Fascists and far-right politicians define an 'other' group in society and then blame them for all its problems. I explain why this tactic is so effective – and so dangerous.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Giving up on nuance is dangerous, but I believe it's happening.
We do not live in a black and white world, but politicians increasingly pretend that we do so.
This isn't just misleading. I think it is really dangerous.
When nuance disappears, manipulation thrives.
And the simple fact is that black and white thinking is always wrong.
People are never wholly good or wholly bad. They might be pretty rotten, but the person who's completely bad has never yet been created, and every group contains a mix of motives and actions, and blanket judgments are always wrong. Complexity is not a flaw; it's a reality, but when nuance goes, all of this is forgotten, and the danger is of the politics of what I would call 'Othering'.
Fascists define a group as the 'other' as one of their core objectives. They claim that the group is wholly bad.
They blame it for all the problems that a society is facing, and they pass the whole burden of responsibility for anything that goes wrong onto that 'other' group, as they would describe it.
And this is designed for one purpose. It is to distract attention from what is actually going on in society so that an elite can secure political advantage for themselves. That's always been the way that fascists work, and it will always be the way that they work.
This is at the core of what they do, and we can see examples in the USA at present. Far-right think tanks and Trump allies have targeted migrants as the 'other' group in the US, whom they are blaming for everything that is going wrong.
As a consequence, they use race, religion, and immigration status as a reason to 'other' those whom they claim to be illegal migrants, but who, along the way, happen to also be part of ethnic minority groups within the States, whom they then pick on as well.
The aim is very clear. They want to benefit a narrow white male, evangelical Christian elite, and they do so by showing complete indifference to the human suffering of others, which is being deliberately imposed at enormous expense to the US budget and so to the US population as a whole.
We can also see examples in the UK now.
The whole of the illegal immigrant narrative has been created. And there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant into the UK, because until somebody actually arrives here and has their claim for asylum assessed, they can never be illegal. So, at the point of arrival, they can't be what so many politicians call people who are trying to get to the UK, which is illegal immigrants. And yet this narrative has been deliberately created by Reform and the Conservatives, but now Labour has joined in.
Without exception, they talk about illegal immigrants as if they are the 'other' group who have created every one of the ailments within our society, when that is utterly untrue.
But Keir Starmer's 'Island of Strangers' speech makes it clear that his party buys into this idea that it is division rather than the creation of community that is now the goal of politicians in this country.
So how did this exceptional shift happen? I think that the roots are in the 2008 financial crisis. The bailouts that followed that crisis were essential, let's be clear about it. If they hadn't happened then, and if they hadn't happened again in 2020 when we had the COVID crisis, our economies would've collapsed. So let's not blame the idea of a bailout as being a problem.
The problem was that the way in which these bailouts were managed ensured that the vast majority of the benefit eventually ended up with a wealthy elite in the UK, and in the USA, come to that.
Median earners, let alone those who were on low pay, saw almost nothing change with regard to their well-being, and in fact, public services worsened, and so an idea that turned into resentment began to develop.
Politicians could have blamed the bankers, but they didn't.
They blamed migrants instead, even though they deserve none of the blame for what has happened, because after all, they did not crash the economy. But the narrative has taken hold because of the lies of politicians, and the German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, had a lot to say about the lies that politicians say.
She suggested that politicians do not lie because they want to be believed. That is not the case at all. She says, the aim of political lies is to make people believe nothing. If truth and lies are indistinguishable, her argument goes, then judgment dies, and people without judgment are open to control, and that's why politicians lie.
They lie to create scapegoats.
They lie to create political paralysis, because distrust is directed against the scapegoat, but the consequence is division that destroys solidarity and collective action, and that in turn permits elite power to go unchallenged.
Lies are then not an accident. They're done by design, and they're designed to destroy our communities.
Nuance matters then.
Truth is not a simple matter of black or white, or right or wrong, or whatever way you wish to make the contrast. We actually always have more in common than divides us, and that is almost always true with every group that exists in society.
