Rev Left Radio - The History of Fascism (feat. Yale Historian Dr. John Merriman)

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

In this episode, esteemed Yale historian and scholar of European history, Dr. John Merriman, joins Brett to discuss the history of Fascism in the 20th century, and its insurgent RE-rise in the US and Europe today. If you want to hear Dr. Merriman's full history lecture on Fascism, you can find that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRSrSml1Hvw You can find out more about John, including all of his books, here: https://history.yale.edu/people/john-merriman Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com ------------ Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, the Omaha GDC, Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Fascism is in the air all over the place. And the kinds of the main elements of fascism that I list in that book, if you think about them, they all apply to Hitler and to the people who followed them. Anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-Vimar, the role of the economic crisis with long, long memories and hating the Allies and hating the Jews and hating the Socialists. Violence, the Nazis and other fascist groups are better at saying whom they are against than what they wanted. A lot of us say, what they want is ultra-nationalism, what they want is the totalitarian state and the destruction of parliamentary rule. What they

want as a dictator. They want a Cadillo, as Franco was. They want a duce, as Mussolini called himself. They want a Fuhrer. They want a leader who incarnates in that mystical body as they would view it the aspirations of the German people. And part of whom you were is who you're excluding. You have a Volkish community in the perverse biological racism of these people and other people who aren't too bad for them. If they are work-shy, Germans who don't want to work, then they're not really part of the Volkish community. I decide who's a Jew and who isn't. That's what Lugar said.

Hitler says, and this is the horror of it all, we decide who will live and who will die. And when they're using euthanasia as a tool to kill people who are mentally handicapped, and even some people who are physically handicapped, and pretty soon in the late 30s the Germans say, wait, these are Germans. If they're Jews who are German, we don't concern themselves German, that's okay, get rid of them. So they pull back on that. But that's there from the beginning. Ultra-nationalistic, ultra-anti-parliamentarianism, you want the guy.

He's going to represent you and he's going to tell you what to do. And the terror is there. The violence is there. The Gestapo. There are hundreds of thousands of denunciations. If you denounce somebody, you could be setting them to torture and their death. There's no question about that. And there's denunciations all the time, hey, my neighbor, I think he's Jewish.

I know my neighbor down the hall. I know he was a big guy in the German Socialist Party, the SPD. I know that the butcher around the street, I might want his store because I'm a butcher too. I know he was a communist activist until 1933. And you sent his enunciations. They got them all the time. They got them all the time. Here's a quote, somebody describing one of the Gestapo offices and the bureaucratization of terror. And it's grimy, this is a quote, grimy corridors, officers furnished with Spartan's implicit offices, furnished with Spartan simplicity, threats, kicks, troops chasing chained men up and down the reaches

of the building, shouting, rows of girls and women standing with their noses and toes against the wall, overflowing ashtrays, portraits of Hitler and his aides, the smell of coffee, smartly dressed girls working at high speed behind typewriters, girls seemingly indifferent to the squalor and agony about them, stacks of confiscated publications, printing machines, books and pictures, and Gestapo agents asleep on the table. Nobody had any illusion about what was going on. And they didn't just rule through terror. You know, the SS, by the way, the SS, everybody knows about the SS.

I mean, they destroyed the essay. Ernst Rome challenges Hitler and the night of the long life, they wipe them all out. The SS was a form of social mobility. For people, these young guys come back after the war, there's no work, and pretty soon in the 20s, they get it. SS, you got a uniform. You can go beat the hell out of communist, Jews, or anyone else, and there's no, the judges are all Nazi sympathizers or right-wing sympathizers. They were all trained in the empire.

You can kill somebody and you'll be out of jail in a very short matter of time. I mean, you're working with impunity, especially in Prussia, where Goebbels is the Minister of the Interior, or is it Goering as the Minister of Interior in Prussia. I don't remember. Anyway, it is all routinized, it is all there. But they don't rule just through terror. And that's what I did not emphasize enough in what you read, and it's going to be the next edition. Hitler promises order.

And order is zero tolerance on petty crime, for example. And they have police who are called the Crepo, appropriately enough in English translation, K-R-I-P-O, and they are, so your basic police, they are not the Gestapo. But they go out and people who are lounging about, who are work shy, that's a dangerous thing to be. Work shy, petty criminals, people who are hungry, who are stealing apples off fruit stands, things like that, they go out and they make war on them. And the German population nods enthusiastically overall as a whole. The war on crimes is something they like.

Hello everyone, welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we're very excited to present an interview with Dr. John Merriman from Yale University. In this episode, we talk about the history of fascism and then try to make sense out of contemporary iterations of far-right and fascist movements today informing our understanding of that from history. So we're very excited to have a big guest like John Merriman on the show to talk about this, And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio and you'd love to support the show and get access to some bonus content, you can always support it by going to patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio and tossing us a few dollars of your hard-earned money.

