Both, actually (see endnote).
That’s a duality that the United States is prepared to
accommodate as it looks to a revitalized India as a strategic asset if not an
outright ally in its crusade to counter “Rising China”.
And it drives US government efforts to shield Modi from the consequences of his alleged involvement in a fascist pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.
And it drives US government efforts to shield Modi from the consequences of his alleged involvement in a fascist pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.
The US State Department has declared that Narendra Modi, as
India’s head of state, receives sovereign immunity from US lawsuits, even if
they allege human rights violations he committed as an individual while Chief
Minister of Gujarat .
Attorneys for the victims beg to differ, and a US Superior Court has charged the State Department to respond to their
objections by December 10.
For over a decade, Modi’s detractors have been attempting to
force the spotlight on the fascist elements of his ideology and politics, and
have failed to exact any meaningful political cost as he has risen to the
position of ultimate power in India.
Will his critics succeed in bringing him to book this time? Don't count on it.
Will his critics succeed in bringing him to book this time? Don't count on it.
The first indication that Narendra Modi is something more
than the proud steward of “the world’s largest democracy” is embodied in the
term “pracharak”.
As helpfully glossed
by the Indian Express:
Pracharaks
are Sangh ["Organization"--ed.] wholetimers who leave their families, often stay unmarried and lead
detached lives devoted to the organisation. When deputed to BJP or other RSS
affiliates, they are called Sangathan Mantris (Organisation Secretaries); in
BJP units, they are usually designated General Secretary (Organisation). The
Sangh has over a hundred affiliated organisations, but most Pracharaks working
in the BJP are either from the RSS or ABVP
Narendra Modi began his political career and spent twenty
years in the BJP as a pracharak, a “spreader of the doctrine” in other words an
organizer and apparatchik for the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist social movement known as the RSS.
Pracharaks are
expected to devote their lives to the cause of Hindu nationalism and, among
other things, remain celibate. Modi is
“single” with airquotes or married* with an asterisk; as a young man he
abandoned his wife to embark on a career as an RSS organizer, a state of
affairs he deemed necessary to acknowledge only forty years later as he stood on
the cusp of becoming prime minister, and the fact that he had habitually filled
in his marital status on electoral documents with an equivocal dash could no
longer be ignored.
Palash Ghosh of the International
Business Daily performed a signal service with his article on the historical roots of the RSS,
which I will quote at length:
The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a
doctor from the central Indian town of Nagpur in Maharashtra, who agitated for
both independence from the British crown and the strict segregation of Hindus
and Muslims.
What may surprise many in the West is that some of the most
prominent figures of RSS deeply admired Fascism and Nazism, the two
totalitarian movements that swept through Europe at the time.
As such, RSS was outlawed by the British (and was even
periodically banned by the Indian government after independence). Indeed,
Naturam Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi in 1948, was himself a former
RSS member who felt that the Mahatma made too many generous concessions to the
Muslims.
In the decades prior to that momentous event, senior RSS
members had direct links to both Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in
Germany. Part of the RSS’ fascination with these totalitarian regimes was their
shared opposition to the British Empire -- however, it went far beyond that.
The RSS (as well as multitudes of other Hindu nationalists) admired the way
Mussolini and Hitler reorganized their respective nations so quickly from the
wreckage of war to build a powerful economy and military under the banner of
patriotism and nationalism.
…
“There are only two courses open to the foreign elements,
either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to
live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to
quit the country at the sweet will of the national race,” wrote [RSS founder Golwalkar—ed].
“That is the only sound view on the minorities problem. That
is the only logical and correct solution. That alone keeps the national life
healthy and undisturbed… The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the
Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu
religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu
race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate
existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly
subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges,
far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.”
If one were to replace “Hindu” with “German,” Golwalkar’s
words would match Hitler’s rhetoric almost exactly.
The RSS doctrine is
Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness”, the idea that the preservation and
advancement of Hindu identity is key to India’s revival. Like the Deoband and Barelvi schools of
Islam, the RSS emerged as an Indian self-strengthening movement resisting the
imposition of British rule and values during the colonial period. Rejection of the Muslim contribution to
Indian civilization (made as a result of Moghul conquest and rule that the
British eerily recapitulated) was also integral to RSS identity politics. So, after the British were gone, RSS was
still around, excoriating Muslims as an alien cancer and repudiating the
Congress Party’s secularism as an attempt to institutionalize Muslim privilege
at the expense of Hindu interests. In
fact, “secularism” and its legal expression, “constitutionalism”, especially as
they enable the myriad government setasides for both Muslims and so-called
Other Backward Caste Hindus, are derogatory epithets in the RSS catechism.