Judging fairly requires us to see complexity and to cut through to the roots of the matters which are the cause of the problems we face. But without nuance, we can't do that. And without nuance, democracy withers.
When we give up our judgment, we lose the ability to resist lies.
We accept manipulation without noticing, and politics is just then an exercise in distraction as we see that it now is with abuses of power multiplying as a consequence, almost entirely unchecked, as is most obviously going on at present in the USA, but just wait for it to happen here, because it is going to happen here and indeed it is.
The farce around things like Palestine Action, where it is very obviously absurd that people have been described as terrorists as a consequence of holding up a cardboard placard, is quite ridiculous, but is an example of that abuse of power.
What must be done then?
We must resist black and white narratives.
We must look for the complexity in every issue.
We must question who benefits from any division that a politician is seeking to create.
We must identify when they are seeking to create those divisions because that, of course, is essential.
We must always ask for evidence for the claims that politicians make.
We must demand accountability for the consequences of those claims, because if they are seeking to divide, then we have to turn the blame on the politician who is trying to destroy the unity in our society.
Political economy always demands judgment.
Judgment always demands that we accept nuance.
Nuance always demands that we reject simple, good and bad labels, and that we look for meaning.
If we want to maintain democracy, we must work to keep it. We must keep our minds open, because closed minds are the pathway to fascism, and the pathway to fascism is what we are on.
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Former US President George W. Bush: “You’re either with us, or against us”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_are_either_with_us,_or_against_us
Reply to Ian Tresman: Whether Bush was aware of it or not he borrowed that line from the Roman general Pompey who used it at the outbreak of his civil war with Caesar. Caesar countered by telling people “if you are not against me you are with me”. Caesar emerged victorious.
I think what we have in the UK is “soft-fascism” and the reason for this can be brought down to one thing – lack of “respect” for others. Lack of respect manifests itself in a wide variety of organisations such as political parties, mainstream media, businesses, and individuals all pushing austerian propaganda in the name of minimising taxes for the rich. The latest manifestation is the refusal to engage with money mechanics and simply endlessly repeat there’s a “black hole” in the government’s finances. It is “soft-fascism” to continuously push for an inequitable tax system. This endless barrage of propaganda is simply under-mining democracy the very basis of which is respect for others.
“Othering” and “scapegoating” are VERY effective “black & white” tools. “Us” & “Them”.
Countering them is very hard work, and rational argument isn’t very effective in some circumstances.
But one way of countering simplistic division is for us to cross divides and promote unity at a personal level.
To counter dehumanising narratives, we humanise instead, individual stories, named people, first hand contact, the search for commonality, forging friendship, learning stories.
This especially applies to our own “enemies”. Do we other them? Do we dehumanise them? Then we are part of the problem. (Yes, I plead guilty!)
Lebanon has 1/3 of its current population as refugees. Most are the traditional “enemy”, from former occupying power Syria – some are cautiously returning, others remain fearful of the new leaders. Lebanon has a history of bitter civil war. Religion has divided communities. Their government is weak and corrupt. Their economy is a dollarised inflationary mess. They are attacked and part occupied by Israel. They suffered a devastating disaster in Beirut when a huge grain silo at the port exploded because of poor maintenance. Yet, like the people of N Ireland, they have had enough of hatred, and violence, so they reach out to one another, having more in common than divides them. It’s very imperfect, but they know that hatred, violence, othering and dehumanising just make everything worse.
Politically we fight fascism by organising something better, alongside people of goodwill.
Economically we can fight fascism by tackling the grievances of the “left-behind” who are their potential supporters.
Socially, we can defeat fascism by connecting across divides, by humanising those they try to “other”, by knowing people’s names and stories and sharing our lives with them.
Love is not a “soft” thing. It is not a feeling, but action. It is a robust, costly and effective weapon, and hate is ultimately powerless against it.
Love is a verb or its meaningless.
And I like your sentiments.
I offer this response to the post Richard but it could equally apply to several others on this and other topics.
