“Fascists” and “Antifascists”: The Standard Memes Ignore the Real Costs of Immigration and Multiculturalism

(Below is my response to “A New Chapter in the Fascist Internationale” by Alexander Reid Ross, in Counterpunch, September 16, 2015.

Mr. Alexander Reid Ross
Counterpunch

Dear Mr. Ross:

I read with great interest your article, “A New Chapter in the Fascist Internationale,” published in Counterpunch and must commend you on your polished syntax and a good, albeit somewhat hasty summary of what is awkwardly termed the “World National-Conservative Movement.”  As a long time reader and admirer of some Counterpunch authors who dispel the myth of progress and who tackle the liberal mystique of permanent economic growth,  it’s quite possible that we have more in common than what may appear in my critical remarks. Having ties with many so-called “White nationalists” in all parts of the world, and being also a Director of the American Freedom Party, let me try to put things into a short conceptual and linguistic perspective first.

The words ‘Fascism’ and ‘Nazism’ are constantly used as weapons to vilify people who identify as White and have a sense of White interests, to the point that these words  have now become meaningless. Both have been so much subject to semantic distortions over the last 70 years, to the point that there is no longer any meaningful relationship between current movements labeled with those terms and the cultural-political movements in the Europe of the early twentieth century.  (I am sure Noam Chomsky would partly agree with that).  Instead, the term ‘Fascism’ is tossed around today as a generic locution in order to criminalize and pathologize any non-conformist White person or any group of White people by implying that they are nothing more than xenophobic haters.

Hence, if we look at Fascism or National Socialism through such demonological glasses, we run the risk of landing in the realms of the ancient Greek underworld, more worthy of the Hesiod’s and Homer’s prose  and certainly not into a dispassionate Elysian field of objective historical narrative. I am probably acutely (and sadly) aware of the “antifascist meta-language,” having grown up in what was known as communist Yugoslavia. Back then “Fascist beasts,”  “Croat Fascist monsters,” “Nazi terrorists,”  were a central part of the Communist  Party  vernacular, and any non-conformist thinker was routinely and permanently consigned to this home-grown  bestiary.   Alas, what I am witnessing now in the USA and EU media, as well as in higher education, is a recapitulation of these paleo-communist memes, albeit dressed up in more attractive attire and blessed with the legitimacy that only the elite media can confer.

I hope you have read some of the authors mentioned in your article. Otherwise, again, one runs the risk of entangling oneself in the dialogue of the deaf.  Apart from books by “mainstream” scholars such as Zeev Sternhell  and Ernst Nolte, it is very difficult to find any other contemporary authors  who more or less objectively document the intellectual origins of Fascism or Nationalism Socialism. Rather than describing the very real problems confronting these societies or attempting an honest appraisal of the popular appeal and economic achievements of these cultures, we see little more than gratuitous moralizing while at the same time the monstrous police states and mass murder perpetrated by the Left during the same period are ignored.  Without wishing to sound pretentious with my own intellectual  baggage, there is no way one can fully grasp the birth of the “conservative revolution,” or  Fascism, or  National Socialism without being fully proficient in the German and the French languages and knowing very well the cultural heritage of Europe prior to 1922 and 1933.

The fears and concerns motivating the current increase in what you would call fascist parties stem from the tidal waves of non-European immigration that are affecting almost all European countries. These fears and concerns are quite different than those that gave rise to fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and they are quite legitimate. The attitude of the left is that people are essentially interchangeable, so that it makes no difference who immigrates to the US or Europe, and the native Whites of those areas have no legitimate interests in preserving their political, demographic and cultural dominance. This is simply not the case.

The immigration issue is critical. The US is projected to be majority non-White in just a few years, and even European countries like the UK that have had relatively homogeneous populations deriving from what is a relatively homogeneous European gene pool for thousands of years are projected to be majority non-White within the century. The ongoing crisis centered most glaringly in Germany promises to speed the day when native Germans, whose ancestors have dominated dominated Central Europe for well over 1000 years will become a minority.

The view that immigrants are interchangeable ignores the costs of multiculturalism in terms of increased conflict, lack of willingness to contribute to public goods like health care, and social cohesion. Thus it’s one thing for the US to have immigrants from various parts of Europe; they have assimilated very well. It’s quite another thing to have immigrants from the Middle East and Africa with very different cultures and very different psychological traits (including IQ levels), and strong tendencies not to assimilate.

This view also ignores the long history of ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic, multicultural societies. The idea that societies where Whites become a minority will live in peace and harmony is Utopian to say the least, especially given the fact that Whites are now being blamed for all the problems of non-White groups, including the educational failures of Blacks and other immigrant groups (an argument that ignores the success of East Asians in Western societies). The hostility toward Whites with their history of colonialism and expansion will not end when Whites become a minority. There is a very real fear among a great many Whites that these changes are absolutely not in their long-term interests. This is quite reasonable and makes the appeal of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the US understandable.

On the personal level, yes, I must admit, I feel more at ease talking to working class Americans when visiting a village in the Ozarks, or being a guest of honor at a simple farmer’s house in the German Harz. One finds that the common sense and political judgment of these people often surpass those of many modern scholars focused solely on demonizing movements they do not understand and promoting utopian projects that ignore human nature in favor of creating multicultural societies that are not only prone to ethnic conflict, but violate the legitimate interests of Whites who have dominated these areas for hundreds or, in the case Europe, thousands of years.

Regardless of our possible disagreements and despite the fact that you will likely dismiss me by simply classifying me as a “White supremacist” or “White nationalist” or whatever, I must point out the following: The ongoing balkanization of the USA (where voting patterns increasingly reflect racial divides) bears remarkable similarity with what occurred in the former Yugoslavia shortly before it broke down in 1991. The current EU and the floods of non-European immigrants in Europe — and yes, at this very moment there is a quasi-state of emergency resulting from the migrants/invaders swamping  my native Croatia — do not bode well for a starry-eyed project of multiracial and ecumenical conviviality. When the proverbial push comes to shove, one no longer needs to study diverse Levantine or African haplotypes or immerse oneself in the books of cultural pessimists.  One must then be ready to weather the storm either by voting for Donald Trump or the American Freedom Party’s Bob Whitaker, or whoever is willing to salvage my heritage.  I am sure in a case of emergency you will also figure out which side of the fence it is better to sit on.

Best wishes,

Tom Sunic, PhD
www.tomsunic.com
http://american3rdposition.com/