Show Transcript: Defeating Fascism

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Back in the USSR: Defeating Fascism

Opening Theme

Welcome brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, I am Siegfried and this is Back in the USSR.  A few weeks ago this show talked about the deadly events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month (which, at the time I mistakenly said was in North Carolina), and how brave anti-fascists shut down the biggest far-right rally that’s been held in North America in years, in spite of the fascists having police protection, in spite of the lethal violence that the fascists used against the anti-fascists, which claimed the life of Heather Hayer and injured many others, and in spite of the demonization that the anti-fascists received and continue to receive from the mainstream media, which has done the utmost to equate fascist violence and anti-fascist self-defense as somehow being the same thing.  Since then the struggle has continued, in Canada as well as in the States and even leftist figures like Chris Hedges have joined the mainstream media chorus condemning anti-fascist resistance as somehow “helping” the far-right – a position disturbingly similar to that expressed by Donald Trump.

Actually, before we go any further I’d like to quote Michael Parenti’s analysis of this common technique by the mainstream media known as “false balancing”, which the Capitalist press uses all the time when it wants to downplay right-wing violence while demonizing progressive forces fighting back against it.  This is from Michael’s book “Contrary Notions”: “In accordance with the canons of good journalism, the press is supposed to tap competing sources to get both sides of an issue.  In fact, both sides are seldom accorded equal prominence.  One study found that from 1997 through 2005 conservative guests on network opinion shows outnumbered liberal ones usually by three to one, while leftist radicals were too scarce even to be counted.  In sum, “both sides of a story” are not usually all sides.  The whole left-progressive and radical portion of the opinion spectrum is amputated from the visible body politic.

False balancing was evident in a BBC report that spoke of “a history of violence between Indonesian forces and Timorese guerillas” – with not a hint that the guerillas were struggling for their lives against an Indonesian invasion force that had slaughtered some 200,000 Timorese.  Instead, the genocidal invasion of East Timor was made to sound like a grudge fight, with “killings on both sides”.  The US-supported wars in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s were often treated with the same kind of false balancing.  Both those who burned villages and those who were having their villages burned were depicted as equally involved in a contentious bloodletting.  While giving the appearance of being objective and balanced, such reports falsely neutralize their subject matter and thereby distort the issue.”

That’s Michael Parenti on “false balancing” in the media.  And of course there are other dimensions to it as well, particularly with regard to this false equation between fascist violence and anti-fascist resistance.  A recent article by the journalist Finian Cunningham noted how the Pentagon denounced American Nazis after the violence in Charlottesville, but continues to train and arm Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the Ukraine in its ongoing aggressive campaign against Russia.  Last week I talked about how the CIA for years spent billions of dollars training and arming terrorist forces in Syria, which are effectively fascist and far-right in orientation as well…and certainly make it known their desire to exterminate whole ethnic and religious groups if they ever take power in the country, which, thankfully, is now extremely unlikely.  But their genocidal violence has taken the lives of tens of thousands of civilians over the past six years in Syria and Iraq.

To quote Finian Cunningham’s article, “there is a long history of such American support for Nazis in Ukraine going back to the end of World War Two, when the Pentagon and CIA covertly backed the Gehlen Organization of former Third Reich General Reinhard Gehlen and his Ukrainian Nazi partisans in their sabotage operations against the Soviet Union…Modern-day regiments under the control of the Kiev regime, such as the Azov Battalion, publicly self-identify with Nazi-collaborating descendants and former pro-Nazi Ukrainian leaders like Stefan Bandera. This Neo-Nazi ideology of the Kiev-run military is a central impetus in why these forces have waged a three-year war on the ethnic Russian population of the breakaway Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. The latter refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the Kiev regime which seized power in February 2014 in a coup d’état against an elected government. The American CIA backed that violent coup.

