I'm Beginning to Think Fascism Won in 1945

And many of us have been living in a kind of quiescent fascist system since then.

The story of World War Two is the most righteous story of the good guys beating the bad guys that probably anyone could think of. Even those who may be critical of war and such simplistic narratives most of the time, often hesitate to apply that same critical thinking to WWII. It is a sacred cow; while it is often extremely hard for individuals or groups to argue for pacifism and peace during or on the onset of any war, WW2 is one of the rare wars where it is even difficult to argue retrospectively that peace was a better option. This seems to be importantly related to the fact that, in the case of WWII, war guilt has been thoroughly thrust upon the losers. A reality that does not hold for any other war I can think of. It is, for all intents and purposes, a kind of blasphemy to suggest any interpretation but the simplistic Myth and Legend most of us know today. In the “Phony Victory” Peter Hitchens argues such a blasphemous position: that the British declaration of war was done for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time, and lead to the destruction of Britain as it was. If you are interested in the argument he presents, then you’ll have to acquire the book yourself, as I won’t be going any further into it here. I will however point out that he similarly highlights that the story of WW2 is far more than mere history, it is “…our moral guide, the origin of modern scripture about good and evil, courage and self-sacrifice.” That “the pseudo-religious side of World War II was (and still is) expressed in more than the remembrance services that oddly grow grander and more spectacular as the war sinks further into the remote past. There is a special sort of reverence attached to this particular conflict” and that

World War II, like all events that have become myths, is a dangerous subject. Oddly enough, in the years immediately after 1945 it was more rationally discussed than it is now, because there were so many people prominent in daily life who had experienced it as it actually was. It is since it has solidified into a legend, especially in my generation, that it has lost all nuance. The belief that it was an unequivocally ‘Good War’ has grown with extraordinary speed, and has recently been reinforced by later ‘Good Wars’ which have ostensibly been modelled on it… On the contrary, the ‘Good War’ claim has been repeatedly promoted by those who have wanted more wars and hoped to persuade us that they too would be good.

As Hitchens points out, this story still holds immense sway over our current way of rationalising the world and justifying actions. Because of this, it is important that sometimes we revaluate the accuracy and legitimacy of the Myth of the “Good War”. Hitchens, in pointing to the modern relevancy of this Myth, gives examples of instances where US presidents and other officials have used the “Good War” to justify some of the most destructive and criminal attacks in history, including interventions in Vietnam, Guatemala, Korea, Panama and others. For example, Hitchens points out that Truman argued in 1950 that US intervention in North Korea was necessary by suggesting that

Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier… If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.

And later into the war, that “we will continue to take every honorable step we can to avoid the general war. But we will not engage in appeasement. The world learned from Munich that security cannot be bought by appeasement.” The US then proceeded to kill up to 3 million Koreans (often not distinguishing between north and south), and drop more explosives on Korea than it dropped in the pacific theatre during the whole of WWII; at least they can say they didn’t “appease” anyone there. Perhaps some might argue such an intervention and mass slaughter of civilians was justified; but for the moment, we should at least agree that the myth of the Good War certainly plays a central role in modern war making and geopolitics. We will see in the following passages, however, that the comparison made by Truman was done with a deadly cynicism and hypocrisy.

What I am not going to be doing is presenting an argument that tries to suggest that a grand vision of peace and pacifism would have been for the better (If you would like to see an attempt at such an argument, see the above link). Instead, my focus is going to be on the periphery and immediate post war period, and how here, key actions were taken to ensure the continuation of fascist ideology and control; actions that still hold sway over today’s modernity.

Certainly, WW2 did culminate with the defeat, and demilitarization, of Germany. And the German people were placed under a kind of brutal collective punishment, and made to answer for Nazi crimes. It did not, however, culminate with the defeat of fascism; quite the opposite. Many people know the story of how the US gave protection and asylum to Nazi scientists and other Nazi war criminals; with operation paper clip being the now declassified Nazi relocation program that has many popular shows and movies made about it or referencing it. Though the reality is still worth reading about. Not so many people know about how the US and Britain propped up Nazi collaborators in occupied countries, and card carrying fascists in the axis countries themselves, while simultaneously violently suppressing the organic democratic movements trying to re-establish humanity after the greatest destruction of it ever seen. As AJ Muste — the topic of the article referenced at the start — points out, “The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?”

