While liberals in the United States have been naively celebrating a supposed victory over fascism following Donald Trump’s narrow electoral defeat in last week’s presidential election, fascist tendencies are actually continuing to manifest more acutely in the imperial core.
Kyle Chapman, founder of a “tactical defense arm” (street violence) of the far-right Proud Boys, claimed in a message on the encrypted Telegram chat app that he has staged a “coup” against Enrique Tarrio – the group’s current leader who happens to be a Black man.
“We will confront the Zionist criminals who wish to destroy our civilization,” Chapman wrote.
“We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race.”
As infighting within the Proud Boys intensifies, Chapman – who’s clearly pulling the organization in a more openly racist direction – also wrote that he is renaming the group the “Proud Goys” in reference to the Hebrew word goy (nation), which has over time become a Jewish term for any non-Jew.
Neo-Nazis have often tried to appropriate the word goy and use it to express their war against the Jewish people.
The Proud Boys are preparing to demonstrate on Saturday with other rightist groups in Washington, D.C., on behalf of Trump’s claims that last week’s election was stolen through widespread voter fraud perpetrated by the Democratic party and its narrowly triumphant candidate Joe Biden.
Protesters are expected to converge on the US capital in a rally being billed as a “Million MAGA March.”
The mass protest is being organized by Scott Presler, a pro-Trump activist affiliated with the Islamophobic “ACT for America” group.
The Proud Boys gained increased notoriety in September when Trump told the organization to “stand back and stand by” during a presidential debate with Biden.
The all-male group was established in 2016 by Gavin McInnes, a far-right provocateur who had co-founded the Vice media brand. It has referred to itself as a “Western chauvinist” fraternal organization but has insisted that its preference for “Western civilization” is build on a civic nationalism and not on racist or anti-Semitic ideologies, despite documented ties to neo-Nazi groups.
In his Telegram post, Chapman said he deposed Tarrio, whom he referred to using a racial slur. He further wrote that the Proud Boys will now focus on “the issues of White Genocide, the failures of multiculturalism, and the right for White men and women to have their own countries where White interests are written into law and part of the body politic.”
As the United States experiences increased manifestations of fascism, a proper analysis should attempt to understand these manifestations dialectically, without divorcing fascist expressions from their capitalist context (George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye can provide helpful insights).
It would be naive to believe that the Trump administration was a “fascist regime” and now the republic has been saved through a return to bourgeois liberal democracy. The “business-as-usual” politics of Joe Biden represent the very system that led to the rise of Trump (its ugly caricature).
The sensibilities of roughly half the US population to Trump being a narcissistic loudmouth with no regard for the dignity of his office or the norms of liberal democracy were obviously offended by Trump’s style and presentation, leading to the naive belief that voting him out of office would be some kind of revolutionary act. The visceral hatred for Trump felt by so many US citizens allowed for the continued widespread ignorance of the fact that Biden represents the ruling class interests that have been driving both the empire and the planet deeper into crisis.
Fascism tends to rise when capitalism enters periods of major crisis. It’s deeply rooted in the capitalist system and serves as a defense mechanism against revolutionary threats. When challenges to the system become more acute, fascism sharpens and also becomes more acute in turn. When the threat is neutralized, fascism fades into society’s background and the mask of bourgeois liberal democracy returns to hide the inherent injustices of the system.
This understanding of the relationship between capitalism and fascism actually correlates to a Hebrew understanding of the relationship between the “fourth empire” (Esav/Edom) and Amalek – the empire’s most militant and self-aware component. Our sages identify Esav/Edom with Western civilization, which is today expressed through the United States and its allies, Christian hegemony, white supremacy and the capitalist system.
Amalek is likewise expressed through fascist ideologies that come to fight against “white Genocide” and “cultural Marxism” in an effort to defend the endangered civilization (a reading of Mein Kampf or other foundational Nazi texts make this clear). Amalek serves as a defense mechanism against threats to Western civilization and all of its systems of control. Due to its intuitive understanding of Israel’s historic role, its primary targets are almost always the Jewish people.
And I believe it’s worth noting that whenever Amalek rises to power, Jews have historically been trapped in their host countries, forbidden even from emigrating to Eretz Yisrael (Cyrus forbade the Jews of Shushan to emigrate to Judea at the time of the Purim story and the British White Paper forbade Jewish emigration to Palestine at the outbreak of World War II). What if such a thing were to happen in America?