The Pentagon’s supply of weaponry to Kiev forces will no doubt embolden their regiments to step up violations of the truce which was supposed to be implemented under the Minsk Accord. Hundreds of breaches are reported on a weekly basis in which towns and villages in Donestk and Lugansk come under fire from heavy artillery. Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, has recently remarked that his defense forces «are not fighting Ukrainians, but rather Banderites» – that is, Neo-Nazi militia who adulate their Third Reich hero Stefan Bandera for assisting the German SS exterminate thousands of fellow Ukrainians deemed to be «sub-human».” These far-right “banderites” are the people who set fire to the Trade Union building in the city of Odessa in 2014, slaughtering or burning alive dozens of unarmed left-wing demonstrations they had trapped there.  Just as in Charlottesville, the police did essentially nothing to stop this lethal fascist violence.

So, PR aside, the US state is absolutely in bed with right-wing violence at home and worldwide.  This is the case today just as it was the case during the Cold War when the US backed the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan that gave rise to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, backed death squads and drug traffickers in Latin America, and even gave support to right-wing terrorists in Western Europe in Operation Gladio.  To say nothing of how the FBI backed right-wing terrorism against the civil rights struggle, the Black Liberation struggle, and against anti-war movement during the Vietnam War years, including operating hand in glove with the KKK.  In its efforts to suppress progressive and revolutionary forces at home and abroad, the American state has been more than willing to empower the most murderous political forces imaginable, including outright fascists.

In the last Back in the USSR show concerning anti-fascism, I said that the worst insult, the most intolerable thing that a communist can experience is being equated with the fascist/Nazi scum that they’ve been bravely fighting against since fascism first ever reared its ugly head in the early 20^th Century.  Fascists hate communists for a reason, because communists have been the most dogged opponents of far-right violence from the beginning and that remains the case today.  We communists don’t tolerate fascists, we don’t tolerate sympathy for fascists, we do not debate fascists, we fight fascists, we seek the ultimate and total destruction of fascism everywhere in the world, and we are proud to say this: Bash the fash.

Song 1: Oi Polloi – “Bash the Fash”

OK, you’re listening to Back in the USSR here on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried, and to be honest, I feel most of what I’ve said about resisting fascism should be a no-brainer.  I mean we’ve witnessed the Holocaust, we’ve witnessed World War II, we’ve seen what fascists do, so why are people turning a blind eye to what’s going on in Ukraine right now, attacking President Donald Trump on bogus accusations of collaborating with Russia while turning a blind eye to his racist anti-immigrant domestic policy, or dismissing Charlottesville as an isolated incident, or letting Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystina Freeland off the hook when she openly defends and celebrates her Nazi-collaborating grandfather after his wartime deeds were recently exposed for all to see last year? Why? 

The struggle against fascism, which once united countless millions of people across the world, has broken down and this has a lot to do, in my opinion, with the demonization or systemic forgetting of the communist, anarchist, and radical forces that fought so fiercely and effectively against fascism throughout the 20^th Century.  People don’t know who their real heroes are, nor, after decades of Cold War propaganda, do they know who their real enemies are.  And this has to change.

Now I could give you an example from the Spanish Civil War and the heroes of the International Brigades, or the countless anti-fascist partisan heroes of World War II, but instead I want to give you a modern example of the Montreal-based anti-fascist activist Jaggi Singh – a man who the mainstream media has also made damn sure you’ve never heard of, and yet he’s fighting the same fight against the same right-wing forces in your own backyard.

(Read “Public statement in solidarity with activist Jaggi Singh, arrested in Montreal for having “impersonated” Nordiques’ Michel Goulet in Québec City (not a joke)”)

Play Song 2: Christy Moore “Viva La Quinta Brigada”

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Now, another thing that people are often ignorant about is where fascism comes from, who supports it, and who fascism supports with its violence and hate.  And even though I did my master’s thesis on this very subject years ago, Michael Parenti can still say it better than I can how fascism serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class and the profit motive more generally.  So I’ll play Michael’s talk “The Functions of Fascism” which will explain the monster we’re up against.  Please stay tuned.

Play Michael Parenti “The Functions of Fascism”

Play Mike Prysner “What it means to be a member of the PSL”

Play Song 3: Leed Reed “Bazooka Rap”

Play Michael Parenti “The Sword and the Dollar”