Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

weren't cowards for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

Lastly, violence served as an homage to the true radicals and revolutionaries at home and abroad. Black Panther envy is a recurring theme in the history of New Left radicalism. The blacks were the 'real thing,' and the whites were desperate to gain their approval and support. French intellectuals and Upper West Side liberals achieved new heights of sycophancy in their desire to prove their radical bona fides. They cheered when black athletes at the 1968 Olympics raised their fists in defiance at the American national anthem, not caring (or knowing) that the imagery was entirely derivative of fascist aesthetics. 'The fist,' an Italian Fascist proclaimed in 1920, 'is the synthesis of our theory.'⁵³ And when George Foreman paraded an American flag at the same Olympics, the Norman Mailer crowd called him an Uncle Tom.

You can tell a lot about a movement by its heroes, and here, too, the record reflects very poorly on the New Left. For all their prattle about 'participatory democracy' it's shocking how few democrats ranked as heroes to even the 'peaceful' members of the movement. At Columbia, Berkeley, and campuses across America, the student activists plastered up posters of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Ho Chi Minh. Under Rudd's leadership, the SDS formed quasi-official ties with Castro's government. In Chicago and elsewhere, they chanted, 'Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!' Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims became a huge best seller.

Rather than call these regimes fascist — which I firmly believe they were — we'll merely note the similarities between these Third World movements and regimes and the conventional fascist ones. Mao, Ho, Castro, and even the Panthers were all ethnocentric movements of 'national liberation.' This is precisely how Mussolini and Hitler depicted their causes. Hitler promised to get Germany out from under the thumb of Versailles and 'international finance capitalism.' Mussolini argued that Italy was a 'proletarian nation' deserving, like Germany, its 'moment in the sun.' Mao's Cultural Revolution, his mixture of socialism and folk Chinese custom, fits perfectly in the fascist wheelhouse. What is Castro but a military dictator (note the constant uniform) who has burnished his leadership cult with socialist economics, nationalist rhetoric, and unending Nuremberg Rally populism?

That Che Guevara has become a chic branding tool is a disgusting indictment of both American consumer culture and the know-nothing liberalism that constitutes the filthy residue of the 1960s New Left. Ubiquitous Che shirts top the list of mass-marketed revolutionary swag available for sale at the nearest bobo chic retailer — including a popular line of children's wear. Here's the text for one ad promoting this stuff: 'Featured in Time magazine's holiday web shopping guide, 'Viva la revolution!' Now even the smallest rebel can express himself in these awesome baby onesies. This classic Che Guevara icon is also available on a long-sleeve tee in kids' sizes...Long live the rebel in all of us...there's no cooler iconic image than Che!'⁵⁴

The Argentine henchman of the Cuban revolution was a murderer and goon. He penned classically fascist apothegms in his journals: 'hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine.' Guevara was a better writer, but the same muse helped to produce Mein Kampf. Guevara reveled in executing prisoners. While fomenting revolution in Guatemala, he wrote home to his mother, 'It was all a lot of fun, what with the bombs, speeches and other distractions to break the monotony I was living in.' His motto was 'If in doubt, kill him,' and he killed a great many. The Cuban-American writer Humberto Fontova described Guevara as 'a combination of Beria and Himmler.'⁵⁵ Guevara certainly killed more dissidents and lovers of democracy than Mussolini ever did, and Mussolini's Italy was undoubtedly more 'free' than any society Guevara the 'freedom fighter' was seeking. Would you put a Mussolini onesie on your baby? Would you let your daughter drink from a Himmler sippy cup?

