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Satire for Sanity
The virus of fascism only ever lay dormant in the West after its apparent destruction during the Second World War.
Early indicators are everywhere that fascism - an ideology that espouses racist hierarchies of human value, of who should have rights and who must not - is reasserting itself in the United States and across large parts of Europe.
There is an intensifying distrust and fear of foreigners. Immigrants are seen as destroying the West from within - irreconcilable with, and antagonistic to, a “superior” civilisation and culture. In the US, a permanent resident - apparently the first of many - has been disappeared into the US prison system, pending his deportation.
Political speech in opposition to western governments and their crimes is being stigmatised and crushed with old laws and new. Supposedly liberal academic institutions are rolling over as they are menaced with legal and financial sanctions. There is little reason to assume that judicial systems will provide any meaningful check on executive power.
The West is taking the first formal steps down a different political path - one whose final destination we know from our own relatively recent history.
The far right is now setting the agenda with the same Cheshire Cat grin, whether it’s billionaire TV star Donald Trump in the US, or Westminster’s glorified used-car salesman Nigel Farage in the UK.
Hiding in plain sight
These developments have not come out of the blue. They have been decades in the making.
This should come as no surprise, because the main repository for the West’s fascist ideas since the Second World War has been hiding in plain sight: Israel.
The West’s undisguised crackdown on the most fundamental of rights, such as political speech and academic freedom, is being carried out in the name of protecting Israel and those western Jews who cheerlead its crimes.
Fascism is stepping out of the shadows in the US and Europe as Israel ostentatiously commits a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, armed and given diplomatic cover by its western patrons.
Israel has continued, with the West’s conspicuous backing, to do the very things that western states themselves found it impossible to justify in the wake of the Second World War.
When the West was reluctantly forced into decolonisation processes in Africa and Asia, Israel was given licence and endless support to grow a violent ethno-nationalist project on another people’s homeland.
Jewish supremacism was respectable, even as white supremacism fell out of favour. Israel became ever bolder in its expulsions and segregationist policies. It herded Palestinians into ever-smaller enclaves, where they were stripped of rights and subjected to constant military abuses
READ ON
The new fascism: Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom
The wide-ranging crackdown on political speech is being framed as a means of combatting antisemitism
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