Talking about fascism today in a world in which concepts and definitions have been so abused by post-truth, relativism, and the subordination of thought to emotion, requires several parallel movements. The first is alluded to with the prefix neo, which would show that today’s fascisms are not those of the past, so clearly embodied by the Hitlerian project of racial superiority and its direct consequence: the Holocaust.
Today’s neo-fascisms are more recognizable in the regimes of radical exclusion on which they preach a reactive policy: in defense of Western civilization/against migrants, in defense of Europe/against Islamism, in defense of nativist nationalism/against globalism and a long etcetera. They share with fascism in its historical manifestation the conservative defense of a narrow and inbred vision of the nation and a militant mobilization against everything that endangers it. But they have not attained sufficient power (although they are dangerously close), to make of that drive, at the same time excluding and supremacist, a State policy; to do what not only German or Italian fascism did, but also communist totalitarianism: to put the machinery of the State in charge of creating a disciplined, obedient society, turned mass at the service of a messianic leader who sees himself as the one who must correct the course of history; a machinery capable of deploying a massive and intimidating horror that guarantees, by force, whatever escapes the ideological imposition.
The neo-fascisms of today are, therefore, not at all negligible, especially when the whole world seems caught in a dynamic of combat, a penchant for war stirred up by every side in which terrorism can be presented as a liberation struggle and ethnic cleansing as the right to defend oneself. They are recognizable, for example, in the Alternative for Germany and its obstacles to visits to former concentration camps; in the process of rewriting history in which the Hungarian government is engaged, celebrating the authoritarian period between the wars and placing the communist past at the bottom of history; in the defense of Franco’s memory in Spain; in the struggle for the opening of a museum of fascism in Italy or the one dedicated to the dictator Antonio Salazar in Portugal.
But in this reality, which could lead us back to a scenario of generalized war, fascist impulses do not only appear where their characteristic features would allow us to recognize them. They can also appear—and they do—where a project of power is apparently positioned against existing neo-fascisms and offers itself as an alternative to them. This complicates the picture and forces us to resist taking the discourse at face despite its material correlate since it can be filled to the brim with the opposite of what it claims to denote.
Here we enter the field of instrumentalization or weaponization. While instrumentalization refers to the use of something (in this case, the concept of fascism) as an instrument of something else (in this case, as we shall see, the legitimization of authoritarianism), weaponization would make it clear that this instrument is a weapon, and can be deadly.
Probably the best-known example of the use of fascism as a weapon, or perhaps it would be better to say, the use of the specter of fascism as a weapon, is that of the Russian campaign that helped to legitimize and justify the invasion of Ukraine. Russian state propaganda spoke, over and over again, about the need for demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. The term comes from the purge of elements of Nazi ideology in Germany and Austria by Allied countries at the end of World War II but it also resonates in the reminiscence of the trauma of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. There is a line of continuity, or at least similarity, that has been exploited by Putin and Russian propaganda and is affectively and politically linked to Soviet history; in that line, the victory over fascism constitutes a fundamental milestone.
The idea of denazification involves an interpretation of Ukrainian history that refers back to Ukrainian fascism as a hegemonic force in history and the present. In history, this is done by emphasizing the figure of Stepan Bandera, who, during World War II, collaborated with the Nazis as part of an attempt to become independent from the Soviet Union. While this is true, the emphasis on the figure and ideology of Bandera, erasing other figures and other ideologies, tries to connect Ukrainian independence attempts only to fascism and ignores that such attempts began with the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. Denazification thus reduces a complex history to the identification of the desire for independence with Nazism.
At present, Russian propaganda identifies the government of Volodymir Zelensky as fascist. Again, the convenient selectivity and flattening of the complexity of a phenomenon serve the construction of a narrative convenient to the project of Russian “denazification” of Ukraine. While there are in Ukraine followers of Stepan Bandera in some areas of the country, that does not mean Ukraine can be identified as a fascist state. Russian narratives about Ukrainian fascism reach their peak with the addendum that Russia is responsible for the solution of the “Ukrainian Nazi problem,” by a version of a history that vindicates Russia’s right over Ukraine and denies, in a twist to the justification of Russian imperialist pretension, any Ukrainian autonomic desire.
In August 2023, Belarus held the 2nd International Anti-Fascist Congress. The first one was held in Moscow on August 20, 2022, months after the beginning of the Russian invasion and within the framework of the international military-technical forum Army 2022. Under the slogan: “In the name of the future of humanity, let us stop neo-fascism together”, representatives of several countries—including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—met in Minsk to promote the idea of the need to eliminate “Ukrainian fascism.”
That Belarus, an autocratic regime that has closed off any possibility of civic action after the repression of the mass protests of 2020-2021, should organize an anti-fascist congress is, to say the least, curious. This is a government allied with Russia, which placed itself (through this congress) at the epicenter of the maximization of the rhetoric about the invasion of Ukraine, by raising the fight against fascism as a horizon shared by a group of supposedly progressive and anti-imperialist countries.