The political affiliate of the RSS is the Bharatiya Janata
Party or BJP, Modi’s current outfit.
He’s been advancing the RSS electoral agenda since he was seconded to
the BJP some forty years ago. Concerning
Modi’s political agenda, one of Modi’s many critics in the “left” “secular”
Congress-leaning media wrote:
In one of those
headscratchers for advocates of bourgeois democracy, the BJP found its road to
electoral success paved with orchestrated anti-Muslim violence, starting with
the destruction of a mosque in the city of Ayodha, in northeastern India. Hindu nationalists claimed, on historically
rather dubious grounds, that the mosque indecently occupied the site of the
birthplace of the God-King Rama, and had engineered provocations at the mosque
since the 1940s.
In the 1980s, the
RSS, BJP, and another RSS affiliate, the VHP (Vishwa
Hindu Parishad, an organization devoted to “defense of
Hinduism” and, in particular, reconversion of Hindus, particularly
untouchables, who were converting to Islam and Christianity at a rate deemed
alarming), turned the Ayodha mosque issue into a rallying cry commanding the attention
of activist Hindus, known as “kar sevaks” or volunteers.
On December 6, 1992, 150,000
Hindus convened by the three organizations rallied before the mosque. After some incendiary rhetoric, kar sevaks tore
the building down, sparking communal violence which claimed 2000 lives across
the country.
Afterwards,
persuasive evidence was presented that the storming of the temple was not a
spontaneous exercise in Hindu extremism, but had been carefully planned over a
period of ten months by RSS and its affiliates.
The Hindu electorate
was energized, not repelled by the BJP’s association with this extremist
agenda, and delivered big gains to the party in the subsequent Lok Sabha (lower
house) national elections for India’s parliament, which signaled the emergence
of the BJP as a viable national force after decades of Congress Party dominance.
Modi eventually won three consecutive terms as Chief Minister of Gujarat, a province on India’s west coast abutting Pakistan with a Muslim minority of about 10%. Modi concentrated power in his hands by personally taking on most of the key government portfolios, and by purging his RSS rivals. Modi allegedly sidelined his chief opponent, the RSS pracharak Sanjay Joshay, with a sex tape that torpedoed Joshay’s reputation for probity and celibacy—and was later dismissed as a forgery.
As Chief Minister of
Gujarat, Modi presided over the next crank of the BJP’s anti-Muslim
meatgrinder, the notorious pogrom of 2002.
Ayodha was once
again the trigger.
A Muslim mob
attacked a train carrying 2000 Gujarati kar sevaks returning from the conduct of a Hindu
ritual at Ayodha on February 27, 2002.
Somehow the train caught fire near a town called Godhra and 59 people burned to death, most of them women and children. In an exercise of Indian muddy-watering
disguised as justice that will become increasingly familiar as Modi’s career
advances, two governmental commissions, one convened under the BJP and one
under its rival, delivered diametrically opposite conclusions ( “Muslim arson”
according the BJP side; accidental overturning of a cookstove on the train
according to the anti-BJP side.)
Communal violence
predictably erupted across Gujarat, with a death toll of nearly 1000, primarily
Muslims, over three days with the usual grim litany of horrors: beating,
raping, mutilation, burning, and hacking .
However, Westerners who get their ideas of Indian politics from Danny
Boyle movies may be surprised to learn that this was not simply a case of
bigoted Hindu lumpen massacring their Muslim opposite numbers.
Violence was
reportedly directed by RSS-affiliated activists dressed in the movement’s
trademark khaki shorts and saffron tops. More
disturbingly, they had voter rolls to assist them in identifying Muslims for
attack. And attacks were not just
directed against conspicuously Muslim individuals and institutions. Muslim-owned establishments, even those
bearing non-Muslim or Indian names and catering largely to Hindus (like the
“Tasty Bakery”), were targeted.
From a contemporary
account by the Indian outlet, rediff:
The manner in which people, irrespective of economic status, were targeted has raised suspicions about the possible misuse of electoral rolls to identify them.
Similarly, according to the victims, licences and other relevant papers from the civic bodies were used to target hotels and other business establishments owned by them.
Similarly, according to the victims, licences and other relevant papers from the civic bodies were used to target hotels and other business establishments owned by them.
"All my five hotels, including
Renbasera, which is meant for poor people, were attacked," one businessman
said.