We really appreciate it. It keeps the show going. And as we said, you will also get access to some bonus content that we put up monthly. So having said all that, let's go ahead and dive into this interview with John Merriman. What's up? My name is John Merriman. I teach at Yale University. I've taught here for ages. I teach in France too. I live in France. I live in both worlds. I'm an historian of modern Europe, but above all modern France, I write on revolutions. Yeah, write on anarchists. I have a history of modern Europe since the Renaissance soon as fourth edition. Yeah, I'm concerned about what's going on now because we are revisiting in many ways the 1920s and 1930s. I spend a lot of time every year, almost a month in Poland to go to Hungary and Eastern Europe a lot in the rise of the kind of right-wing racist populism is a re-rise, I guess. That's a very unfortunate term that I chose that you could see that replicates lots of what's going on, went on in 1920s and 30s in the interim war period. And we see the same thing in the U.S. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as I said, we're very honored to have you on the

show. We've had episodes on fascism before, mainly interviewing people who are active in the sort of current fights against fascism, as well as maybe journalists who have studied the more contemporary movements. But I think, you know, taking a deep dive into the history here, we'll, you know, be able to educate a lot of our listeners on sort of the background so they can start to see and understand fascism on a deeper level because it is something that we need to fully understand in order to combat appropriately. But just to start off, as a professor and as expert on European history. How do you identify politically? Do you identify with anything politically or? Well, yeah, I mean, I'm somebody, you know, on the left. I mean, I got my, you know,

as the song once went, I'm older than I once was and younger than OB, but I got my start virtually as a kid in the anti-war protests in, you know, the Vietnam era. So I went to the University of Michigan, Mighty Mays and Blue, and that was a great place to be starting out. It was a very politically active world, and we confronted some of the same dilemmas, the same sort of abuse of power, the same kind of right-wing impingement on the rights of ordinary people that we see going on with the Trump disaster today, and then we saw in the era of G.W. Bush, speaking of Yale, in the past. But so inevitably, because I, you know, I write out about France, but I, but As I've said before, I've written the history of modern Europe since the Middle Ages.

You know, and could I teach 19th, in 20th century European history and earlier periods? I wanted to learn about fascism. I have a couple of books. A couple of my recent books are on anarchists. I'm not an anarchist, but I wanted to understand the kind of hatred that anarchist bombers had for the state. It's the same thing that I had growing up in the late. 1960s. Most anarchists were not terrorists. They were not bombers. There were people of goodwill and wanted to live a life independent of the state. But yes, to answer your question, Brad,

I'm someone who is on the political left, that is for sure. And living in France, half my adult life has confirmed that evolution. Absolutely. That's wonderful and incredibly interesting. I came across to you because of Yale's courses that they allow online as kind of a little program that Yale does where they put a lot of their, some of their lectures online for people that might not have access to higher education so they can learn. And I came across it that way. And so I encourage anybody who, you know, wants to learn more about this topic to go check those out. But I think we should just go ahead and dive in. And I think the best place to start is actually talking about what fascism is, because as much as the term fascism is used, it's still

surprisingly tricky to define it in a way that captures all of its nuances. And the fact that it takes different forms and different conditions adds to that complexity. So what is fascism, kind of when did it arise, and what are some of its universal aspects which hold true across space and time? Yeah, it's a difficult term. I mean, fascism really started with the Benito Mussolini, who came up with the term. He started out with somebody on the left, and he became converted to right-wing nationalist, aggressive politics during World War I, and had his paramilitary people go out

and bashed strikers and anarchists and socialists in the early 1920s. So he became identified with fascism. But fascism became a kind of generic term from the 1920s and 30s as encompassed national socialism, that is, of Adolf Hitler. It encompassed the kind of right-wing agrarian parties of East Central and Eastern Europe as well. To some extent, although there were fascists who were kind of put, hailed off by Franco. Some of the characteristics also typified Franco's authoritarian nationalist regime and their victory in the ill-fated Spanish Civil War of 1936, 1939. But there are characteristics that we can identify, and that's important, that went across

all of these movements. And the scary thing, we should all be just effing scared today, is, do you see them in the U.S. We see them generated by the White House. We see them orchestrated as a better way of putting it. We see Orban, who's extremely dangerous in Hungary. We see law and justice, which is not the same kind of fascist revival, but tied to extreme anti-Semitic, racist elements within the very right wing of the Catholic Church. And some of these characteristics are an aggressive nationalism, a populism, based upon a belief that their race is superior. And this ties into the racism of Donald Trump. It ties into

what we saw, you know, his response to Charlottesville. It's the very same thing. The sense the white kind of supremacist that he supports and getting support from the Ku Klux Klan, which he in principle rejected, but it's also an important part of his base. This is part of what this was. In the 1920s and 30s, if you lived almost anywhere in central and Eastern Europe and in parts of Western Europe as well, you were taught to hate your ethnic rivals, your enemies as craven reptiles and to believe that you were the greatest people in the world and the rest were people to be simply mistreated. In the most horrible example among many, of course, the anti-Semitism so tied to Hitler and to the rise of the Nazis, they were only the most