Probably through the participation of delegations from Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela in this congress, and the hand of Russian propaganda towards Latin America, the anti-fascist rhetoric in the voice of authoritarian regimes expanded its scope. However, to read this expansion solely in terms of the impact of Russian propaganda would be to deny the convenience for these authoritarian regimes of assimilating the narrative of the need to counter the rise of neo-fascism with an international front. It is, it seems, a coordinated strategy of the authoritarian bloc that deploys, in the face of a shared conception of power, the same discursive logic, and that can resort to it in its search for legitimization in the eyes of progressive movements and forces in the world. The equivalent of the “anti-fascist” congress in Minsk, Belarus, had occurred earlier in Caracas, in April 2022, which should dissuade us from understanding this rhetoric solely as a Russian thing and more as a confluence—no doubt driven by the justification of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—of legitimizing devices of the growing autocratic bloc.
In Latin America, fascism has been used by authoritarian regimes to tar the anti-authoritarian or anti-totalitarian struggles that take place within them, and thus naturalize the extreme repression to which they are subjected. In the region, Venezuela is the country that has taken this rhetoric the furthest. Recently, the International Summit against Fascism, Neo-Fascism and Similar Expressions was held in Caracas. It is the second call for the summit held in April 2022. It is interesting, to say the least, that the call took place on August 19, days after the electoral fraud of July 28, to be held on September 11, 2024. It was mobilized as there was this urgent need to provide narrative support for the usurpation of the electoral result. It is the supposed anti-fascist struggle as a firewall, which evidences its purely instrumental character in the urgency of the call. The summit was attended by intellectuals such as Fernando Buenabad, always ready to defend authoritarianism.
However, the summit held two years earlier was not the only precedent, although it would have been the privileged format in a dynamic of event organization to which these regimes have been resorting in recent years, and which had an outstanding example, just two days before the Venezuelan elections, with the World Social Alternative Forum. These are events that attempt to bring together a group of political actors (activists, organizations, intellectuals) associated with causes such as the fight against climate change or the defense of Indigenous territories that, under the aegis of the organizer (the Cuban or Venezuelan government), are redirected to the defense of the convening governments. These events may speak of the need for a new international order, anti-imperialism, or even anti-fascism, but, in practice, function as endorsements of the political control agendas of authoritarian regimes.
In April of this year, instrumentalizing the use of the term fascism, the Venezuelan government signed the Law against Fascism, Neo-Fascism and Similar Expressions. Presenting the law, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said that “stopping fascism in the world is a task that cannot be postponed for the good of humanity.” The rhetoric places the fight against fascism as an international issue, even though the Venezuelan law applied to its dissidents the interpretation of fascism that sustained it. “Stopping fascism in the world,” Rodriguez continued, “is a task that cannot be postponed for the good of humanity, because it not only manifests itself in expressions of hatred, violence, and death, but also forms of economic fascism, such as the criminal blockade imposed against Venezuela.” Thus, a system of sanctions is included among the manifestations of fascism, and likewise manifestations of discrimination such as “racism, chauvinism, classism, moral conservatism, neoliberalism, misogyny and any kind of phobia against human beings.”
The fascism included in the Venezuelan law is no longer one that has a structural content; it no longer understands it as a way of conceiving and executing power, but through forms of discrimination that, in the absence of a government program or as part of a political project, would be far from constituting forms of social domination. With such a lax interpretation, even expressions such as misogyny can be read as fascist. The law against fascism is based on an absolute trivialization of the term that empties it of recognizable content and turns it, therefore, into a repository of everything that the Venezuelan regime interprets as counterproductive. As the regime has already amply demonstrated, they can use the term at will. If it does not really mean anything because its semantic expansion has rendered it useless, then it ends up meaning whatever suits whoever defines it.
Enforced by a regime that has made repression, restriction of liberties, control of institutions, and, finally, electoral imposition their approach to government, the law against fascism could not serve any other purpose than the legal legitimization of the suppression of the political opponent. In the pre-electoral context that foresaw the possibility that the opposition might win—when this was signed into law—it was evident that it could be used to delegitimize, criminalize, and even directly repress the opposing forces. And as the best example, Delcy Rodriguez’s quote in the law presentation is explicit: “We have gone through these stages of the exit in 2014, the guarimbas in 2017, and today the extremist sector has been summoned to fight to the end. I want to remember that Hitler called for the final battle and exterminated millions of men and women in the European continent, and today history repeats itself.”
More recently, Rodriguez took up the slogan of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to insist on the point: “We must ask ourselves what they mean when they say ‘To the end,’ because there again is the germ of the violence of hatred and extermination.” This malicious comparison, which equates a slogan with no fascist or violent allusion anywhere and which basically expresses the will to fight until the popular mandate is recognized with a project of extermination, and before that with Hitler, is delirious. In its delusion, it demonstrates, however, the total disregard for reality characteristic of dictators and tyrants. And the imposition of power after July 28 in Venezuela is nothing more than that: a dictatorial imposition, with no other support than feverish declarations and blatant state violence. This craziness has legal consequences, though. Under the protection of this law, the opposition can be criminalized, disqualified, judged, and jailed and, at this point, the rhetoric reaches its fullest dimension. It not only generates legitimizing discourses but also punitive actions.