According to some people, in
previous riots attempts were made to oust them from colonies like Meghaninagar.
"They succeeded to a large extent during the 1985 violence, yet the posh
Gulmohor Society was ours. Now, that's also gone," said one.
Many people alleged that the voters'
list was virtually used as a killing tool by frenzied mobs. "They hardly
failed to lay hands on their targets, thanks to documents like the voters'
list," a senior police officer admitted on condition of anonymity.
"The mission was accomplished with clinical precision."
…
"The voters' list certainly
made their task easier and the motivated mob knew exactly who stayed
where," a woman at the Sanklitpur relief camp in Juhapura said.
Even business establishments run by
Muslims in partnership with Hindus were not spared. "The message for
Hindus friendly with Muslims was clear -- do not do business with them,"
said Ibbal Tadah, an insurance surveyor in Juhapura area.
…
Then there is the suspicion of state
connivance, as alleged by the Congress and other opposition parties, reflected
in the traffic police virtually staying away from the roads on February 28.
…
Similarly, the fire brigade was
hardly in action when Ahmedabad was burning. In many places, shrines were razed
and houses burnt at locations hardly a stone's throw away from police stations.
Meanwhile, with each successive
riot, there has been a definite pattern in the relocation of population.
"Each Hindu pocket is becoming more concentrated with its own people,
while the story is the same for Muslim-dominated locations," a police
officer said.
A report by an Indian Editors Guild factfinding mission
pointed out rioters were also able to enter otherwise secure government areas
and torch Muslim property records:
The Old Secretariat is a protected area. Yet
the Gujarat State Wakf Board [which oversees religious and charitable
foundations endowed by Muslim philanthropists—ed.], located just below the
Directorate of Information, and the Gujarat Minorities Finance and Development
Corporation housed in the Block opposite, both Government offices, were
attacked and torched by a mob during office hours on February 28. …. No arrests
had been made until April 2, the day of our visit. Records pertaining to
dargahs, mosques, madrassas and kabristans were lost in the fire.
Over 100,000 Muslims
fled to refugee camps, which Modi refused to support since doing so, according
to him, would serve as acknowledgment of government responsibility for the riots.
The riots fit into
an effort to marginalize Muslims in the province’s political and economic
life. A few months after the riots, an
observer wrote:
In 2014, Reuters’
John Chalmers and Frank Jack Daniel reported from Juhapura, a Muslim ghetto in Ahmedabad:
…
Husain is one of roughly 400,000 people living in Juhapura, a teeming Muslim township within Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city. Many of them moved there after the 2002 riots. Local Hindus jokingly refer to it as "Little Pakistan".
…
Memories of the 2002 rioting have not faded for the many residents of Juhapura who lost relatives, homes and businesses. And its legacy has been increasing segregation.
In particular, a property law unique to Gujarat has perpetuated segregation, creating ghettos such as Juhapura and a sense of apartheid in some urban areas.
The "Disturbed Areas Act", a law that restricts Muslims and Hindus from selling property to each other in "sensitive" areas, was introduced in 1991 to avert an exodus or distress sales in neighbourhoods hit by inter-religious unrest.
Modi's government amended the law in 2009 to give local officials greater power to decide on property sales. It also extended the reach of the law, most recently in 2013 - 11 years after the last major religious riots.
The state government says the law is meant to protect Muslims, who account for just under 10 percent of the state's 60 million people. "It prevents ethnic cleansing and people being forced out," a senior government official who requested anonymity told Reuters.
Critics say the act's continued enforcement and the addition of new districts covered by it - about 40 percent of Ahmedabad is now governed by the law - means it is effectively being applied as a tool of social engineering.
…
The Indian Express newspaper said in a recent editorial: "More Muslims and Hindus have moved into separate spaces in Gujarat, finding trust and assurance only among neighbours of their own community, and it has ended up entrenching segregation and shutting Muslims out of the mainstream."
Indeed, those taking
note of the heightened ties between India and Israel after Modi’s elevation to
Prime Minister will find something to ponder in the politics of communal
exclusion in Gujarat.
In a startling revelation, Professor Keshavram Kashiram Shastri, 96-year-old chairman of the Gujarat unit of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, told rediff.com that the list of shops owned by Muslims in Ahmedabad was prepared on the morning of February 28 itself.
…
A scholar of the Mahabharat and a highly respected literary figure of Gujarat, Shastri said in a tape-recorded interview, "In the morning we sat down and prepared the list. We were not prepared in advance."
