Understanding fascism through the lens of the songs of, um, David Rovics.I woke up one morning once again thinking about how to stop fascism, and a Google Alert mentioned a song I wrote that I had forgotten about, about people who went on trial for defending themselves against being attacked by Nazis, and I thought, I should compile a playlist. In the process of doing that, and putting it together more or less chronologically, I realized that this playlist could use an extended introduction.
In putting together a playlist like this, my first challenge was to figure out which songs really belong in it. This is more complicated than it may appear. I may have mostly been going on instinct here in choosing which songs to put in and which to leave out, but to the extent that thought was involved, this required answering the question, what is fascism, and what isn't fascism?
In many important ways, the answer is irrelevant, and in other ways, the answer is crucially important.
Why it's irrelevant is when we're talking about the oppression of humans by other humans, this has come in so many different forms over the centuries. I've written many songs about American apartheid -- slavery and Jim Crow. Many others about genocide, pogroms, massacres, the clearing of the west, interning people in reservations. Many more about imperial, genocidal wars, such as those waged against the peoples of Korea and Vietnam by the US Air Force. US policies of slavery, genocide, and carpet-bombing all rival the worst horrors committed by the Nazis, as unimaginably horrific as they were. But was or is it fascism?
Yes and no. But for the purposes of this playlist, with its aims of brevity and specificity, no. Why?
Because no matter how bad anything that happened before the twentieth century was -- including slavery and genocide, two of the worst imaginable things humans could do to other humans on a systematic basis -- it was not fascism. Why?
Because fascism, or national socialism, as it is/was also known, was/is fundamentally a response to socialism -- a response to the fear of socialism, and a response to actually existing forms of it. The national socialist movement in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, that rose up in the wake of the Russian Revolution after 1917, was a response to the Russian Revolution and the global atmosphere at the time that gave rise to it.
After the Russian Revolution, the ruling classes around the world realized they needed to up their game -- they needed to respond to this development, in a big way. To cut a very long story short, they did respond. Responses were complex, and varied over time and place radically. Initially, the response in the US was a campaign of state terror waged against socialists, communists, anarchists, and any other element of society opposed to the continuation of rule by the robber barons of capitalism. The response following the 1920's, with the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the White House, was very different, with a government more sympathetic to the welfare of the working class, much like those that were in power in Scandinavia then.
In many countries, there were powerful elements of society pushing for a more egalitarian future, with some of the more enlightened elements of the powers-that-be realizing that major changes were necessary in order to maintain their hegemony, and not go the way of the USSR, with a successful worker uprising toppling the capitalists and the tsar's head rolling on the floor and all that. But in these same countries, such as in the US and in Sweden, other elements of the ruling class were more interested in massacring workers who rose up -- and they did, repeatedly, in 1931, and at other times. These elements of the ruling class -- along with major segments of society at large -- were sympathetic to the rising fascist movements in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, and were hoping to see something like that in the US. Some of the more prominent supporters of fascism in the US that you've probably heard of include industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The policies of the fascists -- not necessarily reflective of the beliefs of all of their supporters, but the actual policies of the actual fascists in power in Italy and Germany in the 1930's -- were designed to mimic elements of real socialism, and not in small ways. While poverty, hunger, and unemployment characterized life for the working class in much of the UK and the US, for example, in Germany there was more or less full employment, as there was in Moscow. The full employment in Germany was largely dedicated to building up the country's military capacity, for many years prior to the beginning of hostilities in what became known as World War 2, but it also was directed at the general well-being of the German working class, who were generally in much better shape than their counterparts in most of the other countries still recovering from the devastation wrought by the last war they had all been in with each other.
Within the ranks of the fascist movement -- as with other political movements -- there are, and were, divisions. These have included elements that are attracted to the cause out of more anti-elitist, underdog sorts of notions, hoping this would be a movement to serve the interests of the working class -- interests which many people now and in the past have not felt were not being served by the left parties that have sometimes been in power, or have failed to ever seize it in the first place.
These days, it's become fashionable in certain dark corners of the more anarchist wings of the internet to accuse people on a fairly wanton basis of being fascists or fascist sympathizers if they (we) are trying to understand the phenomenon of fascism, in its current or even historical contexts. We are told that by making a distinction between different current and historic divisions within national socialist movements, we are encouraging "entry-ism," we are "platforming," we are basically trying to taint an otherwise pure left with fascist idea, somehow or other.
