When Trump defends armed rightwing gangs, his
rhetoric has echoes of fascism
David
Renton
Signalling to his base, as he did referring to the
Proud Boys on Tuesday, the president is following a playbook from 1930s Germany
Thu 1 Oct
2020 09.23 BSTLast modified on Thu 1 Oct 2020 09.24 BST
You can
imagine the men as they prepared for the showdown. For days, the papers had
been predicting a “great sensation”. Press photographers besieged the entrance.
No one could enter the building where the debate was due to take place without
a special permit. In his dark blue suit, one question above all troubled the
party leader, and with the help of his advisers, he puzzled how best to answer
it. What if he was accused of links to fascist street gangs?
This wasn’t
the United States in September 2020. It was Germany in May 1931.
For as the
historian Benjamin Hett describes in his book, Crossing Hitler, the summer of
1931 saw Hitler being summonsed to court and accused of being complicit in the
work of gangs who had beaten – and killed – their anti-fascist enemies.
Hitler’s
response was to play a double game. First of all, he was worried about looking
weak in front of his supporters, who had called him a coward and a conformist.
So he needed to signal that the gangs still had his support. Second, he tried
to pretend that any harm caused by his supporters was necessary since the
country faced a much more threatening enemy: the far left.
“The SA men
are the first men in the party,” he told his opponent, the private prosecutor
Hans Litten. Then, in answer to Kurt Ohnesorge, the judge who moderated the
hearing, Hitler said that the “red murderers” of the left were the real
problem: “If an SA man really oversteps the boundary of self-defence, you can’t
hold a man responsible for that.”
Compare
this to Donald Trump signalling to his base. During Tuesday’s presidential
debate, he was asked: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacist and
militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the
violence?”
He
answered, “I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from
the right wing.” He continued: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Then came
the justification: “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something
about antifa and the left. Because this is not a rightwing problem, this is a
leftwing problem.”
Trump is
wrong to pretend that the left is responsible for the violence on America’s
streets. Between 1 January 1994 and 8 May 2020, white supremacists and other
rightwing extremists in the US carried out attacks that left 329 people dead.
In the same period, a single attack staged by an anti-fascist resulted in a
killing. And during that incident, the one person who lost their life was the
anti-fascist perpetrator.
That survey
ended in May. Since then, the number of killings carried out by anti-fascists
has risen from zero to one. On 29 August this year a pro-Trump truck convoy
made its way through Portland, firing paintballs and pepper sprays. A
counter-protest saw an associate of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, Aaron J
Danielson, shot dead. One anti-fascist, Michael Forest Reinoehl, admitted to
the shooting in a media interview, but said he acted in self-defence. He was
shot by US marshals on 3 September in Lacey, Washington.
Even after
Danielson’s death, the grim headcount remains: the far right has been carrying
out killings at the rate of 300 to the anti-fascist one.
The 1920s
saw a similar disparity of casualties. The most detailed survey of deaths in
Weimar Germany, carried out by the German mathematician Emil Julius Gumbel,
found 314 murders carried out by the right in 1918-22 and 15 by the left. After
1923, deaths fell almost to zero before resuming again from 1928 with the rise
of the Nazis.
In the US,
since 2016 and Trump’s election, attacks on leftwing demonstrators have become
more frequent. They have included the killing of anti-fascist protester Heather
Heyer at Charlottesville. James Alex Fields Jr drove his car at protesters
after being photographed earlier brandishing a shield with a fascist symbol
right out of the 1920s (a bundle of rods and an executioner’s rod). He was
sentenced to life in prison.
There were
the 11 worshippers shot at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, allegedly
by Robert Bowers. And there have been the more than 100 white supremacists who
have attempted to disperse anti-racist protests since the spring by driving
their cars at demonstrators – the same method of attack as that used by Fields
at Charlottesville.
Hitler’s
followers were responding to the electoral success of the left; they knew that
in areas of Berlin the Communist vote was as high as 40%. And, in order to
break the opposition to Hitler, they went into those districts and beat and
killed antifascists. It was this violence that led to Hitler’s trial.
The main
purpose of the Proud Boys, in summer 2020, is the same. That’s why the they
were in Portland last weekend, carrying posters denouncing anti-fascists and
supporters of Black Lives Matters, and promising to drive the left out of the
city.
Trump is
lying when he says that the left is responsible for the violence. In blaming
the left he is encouraging his armed supporters and inviting further killings.
In many
ways Trump is a weak authoritarian. After four years in power, Trump has not
gone to war. His opponents are at large and not in jail. But when Trump defends
armed gangs, he echoes the worst moments in modern history.
• David
Renton is a barrister and author of Fascism: History and Theory
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