Clearly, the RSS affiliates in Gujarat regarded the Godhra tragedy as an indication of Muslim criminality and, perhaps worse, presumption that must, as matters of Hindu supremacy, justice, policy, and political calculation, receive immediate, unrestrained, maximal, and conspicuous punishment.
As to Modi, for whom membership in the RSS family was a matter of intense personal as well as political identity, his role in the Gujarat pogrom has been a subject of considerable scrutiny and legal gyrations over the last decade, complete with allegations of collusion, coverup, evidence destruction, and witness intimidation, which gave the US sufficient grounds to deny him a diplomatic visa (and revoke his tourist and business visas) in 2005.
In 2007, an Indian media outlet, Tehelka, covertly recorded interviews with several participants in the 2002 pogrom.
One mob leader described Modi's fury at the deaths of the kar sevak activists at Godhra:
In Godhra, he gave a very strong statement...He was in a rage...He's been with the Sangh from childhood...His anger was such...he didn't come out into the open then but the police machinery was turned totally ineffective...
Another mob leader stated that Modi gave him three days to conduct the pogrom before the army came in and restored order:
TEHELKA: What was Narendra Modi’s reaction when the Godhra incident
happened?
Haresh Bhatt: I can’t tell you this… but I can say it was favourable… because of the understanding we shared at that time…
Haresh Bhatt: I can’t tell you this… but I can say it was favourable… because of the understanding we shared at that time…
TEHELKA: Tell me something… Did he…
Bhatt: I can’t give a statement... But what he did, no chief minister has ever done …
Bhatt: I can’t give a statement... But what he did, no chief minister has ever done …
TEHELKA: I won’t quote it anywhere…For that matter… I am not even
going to quote you
Bhatt: He had given us three days… to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that… He said this openly...After three days, he asked us to stop and everything came to a halt…
Bhatt: He had given us three days… to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that… He said this openly...After three days, he asked us to stop and everything came to a halt…
TEHELKA: It stopped after three days… Even the army was called in.
Bhatt: All the forces came… We had three days… and did what we had to in those three days...
Bhatt: All the forces came… We had three days… and did what we had to in those three days...
No police appeared. At least sixty nine people died. In 2009, a witness testified at an inquiry that Jaffri had desperately tried to phone Modi and other Gujarat politicians during the siege.
Sandhi (48) said she was standing near Jaffery in his house,
while he was making frantic calls to officials and senior politicians like
Advani, Modi, Chaudhary and Sheikh, seeking protection.
Two key witnesses -- Imtiyaz Pathan and Rupa Mody --had also
testified before the court that Jaffery called Modi and other senior officials
for help.
Despite these apparent smoking or smoky guns--and thanks to a solid phalanx of political, media, and legal defenders--nobody was able to lay a glove on Modi as an initiator and enabler of the pogrom.
Modi urged everybody, Muslims included, to “move on” after the riots, and calculatedly made a name for himself as a business-friendly technocrat, not a wild-eyed ultranationalist.
By most accounts, Muslims in Gujarat now "know their place"; they are thoroughly cowed by memories of the massacre and the BJP's conspicuous local and national political success and are, for the time being at least, resigned to their subordinate status in the state.
As the Congress Party floundered, Modi clearly became the electoral man of the hour, and India and the world were both eager to forget the murderous ugliness that had marked his tenure in Gujarat.
Modi’s riot-related difficulties apparently ended with his receipt of a “clean chit” of exoneration from a governmental commission in 2012. The composition and probity of the commission were of course questioned by Modi’s opponents; judging from descriptions of the commission’s report, which included generous conclusions like this, they have a point:
[As to the allegation that] Mr Modi had told the police during the riots to allow the Hindus to vent their anger over the massacre of 56 kar sevaks in the Godhra train burning incident…[The report says] "[E]ven if such allegations are believed for the sake of argument, mere statement of alleged words in the four walls of a room does not constitute any offence".
With Modi poised to become Prime Minister in 2014 James Mann delivered the requisite whitewash in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of the Western world, ascribing the visa ban to inexplicable application of some weird religious freedom statute.
Well-intentioned U.S. policies sometimes work out in absurd ways, but this is hard to top: In a few weeks, India, the world's largest democracy, will probably elect as its next prime minister a politician who for nearly a decade has been prohibited from setting foot on U.S. soil… The State Department invoked a little-known U.S. law passed in 1998 that makes foreign officials responsible for "severe violations of religious freedom" ineligible for visas. Mr. Modi is the only person ever denied a visa to the U.S. under this provision, U.S. officials confirm.