successful of lots of right-wing parties in Germany seeking to destroy the Weimar Republic after the war. That was very part of it. Another essential aspect of this is that it supports, it is against parliamentary rule. It believes that the national consensus is something that has to be supported at all costs and that democracy and parliamentary rule are basically not very good things. So in Hungary and in Slovakia or in Slovenia and in the Czech Republic and in Poland. We see these right-wing parties in power trying to eliminate the judiciary as really an independent agent within these governments. And if you go back, you found exactly the same thing in Spain after Franco comes to power,

the same thing in Italy in the time of Mussolini, and the same thing with Adolf Hitler. We have to remember that between in the 1920s and 1930s, all, of Europe, all of Eastern and Central Europe, and most of the entire continent were ruled by authoritarian rulers. The exceptions were Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic where there's lots of problems, and Slovakia, and Western European states, such as the Netherlands, which had a small fascist group, the Belgium, which had a very influential, a fascist group, and even you had Oswald Mosley marching around Hyde Park in London in the 1920s and 30s. So these characteristics, these aggressive races, this aggressive racism, this aggressive nationalism are essential parts of the fascist slash right-wing enterprise in the 1920s and 30s.

Mussolini was on the cover of Time magazine eight different times. He was considered the person who got the railroads to run on time, even though in Italy, even if the only ones he did. were the railroads that went to the ski resorts. But it was a time of right-wing rule, and people admired that. And the problem now is we're finding the same thing going on in these countries. France has the National Front, which happily didn't win the election. Very virulent, at least 12, 13 percent of the voting population in Germany are attached to far-right racist parties.

Austria is a mess in that very same way. You know, we're in a mess, and it transcends. oceans, it transcends the Atlantic in particular, and Donald Trump is a part of all of this. Yeah, I think just recently in Germany this week, there was a far right-wing fascist big march in one of the major cities. And I thought one of the-heemites in the east, and Shemites near Dresden in the east. That's right, that's right. And one of the striking things about that video was that the march went past a giant statue

of Karl Marx, who was kind of looking on as these fashion. just marched underneath his glare and even did Sieghael-Sal-Suluch, which I believe it is technically illegal in Germany. Is that correct? That is correct. Yeah. So it's horrifying and it's happening all over the world. But speaking of Marx, Lenin once said that fascism is capitalism and decay, which argues for a material and class basis to fascism.

On the other hand, liberals tend to view it as, you know, more or less a distinct phenomenon not necessarily attached to class or capitalism in any meaningful way, and certainly not a product of the failures of liberal democracies. So in your opinion, what are the connections between fascism, capitalism, and the broader class society and so-called liberal democracies? Oh man, that's a big important question. When Hitler came to power, the destruction of, and destroyed the Weimar Republic, comes to power in January 1933.

His first base of support was the German middle class, both Protestant and Catholic. He did very well in Bavaria, because he spent a lot of time in Munich, and Bavaria is always right wing, but it's a very scary place now, but he did very well in Protestant Schleswig Holstein in the far north. He did well everywhere, but he did first well among the German middle classes. And these are people who got burned during the huge, huge inflation of 1922, 23, when people were pushing shopping carts of Deutsche Marx to try to buy a single turnip and all of that. And they had to pawn a, you know, an armoire or a piece of furniture to have been in their family for decades and the silver, and they didn't forget, and they hated

they hated Weimar, and they were willing to vote for Hitler. Hitler's ties to big business, have been very contemptuous, big business, wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic, but they weren't necessarily for Hitler in the beginning. They thought he was a vulgar commoner and Austrian, etc., etc. So the class basis was extremely important. In Italy, it's the same thing. In Spain, It was the same thing, because you had the longshoremen of Barcelona who were anarchists. You had the cork makers of under Lucia who were anarchists. So the class basis was important. The big money, the middle classes, ran the newspapers, they ran the show.

But basically everybody, workers fewer than other people, in the end, supported Hitler. The same thing happened in Austria. The same thing happened in Italy. Now it's more complicated because in France and people who support, And I live in France, you know, half the time in my adult life I spend in France. My kids grew up there. They both went to this establishment, but they grew up in France. There you find all sorts of people voting for the National Front who are the same kinds of people

who are, you know, working class people for whom things have gone wrong in North Carolina and Wisconsin and West Virginia, in Pennsylvania, in Youngstown, Ohio, who suddenly who move over time from the Republicans to the racist Democrats. So we can't really say, well, you know, that this return to kind of Trump populism is a thing of the middle classes because it's probably not. The middle classes are more educated than the non-middle classes. And there's a strong degree of association between lesser educated people and support for Donald Trump. And so, I mean, the same thing.

If you look what happened with Brexit in England, it's lots of working class people living in the provinces, outside of London and living in Wales voted for racist reasons for Brexit. So it's a class analysis. It's harder to do now. The same thing in Poland. I mean, Poland constantly, 41 times and more than that in the last 10 years. And there it's not the quite same thing as the kind of return to fascism in the 1930s in Hungary, but it's tied to the right wing of the Catholic Church.