This orientation belies a deep confusion, and a profound misunderstanding of what fascism -- national socialism -- is all about, and why it has attracted so many millions of fanatical adherents around the world over the course of the past century. It's not dangerous to talk about this stuff -- it's dangerous not to talk about it. It's not dangerous to talk to fascists and understand why they became fascists, it's dangerous not to do that. We will only possibly win this argument by engaging in it.
The Playlist
There are 24 songs in the playlist, more or less organized chronologically. You absolutely have to listen to the songs to understand why the songs are relevant -- I am by no means going to explain that here, just so you understand. The music is the main thing, what I'm now about to write is only accompanying material, to highlight certain aspects of the songs themselves.
1933 is the year Hitler came to power, and is the title of the first song in the playlist. As with most of the songs I've written about history, I wrote this one because of how prescient events of 1933 in Germany seemed in the period following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump's appeal to the defeated and disenfranchised American working class mirrored Hitler's appeal to the German people. Both actively engaged in demonizing and scapegoating groups of people both within their national borders and outside of them, who generally had nothing to do with directly causing the problems that Hitler and Trump were supposedly so concerned about.
By later in the 1930's, my nanny Lola was one of many German Jews who fled Germany. Lola was part of an organized effort to get the children out, called the Kindertransports. She lived out the war in London, under the regular bombardment of German planes and missiles. At the end of the war, she married a New Yorker and moved to New York City, where I was born a couple decades later.
Popular history here tends to peg World War 2 as beginning when the US officially entered the war, in 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Not with the US naval blockade on Japan that preceded the attack. In what they call the European theater, the date is often 1939, when Germany invaded France (again). But it was years earlier when German and Italian troops and armor were first sent to Spain to defend the military junta from the people there. The Americans who volunteered to fight fascism in Spain in the years during which the US was officially neutral on the question were mostly organized under the banner of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.
Many of the leftwing refugees from the Spanish Civil War who survived and escaped went to France, where they were generally treated terribly by the authorities. This got much worse when Germany invaded -- except for the lucky few who sailed to Chile, on a boat that was made available through the efforts of many people, including the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda.
Even as German troops were invading European countries, the US, Canada, and many other nations were refusing to take in refugees, such as the family of the famous Dutch Jewish girl, Anne Frank, whose father tried and failed to find asylum for him and his family in North America. He was sent back. The official atmosphere of hostility towards eastern and southern Europeans, Jewish or otherwise, in the United States and Canada at the time would be hard to overstate.
While Henry Ford was one of many supporters of fascism in the United States, Chiune Sugihara was one of many opponents of fascism from the Empire of Japan. He and his wife, Yukiko, were directly responsible for saving the lives of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, who were able to get out of Russia before the Nazi troops arrived, using visas signed by the rebel diplomat. Many of the refugees survived the war by hiding out in China, living under Japanese occupation. To this day, their descendants refer to themselves as Sugihara Survivors.
The overwhelming majority of Polish Jews who weren't able to get out of Poland with the help of diplomats like Sugihara were condemned to die in the Nazi death camps, after being herded into ever-smaller ghettos. Once only a small fraction of what was once a large and thriving Jewish population was left, the Jews of Warsaw rebelled, fighting the Nazi troops for 28 days and nights, in what is widely considered to be among the very most impressive urban rebellions in the history of urban rebellions, in April and May, 1943.
Later in 1943, the Nazis were planning on rounding up all the Jews of Denmark, but a Nazi official spilled the beans and, possibly with the assistance of Danish physicist Neils Bohr, convinced the Swedish king it was time to give asylum to the Danish Jews. The Danish resistance soon began the boatlift operation, which successfully saved the lives of 95% of the Jews of Denmark.
In June, 1944, US, British, Canadian, Polish, Danish, and other soldiers from Allied nations landed in France, as the Soviet Army was making its way westwards, into Germany, at the cost of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians, and a country completely destroyed. Losses among the soldiers landing in Normandy were also tremendous.
