Funny Folks in All Kinds of Places

“Former” Klan leader David Duke in Syria, far-right conspiracy theorist and spook Lyndon Larouche in the People’s Daily…

It’s really not so much surprising, as noteworthy, don’t you think?

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It should not be seen as proof, but rather a simple reminder, that there is no firewall between the left and right, between “our side” and “theirs”; we are not only fighting on a political terrain, we ourselves constitute that terrain. Any reassuring assumptions about how anti-imperialism, or state communism, or even “mass support” will somehow automatically play to the left and not the right, increasing human liberation and not misery, is… well… just a reassuring assumption. Unproven, unproveable, because ultimately untrue.

That is not to say that anti-imperialism (like anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal politics) are not necessary components of a movement for human liberation, but that – in and of themselves – they are not enough. On each and every level of struggle, additional struggle is necessary to realize the liberatory potential that you may have already been tempted to take for granted. And so on and so forth.

It’s a process, and i assume it to be a never-ending one. I imagine such struggle will take place in post-revolutionary, in Stateless societies, in classless societies, just with different stakes. Historical progress is thus translated into giving human beings better and better odds, grater and greater guarantees against defeat and reaction.

At this sorry point in human history, of course, the odds are bad and there is little guarantee against either defeat or reaction. David Duke in Damascus, Lyndon Larouche being interviewed by the “most influential and authoritative newspaper in China”- not anomalies, but signs of things to come.

In this regard, I find it useful to quote from Don Hammerquist’s essay “Fascism and Anti-Fascism”:

Fascism in my opinion, is not a paper tiger or a symbolic target but a real and immediate danger both in this country [the United States] and around the world. However, the nature of this danger is not self-evident. It requires clear explanation and it requires the rejection of some conventional wisdom. Fascism is not a danger because it is ruling class policy or is about to be adopted as policy. Not even because it could have major influences on this policy. Nor is it a danger because of the “rahowa”, racial holy war, that is advocated by some fascist factions. The policies of official capitalism carried out through the schools and the criminal justice and welfare systems are both a far greater and a more immediate threat to the health and welfare of people of color than fascist instigated racial attacks and their promotion of racialist genocide. The real danger presented by the emerging fascist movements and organizations is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left. This default is more than a possibility, it is a probability, and if it happens it will cause massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency.

“Fascism and Anti-Fascism,” by Don Hammerquist, in Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement, Kersplebedeb Publishing 2002

Categories: anti-imperialism, fascism