Poland is still a very practicing religious people believe in going to, church, half the population does go to church, a lot of the people who go to church are not, you know, right-wing nuts, but you still have this association that cuts across class lines of people who are against immigrants, or against anyone who's not Polish, who are anti-Semitic, etc., etc. Are there correlations between the rise of fascist movements historically and failures of capitalist economics, I mean, in times of crises or recessions, depressions, et cetera? You nailed it, man, that's it. Because what happens is, as we saw, on the 19, I wasn't around the 1920s and 30s, but, but, but the, you know, Europe is in

agricultural depression the entire time between the end of World War I and World War II. It's in industrial oppression all the years, except 1924 to 1929. Hardship makes people look for targets of their disapproval. And that's what's happened, you know, in the, in the U.S., all these people that are out of jobs here and there. They say, you got to blame somebody. So, Well, it's got to be the fault of the immigrants. It's got to be the fault of all those people coming to this country who shouldn't be here, quote, unquote. Absolutely, because the hard times that prevailed in Europe in 2008, the high economic, high rates of unemployment in all these places, it's very much tied to the search for scapegoats.

And that's exactly what happens in the 1920s. You have to see anti-Semitism existed before World War I. World War I made Hitler into an anti-Semite. He hated the SPD, the Socialists, before that. World War I made him blame the Jews. And so you've got people want someone to blame, so it's a period of xenophobia. And the most pernicious version of xenophobia is the kind of anti-Semitism.

And, you know, Trump's white supremacism is his hatred of ethnic minorities, his hatred of shithole countries, quote, unquote. You know, it stems from the, the, you know, kind of a, the kind of white supremacist racism that seeks to find a scapegoats for economic hardship. Absolutely. And, you know, today, I mean, in Europe, in the U.S. as well, alongside the rise of fascist movements have also been the rise of radical leftists of various stripes who meet them in the streets to combat them. So can you talk about the history that socialist, communists, and anarchists have had in confronting the rise of fascist groups in Germany, Italy, Spain,

etc. Well, sure. I mean, in Spain, I mean, let's take with Italy first. You know, after the war, you know, all sorts of people moved into the, you know, the Communist Party, looking at the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, in the Russian Empire, in 1917. There's a big move from the Socialist Party into the Communist Party and, you know, and they oppose fascism. If you look at what happened in February of 1934, there's basically these right-wing leagues. A lot of former soldiers marched down the Chancesizier, and they want to storm across the sand and the Republic, very many of them. And what this brings is a huge alliance between socialists and communists and radicals in the French sense, which were basically anti-clerical social moderates, to try to stop France becoming from the next.

fascist country. The same thing happens in Spain with Franco's hordes, you know, flying into Spain. And, you know, the Reds killed a lot of people, too, but nothing like what happened with the, you know, the bull ring butcheries carried out by Franco's armies. But it's the same thing, the attempt to defend the Republic, betrayed by Stalin, of course, and Georgia Orwell's magnificent homage to Catalonia is great on that. But was these groups, including anarchists, in the case of Spain, try to stop fascism. And we can look it back and said, well, what if the British had allowed the French to send weapons to Spain, would the history of the late 1930s be different?

Could Hitler have been stopped? If the French had sent troops against Germany when Hitler occupies the Rhineland in 1936, would Hitler have been different? Yes, socialists and communists for all the hatred they had between them, and anarchists in countries that had lots of them, like that. Spain and southern Italy for obvious reasons, yes, they do fight and fight against fascists. Well, I guess in all those areas that communist and radical leftists have stood up and kind of combated fascist, what has been the reaction by like the more centrist or conservative

elements in the parliamentary democracies that existed before the rise of fascism? How did those in elite political parliamentarian power address or view or understand fascism as it was beginning to rise in those places? Well, I'll give you a good example. If one has to understand, one wants to understand why it was that Vichy France collaborated so willingly with the German occupiers. It was because Hitler and the victorious German armies defeating France with a fairly great ease in 1940 gave the kind, the old traditional conservative political elites exactly what they wanted.

They wanted a regime closely tied to the right wing of the Catholic Church, and they got that. They wanted racial laws against foreigners, and that's what they got. I mean, the laws that they were put in power in Vichy, France, so far as trying to identify who is Jewish and who wasn't, were even stricter, in quotes, than the Nuremberg laws in Germany. So these elites got what they wanted. The same thing, look at Belgium. I mean, we don't look at Belgium enough, but there's a lot of collaboration, particularly during the war, World War II, in the Flemish, wealthier Flemish parts of Belgium. And the traditional conservative right had very strong support in the Dutch, or Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium.

And they were pretty happy when the Germans took over Belgium. Absolutely. So moving on a little bit, talking about Nazis and Hitler specifically, it's often argued by either ignorant or cynical reactionaries and various centrists that Nazis were socialist too. And you'll see folks from the Fox News corners of our society make a lot out of this lie. So can you talk about how Hitler opportunistically used some socialist rhetoric and juxtapose that to his true beliefs about Marxists, Bolsheviks, communists, et cetera? No, that's just crap. You know, they call the national socialism. But Hitler supported and drew support, particularly after it came to power, from the big business.

