Gabriel Rockhill on the Effacement of Fascism in the Liberal Political Imaginary

Transcribed and lightly edited excerpt by Helmut-Harry Loewen, Winnipeg, 17 February 2020, from a presentation by Dr. Gabriel Rockhill (Philosophy, Villanova University): “Toward a Counter-History of French Theory: Understanding the Global Political Economy of Ideas” at the Atelier de Théorie Critique / Critical Theory Workshop's Summer Program at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, 15 July 2019:

The predominant historical imaginary of the Western world in its globalized extension – definitely since World War Two, if not earlier – is based on the idea that we live in liberal democracies that uphold the rule of law and whose role is to maintain a neutral state apparatus that protects the rights of all individuals. This is the core of political liberalism.

What this account, this historical imaginary does is it completely effaces other quintessentially important dimensions of history, one of the most important of which is the rule of authoritarian and fascistic rule as a quintessential component of all modern liberal nation-states. Of course, we saw this yesterday [on Bastille Day, 14 July 2019] with the juxtaposition between the pageantry of the liberal state and its military apparatus, which is performing before the public all of its military might and its pomp and circumstance, presuming and hoping that all of its citizens would just line up as passive spectators and look at, with awe, the kind of at once military might and protective state of law of the French nation-state, combined with the fireworks display and everything else. What’s going on at the same time? At the same time you have Yellow Vests protests that continue to go on, that aren’t covered by the media, and the targeting of certain leaders of the Yellow Vests movement who are arrested in very clearly targeted circumstances, taken then to some police warehouse holding tank of sorts, all the while with the pageantry going on. What this displays for me in microcosm is precisely the way in which liberal nation-states have actually functioned historically. And that is, the window display is always one of the state as benefactor protecting the rights of citizens, when what actually occurs is that the poor and anyone who resists the top-down class warfare of the ruling class is subjected systematically to fascistic and authoritarian rule.

The idea that there’s a risk that the nation-state would become fascistic – like France or the United States in the Trump Era – is nonsense, because it’s an epochal conception of history that misses the fact that fascism and authoritarian rule are integral to how liberal nation-states that are capitalistic have always functioned. This is Césaire’s point, if you’ve read his “Discourse of Colonialism,” concerning the very term “fascism,” where he says, well, people are talking about fascism when it starts happening in Europe, but the history of colonialism is the history of the authoritarian destruction of the lives of the masses of the population, and to subject them to capitalist colonial rule. The problem with a unidimensional conception of history and the dominant historical imaginary is that all of this is effaced so that all you can see is the liberal story of the benefactor state, or the “contradictions of liberalism” which presumes – if you think of the work of Chomsky and others who maintain this line – that what the nation-state says, it could potentially do. The nation-state says we have the rights of man and the citizen, we protect all of our citizens, etc., but it’s in contradiction because it’s constantly doing the opposite. But the problem is that this doesn’t understand how fascism and liberalism actually historically relate to one another. The way they relate is as two modes of governance that I refer to as the good cop/bad cop of capitalist rule. The two modes of governance function in very close complicity with one another. They often will toggle back and forth between them. For poor communities of color in the United States it’s usually the fascistic authoritarian rule of the prison-industrial-complex, but for whites - not understood as a color but as a social economic category - they’re usually subjected to liberal rule.

If we have a more multidimensional understanding of this history, then we cannot succumb to the idea of some kind of ‘Zeitgeist’ or march of history or other such things. This is integral to an understanding of our conjuncture. The risk isn’t that fascism will come about. The reality is that it’s always already been here. Liberals have to train themselves to see its existence. […] The whole narrative that’s been shoved down everybody’s throats through Hollywood and soft power mechanisms in general is fundamentally flawed: the idea that the United States defeated Nazism and fascism and then established the liberal rule of law and extended it around the world. This is flawed at so many levels I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I’ve mentioned Operation Paperclip whereby 1,600 Nazis were directly brought into the United States after the war, given laboratories and funding for research. 10-15,000 Nazis, according to Eric Lichtblau’s study [“The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men”] were brought in after the war. The goal was to maintain what the U.S. knew very clearly, because we have all of the internal documents that spell it out, and that is that the fascists and the Nazis are very good at one thing, and that is destroying anybody who is trying to resist capitalism. We got to work with these hired guns and set up – people know about Operation Gladio within Europe – secret stay-behind armies. This has been extremely well documented. These documents go up to the European Union - they have a resolution on this, so it’s not some kind of weirdo conspiracy theory; as well as the Italian high court. The state of Italy was found guilty of having a stay-behind army that was orchestrated by the CIA, which was a group of fascists whose role was to make sure that if leftists came anywhere close to power, their organizations would be destroyed, their leaders targeted for assassination or incarceration. They then began during the “Strategy of Tension” committing acts of terrorism against the civilian population in order to do two things: one was to scare the lights out of the citizenry to make sure they would vote in law-and-order governments, which were right-wing governments, and secondly, to delegitimate the leftist movements, particularly the Communists, but anyone who’s anti-capitalist, anarchists, etc. And that project is precisely how the world we live in functions, but it is difficult for people to see. This is why conceptually I refer to this as the aesthetics of power. The aesthetics of power indexes how a powerful apparatus like a nation-state or the global corporatocracy produces an image of itself, an aesthetics that is quintessential to the functioning of that power. If people educated in the United States knew anything about from Japanese internment camps to Operation Gladio to a whole series of other operations that were going on, it would be more difficult to keep the citizenry placated. And so you have to produce an image of power that is more or less the opposite of how that power functions. This is why soft power is so important, because it confuses people about how the world works.

Transcribed portion: 09:02 mins. – 17:07 mins.