The most revealing perspectives on Modi, both in 2002 and today, are supplied by three Indian journalists, admittedly of the “secularist/constitutionalist/pro-Congress” bent, who had visited Gujarat shortly after the riots as representatives of the Editors Guild in May 2002 to investigate the role of the media in fanning communal hatred.
Their report describes an atmosphere of brutality, intimidation, and impunity, presided over by Mr. Modi, who blithely tap-danced away from culpability thanks to the loyal savagery of the RSS/BJP/VHP apparatus.
On the issue of incitement—Modi had first deemed the train fire a terrorist attack orchestrated by Pakistan, then allegedly explained away the subsequent violence as “Newtonian action/reaction”—there was apparently an awkward moment:
Responding to queries regarding various statements attributed to him by the media, Mr Modi denied citing Newton’s law. Nor had he spoken of “action-reaction”; he had wanted neither the action (at Godhra) nor the subsequent reaction. When we cited footage in Zee to the contrary (Annexure 4A), there was no reaction from Mr Modi
None of the three authors, Aakar Patel, Dileep Padgaonkar, or B.G. Verghese are, it is safe to say, fans of Mr. Modi.
Shortly after the visit, Verghese wrote:
The rest of the country witnessed a storm of anger and protest against what was widely seen as a planned genocide in furtherance of the Parivar's [umbrella term for the constellation of Hindu nationalists organizations with the RSS at its center--ed.] warped agenda. This was spearheaded by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other front organisations and orchestrated by the BJP chief minister, Narendra Modi...
As the evidence piled up—and was ignored by Indian voters--some of the Indian media elite reacted to Modi’s rise to ultimate power with disbelieving horror.
The second author of the Editors Guild report, Dileep Padgaonkar, a stalwart of the liberal secular order who edited the Times of India for a stretch, delivered a half-amusing half-disconcerting, and totally desperate mea culpa cum beat-sweetener on the occasion of Modi’s elevation in 2014.
In A Missive to Distraught Liberals
addressed to the “Sentinels of the Republic”, Padgaonkar wrote:
So why did we lose the plot? The plain answer is that we misread the nation’s mood. …
An equally miserable failure of ours was to underestimate the spell Modi cast on the electorate. …He also tapped into voters’ yearning for a leader endowed with the will and aptitude to bring prosperity to the people, ensure clean and effective governance, provide security and instil national pride in citizens.
To reassure observers who might worry that there are limits to abject, self-destructive groveling, Padgaonkar promised to internalize the lessons of his defeat:
What we need is to acknowledge the flaws in our idea of secularism. Correctly or otherwise, it has been perceived as a hostile attitude to even the most uplifting traditions of India’s myriad religious and spiritual traditions. And, by that token, it has been equated with an indulgent attitude to Muslim extremism. A course correction is in order.
In contrast to this demoralized liberal rout, the third author, Aakar Patel, a Gujarati, offered rediff a clear-eyed appraisal of Modi:
I think he is the most talented politician of our time. A
brilliant public speaker, charismatic, very hardworking, uninterested in most
things outside politics and government.
He is neither well-read nor well-travelled and as a writer
is not particularly interesting. He is also a published poet.
You had mentioned how as chief minister, he held most of the
key portfolios? Is it because he wants absolute power or is it insecurity?
Both. For over a decade (till he became the BJP's PM nominee), he has held most of the
top portfolios.
In 2006, he was personally Gujarat's minister for finance,
home, industries, energy, administration, mines and minerals, ports,
petrochemicals and any other important ministry you can think of.
He doesn't think anyone else has his brilliance or integrity.
And he cannot bear to stand a rival.
Or is it because he genuinely believes that when power is
concentrated in one person, the government functions better?
He also believes in this principle -- so long as he is the
man with power.
…
Do you see him redefining his relationship with India's
Muslims if he did come to power?
He has the atavistic RSS attitude to South Asian Muslims as
traitors (Indian Muslims) and enemies (Pakistanis). He cannot shake this off
because he is a man of little education and strong convictions.
What is his relationship with the pillars of democracy? The
legislature? The executive? The media?
He has contempt for the legislature in Gujarat and here his
record is pretty clear. He is a demagogue in the classical sense and is
democratic to that extent.
He doesn't understand the democratic idea of minority rights
or of legitimacy.
So far as the media goes, he doesn't think he needs it and
because of its attention, he can reach his audience over the head of the media,
which is something he has done successfully for the last 12 years.
