trump presidential campaign, racism is at the center.
In a way, that's out of the fascist playbook, not the populist playbook.
I mean, to do politics, putting racism at the center.
The same happens with violence.
And certainly, and this is the topic that we are talking today, the same happens with lies.
I mean, lying like the fascists.
Trump and Bolsonaro lied like the fascists, not like the populists.
The last element is a key one, or is a key one, which is dictatorship.
We are not in that situation yet.
And that's why I would hesitate to call Trump a fascist.
I think he's a post-fascist, a populist.
That is the closest to fascism that a populist had ever been.
But he's not a fascist yet because the dictatorial element is not there yet.
And that is exactly we, as now I'm no longer talking as a scholar, but also as a citizen.
That is the element that we need to fight again and again by voting, protesting, and defending the place of the independent press.
Yeah, and I'm so glad that you said it in that way because I think it presents it and frames it as this is, I think it's a dire moment.
And that's one thing that I keep trying to explain to people is I think, you know, we have a person who is instinctually and behaviorally unauthoritarian.
And one of the things that we've seen, like you said, populists will lie, but it's his willingness to not only lie, but to embrace the violence that his lies creates.
And I think that one of the things that we've seen, obviously, with the shooting in Kenosha and some of the violence around his rallies and around the country, It's that, I guess, shamelessness that sort of exists there where other politicians will sort of fearmonger, they'll play conspiracy theories, but they would obviously be repelled by this stuff.
They would be, you know, they would react in revulsion to anything that they had done leading to some sort of Street-level violence or sectarian violence, but it truly seems like he's not only willing to embrace it But he's more than willing to spread it and stoke the flames of it that actually makes this a moment of real potential danger Yes, and to name this explicitly I would say a moment of potential fascist danger because I mean in the history of populism what you have is that populists will try to
that scare voters.
And in Trump or in Bolsonaro in Brazil, what you have is people that share ideas with fascists, basically foment racism and violence, enable even, and this is the key element that you were suggesting presents us with a dire moment, and this is the key element that you were suggesting presents us with a dire moment, is that they not only have these ideas and foment them, they enable these ideas, and The Act of Violence and Emergence of that.
My book starts, it seems like a long time ago, but my book, as you know, starts with this El Paso terrorist who basically repeated some of the arguments that are invoked by the president and decided to kill in a racist way.
And you have similar elements all over the place, going back, I mean, arriving at this last moment in Kenosha, who the president is not even willing to denounce.
I mean, the idea that a person who is dressed as a paramilitary decides to kill opponents of the president. - Correct.
Yeah, and you know, I've been trying to draw comparisons for this.
It's one thing for, like, the Republican Party or the Right or the National Rifle Association in the 1990s to sort of use New World Order slash, you know, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories until we reach a point, of course, where we start having violence in the form of, like, Timothy McVeigh bombing the Alfred P. Murrah building.
And then they pushed away from that, and they condemned it, and it seemed like they turned down the temperature a little bit, of course, until, you know, we reached the election of Barack Obama.
But we also have a situation now where it's not only not a rejection, but it's becoming an embrace of this invisible war that these people think that they are a part of, and it's almost like the welcoming of that invisible war that, in other times, I think leaders would either be ashamed of or frightened by.
Yes, exactly.
And so what we are seeing is a kind of ongoing alliance between populists and fascists that we have never seen before in such a way.
And even to the extent that, you know, I think it would be fair to consider the president to be a wannabe fascist or even a wannabe dictator.
But of course, I mean, not all the time these kind of leaders achieve what they aim at.
And that's why it's important that we are having this conversation as a small example of what needs to be done.
We need to talk about this.
We need to denounce this, not only to understand it, but denounce it.
And certainly vote against this.
Well, I have to say, I'm incredibly happy that you are talking about this and writing this book.
Because I think what you just said is very important, which is the word fascism and, of course, Nazism, those things are such loaded rhetorical terms that we sort of shy away from them.
And I think it's actually hindered our ability to reckon with not only our moment, but like the moment of political and existential crisis.
And I just, I think you're exactly right that calling it what it is and talking about the potential for these things is exactly what we need to do in order to shed a light on this stuff.
Yes, sadly so, but it needs to be done.
Well, I have to tell you, again, we've been talking with Federico Finkelstein, the author of A Brief History of Fascist Lies, an absolute must read.
I thought this was a mind-blowing book.
Congratulations on it, and thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much.
Alright everybody, that was Federico Finkelstein, the author of A Brief History of Fascist Lives.
Again, pick that book up.
You will not regret it.
I think it makes things so much clearer in trying to understand who Donald Trump is and what fascism actually is.
Thank you, as always, for hanging out with us.
We appreciate you so much.
The likes, the shares, the comments, the ratings, all of that stuff.
Remember if you want to support us you can head on over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast that that episode about network I don't know about you Nick.
I'm pretty excited about this.
Oh, absolutely I mean again, I've been going through it and it's it's it's so prescient.
It's so frighteningly prescient And I don't know It's it's it's over it's overpowering how good it was and what Patty Chesky had tapped into that I can't wait to talk about it And the damnedest thing about it is this movie was made in 1976.
And it was so unbelievably prescient about where we were going.
I said before the podcast that I think it shows us what has happened with our media, why our politics has become what they are.
And what greed has done to the American character.
So head on over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast become a patron so you can get access to that episode.
Go watch Network.
I promise this thing is it's it's it's entertaining and it is totally informative.
Until next time you can find Nick over at Can You Hear Me?
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