Our cowardice about calling out fascism

Australian referendum advertisement from 1951.

Yesterday I grumbled about what I regarded as the Guardian’s cowardice in not calling out Australian fascism as manifested in the anti-immigration marches on Sunday. The rather breathless denunciation of neo-Nazis being central to those marches was almost pitiful for avoiding the ‘f’ word. Because it would have meant acknowledging that some Australian ‘mums and dads’ (ugh, what an ugly cliché for the intended meaning of ‘underclass’) are fascists.

It made me wonder how anyone working at the Guardian, thinking themselves rational and progressively-minded, could not know that you can’t oppose what you are too chicken to name. I can’t quite bring myself to believe that the Guardian employs people too ignorant to know how fascism manifests itself, even if the fascists themselves are often too ill educated to know what they stand for.

Are we really stuck in the fascist propaganda lie that fascism died out in 1945, and only exists where jackboots are worn with Hugo Boss uniforms? Has no one working in journalism today read Umberto Eco’s outstanding 1995 essay ‘Ur-Fascism’? You can still read it online at the New York Review of Books, or without paywall here.

Let’s back up a little. If we look at what’s happening in American politics today, and recognize it’s the end point of decades of political corruption, surrender to extremism from the Christofascist right and more recently from the alliance between kleptocrats and populist fascists, we can trace that influence directly into mainstream Australian politics since at least the 1970s. Through the Coalition parties, so intellectually sclerotic they have credulously adopted key features of US Republicanism, making them a mainstream Australian political configuration harbouring fascist tendencies quite openly.

Propaganda cover for those tendencies was and is given by the Murdoch family media network, which is itself tainted by its prominent rôle in the rise of the US kelptocrat-populist fascist alliance, and by adopting the rhetorics of that brand of fascism in Australia, expressed in culture wars distractions, socio-economic divisiveness, and reactionary bigotry about women, Aborigines, and migrant groups.

For all of that time no one seemed willing to call out this fascism by name. Not even when the openly Christofascist Scott Morrison ran for the 2019 federal election. A self-declared member of an imported US dominionist cult, Pentecostalism, he won that election! You can’t do that here without a large number of Australians subscribing to, and supporting fascist ideas.

Even as Morrison’s religion became an election issue, the so-called news media not controlled by the Murdoch family refused to name fascism as a problem. Sometimes calling it ‘right wing extremism’ instead, making it sound like some sort of benign ‘extreme sports’ for eccentrics no one really need worry about.

I can understand the chickenshit cowardice of the leaderless, missionless ABC. I can’t quite fathom it in Nine Entertainment, or Seven West Media, unless, of course, they too support fascist tendencies. And that leaves the Guardian and smaller media outfits who say they are progressively minded … but sure don’t act like it.

Maybe the Guardian could get the ball rolling by commissioning some backgrounders to explain what fascism looks like today. Debunking the idea it doesn’t exist anymore, and that it could only exist in a fully-blown staging of past events, rather than as a mutated political form creating entirely new dramas.

Eco could be a good starting point. So could finding academics not so bland and ignorant they write for the Conversation, willing to define fascist tendencies, by name, in today’s Australia. It is true that journalism academic Denis Muller bloviated about racism, and even mentioned neo-Nazis in yesterday’s Conversation’ piece about ‘racist’ rallies’, but not a mention of fascism as a wider problem for Australian politics.

The next time you see some politician standing in front of flags, or with soldiers sharing a podium, you’re looking at fascism. The next time some politician, public servant, or other self-appointed spokesman earnestly tells you how abrogating human rights for the national interest is good for the country, you are looking at fascism. The next time you see anyone defending the de-funding of education, especially in tertiary institutions and liberal arts courses, you are looking at fascism. The next time you see anyone denouncing science they don’t like, you’re looking at fascism. The next time some low level bureaucrat (public or private) tells you they have the right to behave like contemptible, power-mad dickheads because it’s ‘our policy’, you’re looking at fascism. The next time someone tells you your own rights (not to be confused with privileges) should be infringed in the name of upholding ‘rights’ for someone else, you’re looking at fascism (especially if it’s really about giving religious bigots special privileges).

Look around you and tell me honestly you haven’t seen those fascist tendencies every day for years now.