NONE DARE CALL IT FASCISM

The assault on Capitol Hill has resulted in a New Zealand mainstream media trying hard not to state the obvious. Instead the assault has been described, among other things, as the work of anarchists, a 'right wing protest' and an 'insurrection'. None are true.

THE MORNING AFTER the assault on Capitol Hill in Washington, The Press newspaper in Christchurch headlined its front page report on the attack as 'Anarchism in the USA'. While this headline played to the usual right wing caricature of anarchists as wild-eyed crazies intent on blowing things up and bears no relationship to the anarchist tradition itself, anarchism also had nothing to do with what occurred on Capitol Hill.  Similarly RNZ  misinformed its listeners when it reported that the assault was the work of 'right wing' rioters and protesters. I imagine that those who subscribe to traditional  conservative politics must still feel aggrieved that they had  been lumped in with a mob that engaged in hand to hand combat with the police and talked of killing Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile Newshub went as far as to describe the attack as an insurrection, without actually discussing what the political nature of this insurrection was. But since the term  was being bandied about elsewhere in the media, Newshub obviously thought it was safe for it to use the term as well.

It would of been far more accurate to describe the Capitol Hill attack as fascist inspired, but that was  exactly the definition the New Zealand corporate media stayed well clear of. Perhaps that's because the corporate media is not yet ready to confront the fact that a nascent fascist movement has grown within the country that champions itself as the leader and defender of the 'free world'. And its a nascent fascism that is entangled with the American state itself, its tentacles having slithered around politicians, police officers and military and intelligence officers. There remains a widespread suspicion that the Capitol Hill assault had 'inside help' and that it was the beneficiary of  a deliberately more 'sympathetic' level of policing compared to anything that left wing protesters normally receive.

But the American establishment seems to have little real comprehension of what is going on and is certainly not prepared  to own up to its role in the rise of American fascism. Instead it thinks that banning Donald Trump and his followers from social media will do the trick and restore some semblance of normality. But decades of enforcing a neoliberal capitalism that has enriched the few at the expense of the many has only cultivated a fertile ground where a embryonic fascist politics has been able to thrive among what socialist Clara Zetkin once described as 'the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned'.

Its also a fascist politics that has emerged, albeit in its tentative stage, in a country where the left has barely made its presence felt for decades. The American left has been hamstrung by the politics of 'lesser evilism' and the disastrous belief that the neoliberalism of the Democratic Party is somehow preferable to that of the Republican Party. But lesser evil politics, the failure to effectively respond to neoliberal capitalism, has only allowed the emergence of a much greater evil and one that won't go away simply because Donald Trump is no longer President.

Some might assume that the tumultuous events unfolding in the United States have little relevance to New Zealand domestic politics. Its unwise to jump to that conclusion. New Zealand too is in the depths of  an economic crisis with more and more New Zealanders being pushed to the economic margins while a wealthy elite continues to grow richer. At the same time a Labour Government is enforcing the neoliberal status quo and is being allowed to do so by a timid left that continues to peddle Labour as the 'lesser evil' and even parades Labour's conservatism as something to boast about.  The parallels with the United States are obvious.