There are still people who make an equation between fascism and socialism,
who like to think of them as somehow together having a big role for the
government and that that's the issue. That's a remarkable act given that
Hitler attacked and destroyed the Soviet Union, given that every fascist
has been the enemy of socialists and vice-versa for as long as modern history
has any records of these two social forces. Yes, they both want the government
to step in, but that's where it ends. They want the government to step in for
radically different reasons, on a different project going to a different
future. The fascists want the government to come in and reinforce, stabilize
private capitalist profits. And the socialists want the government in to
help transform society so it isn't capitalist anymore, so that the number
one guide to what gets produced what gets invested in isn't profits for a few
but social benefits for the many. The Socialists are the ones who make fun of
the notion that if you do something for private profit it'll trickle down and
help everybody else. No it doesn't, they point out, which is why the inequality
that we have seen in the last thirty years only worsens the inequality that
capitalism already had. And that's why the so called solution to the
instability of capitalism, it's periodic downturns punctuated by that collapses
and crashes that we've been talking about today, socialists argue that's not
a system worth preserving. That's not a system that should be fixed up yet again.
It is a refrigerator that has broken down so many times that the only logical
and sensible response is to get a new one, to go to a different one, not to keep
fixing something that works as badly as this one has now done
and repeatedly. Well then, what can we say about this? Well the first and most
important lesson is fascism is the effort by the richest people in this
society sitting on top of the biggest corporations to save the system that
made them rich after it has gone through a crash like 1929 like 2008. That's what
it's about: save the system. Get rid of the critics
of the system, the left, the Socialists, the communists, the critics. Shut 'em up.
Put 'em in jail. Kill 'em. Get rid of them. And then deregulate, support, subsidize.
Use the power of the government to support a broken economic system and do
it all in the name of the nation, of the identity of the nation. Find people to
demonize, who threaten the nation and then act out a drama of squelching them.
In Germany it was leftists and Jews. In Italy it was southerners versus
northerners and gypsies and Jews. In other countries you invent a
"good old days" mythology, a story of the past when the nation was wonderful and
great and super and we're gonna go back there. "Make put-in-the-country
great again". That's a standard play. Hitler called what he was doing the
Third Reich because it had a Reich that was the second and a Reich that was the
first. That was the good old days of the past of Germany and he was gonna bring
it back, make Germany great again, literally his slogan. And use whatever
supports a nationalism can. If you can identify the nation with religion, go for
that. Use religion as a way. "We're protect our religion" is "we're protecting our
nationalism" and we're gonna have a powerful government that does that so
you can disguise and cover the support for a broken economic system against its
critics. And build up the military. Why? Because that too is protecting the
nation against foreign endangerment of whatever kind you can conjure up. The
nationalist hysteria is a mechanism fascism has always used to support its
prime function which is to rescue, reinforce and stabilize the instability
and the social problems of a capitalist system.