He used to talk about, well, what Germany would, the Aryans in power, the Nazis, the national socialists in power, would eliminate class conflict. Because everybody, whether they're big managers or whether they were owners or whether they were really well-paid artisans or whether they were impoverished proletarians in the factories, would all share a sense of being Germaness, and therefore you wouldn't have class conflict anymore. And so this could be perceived of quite erroneously, and this is a bunch of crap, as something that was socialist. Well, there's nothing socialist about it at all.

I mean, he sent a few drunken people on the first Baltic cruises, and they could say, oh, look at, you know, what the Fuhrer is doing for us. And we invented the Volkswagen, even though it was never produced during, the war. And they started making auto routes that had no cars on them. So there's really nothing socialistic about it. If you talk to Mussolini, who didn't listen, he just bellowed. But Mussolini, like Hitler, sort of drew on this idea of corporatism that you could vertically

construct these existences that would be organized by industry. And this would somehow convince workers who earned so little and very well for people in the same industry that they all had the same interests. And that was being, depending on where you were, Italian and Hungarian or German. So, no, there was nothing socialistic about it, except that they eliminated strikes by, you know,

they banned and, you know, killed communists. The strikes would become illegal almost immediately after Hitler comes to power. There were some brave German workers who passed out leaflets and ended up, you know, getting slaughtered, and German workers were less likely to support Hitler than the rest of the population. But in Germany, when they tried, when Stoffenberg puts a bomb

under this big wooden table and tries to kill Hitler in 1944, Germans of all social classes pour into the streets. In 1944, with bombs falling all over the effing place, saying, oh, thank God for saving the future's life. And among those you could find workers as well. There was nothing truly socialistic about fascism and the other right-wing movements. And it's also true that Hitler intimately tied his anti-Semitism to his anti-Marxism and anti-Bolshevism. Was that sort of a common enemy in his eyes? Well, yeah, because, you know, when Hitler was lived in his, his,

a shabby roominghouse with his long-suffering roommate in Vienna, and he watched the SP day marches go by, the socialist marches. And he spew out his hatred. And, of course, one of the things that the Germans and other, you know, other places that in which anti-communism was a strong component of far-right movements tried to make is that lots of the people who were, who were the Bolsheviks and Jews were Jews. And like Trotsky, for example. And, and, you know, and And so there was a close, or Marx, and there was a close identification before the Bolsheviks, obviously, but there was a close identification in popular perceptions between socialism, Bolshevism, communism, and being Jewish. Yeah, and that anti-Semitic conspiracy theory stuff, we'll touch on in a second,

but it's also given rise to concepts like cultural Marxism, which is also steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to this day. Yeah, yeah. I would say so. So you've talked about a little bit earlier in this interview about how you've lived in European countries throughout your life, including places like Poland, yeah. I traveled everywhere, but it eluded France half my adult life. Absolutely. And then also places like Poland and Hungary in which far right-wing populism is very much

alive and growing. So can you talk about those situations and the level of resistance to movements that are present in those countries right now? Sure. I mean, the Polish thing, I mean, I was even decorated by the Polish government. I think, once, not I think, but I think I think I think I think I think I kind of ate more parogi than anyone else, but this was a very important. different government. You know, I work hard with my friends organizing a group that reads manuscripts

about Eastern Europe and tries to make them better. I have a lot of friends in the opposition in Poland, that's for sure. Even if a friend who was in the government in Poland, there's a lot of opposition. Poland is a very complex situation. It's not just rural versus urban, which you found in the U.S. often, nor is it just East versus West, because Eastern Poland is always more conservative of than western Poland. It has to do with the fact that Krakoff is basically a very right-wing city. That's where the awful Kaczynski comes from, the surviving twin and Duda and these other people. Whereas Warsaw is very progressive. Yeah, there's lots of people in the streets trying to protect the independence of the judiciary, trying to support the independence of the nightly news,

They're trying to turn a Polish TV into the equivalent of Fox News, trying to support the real history of Poland instead of the sort of invented history that's been created. I'll give you an example. I go to a place called Zamoche in eastern Poland, which is fairly close to Ukraine near Leviv, another place I go fairly often. And I've been there with my son once because he's been invited. And Rosa Luxembourg, who's one of my heroes, was born in, and she was a left-wing Polish Jewish woman. she was born in Leviv, I've been born in Zamoche, in Poland. And I used to go every year when I went through to Zamoche, I'd kissed the door in the house that she was born. And my son went to and he kissed the door. And then now the Poles have taken

that away because that's not part of the history of Poland they want. They only want the history of the martyred Poland. And Poland was marred. But the Catholic Church, you know, being the representing all that is has been Poland is simply nonsense. And this recent law that they passed and had to back off a little bit saying you could be arrested if you suggested that there were collaborators in Poland during World War II. There were fewer collaborators in Poland than in other countries. Take Hungary, for example, or Bulgaria, or anywhere you want to name. But there were collaborators.