Firstly, a brief detour: what is fascism? It will help to have this cleared up before we get into how the US propped it up post WWII. To put it simply, fascism is a form of nationalism. But more importantly, where it distinguishes itself from other forms, and where it gets its long lasting relevance in modernity, is in its violent marriage of state and private power usually with a rhetorical flair of extreme industrial “efficiency”. This is probably best exemplified by the curious history of the term “privatization”. Privatisation is the process by which a state funded and developed industry or asset, will be handed off to private bidders, usually at well below any sensible market rates. Often this is justified by the ideological position of the “efficiency” that private enterprise brings; usually supported by the state taking prior actions to try to make the public institution run as badly as possible (we’ll be coming back to this “efficiency”). The term itself originates in the 1930s, where the magazine “The Economist” was doing an article about an up and coming government doing things quite differently to how things had been done before. This, of course, was Nazi Germany. Economic Historian Germa Bel notes that

industrialists supported Hitler’s accession to power and his economic policies: “In return for business assistance, the Nazis hastened to give evidence of their good will by restoring to private capitalism a number of monopolies held or controlled by the state” This policy implied a large-scale program by which “the government transferred ownership to private hands”

and that the first recorded use of the term privatisation (or reprivatisation; the more literal translation from the German), appeared in a 1936 issue of the economist

“‘Re-privatisation,’ as it is called, has, however, been under way in the cases of all three banks. Some 40 per cent of the G.D. Bank’s holding of Deutsche-Disconto shares had passed back into private hands by the end of 1935. The new advance of bank shares to above par ought to smooth the way for complete ‘re-privatisation.’”

with the explicit goal of Nazi privatisation being

to stimulate the propensity to save, since a war economy required low levels of private consumption. High levels of savings were thought to depend on inequality of income, which would be increased by inequality of wealth. This, according to Sweezy (p. 28), “was thus secured by ‘reprivatization’.

Today, “privatisation” is just a normal term one will regularly hear if one likes to talk about government and politics. It is far removed from its Nazi origins; but only in an idiomatic and propagandistic sense. Its motivations and mechanisms haven’t changed at all; and its normal every day presence, is, I think, an example of how fascism was never dealt with, and was instituted into our every day lives; what I will call quiescent fascism. Quiescent fascism then closely resembles or directly supported what is often called Fordism (with Ford himself being a prominent Nazi Collaborator, the use of the term “Fordism” often comes across as a bit of a white washing of history). Fordism is,

this industrial/technical paradigm that has had such a pervasive effect, imposing itself as the only feasible model of productivity and efficiency. Hierarchies, division of labour, surveillance and control: these terms became synonymous with efficiency and therefore with consumer wellbeing. Mass producers soon found that mass consumer markets were required to absorb the expanded output of goods. Enormous marketing efforts were launched to shape and uphold consumer demand.

notes Academic John Matthews. If anything, he understates the point. “hierarchies” are more accurately authoritarian corporate structures, and the rapidity at which the advertising industry grew, to dominate all other industries, was unprecedented. It is not an inaccurate statement to make, that under Fordism, and in the modern world, the economy has become a mechanism, not about producing goods and services; but about creating consumer demand through advertising, and subjugating the public to private tyranny. Many businesses spend more on marketing than they do on their own goods. Matthews goes on

But as the Great depression showed, corporate efforts on their own were not enough to sustain spending, and there was gradually erected an apparatus of government support for high wages and income maintenance. It was this combination of mass production and organised mass consumption that we now call Fordism.

Thus, Fordism, is the result of this marriage (as opposed to competition between) of state and private authoritarian power, to the benefit of both, often with the still attached rhetoric of the primary importance of economic “efficiency”; but with the violence having become more systematic and indirect, and less opportunistic and direct. And this so called “efficiency”: if most or a large portion of economic inputs is invested towards generating demand for its own outputs (advertising, marketing, PR), and even then, the system requires vast taxpayer stimulus to avoid collapsing, should anyone actually want this “efficiency”? From a macroscopic view, it seems totally inefficient and absurd, and yet, it has become a key component of a system of more or less global hegemony that has come to power in the post WWII era. This is what I am terming Quiescent Fascism.

This is not such an absurd use of the term fascism. For example, the depression era economist Robert Brady makes the argument that much of the US approaches to combatting the depression, which were built around the state based stimulation of private enterprise to its own benefit, were either inspired by fascism, or more simply fascist in nature. A summary of his work “Business as a System of Power” states that

Brady saw the direction of business moving in a variety of directions: from the totalitarian model set by fascism with its highly centralized approach to special interests, profit making and policy made in the interests of those who rule; and the alternative democratic model set by the democracies of the West, which expound the latitude of direct public participation in decision-making and social organization of the economy as a whole.

The initial intervention in the markets by the state, in the form of the “New Deal” by FDR, ultimately failed to keep Fordism propped up.

