"Warning (Warnung, auch)"

 

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS

I recently came across a fascinating book of history and political science on the development of fascism in a nation-state. For your edification, I am here presenting a few excerpts, with certain edits and alterations for present relevance.

"A wholly definitive study is still impossible, because of the timing, and because many indispensable sources of information, such as party and organizational archives, such documents as income tax returns, intra-leadership communications, and "classified [for various reasons] documents," are as yet closed to scholars (unless leaked). With regard to many events, judgments must be based upon admittedly incomplete evidence. These difficulties, which always beset the student of contemporary politics, are aggravated here by the determined and well-organized efforts of the new government and party-in-power to discourage incisive research into its methods and objectives and to misrepresent many of its goals and techniques for reasons of political expediency. Deception is a political imperative in all government. In this regime, it is an applied science and a fine art."

"The new leaders who 'think with their hearts' repudiate all objectivity and scientific detachment as evil products of liberalism... Under these circumstances any effort at objectivity implies per se the adoption of an attitude evoking negative emotional response from the officials under observation. Like every form of highly emotionalized and subjectivized mass politics, Trumpism demands acceptance or rejection, period.

Only a social revolution can destroy the Trumpist state. Only an upheaval in which the political power of the economically-dominant sector of the ruling class is permanently broken by mass action from below can offer hope of weakening the grip upon the sources of power of the Trumpist state. The new Trumpist absolutism is the only possible source of power for the ruling class in the age of increasingly concentrated monopoly capitalism, since it protects their interests far better than any imaginable alternative.

In the run-up to Trumpism, the true left in the United States accepted this view of the situation. "But their small size, the destruction of the militant trade unionism that they had led many years before, undertaken by a concerted effort of the ruling class across the nation, and the incredibly destructive in-fighting over who indeed were the 'true leftists,' especially in relationship to the history of the Soviet Union and its leadership, and over the 'lesser of the evils' proposition, with the resulting failure to form a Popular Front, rendered them very limited in what they were able to do to effectively fight the onslaught of Trumpism. 

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Source: OpEdNews.com (OEN)