See, too, that's all there is to it. There were Jews who were killed by Poles. I have a former colleague here that I do really know called Jan Gross, who teaches at Princeton. And he did this book called Neighbors. It's the story of these Jews, the story of these Poles who murdered Jews in a small town in central Poland, and the Germans who had been happy to do it just stood by. And they were going to prosecute him. Criminal proceedings for suggesting that Poles could have been responsible for a very small case,

but still a lot of people died, burned to death, beaten to death. for the Holocaust. So this is bad news. Now, you don't have the kind of stormtroopers marching in the street, which is what we're going to have in Hungary pretty soon, where the situation's different. But it still is pretty scary because, you know, I'm close to a lot of people in Poland, and I care about Poland. But, you know, what's going on in Poland, what's going on in Slovenia, where Raban, who is essentially a dictator in Poland, you know, managed to convince the Slovenes, paying a lot of money for the right-wing press there that somehow the presence of 78 refugees posed a threat to the future of Slovenia's existence. You know, it's just crazy. It's just crazy. We're in a bad way.

And we mentioned earlier the history of the connection to economics and even the situation in the U.S. with economics, which I think most of our listeners will be familiar with. Well, what's the economic situation in Eastern Europe? What's giving rise to a lot of these fascist movements over there, in your opinion? Well, again, I wouldn't call the Polish movement a fascist movement. It's extreme right movement tied to the right wing of the Catholic Church. But the Polish economy was booming, and then, you know, then it slumped. I mean, Salishia was booming, and then the unemployment rate is rising again. A lot of the polls who moved to Ireland have come back after the decline of the Irish economy,

was sort of the golden child of high tech and all that. They're moving back to Poland. Same thing with England. Well, you know, polls wake up in London and find racist signs. written in Polish in announcing them saying, go home. And they're coming back to Poland. So there are more people without jobs in Poland than there were before. Also the point of view, you know, that Poles could lose right now the EU spends 9% of his budget on Poland. 9%. That's a huge amount of money. But the European Union is asking, if you've got a country that's taking

9% of the money that now is rejecting the values of the European Union, what the F are we giving them the money for. So there's a chance that this economic situation could become worse. It's not, the economic situation is not as bad at all as it is in Greece or in Portugal or in Spain, where you've got something like over 25% of young people are unemployed. But in France, we have something like 20% of young people are unemployed, including not just in big cities, but particularly in rural areas, such as where I live. I live in Al-Dash. I live in Paris, too, but I live in Al-Dash in the southeast. So, you know, voila. Yeah, there's that connection that you keep talking about with economics and then, you know, this notion that there's scarcity and so refugees are seen as the scapegoats by which these right-wing movements focus their hatred.

And I'm always talking about the future of climate change and the possibility of mass displacement and mass migration and the furtherance of people into other territories they haven't historically been. Are you worried that that will just add fuel to these far right-wing or even fascist movements in the future? and climate change is intimately connected with fascism and anti-fascism going forward? Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not quite clear on the question, but if you're arguing that because of that, well, I guess I put it this way, if you take North Africa, and I would have been to North Africa once, my kids and my late wife were there various times, but if you take North Africa, with the climate change, there's some specialists that argue that if this continues that in 25, 30, 40, 50 years, North Africa will be unlivable.

So what's going to happen in that case is you've got more and more people from above all, Algeria, but also from Tunisia, Morocco, but also from Mali and from Senegal and from Guinea and places like that, we're going to try to get to France, get to Europe, get to Spain, and the number of people, you know, drowning in Mediterranean will continue to increase even more. And what this does, as we've seen in those countries, and we see in this country, it increases the hold of the far right. But it's not just the far right. I mean, you've got, if you look at Macron, you know, the kind of, and Macron really, you know, I was so happy we won the World Cup. It was absolutely fabulous. And Macron really missed a chance, you know, to say something about multiculturalism in France, because this is a new France. It's a multicultural France. It's a wonderful France that's drawn so much, you know, so many good things.

things from from people that were born in uh in uh you know in africa or in uh caribbean or or or or french-speaking places like that french-speaking places like that from confophone places who have come come to france but but yes if i understand your question correctly increased uh climate change uh will will certainly uh bring all these factors even more into uh into play definitely i think that's something that all organizers on the left should should really think about it and start thinking, you know, 10, 20, 30 years in the future because it's definitely coming. But I do want to shift a little bit.