Despite the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, real G.N.P. [Gross National Product] did not regain its 1929 volume until 1939, when per capita income was still 7 percent below its 1929 level. Unemployment, reaching an estimated 25 percent of the labor force in 1933, averaged nearly 19 percent from 1931 through 1940 and never dipped below 10 percent until late 1941. The anemic nature of the recovery during the 1930s was a direct result of the inadequate increases in government support for the economy. . . . Only the Second World War ended the Great Depression. "Rearmament" commenced in June 1940 and over the next year, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, military spending jumped more than six-fold, to 11 percent of the G.N.P. It rose to 42 percent of G.N.P. in 1943-44. Under this mighty stimulus, real national product increased 65 percent from 1940 through 1944, industrial production by 90 percent. . . . What had really happened between 1929 and 1933 is that the institutions of nineteenth-century free market growth broke down, beyond repair. . . .

Richard B. DuBoff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989, ch. 6.

Quite similar to the rearmament program and its affects, in Nazi Germany. And so now, to keep the markets propped up, we have the Military-Industrial-medical-pharmaceutical complex; the key sectors in which state spending is used to prop up private business; and advertising and marketing as become bigger than ever.

How an absurd and inefficient system ended up “imposing itself as the only feasible model of productivity and efficiency.”

Now, simply inventing a term, and then giving a few arguments from analogy and entomology, while citing a couple of relevant experts, would not be enough to argue that we have been living in an age of quiescent fascism since 1945. I could further argue that quiescent fascism more or less has no use for direct opportunistic violence, having already established itself as a global hegemon. But this, I think, would also not be sufficient for most people; for most people, without the direct violent oppression, the word fascism loses its substance and meaning. But if I were to argue that this global hegemony of quiescent fascism was established with direct, widespread, and extreme violence in the post WWII; that, I think, would be sufficient argument, along with the rest, for using such a term. This did in fact occur; and is barely known at all. For example, in south Korea, historian Bruce Cumings notes (Korea: The Unknown War, New York: Viking, 1988, especially pp. 10-48)

Many Americans express surprise when they learn that U.S. involvement with Korea came well before 1950, in a three-year occupation (1945-8) in which Americans operated a full military government. . . . An ostensible Korean government did exist within a few weeks of Japan's demise; its headquarters was in Seoul, and it was anchored in widespread "people's committees" in the countryside. But this Korean People's Republic (formed on 6 September 1945) was shunned by the Americans. . . . The American preference was for a group of conservative politicians who formed the Korean Democratic Party (K.D.P.) in September 1945, and so the occupation spent much of its first year dismantling the committees in the South, which culminated in a major rebellion in October 1946 that spread over several provinces. . . . Under American auspices Koreans captured the [Japanese] colonial government and used its extensive and penetrative apparatus to preserve the power and privilege of a traditional land-owning elite, long the ruling class of Korea but now tainted by its associations with the Japanese.

In a separate work, Cuming’s emphasises that (The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. I ("Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947"), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)

From September through December 1945, the American Occupation made a series of critical decisions: it revived the Government-General bureaucracy and its Korean personnel; it revived the Japanese national police system and its Korean element; it inaugurated national defense forces for south Korea alone; and it moved toward a separate southern administration.

Peter Hitchens, referred to in the introduction, is not American; but he is a well studied individual, so it does stress the point made by Cumings, that Hitchens was unaware of this occupation; as shown by a quick throwaway line where he suggests that before 1950 “the policy of the USA had been to stay out of Korea”. As Cumings points out, this was far from the case. Under this military occupation of Korea, the US established the north/south divide that lasts till this day, and oversaw the murder of up to 200,000 South Koreans during a mass murder campaign by the US backed government. This history was suppressed up till the 1980s under threat of torture and death. Because of this history, and the fact that South Korea is a US “ally”, it is barely known. In other words, South Korea is a country where the fascists won in 1945; and its current status quo, an example of a kind of quiescent fascism. Up until 1987, South Korea was still executing people for the crime of “Capital Flight”. Just last month, we saw the President of South Korea try, and almost succeed, at placing the country into a state of martial law, in order to supress the opposition party. The government then attempted to impeach him, but failed to do so.

This history of the US installing a murderous fascist regime in Korea, and helping to establish the north/south divide, makes the previously highlighted statement by Truman, all the more absurd and Orwellian. It is particularly hard to avoid a strong feeling of disgust when noting that Truman utilised the remaining Japanese Imperial political infrastructure to establish his military dictatorship in Korea, and then 5 years later invoked the memory of Imperial Japan as a bogeyman to justify further military intervention. If anyone was the Hitlerian bogeyman Truman was describing, it was himself.

