Fascism Visual Representation
Zita Lifland
[What are you doing to stop this? Esperantists of the World, Pit Your Strength against International Fascism!]. . Graf. Ultra Lithograph, 4 colors; 109 x 78 cm. In this poster, two red clenched fists prepare to stab bloodied daggers into the Iberian Peninsula. The two fists are emerging out of Italy and Germany and they bear the symbols of the fascist movements in those countries on their wrists. The image serves as a graphic representation of the role of Italy and Germany in the Spanish Civil War through their support of Franco and Nationalist Spain. It also reflects the fear that the battle for Spain was merely the next step in a fascist take over of Europe.
This poster also reflects one of the many attempts to internationalize the Spanish conflict. The text on the poster is written in Esperanto, an artificial language created by Lazar L. Zamenhof in 1887 in an attempt to develop a truly international language that belonged to no one people or nation. Given the presence of groups of soldiers and volunteers from other European nations, this poster, in using Esperanto, may have been an attempt to create solidarity among the various international groups contributing to the defense of the Spanish Republic. The use of Esperanto may have also helped to mediate between the different language groups within Republican Spain, which initially included much of Catalua where Catalan is spoken, in order to motivate people in the struggle against fascism in Spain.
In this presentation-led workshop, Heba Y. Amin, Emilio Distretti and Ian Alan Paul will introduce a new participatory database that documents the diverse afterlives of Mediterranean fascism(s). In the 1930s, European fascism(s) used the Mediterranean Sea as a laboratory for state and ideological formation, imperial ambitions, and the creation of a strategic military asset. The speakers will present investigations and entries to the Undoing Fascism(s) database that propose new analytical tools to reconfigure and resignify the legacies of fascisms that continue to affect our collective future.
In conversation with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research), the event will engage modes of thinking to respond to a global present suffused with resurgent ethno-nationalisms, authoritarianisms, and dispossession. The Undoing Fascism(s) database is organised as a lexicon that aims to cultivate new political communities in an antifascist and de-colonial spirit.
Heba Y. Amin is a multi-media artist from Egypt. She works with political themes and archival history, using mediums including film, photography, archival material, lecture performance and installation. Amin teaches at Bard College Berlin, is a doctorate fellow in art history at Freie Universitt, and a current Field of Vision fellow in New York. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and co-curator for the biennial residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association.
Emilio Distretti is a researcher and an educator based in London. Emilio is Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Basel. His research takes on interrelated avenues on the politics of space, architectural heritage and postcolonial and decolonial politics in the Mediterranean.
Ian Alan Paul is an artist and theorist whose work examines enactments of power and practices of resistance in global contexts. Their practice straddles experimental documentary, critical fiction, media art and code. Paul is presently based and pursuing projects in Barcelona.
DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) is an architectural collective that combines conceptual speculations and pragmatic spatial interventions, discourse and collective learning. The artistic research of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti is situated between politics, architecture, art and pedagogy. In their practice art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts.
Leftism is defined as the movement intended to elevate outgroups, which is why Hitler saw all Jews as Communists and all Communists as Jews. Communism, in his eyes, was the ideology that threatened to establish equality of Jew and Aryan. It was the mass politics of equality, and therefore needed to be crushed to ensure the triumph of the mass politics of hate.
So much for the white European left. But there were other left traditions. In particular, Black anticolonial and antiracist thinkers in the US and globally were quick to see in fascism the continuation of racist mass politics with which they were very familiar. As Alberto Toscano explains
Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.
Fascism from this perspective was not (or not solely) a response to left movements in Europe. It was instead a rebranding of colonial logics, repurposed and redeployed closer to home as a way to exploit left divisions and destroy left community as an extension, and defense, of the ongoing assault on non-white colonial subjects.
It's true that it's designed to take out the left. When the dust settles -if it ever does-it's going to be clearer that fascist billionaires are funding a lot of the fascist 'thought leaders.' They see the change in the wind and are responding even if it looks like the government does less than ever--they have amassed sufficient power and the public is restless. It's a no lose prospect.
Only a substantial coalition of everyone not fascist can beat fascism I believe. This doesn't have to be negative but maybe the content of opposition to fascism has to be fluid to let the coalition form without anyone needing an ideological ticket punched. There are many reasons to despise and oppose fascism from all over the political spectrum. Leftists are the ones fascists want to kill so they have the most skin in the game, and the tools for a social and historical analysis.
Nevertheless, fascism is based on complete lying bullshit and is always exactly what we see with Trump--a gang of thieves who will plunder the state, and create an even more corrupt, more oligarchic system where unthinkable numbers of people will suffer and die before their time. It's a way of weakening the polity for parasites to feed.
Yes, it has been around in the US for a long time, and used here and there, a product of colonialism--so Jim Crow inspired Hitler just like the Armenian genocide inspired him. But that's exactly why people should see it is in their interest whatever their outlook--even if think it can't happen to them because they are white and middle class, they're wrong. It hasn't happened to them because the state had tools that limited its reach but when it becomes the state the gloves are off. You have no recourse. The stupidest and greedy people will rule over them too just like they rule over a smaller subset of people now.
While that sounds free of content, it isn't because many American people have values that are contrary to being ruled over in this way. Maybe it's not quite the content we think a robust antifascism has but I don't think we should be that picky since we need everyone on board and fascists are enemies of humanity.
With a few red-brown exceptions like Glenn Greenwald and RFK, Jr., everyone on the left, very broadly construed, agrees that Trump is a nightmarish orange bolus of incompetence, authoritarianism and hate. Given that, it\u2019s not surprising that opposition to Trump and to a more and more openly fascist GOP has been a major rallying point for Democratic partisans.
Some leftists, though, are worried that the focus on Trump and fascism will distract from other leftist goals. Historian Daniel Bessner, for example, has argued that the focus on fascism is the result, not first of all of a rising fascist movement, but of the fact that \u201Cliberalism finds itself in crisis.\u201D For Bessner, the obsession with Trump prevents us from focusing on the real enemy of capitalism; antifascism is, in this formulation, a barrier to anticapitalism, aka Communism or socialism, and therefore a barrier to real change. A subtext, I think, is that antifascism leads to rallying around the Democratic party out of fear, rather than boldly developing more radical (and possibly third party) solutions.
I talked about some of my objections to Bessner\u2019s article here a bit back. Rather than reiterating that discussion, I\u2019d like to talk about antifascism as a positive force\u2014one which is absolutely essential to any real left movement and any real left change.
It\u2019s important to understand, first of all, that fascism didn\u2019t spring fully formed from the noggin of Mussolini in a grotesque virgin hate vomit. Rather, fascism was developed as a dialectic response to the left\u2014or, more specifically, as a technique for coopting, draining, and exterminating the left.
In his classic Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton notes that even the original symbol of fascism\u2014the fasci, or bundle of sticks bound together\u2014was originally used by the left as a visual representation of solidarity and power. Fascists like Mussolini wanted to capture the energy and mobilization of left mass movements for a nationalist, reactionary program. Paxton characterizes it as \u201CDictatorship against the Left amidst popular enthusiasm.\u201D
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