War and Fascism March in Lockstep
PART’s Perspective:
War and Fascism March in Lockstep
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)
Nearly a century ago, Benito Mussolini clarified the relationship between war and his fascist project of making Italy a colonizing power. He said, “War is the normal state of the people. The function of a citizen and a soldier are inseparable…. War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies, and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it. It matters little who wins. To make a people great, it’s necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants.”
The particular aggressive wars of choice that he launched were against Libya through aerial bombardment and independent Ethiopia by invasion. Trump is following that same fascist playbook with his attacks on Venezuela and now Iran. Like Mussolini and Hitler before him, he has unleashed the dogs of war on a far larger scale than he intended.
Stress Tests
In this second term, already into its second year, Trump has been subjecting the structures of government and the capacity of civil society to ongoing and intensifying stress tests. Government has failed the test. The “checks and balances” are designed to check and marginalize the power of the people, and balance human rights with the prerogatives of wealth and white supremacy. The challenge now is for the working class and civil society to meet Trump’s stress test with a counter-offensive as urgent, massive and transformational as the times demand.
Trump’s efforts to normalize troops in the streets of US cities, arming ICE as a force to terrorize and intimidate not only immigrants but the whole population, produced a strong countervailing resistance. It turned his immigrant bashing from a political strength into a weakness. So he backed off slightly and immediately pivoted to the international arena. He brazenly and blatantly contradicted all his campaign promises and posturing for over a decade as a peace candidate opposed to endless wars for regime change.
The response to his invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its elected president and the first lady who is also an elected representative, and the related threats against Cuba, did not produce as effective and widespread a resistance as had the ICE and military invasions of US cities. Nor did the continuing genocide in Palestine after Trump’s so-called cease-fire. Thus emboldened, Trump and Netanyahu launched an aggressive, massive surprise attack on Iran while “negotiations” were ongoing.
In Israel, despite retaliatory strikes by Iran, this war seems so far to have achieved the results Netanyahu was looking for, silencing his opposition to a great degree, as his partisan opponents generally fell in line to support the Israeli/US attack.
But if Trump and Netanyahu imagined that “decapitation” would work in Iran, they were incredibly and tragically over-optimistic. Iran, a large, young, well-armed, populous country that has a military with plenty of defensive combat experience, has proven capable of taking the war to Israel and to US bases and warships throughout the region. The Iranian people will determine their own future; it will not be imposed by the US.
Neo-conservatism + Neo-liberalism = Neo-colonialism and Neo-Nazism
Far from rebuilding Trump’s eroded support base in MAGA and society, response to the invasion has been generally negative, particularly from MAGA, which is having trouble wrapping itself around the shift from a perceived America First isolationism to international aggression in service of regime change and the same old pro-Zionist neo-con dreams of “reshaping the Middle East.” Rather than distracting MAGA from the Epstein files, the Iran invasion in cahoots with Israel has served to intensify the misgivings already disrupting and fracturing his coalition.
The question remains, however, how the stress-test of war will be responded to by broader sectors of civil society. Sentiment measured in public opinion polls show that a substantial plurality are opposed to the attacks on Iran, and a majority oppose or distrust Trump’s use of US military might to dictate to other countries. But it will take a lot more than sentiment to stop the US war machine.
Peace and anti-war forces and the left did not adequately prepare the public at large, or the sectors they have organized around “domestic” issues, to act decisively against the well-telegraphed assaults on Venezuela or Iran. The weeks of attacks on fishing boats or later oil tankers in the Caribbean were not met with sufficient demonstrative outrage, let alone anything like the Italian workers’ combative response to Israeli war crimes. Trump had a relatively free hand for his limited-scope incursion into Venezuela.
Nor were there any clear, well-publicized and organized plans in place for mass action in case Trump’s threats and saber-rattling in the so-called “Middle East”, directed at Iran, became a reality. Which they did in the form of the vicious bombing, including of civilian areas, that materialized on Feb. 28. Demonstrations that were called in many cities attracted crowds only in the hundreds. In Los Angeles, there was little advance notice for a rally at City Hall, despite endorsements from the Black Alliance for Peace, CodePINK, and DSA-LA in addition to sponsorship by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition and the PSL. The turnout was small despite celebrity speakers like Jane Fonda. Pro-war Iranian monarchists thankfully did not disrupt it, because they were having larger rallies of their own on the other side of town supporting the war.
Nor were there any of the kind of pre-war protests that preceded the various Bush wars of choice on Iraq. This despite the fact that Trump quite openly refused to consult even with his lap-dog Congress as required. Trump does not believe in asking for either permission OR forgiveness. He is constantly testing the limits of what he can get away with.
We have yet to demonstrate that we are passing that intentional stress test. Illusions about the possibility of the Democratic Party or the “mid-term” elections being effective in countering Trump — illusions based on the belief that the problem is only Trump, and not the imperialist system and corporate domination — are part of the problem. Fascism is in fact deeply rooted in US settler-colonial capitalism and white supremacy.
Trump Youth?
Meanwhile, other sectors of civil society continue to accommodate themselves to Trump’s fascist proclivities. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth demanded that Scouting America drop all badges and references to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or face exclusion from use of all Department of War facilities and bases. They did so, although they balked at his maximalist demands of returning to the name Boy Scouts and restricting their membership to biological boys. Although he stopped short of renaming them “Trump Youth,” Scouting America should have rejected any ultimatum, and in fact stopped using military bases for any of its functions.
Artificial ‘Intelligence’ and the Intelligence ‘Community’
Similarly, despite the supposed “red lines” drawn by founder Dario Amodei on the use of Anthropic by the “Department of War”, its Claude A-I was in fact used in the attack on Iran, as it was in the attack on Venezuela. Trump petulantly declared Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” and intends to rid the US government entirely of its products, and Secretary of War Hegseth practically accused the company of treason, but they will keep using Claude. It was customized by Anthropic for high-security classified operations by the military and “intelligence community,” and must be phased out over six months and replaced by other ‘frontier’ A-I tech, which Open AI or Musk’s X-AI will be only too happy to provide. Even the slightly more scrupulous Amodei has made it clear that he will collaborate with DOW and the other agencies in making the transition smooth.
Last month ARA-LA co-sponsored a teach-in on A-I, Labor and the Future of LA, War and the World, a small but positive step towards organizing working people and civil society against the threat A-I poses and against the national security state apparatus and military-carceral-industrial complex that are driving its use to build a fascist surveillance infrastructure domestically and a robotic military juggernaut internationally.
The video recordings of the conference are at:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/oaPdrHmrOAI
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH3Xy5bf8Jo
The task remains before us to amplify and crystallize the mistrust most people have of A-I, and the growing disillusionment with Trump’s transgressions and aggressions, into a powerful, positive and effective movement for solidarity, peace, and justice and against imperialism, colonialism and racism. Trump has shown through his stress tests that “democracy” as practiced by the oligarchs and the empire is a sham.
It’s up to us to build up the popular forces of solidarity, resistance and liberation that can apply stress and pressure to the fault lines and internal contradictions of capitalism and the empire, to salvage the planet and a future worth living. That will require not just regime change, but system change, to an eco-socialist economy and society.