Thread by @pawelwargan

🧵The liberal memory is fickle and short.

It will have you forget the Holocaust in Gaza and try to convince you that US American fascism arrived, fully-formed, with orange foundation and a blond sweep.

It will have you forget that, many decades ago, the US inspired Hitler.

While Europe colonized and exterminated Indigenous peoples from India to the Congo, the US expanded West.

State governments offered bounties for "red skins sent to Purgatory." By 1900, the Indigenous population in what is now the US collapsed from up to 15 million to 237,000.

“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are,” Theodore Roosevelt said in 1886. He justified the US genocide against the Native American people as the "pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands".

Among many acts of settler-colonial barbarism, US colonizers exterminated much of the native bison population — devastating Indigenous communities who depended on them. As we see with the Zionist destruction of native Palestinian olive trees, the eradication of the conditions for indigenous life is central to the settler-colonial playbook.

The US doctrine of "manifest destiny" — the idea that the US had a divine right to expand West, and, by implication, exterminate those who stood in its way — was indistinguishable from the later German doctrine of "lebensraum", which sought to replicate that model in the East.

It is no surprise that Germany's killing fields in the "Wild East" resembled those of the US in the "Wild West". Hitler admired, he said, how the US had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep[s] the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

But the comparisons run deeper. As James Q. Whiteman documented extensively in Hitler's American Model, German jurists and lawmakers spent considerable time studying US race laws. Jim Crow became foundational for the Nuremberg Race Laws adoped by Germany in the 1930s.

Colonialism was long recognized as the rotten seed from which fascism sprouted.

After Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which exterminated nearly 300,000 people, George Padmore wrote that “the Colonies are the breeding ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today”.

That analysis would echo in the later writings of thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, who wrote that Hitler’s real crime in the eyes of “civilised” Europe was “that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘n*****'s’ of Africa”.

Colonialism was not simply a project of sadistic violence. It followed the logic of primitive accumulation — the capture of land and the plunder of its resources required the expulsion, demobilization and often extermination of those who might defend it.

In this way, fascism is symbiotically linked with capitalism. It emerges, as V.I. Lenin argued, from capitalism's decay — as a desperate attempt by the ruling class to overcome the contradictions of capitalism through extreme violence.

For that reason, fascism also represents the convergence of corporations with the state — the reduction of the capitalist state to its primary class function, the defence of private property. This is why Mussolini though "corporatism" would be a more appropriate term than "fascism". In the US, that convergence runs deep.

With the consolidation of Western imperialism after WWII, the crisis of capitalism became global — and the instruments of reaction did, too.

As European fascism was formally defeated, the US and Western Europe moved quickly to salvage the pieces. Institutions like NATO, the CIA, NED, USAID, and others emerged over time as instruments that nurtured and cultivated reactionary forces around the world to prevent the emergence of progressive and emancipatory political projects.

From 1949, for example, the US led a covert project to support reactionaries and Nazi-collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. It hoped to form a violent insurgency against the Soviet Union within these territories, while building a reactionary bloc among their emigres living in the US, Canada and Western Europe.

We see these policies play out to this day — in the Canadian Parliament, in the "Victims of Communism" foundations, in the attempts to equate Communism and Nazism, in the memorials to Nazi collaborators that dot the West, or in the streets of Riga or Lviv.

Another example: From 1948, the CIA funneled tens of millions of dollars to extremist right-wing groups in Italy.

These groups were responsible for scores of deadly terrorist attacks that massacred hundreds, many of which were blamed on the left. These included attacks like the bombing of the Bologna Centrale railway station on 2 August 1980, which killed 85 people and wounded over 200.

According to a 2000 Parliamentary Commission in Italy, these attacks were part of a “Strategy of Tension” that terrorized people into abandoning their support for the popular Communist and socialist movements, intended in particular to "stop the [Italian Communist Party], and to a certain degree also the [Italian Socialist Party], from reaching executive power in the country”.

Outside Europe, the US waged a ceaseless counterinsurgent war — directly and through proxies — to undermine the emergence of sovereign political regimes across the Global South. Three to four million were massacred in Korea. Up to three million in Vietnam. Over a million in Indonesia. Hundreds of thousands across Latin America. And now, hundreds of thousands in Gaza. Each time, opposition to the violence was viciously suppressed back home.

US American fascism is no abberation. It is innate to the US political project. Its fundamental impulses have been there from the very beginning. It existed in the institution of slavery. It existed in the lynchings of the Ku Klux Klan. It exists today, in the prison camps that hold a quarter of the world's prison population — often worked without compensation.

And because it is intrinsically tied to the ceaseless violence inflicted by the US on peoples outside its borders, US fascism cannot be countered with liberal sloganeering — or the social-imperialist posturing of those who would privilege the lives of US workers over those in Bangladesh, the Congo or Bolivia. The only anti-fascist position is an anti-imperialist one.

If you would like to read more about fascism, study thinkers like R. Palme Dutt, George Padmore, Sylvia Pankhurst, Amílcar Cabral, George Jackson, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Domenico Losurdo, and Michael Parenti. They connected the question of fascism with the question of imperialism and colonialism, showing that the only antidote to fascism is a serious commitment to socialist internationalism.