I mentioned earlier this notion of cultural Marxism. And as I've studied the history of Nazism, there's lots of interesting and absurd sort of conspiratorial thinking, pseudoscience, historical revisionism, and even occultism. So my question for you is what is the relationship, both historically and contemporarily, between fascism and various forms of conspiracy thinking? Well, I don't know. I guess the first thing popped into my mind is the idea. It's something that dumb Donald said the other day, is that if the GOP loses and if all these, you know, anti-science evangelical types like the pathetic dumb as a salad, Mike Pence, you know, don't win, that there'll be violence organized by groups on the left. And, you know, that's the clearest example I can think of when it comes from the past week here, really. You know, the fear is that the confrontation between communists and, you know, the paramilitary, the SS, the SA, and, you know,

gorings guys in Prussia and all this had. It was fear not of, you know, of conspiracies, but it was fear of, you know, of a mass movement. Because communism was a mass movement, too. But I guess that if I understand, again, your question is that they could perceive because of the common term, because of international communist organizations, they could perceive of the left as an international plot against nationalism, against big money, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Yeah. And a lot of like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the global banking system, notions that George Soros funds the left, you know, protest movements, infoors. Hungary where George Soros, you know, who, and the anti-simate campaign against him has been agdoned by Netanyahu in Israel. The idea that, you know, the clear identification of Soros, who is Jewish and his university in Budapest and also in Zagreb, you know, in, in, in, in, in Croatia,

that his identification with the fear of immigration, as a Jew, with the right-wing fear hatred of immigrants it's just clear they have you can see all the you can look it online you can see all these uh these sort of images of the the face of soros that come right out of the out of these just you know nauseating lithographs from from the time of uh of udolph hitler yeah exactly it's a great example hungry's in a mess i'll tell you that hungary's in a mess definitely i was in the south uh a couple times in page and i was down as a zadr and you can see see, you can see the wire, you know, along that they stretched barbed wire, they've stretched along the southern frontier. But it's, again, it's not just right-wing parties. A lot of

centrists, as I said, I gave the example of Macron have gone along with this, too, because the vocabulary of Macron isn't that much different than that of the real, real racism of Sarkozy and his sort of di-tribes against immigrants back when he's in president, was president, and hopefully he'll be in jail soon enough. Absolutely, and that's important to know how the center plays into a lot of this. But kind of spanning out and sort of approaching the end of this conversation, a few more questions. Based on your study and your expertise, what have been the most successful forms of resistance to fascism historically? And what can we learn about from those successful forms of fighting fascism of the past today?

Yeah, going back to the popular front in France, which lasts from basically 1936 to 1936 to 19. into 39. It was floundering after that. It was the creation of mass demonstrations six days after the events of February 6, 1934. There were huge demonstrations, and all except two or three of the prefectures, that is the capitals of the DiPathmo in France, demanding people demanding that their leaders put aside their differences, that the communist stopped calling the socialist, social fascists, they start talking to the radicals, and start talking to the radicals, and start talking to anarchists and unite against fascists. And it was very, very successful. It kept the fascists out of power until the Germans brought them to power in 1940. That's a good example.

Or if you look at a tragic one, ill-fated the Spanish Civil War. They were, the parties of the Republic were betrayed by Stalin. And plus, you know, the armies of Franco had German planes, and they had, you know, Italian tanks and planes, and Italian tank tanks just got stuck in the mud. but they got a financial kind of financial support. And maybe if Britain and France had in the United States that contributed funds, maybe the history of Europe would have been different. But that's a very good example.

The kind of mass mobilization that you see around the country now, my daughter's working on an electoral campaign, even here in Drury, North Haven, Connecticut. I tried to defeat a Trump candidate. And people are coming, you know, are becoming, more interested in being engaged. We're going to see that we've seen this in Florida. Boy, do we ever need it in Florida. Speaking of Yale, look at this guy who's the governor of Florida, just un-effing believable, you know, what he said the other day. You know, people are going to,

I don't think Florida's going to be one, but, you know, people have to mobilize. They have to take the challenge of Trump and, you know, Banyan and Miller and all these just, you know, odious human beings. They're very, Aradipach, the bottom of the barrel of humanity, and mobilized and the way folks did, and I can even remember this in the late 60s in the 1970s against the war, because they won. We won. 75,000 people died for nothing. America's died of Vietnam for nothing. But, you know, mobilizations are possible. And then, you know, in Poland, there's been the anti-government demonstrations and big ones in Warsaw, you know, the state, the government's trying to make them illegal.

anyway. So there's hope, isn't there? We need hope. I hope. I hope so. Yeah, definitely. So kind of building off that last question, then, what are your personal opinions on the most militant forms of anti-fascism known as Antifa in the U.S. and Europe today? Do you think those are sort of important parts of this popular front against fascism? You know, I don't know enough about the American situation. Could I've been on leave since I've been in France, basically, or in Southeast Asia, since they're mostly in France, since the beginning. of January, I just came back to start teaching this past week. So I'm not plugged enough to say. But, you know, there have been big demonstrations in Paris and in other places. There have been counter demonstrations against the fascists and the neo-Nazis in Germany. And that's very, very important that that continue, especially because of the sheer violence, the murder of immigrants and all this, it's just incredible. So hopefully, hopefully that won't continue.