In Greece, the allied forces immediately mobilised to crush the primary anti-fascist resistance there, leading to the Greek civil war, which left approximately 200,000 dead. Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982:

Britain's defeat of E.A.M. [National Liberation Front, the main anti-fascist resistance organization] in December 1944 shattered the hegemony of the left, emboldened the right, and opened the way for a royalist takeover of the organs of state power: the police, the army, and the administration. . . . Throughout the countryside, right-wing mobs brutalized or killed leftists, republicans, and their families. National guardsmen attacked left-wing editors and smashed their printshops. . . . As usual, the Russians accepted such developments with a cynical equanimity. "This war is not as in the past," Stalin . . . [said] in the spring of 1945. "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. . . ." By the end of World War II, then, American policymakers were ready for the counterrevolutionary initiatives of subsequent years. . . . Behind American policy, as behind that of Britain and Russia, lay the goal of containing the Greek left. . . . "It is necessary only to glance at a map," Truman declared [in his March 12, 1947, speech announcing the Truman Doctrine], to see that if Greece should fall to the rebels, "confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. . . ." Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr . . . protested that "this fascist government through which we have to work is incidental. . . ." [K]ey American officials, particularly in the U.S. embassy, agreed with the Greek authorities on the necessity of harsh measures. . . . American officials initially provided undeviating support for political executions. . . . Although "some of those persons imprisoned and sentenced to death after the December 1944 rebellion may not have been at that time hardened Communists, it is unlikely that they have been able to resist the influence of Communist indoctrination organizations existing within most prisons," [said the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Athens, Karl Rankin]. . . . In May [1947], the British ambassador reported that members of the U.S. embassy had been discussing "the necessity" of outlawing the K.K.E. [the Greek Communist Party]. . . . That December, with the rebellion in full sway, the Athens government passed a law formally dissolving the K.K.E., E.A.M., and all groups associated with them; seizing their assets; and making the expression of revolutionary ideas a crime subject to imprisonment. From the standpoint of American officials, this was a struggle to the death.

In fact, the Greek civil war represents one of, if not the first, use of napalm supplied by the US. It was used directly on the anti-fascist groups that were the main resistance forces to the Nazi occupiers.

However, in my opinion, the account given above distorts the reality a bit of what was actually going on. This wasn’t about communism vs capitalism, or left vs right, this was about self determination and democracy, versus foreign control and intervention on the side of “business as a system of power”, of fascism. An example in the case of Greece illustrates this concretely. As Vincent Bevins notes in the Jakarta method, “Stalin actually instructed the Greek communists to stand down and let the British-backed government take control after the Nazis left. The Greek communists refused to heed his instructions”. Similar examples of this use of direct violence in the immediate post war period, to suppress legitimate grass roots democracy, and install fascist card carriers or collaborators, overseen or directly applied by Allied forces, were recorded in Japan, Italy, and Germany, and many other places, not so well documented.

While South Korea is probably the most extreme and genocidal example in the immediate post war period, the statement does not clearly hold once you begin to step beyond this time frame. The cold war represents the continuation, and escalation, of this use of direct violence for the same ends. The cold war — its name a piece of propaganda itself — was in fact a huge hot war on the third world. Examples include Guatemala, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia and East Timor; all of which featured prominent intervention by the US in the form of death squads and genocidal killing, continuing its efforts to establish this fascist (often called neo-fascist) hegemony. One of the most well known examples of this being Chile’s (or more accurately, the Chicago School’s) Pinochet. However, I am going to go over a lesser known but perhaps far more brutal example of US backed fascist (or neo-fascist) violence in Indonesia. Here, one of the best written accounts is “the Jakarta Method” by Vincent Bevins, just mentioned. Though the book still indulges in the distortion outlined above, with the subtitle of “Washington’s anti-communist Crusade…”. Approximately one million civilians were killed in Indonesia between 1965-66, with US backing, though US intervention started earlier in the 50s with various CIA programs in place, all with the goal of making Indonesia more compatible with this “business as a system of power”. Virtually anyone who associated with “communism” or anyone inconvenient who could be labelled as such, was targeted and killed, and authoritarian business was emboldened. The killers are still at large, and them and their decedents have recently regained power in Indonesia.