One can have a Jesuitical argument about the precise political labels these men deserve, but the fact remains that what made these 'liberationist' movements so popular were precisely those attributes Guevara, Castro, Mao, and the rest shared with the heroes of fascism. And if you scrub the names Marx and Lenin from their speeches, what remains is the stuff of any diatribe Mussolini delivered from a balcony (indeed, sometimes with Mussolini you don't even need to scrub the Marx and Lenin away). These were all nationalists committed to national socialism promising to enact a 'truer' and more 'organic' democracy, one that rejected the 'formulaic,' 'superficial,' and 'decadent' 'sham democracy' of the bourgeois West. Figures like the Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba were heroes for no other reason than that they opposed the United States and claimed to represent a racially pure revolutionary cause.⁵⁶ The United Nations and affiliated elites adopted the racist stance that when blacks or other oppressed peoples killed each other or killed whites, it was a legitimate expression of Third World will to power. Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, the Chinese way, and anticolonialism generally were recast versions of Hitler's Pan-Germanism and Mussolini's effort to be the ruler of 'Latin civilization' and 'Italians everywhere.' Third Worlders needed lebensraum, too.

Under doctrines of black liberation, 'revolutionary' violence was always justified so long as you insisted that the bloodied corpse had somehow been an accomplice to oppression. Whites became the new Jews. '[T]o shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time,' observed Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface to one of Frantz Fanon's books. All of this blood chic was retailed in Norman Mailer's White Negro, which fetishized black crime as hip, cool, and revolutionary. The New Left not only bought this line; they sold it. A poll found 20 percent of American students identified with Che Guevara — beating out Nixon (19 percent), Humphrey (16 percent), and Wallace (7 percent).⁵⁷

Madness, cruelty, and totalitarianism were 'in.' Thugs and criminals were heroes, while champions of the rule of law were suddenly 'fascists.' Almost from the outset, this logic poisoned the civil rights movement's early triumphs. At Cornell most of the black students were admitted on what we'd today call affirmative action, with lower-than-average SAT scores. Particularly revealing is the fact that many of the gun-toting revolutionaries were recruited to the school precisely because they fit Mailer's stereotype of the noble 'ghetto youth,' the authentic Negro, and as such were given preference over other blacks with higher scores and better qualifications — because more qualified blacks were too 'white.'⁵⁸

By the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had for all intents and purposes become a Black Power movement. And Black Power, with its clenched fists, Afro-pagan mythology, celebration of violence, emphasis on racial pride, and disdain for liberalism, was arguably America's most authentic indigenous fascism. Stokely Carmichael — at one time the 'prime minister' of the Black Panther Party — himself defined Black Power (a term he originated) as 'a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.'⁵⁹ Carmichael shared Hitler's dream of building a folkish racial state upon the ashes of the old order.

Indeed, when one reads the racial indoctrination taught to the children of Nazi Germany, it's difficult to see the difference between Carmichael's black pride and Hitler's German pride. 'What is the first Commandment of every National Socialist?' asked a Nazi catechism. 'Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as your self!' The connections between Black Nationalism and Nazism, Fascism, and other supposedly right-wing racist groups aren't merely theoretical — or recent. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Back to Africa movement, admitted in 1922 that his ideology was perfectly simpatico with Mussolini's. 'We were the first fascists,' he declared. Indeed, his rhetoric was often eerily consonant with German fascism: 'Up You Mighty Race, Accomplish What You Will,' 'Africa for the Africans...at Home and Abroad!' and so forth. In the 1960s Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam, formed a cordial relationship with George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell was even invited to speak at the Nation of Islam National Convention in 1962, at which he praised Elijah Muhammad as the black Adolf Hitler. On January 28, 1961, Muhammad sent Malcolm X to Atlanta to negotiate an agreement with the Ku Klux Klan whereby the Klan would support a separate black state.⁶⁰

More generally, the Black Power movement became addicted to violence, setting the tone for the white left. H. Rap Brown had exhorted his followers to 'do what John Brown did, pick up a gun and go out and shoot our enemy.' Malcolm X repeatedly exhorted blacks to employ 'any means necessary.' James Forman, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, declared that if he were assassinated, he'd want in retaliation '10 war factories destroyed...one Southern governor, two mayors and 500 racist white cops dead.' Good thing he belonged to an avowedly nonviolent group! Benjamin Chavis, the future head of the NAACP, first attained national recognition when he was arrested and convicted as a member of the Wilmington Ten, a group that allegedly conspired to firebomb a grocery store and then shoot the police when they responded to the scene.⁶¹ And always and everywhere there were the Panthers, in their paramilitary garb and black