At the World Congress against Fascism, Neo-Fascism and Similar Expressions in September, a paper was presented that lets us observe some of the arguments sustained by functional intellectuals and accomplices of this great communicative strategy that seeks nothing more than to use the ghost of fascism to legitimize its project of oppression. This is “Simón Bolívar y el antifascismo” (Simon Bolivar and anti-fascism), by Iñaki Gil de San Vicente. In it, the author develops a series of arguments that support the idea that the political project in power in Venezuela today is an anti-fascist political project. The text—in line with the definition in the law of April 2024—blurs the notion of fascism in such a way that it ends up being equivalent to democracy. It says: “Democracy is nothing but the deceptive form of the true dictatorship of capital. We know that when the working classes discover it and stop taking that sweet and cloying poison that nullifies consciousness, capital resorts to the icy bile of fascism.” Fascism would be, in this logic, simply a democracy that has taken off its mask. Gil de San Vicente adds that the dichotomy between democracy and dictatorship is a false dilemma, and that popular power must be protected by employing a transitory dictatorship. This is, undoubtedly, a reworking of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And it is, finally, an idea that supports a dictatorship that is not of the proletariat and has, on the contrary, established a system of exclusions and restrictions for the action of society.
This type of argument would be surprising were it not for the fact that witnessing firsthand the capacity for cynicism of such a regime prevents us from understanding it as anything more than the impossible justification of a regime of authoritarian oppression, which speaks of popular power just when curtails it. This type of language, besides showing the cynicism of the ruling elite and its intellectual accomplices, serves to hide the fascist tendencies of the Venezuelan government itself. If we understand fascism as a form of power that requires a total State to impose a regime of exclusion on a part of society, the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Cuban governments are closer to fascism than any of the expressions typified in Venezuelan law.
For example, in a recent interview for Resumen Latinoamericano, Cuban cultural curator Abel Prieto commented: “Many people are rereading the famous book by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, The Principles of Propaganda. When you read that, you realize that you can apply it to social networks because they are the same principles that influence today’s networks all the time: repeat the messages, make them very simple, and don’t make the audience think, or analyze anything. They have to be very basic messages and reiterate them, and then the lie will become the truth.” It does not take much intellectual effort to realize that this conception of propaganda governs the communicative efforts of the Cuban government: simple, binary truths, which are repeated over and over again and become “truths” by the force of repetition and by precluding the possibility of questioning them.
In the case of Nicaragua, the anti-fascist rhetoric follows the same logic and expresses the same problem of the concealment of their fascism behind the pretended fight against fascism. Daniel Ortega compared, at the beginning of 2023, the assailants of the Brazilian congress with the Nicaraguan opponents. He said then that “fascism is reinstalling itself in the world.” This “concern” came from the mouth of a tyrant whose repressive forces killed 356 protesters in 2018. Wilfredo Miranda, a Nicaraguan journalist dedicated to the analysis of these issues, points out that the Orteguista repression unequivocally belongs to fascism. This type of regime does not use the appeal to fascism only to directly attack movements, people, and groups that oppose the authoritarian or totalitarian establishment, but, in addition, by doing so they hide their totalitarian vocation of fascist nature.
The impact of the congress against fascism in Venezuela was not long in coming. The congress was followed by the creation of an Anti-Fascist International. On September 17, Casa de las Americas declared its support for it. The Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) called for an international essay contest on fascism, neo-fascism, and other similar expressions, organized together with Casa de las Americas, the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Network in Defense of Humanity. A distinctive feature of these efforts to promote the Anti-Fascist International is its state nature. And it is not just any type of state but states with political regimes such as those of Venezuela and Nicaragua, or openly totalitarian, such as Cuba. States that systematically suppress the will of the citizenry to impose their political project. It is these governments who, co-opting the space of social movements and civil society organizations, set themselves up as leaders of the global struggle against fascism.
Of course, the fact that it is these despots who claim to lead the anti-fascist struggle does not imply that the danger of fascism is false. It does mean that we must be sufficiently attentive to anti-fascist rhetoric, because sometimes, as we have seen, that is where one of the many faces of fascism emerges. The anti-fascist forces of the world would do well not to have these regimes as allies in their struggle. Fighting fascist tendencies while in alliance with a State of fascist tendencies serves nothing but to contribute to the rise of fascism everywhere: in the authoritarian regimes that claim to be anti-fascist to hide under that mask of their project of total control and in the reactions to them that, by pendulum effect and radical opposition, end up favoring other projects of radical exclusion.
* This text was made from the homonymous episode of Caminero, a podcast in Spanish hosted by the author in Rialta Magazine.