Umberto Eco who had experienced life in a fascist state compiled a definition of what he termed Ur-fascism. As he says “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.”
Eco’s list of 14 indicators of ur-fascism include;
No.4 Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
No.5 Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
No.6 Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
No.10 Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Eco’s full list can be found here https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html
Thanks
Schofield – I have just posted on another blog here and the ‘soft-fascism’ idea had occurred to me too. I’d locate this soft fascism in the Establishment in this country, where I think we’d find it was actually a lot harder in it attitudes and they perform a form mind control exerted on the general population.
The objective has always been to ‘flood the zone with shit’ and stop people from seeing what is making them poor and ensure stability at the top of our society.
‘Soft-fascism’ is ideal for a little island like this – relatively easy to control land mass wise, but also constrained because it is not so big that you can create hidden extermination camps and mass graves and anyhow, our fascists do not like the hard work of running such establishments and programmes.
No, our fascists’ tool of choice, tool of cruelty first and foremost is money – making sure that there is never enough of it for the larger part of the population – control – put simply.
Thank you for this.
There’s a simple but powerful idea that explains a lot of what we’re seeing in society today: if you’re used to privilege, equality can feel like oppression. So many of the complaints we hear about ‘others’, whether immigrants, minorities, or different social groups, often come down to this: they shouldn’t have what I have. It feels unfair, even threatening, when others gain access to things you’ve always taken for granted.
When times are tough – 2008, austerity, Brexit – people feel insecure. They feel poorer, less powerful, and less heard. And when that happens, someone usually gets the blame. Without nuance, it becomes easy to point fingers. To shout at ‘them’.
Someone (James O’Brien?) called this ‘footballification’ (?), the idea that politics has become like football: my team right or wrong. That quickly becomes my country right or wrong. There’s no room for debate or complexity, just loyalty (often blind). And then there’s projection: blaming others for the very things we’re doing ourselves. Goebbels (?) said something like, always accuse your enemies of what you’re doing. It’s a strategy that still works, sadly – there are many in society, especially currently, who use these ideas to corral folks (Volk?) into a way of thinking that makes simplification a virtue. These tactics are being used more and more, to stoke fear, to divide, and to push people into simplified, black-and-white thinking. It makes life feel easier, but it also makes hate easier. And that’s scary.
Richard,
thank-you for this. The first step in dealing with a problem is to name it, and you are right .W hat is happening in the US is an attempted fascist coup. There is no point in trying to pretend otherwise. I think you are also correct in locating its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the way in which QE policies fostered inequality. I used to comfort myself by believing that today’s
America is not the same as 1930s Germany and it would therefore be difficult for a fascist government to cement control of the state in the way that Hitler did in Germany because the US is a much bigger state with a longer more embedded democratic tradition. Your post relaying Robert Reich’s views on Palantir has however shaken me, as means are available to Trump and his ilk which were not available in 1933, and clearly modern tech does provide the means to very effectively control citizens. I have been too complacent. For me, now a dividing line is emerging, between the fascists and the rest. There needs to be a popular front against fascism both nationally and internationally. Anybody on the correct side of that divide will have my support.
Thanks
….”never wholly bad”……Netanyahu comes pretty f*****go close in my book.
Emphasis on ‘wholly’
A person cannot be illegal, they can do illegal things – commit a crime but that doesn’t make them illegal.
“committing a criminal offense does not make you an ‘illegal’ person” – UNHCR
“Criminalising irregular migrants, rather than addressing the laws and policies which create irregularity, prevents a truthful, respectful and informed debate on migration.” – UNHCR
Under the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, it should not be illegal for someone who claims asylum to enter a country by irregular means, neither are they obliged to stop at the first country that might be considered safe but having entered a country they must conform to its laws and regulations.
WHY ‘UNDOCUMENTED’ OR ‘IRREGULAR’ & NOT ‘ ILLEGAL?’ :
https://www.unhcr.org/cy/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2018/09/TerminologyLeaflet_EN_PICUM.pdf
How can the government not be aware of this?
They are.
They are lying when they pretend they do not.
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