Italy is a big problem now because, you know, talk about bouncing back, returning to the 1930s. It's the same kind of racist discourse and the kind of racism of the Italian right in Italy in the 1930s was probably less virulent than that that you find today in modern Italy. But there'll be people will come out on a little march and they'll impose and hopefully things will get better. better. Definitely. Now the last question I want to ask is important to me because, you know, we talk a lot

about the anti-Semitism and the racism and the nationalism and those are all, you know, important components of fascism. But one thing I don't think it's talked about enough is misogyny and sexism and we see that a lot on the far right here in the U.S. especially. So kind of historically, how have women fared under fascist regimes? What happens to women's rights when fascists have taken over in places like Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.? Well, I'll give the example of Germany, I mean, women had virtually no rights in Germany.

Hitler wanted them to stay home and breed Aryan babies. And that was ironic because so many of them end up having to work in factories replacing the men who were away at the front getting killed. And the same thing happened in the U.S. for very different reasons, Rosie, the Riveter, et cetera, et cetera. women basically had no rights under fascism, under national socialism. It's basically the same case as in Italy, and this is one reason why I think you found in the case of resistance movements against, for example, the Vichy regime, the role of women underreported, but was so very important in the resistance, because in the case of France, one of the things happens is that Vichy regime makes abortion a capital crime. In fact, only two

women, but that's still too many were ever executed for abortion. It really eliminates the right to divorce. It sets back women's rights. Of course, women in France didn't have the right to vote until in 1945. So a capitalist regimes hadn't been so good on women's rights either. Right. Yeah, do you think the future of sort of combating fascism and eradicating its continual resurgence? Do you think that lies ultimately in the transcendence of capitalism and a move towards some version of socialism, in your opinion? Wow, that's a difficult one. I don't know. That's a big question. You know, we used to dream about well, we're going to end capitalism, but for somebody, a couple, the cell of the Communist

Party in my village called Balazook in France, about 20 years ago asked me to come talk about the collapse of capitalism and I had to go and say, well, I'm sorry, but it ain't going to happen. You know, I don't know, because we're at a time now where there's a big threats on the kinds of gains, social programs that are terribly, we're terribly, terribly terribly important, such as we have the best health care in the world, along with the Norwegian France, with the Norwegians and the case of Japan, but ultimately, you know, these are at risk as they are in England. So I don't know. I mean, you know, the best we can hope for, I guess, is, you know, I don't know if one can imagine that somehow the great,

the great rich people in the U.S. are going to start contributing large sums to help ordinary people, that's not going to be the case, though some of them do. But I'm afraid capitalism is here to stay. I mean, I still believe that the best kind of pattern with that of sort Swedish social democracy and Norwegian equivalent, but those are under threat as well. So I don't know. Yeah, well, we absolutely have a very long fight ahead of us, and especially here in the US, which I'm the most intimately familiar with, you know, the sort of hierarchies of race, class, and gender that are fostered under our capitalist system really get replicated and violently enforced in the fascist movements here.

So I see the sort of hierarchies of capitalism and its connections to fascism as being incredibly strong. And so ultimately I do think that we have to sort of transcend the material basis of capitalism in order to sort of prevent this continual resurgence of fascism. But we've taken enough of your time today, Dr. Merriman. We're very honored to have you on. I'm John, thanks very much. Okay, okay.

Before we let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find your work online and maybe offer a recommendation or two for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of fascism? Geez, I don't know. I have this book that has a lot about fascism, the fourth edition of History of Modern Europe, W.W. Norton, the third edition is out. The fourth is in Chinese, too, but if you read Chinese, but it's in English, the fourth edition is coming out at the beginning of next year. I got these two courses.

History of France since 1871 and History of Europe, 16. 1948 and 1945 that are online with Yale or with YouTube. I don't know, my most recent books are the one that's called Ballot of the Anarchist Bandits, another is called Dynamite Club, about the invention of terror in Paris. It came out of a second edition and talks about nowadays too. If you want to read about state terror, I have a book came on 2014 called Massacre, the Life and Death of the Paris Common, where a lot of the people who espoused ideals, that we've been talking about, this is pre-fascism,

wanted to live free and independent in a fair world where they proclaimed their independence on March 18th, 1871, and the state crushed them like grapes, massacred them, killed them for who they were because they were ordinary people who believed in something. And for me, it anticipates the demons of the 20th century. So I guess if you want to see what I see about those things, again, this is not my goal to push my own books,

I mean, I don't care, but, But you can, if you look me up on Wikipedia or some damn thing, if you're interested in reading me, you know, Mabola, I'll be there. Wonderful. And we'll link to that in the show notes. Thanks again, Jami. Really appreciate it. Take it easy, Brad. All right.

Have a good one. Yeah, you too. Bye. Bye. hell, but I won't back down. Gonna stand my ground won't be turned around. And I'll keep this world from dragging me down. Gonna stand my ground and I won't back down.

Hey, baby, there ain't no easy way out. Hey, I will stand my ground and I won't back down. Well, I know what's right, I got just one life in a world that keeps on pushing me around, but I stand my ground, and I won't back down. Hey, baby, there ain't no easy way out. Hey, I will stand my ground, and I won't back down. No, I won't back down. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.