Photo by AP
=================================================
Endnote
*A few words about the “F” word.
Endnote
*A few words about the “F” word.
China Matters has an aversion to the casual use of the
epithet “fascist”.
“ Fascism” is a particular political response to a perceived
national crisis. To fascist
practitioners, the root cause of the crisis is identified as contamination of a
pure, virtuous national polity by alien elements, maybe ethnic, maybe
religious, maybe cultural, often “all of the above”. The national essence must be purified, first
by creating an unpolluted kernel of activists in a mass movement. The movement has its own armed force, to
protect itself and impose its will on others.
The purpose of the movement is state capture: to seize control of the
state and purify it, other key institutions and, if possible, the territory of
the nation from the contaminating elements.
Hitler was a nasty, clever practitioner of fascism, but not
its creator. The roots of fascism go
back to the 1880s. What Hitler did was
adopt the current best practice in insurrection, the mass mobilization of the
1917 Bolshevik revolution and subsequent crash industrialization in Russia, to
Germany. With a twist.
For Hitler, the virtuous conspiracy to capture state power
would be conducted against the polluting influence of Jews and Bolsheviks by
the Volk under the leadership of the Nazi Party, instead of by the proletariat
perfecting the class and productive relationships in Russia under the guidance
of the Bolsheviks.
I am willing to defer the knotty question of whether fascism
and Bolshevism are qualitatively the same, or if one is worse or better than
the other, to the philosophers. Both
exploited the unchecked power of the ruling party and group to do massively
horrible things to the world.
But the relevant point here is that both systems were
astounding successful, albeit for relatively brief periods of time.
When the bourgeois liberal capitalist world was flat on its
ass during the Depression, Hitler created an economic and military power that
subdued continental Europe. During the
same period, Stalin’s USSR achieved feats of high-speed industrialization that
I suspect still have not been equaled.
Truth be told, it’s easier to awake the demon of nationalism
than it is to persuade people of their class interest, so I guess that’s why
there are only four nominally communist regimes left in the world, while
fascism is doing great everywhere.
Indeed, if the geopolitical obsession of the United States with Russia
and China is set aside, the main enemy of liberal democracy today is not
godless communism; it’s good old fascism.
The fascists’ brutal and somewhat transitory achievements of
wealth and power still exercise a dark attraction for people who see their
nations in crisis. Moving beyond the
“all or nothing” categorical assertions of the defenders and enemies of the
current Kyiv regime, the classic example of a purely fascist strain in European
politics today is within the Pravy Sektor/Svoboda factions in Ukraine.
I wrote on the relatively undiluted fascist character of
these movements in Counterpunch a while back and concluded with this observation:
It is anathema to liberal democrats, but it should be acknowledged that fascism is catching on, largely as a result of a growing perception that neo-liberalism and globalization are failing to deliver the economic and social goods to a lot of people.
Democracy is seen as the plaything of oligarchs who manipulate the current system to secure and expand their wealth and power; liberal constitutions with their guarantees of minority rights appear to be recipes for national impotence. Transnational free markets in capital and goods breed local austerity, unemployment, and poverty. Democratic governments seem to follow the free market playbook, get into problems they can’t handle, and surrender their sovereignty to committees of Euro-financiers.
Fascism, with its exaltation of the particular, the emotional, and the undemocratic provides an impregnable ideological and political bulwark against these outside forces.
Fascism has become an important element in the politics of resistance: a force that obstructs imposition of the norms of globalization, and an ideology that justifies the protection of local interests against the demands of liberal democracy, transnational capital, and property and minority rights.
…
For some, resentment will, inevitably, congeal around nationalism and the perception that fascist resistance, defiantly militant, uncompromising, and irrational, racial and undemocratic, exclusionary and brutal, is the best instrument to achieve local identity and agency—power– in an ever bigger, more dangerous, and less responsive continental order.
Fascism, I’m afraid, isn’t just part of Europe’s past; it’s part of Europe’s future.
And also India’s future, as can be seen through my review of
the rise of the RSS and BJP…and Narendra Modi.
In summary, “fascist” is not a shorthand term for “racist”,
“xenophobic”, “authoritarian”, “totalitarian” or “brutal, murdering
asshole”. When I use it, I’m referring
specifically to an alarmingly nasty and relatively robust strategy for popular
mobilization, state capture, and governance.
And consider this extended digression as a notice that, when
I say that Narendra Modi’s roots are fascist, I am not employing the term
as a lazy perjorative.
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