Are you ready for some insights into #fascism? I didn’t imagine as a younger man I’d be reading books like this. But the world is not the airbrushed one I once knew.

As Derek Halden recently said to me – & it struck a chord – reading & writing is our way of coping.

This book took me a little while to get through & there was a lot to try & absorb. I took screenshots of what I felt were the most poignant & helpful passages. Below, are a few but not all of the quotes which I hope help others.

Every time another election takes place we should worry about which way the pendulum is swinging.

“A survey of AfD members in the central German region of Hesse showed that a large majority were fully subscribed to the mythology of the new far right: that migrants are responsible for crime; that they ‘feel alien in their own country because of Muslims’; that ‘gender madness has to be stopped’; & that ‘global warming is exaggerated’.”

“There is, in short, a structural racism in Britain that endures, despite formal legal equality” “their rage [far-right angry ‘protectors’ of Winston Churchill’s statue in London on 13 June 2020] was triggered by fear: fear that a group that is supposed to be subordinate to them might be on the verge of achieving freedom & equality”.

 “Day X. The expected catastrophe – a mass outbreak of racial civil violence”.

“There is a plebeian mass base for American fascism & Trump has chosen to lead it, even though his own political project was not initially fascist” “His project, clear throughout his years in office, was to end globalization & reinvent neoliberalism as a nation-centric game, enriching himself & sections of the business elite in the process”.

“In the mass social movements – #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter & #fridaysforfuture – we are seeing, just as with the Italian peasants, the demand for freedom exercised by people who are not supposed to be free. This demand is so shocking to the authoritarian conservative sections of society that they respond with the fantasies of violence that now fill their Facebook pages, Telegram channels & WhatsApp groups: a digital echo of the conversations in the landlords’ clubs of the 1920s”.

“The only way to defeat it is both politically & culturally, through a political alliance of the centre & the left, combined with a grassroots movement & an effort to weave anti-fascism into all aspects of popular culture”.

“the pejorative term ‘social justice warrior’ (SJW) enter right-wing culture, often presented alongside memes depicting SJWs as ugly crazed or diseased women, or men with feminine attributes.”

“Trump & his allies spent so much energy delegitimizing the word ‘#antifa’ because a pervasive anti-fascist culture is precisely what they fear most. The task of the 2020s is to make it happen”.

Fascism is a process, not a single person or event. It preys on the vulnerable and impressionable. Be on your guard. Be proactive.

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Further comments I added to the post:

I can’t help but think about Twitter becoming X…
“In September 2019 German security forces had uncovered a secret network of soldiers, police and veterans known as Nordkreuz (Northern Cross). Its members were using the Telegram messaging service to co-ordinate the compilation of hit lists, using data stolen from police computers, of 25,000 German citizens deemed to be too supportive of refugees”… “The group members continually fantasized about the collapse of the German state and made active preparations for “Day X” – which they expected to be triggered by a climate catastrophe, a Muslim uprising or a new financial crash. They are part of an international right-wing subculture known as ‘preppers’ – people preparing to survive a catastrophic event”.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt “understood that the purpose of conspiracy theories is to make people knowingly complicit in irrationalism: to shut them off from facts, analysis and reason, and to create a closed world in which everything makes sense. In the ‘lying world’ created by Nazi propaganda, she wrote, ‘through shear imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations” … “Nowhere was that better illustrated than by the QAnon conspiracy theory, which during 2020 spread from the USA to become a worldwide signifier for the far right”.

This particularly repulses me because I associate the Matrix with quite the reverse of fascism:
“Today’s far right call this process of rejecting reality ‘redpilling’. The metaphor is drawn from the movie The Matrix, in which the hero has taken a red pill in order to see as fake the reality in which he lives”. A few years back “to take the red pill meant to realize that men are oppressed by women, not the other way around. Today it signifies a more general conversion to the wider spectrum of right-wing thinking.”

Welcome to the modern world:
“You can go on strike against a factory owner; try going on strike against Facebook, your landlord or your bank. The lower skilled and less qualified you are, the easier you are to exploit in these new ways. From payday loans to the quarterly energy bill or insurance premium, those with the least social power generate the biggest rate of return” … “it has become much harder to identify who is exploiting us. The top 0.1 per cent in every country are part of a globalized, super-rich stratum whose wealth is based primarily on rent-seeking and finance – and most of lives do not bring us into any form of contact with them” … “Instead it has become easier to identify somebody lower down the ladder as responsible for your own poverty and powerlessness: the buy-to-let landlord, the staff at the benefits office, the call centre worker at your bank; the person in the queue at the doctors surgery who speaks a foreign language; the security guard at the supermarket telling you to wear a face mask”.

A new context:
“Today, however, there is a growing divergence within the life experience of working people. It is based upon multiple inequalities: between those with degrees and those without; between those who live in multi-ethnic cities and those who live in ‘forgotten’ towns; and between those with a secure job and those in precarious work. In every country where right-wing populism has advanced, it has fed on the cultural divisions between those whose identities focus inwards, to their community, and those focused outwards to the world”.

Have you watched the Barbie movie?
“Clearly we are nowhere near meaningful equality between men and women, whether it be on pay or freedom from male violence. But to contemporary fascists, the world already looks like a feminist utopia”.