Among the principal victims of fascism in Germany were the Germans. "First they came for the communists" is a quote made famous later. One of those communists they came for was Hamburg City Council member, Franz Jacob, who was eventually executed in 1944.
Many of the losses in lives among members of the Dutch resistance to fascism during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands happened during the last few months of the war. One of the resistance members killed, in a drive-by shooting while standing on a sidewalk in his home city of Eindhoven, was a young man named Henk Streefkerk.
On May 1st, 1945, Soviet troops liberated an international group of women who had been imprisoned at Ravensbruck, who were on a forced march to Berlin, being led by the SS. Upon realizing they were free, they started singing "The Internationale," and were joined by the Soviet soldiers.
In the decades following World War 2, Germany became a society that made huge strides in coming to terms with its horrifying recent past. One of the many traditions that became commonplace across the country was that of the Stumbling Stones -- little bronze squares embedded into sidewalks in most of the cities in Germany, and some other countries as well, informing anyone who looks at them who used to live at that address, or who ran a shop there, before they were deported to Auschwitz or wherever else, and info like the date of their deportation and death.
In the decades following World War 2, the contradictions that existed within many countries that gave rise to the many different militant social movements that existed before the war, continued to exist after the war. In many cases, that got worse by the 1980's, with the dissolution of industry in many western countries, the loss of so many millions of union jobs, the rise of technology, further automation, and the precarious gig economy. Among the ranks of police officers in many different countries, fascism continued to be a popular idea. This was true of the highest-paid uniformed officer on the Portland police force, before he retired.
It was also true of the fascist on the Max Train in Portland who stabbed two men to death, and almost killed a third. It was true of the guy in the bar who had the misfortune of harassing CeCe McDonald, before he was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors right in the middle of his swastika tattoo -- right before CeCe then went to prison.
In many formerly Warsaw Pact countries, fascism has been especially popular in the past few decades, with the collapse of the former regime, which called itself socialist. Whether or not it was socialist, depends on who you ask. In any case, in answer to the collapsed state of affairs, fascism became popular. Especially in Serbia. But also in Bulgaria, where one Nazi had the misfortune of dying one night, as he attacked two Roma men at a train station in Sofia. No one knows who stabbed him, but Jock Palfreeman went to prison for it.
The ideology of white supremacy in the US obviously has so much to do with the ideology of national socialism. Anyone familiar with fascism is aware that many of the biggest inspirations of the fascist movement in Europe were the race-based systems of oppression originating in the US, especially. So there has long been both explicit and implicit connections between the white supremacist movement in the US and the fascist movement, to the extent that they are separate at all. The mass murderer who took the lives of so many people at the African Methodist church in South Carolina is a case in point.
The case of the Rotherham 12 in England is a classic example of how the police typically collude with fascists, even in countries run by people who like to portray themselves as liberal democrats. Antifascist marchers were deliberately "escorted" by police to a known far right hangout, at which point attacks ensued. Those who defended themselves against the far right hooligans were arrested, homes raided by police at dawn. For years, they faced potential prison time, until finally being acquitted. This pattern has repeated itself in many different countries over many decades.
When the far right rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia -- including many explicitly fascist members of the right -- one of them drove his car into a group of marchers, wounding many, killing one. Vehicular and other such attacks have since become commonplace across the country.
With the rise of Trump and his xenophobic policies, one descendant of people who lived under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, Will Van Spronsen, felt the time had come to make a stand, White Rose-style, knowing he faced certain death in his effort to free those detained at the ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington.
Similarly, Michael Reinoehl was doing security in downtown Portland, Oregon after a day of physical conflict with the far right on the streets of the city, when Trump supporters descended on the place in hundreds of flag-draped pickup trucks. The inevitable happened again, when he shot and killed a member of a far right group who he thought was about to do the same to someone else. He was killed in a hail of bullets by police from several different jurisdictions days later, none of whom had their body cams on. This was yet another indication of the sympathies of the police in such situations.
Woody Guthrie's guitar had written on it the phrase, "this machine kills fascists." It wasn't that his guitar had a special function, like James Bond's guitar would. Woody was talking about the power of words, to foment movements, to inspire people, and to educate and organize them. Which requires engaging with them, of course -- not shunning them. But rather, recruiting them.