While it is not true that history is written by the victors, as historians have recorded these crimes, it is true that popular history is written by the victors. And the fact that this history is virtually unknown, especially the immediate post WWII part (even by people researching into the topic), is, I think, further evidence of fascism being the victor of WWII. Literally millions of people in the post war period have been targeted and killed for the explicit purpose of establishing this global hegemony of quiescent fascism. This existing hegemony also helps us to explain why fascism seems to be so easily rearing its head again in the so called “democracies” of the world: it’s just a hegemonic system turning from it’s quiescent state, to its active state. As the economist Robert Bradly pointed out earlier (or a summary of his work, more exactly), Representative Democracy was selected as being a political framework that worked well with “business as a system of power”; i.e. “the alternative democratic model set by the democracies of the West, which expound the latitude of direct public participation in decision-making and social organization of the economy as a whole.”.

The results of these actions are so widespread, lasting, and so insidious, in terms of the language we use, the institutions we inhabit, and even down to the poisons we spray around our houses and farms (much of which are derivatives from Nazi experiments to wipe out Jewish people), that it is hard for me to contemplate. So forgive me for the less than coherent presentation of the information here. There’s a lot to cover, and I wasn’t sure what to include and what not to. I get a strong sense that another world was possible; a world built around that which the democracies of the west “expound”; and the “normal” we now inhabit, with democracy shoved into an entirely too narrow purview, is such a huge distortion of what could and should be. I get the sense that the best and most accurate way to frame this absurd reality we now inhabit, is that fascism won in 1945. Of course, by the end of WWII, things were already too set in motion, if Muste’s words are to be taken seriously. In other words, there is no such thing as a “Good War”, and it is vital that this Mythology around WWII be challenged; lest we be doomed to repeat ourselves. But this is a monumental task, and certainly does not end with the contents of this article, which merely scratch the surface.

There has of course been many wins by organised labour since 1945 against this hegemonic quiescent fascism. Many of the things we take for granted today were won here; but never given freely. But what I have described here as quiescent fascism still sets the boundaries and foundation. This history is worthy of its own post, so I won’t linger here.

Perhaps the US is somewhat innocent here though? Perhaps, by analogy, the charge should be homicide, and not murder. Perhaps they had good reasons, and it was simply a mistake that things ended up going the way of a quiescent fascism. I will end here with a quote from the footnotes of “Understanding Power” by Noam Chomsky (the source of some of the other excerpts here as well), that should hopefully quell such illusions.

The reasons for the warm American response to Fascism and Nazism that are detailed in these books are explained quite openly in the internal U.S. government planning record. For instance, a 1937 Report of the State Department's European Division described the rise of Fascism as the natural reaction of "the rich and middle classes, in self-defense" when the "dissatisfied masses, with the example of the Russian revolution before them, swing to the Left." Fascism therefore "must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left." The Report also noted that "if Fascism cannot succeed by persuasion [in Germany], it must succeed by force." It concluded that "economic appeasement should prove the surest route to world peace," a conclusion based on the belief that Fascism as a system was compatible with U.S. interests. See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, p. 140; see also, Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, p. 26 (U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Bullitt "believed that only Nazi Germany could stay the advance of Soviet Bolshevism in Europe"). At the same time, Britain's special emissary to Germany, Lord Halifax, praised Hitler for blocking the spread of Communism, an achievement that brought England to "a much greater degree of understanding of all his [i.e. Hitler's] work" than heretofore, as Halifax recorded his words to the German Chancellor while Hitler was conducting his reign of terror in the late 1930s. See Lloyd Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993, p. 13. See also, Clement Leibovitz, The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal, Edmonton, Canada: Les Éditions Duval, 1993 (fascinating 533-page study reproducing vast documentation, largely from recently-declassified British government sources, of the secret British deal allowing Hitler free rein to expand in Eastern Europe; this deal was "motivated by anticommunism" and was "not a sudden policy quirk but was the crowning of incessant efforts to encourage Japan and Germany 'to take their fill' of the Soviet Union" [p. 6]. Leibovitz's study also establishes conclusively, from a wide variety of sources, that there was great sympathy for Hitler's and Mussolini's policies among the British establishment). Furthermore, although Hitler's rhetorical commitments and actions were completely public, internal U.S. government documents from the 1930s refer to him as a "moderate." For example, the American chargé d'affaires in Berlin wrote to Washington in 1933 that the hope for Germany lay in "the more moderate section of the [Nazi] party, headed by Hitler himself . . . which appeal[s] to all civilized and reasonable people," and seems to have "the upper hand" over the violent fringe. "From the standpoint of stable political conditions, it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power," noted the American Ambassador, Frederic Sackett. See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 140, 174, 133, and ch. 9; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1933, Vol. II ("British Commonwealth, Europe, Near East and Africa"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949, pp. 329, 209.