The tyranny of hope

It never ceases to dismay me the extent to which so many otherwise intelligent observers get all bogged down in their attempts to analyze political movements accurately and without prejudice, regardless of the fact that their research may inevitably result in an emotionally depressing conclusion. Instead of keeping their analysis totally independent of their own political goals, in a scientific way, they insist on going off on various irrelevant tangents that are dictated to them by their own personal desires. Even if their analyses seem to overwhelmingly point to a rather obvious conclusion, they reject any analytical result that does not conform to their desperate need to come up with some kind of potentially victorious strategy that could, at least from their point of view, make the world become a better place in which to live. This type of flawed analysis, totally dependent on personal wish-fulfillment, seems to be particularly popular among many left-wing analysts, in their desperate attempts to deal with the rise of ultra-right-wing political movements nowadays.

A case in point is a book that I read recently by Enzo Traverso, Les nouveaux visages du fascisme (“The new faces of fascism”), published several months ago in France. Traverso is a specialist in the political and intellectual history of the twentieth century, who taught political science at the University of Picardie before moving on to become a professor at Cornell University in the USA. His book, published in the form of a conversation with Régis Meyran, focuses on a comparison between twentieth-century fascism and various new forms of the same ideology that he calls “post-fascist”, rather than the more obvious “neofascist”. He is particularly virulent in denouncing various right-wing nationalist movements in contemporary Europe that are using populist Islamophobia as a platform for taking power.

Curiously, however, he refuses to accept Islamism, defined as the political use of fundamentalist Islam for ultra-conservative political reasons (less violent groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as well as terrorist organizations like the Islamic State), as another form of neofascism, or post-fascism, preferring to interpret it as a kind of radical sunni nationalism. According to him, this ideology cannot be compared with classical fascism, even though such European movements as France’s National Front certainly can be so compared. First of all because, according to him, political Islamism has a universalist dimension within the world-wide Muslim community, and secondly because it is seen by many Muslims nowadays as an anti-colonial movement struggling against Western imperialism.

So far as his first argument is concerned, there is an obvious contradiction between describing ultra-right-wing Islamic extremism, not only the majority sunni component but also the minority shiite component, as a nationalist movement with a universalist dimension, while simultaneously ignoring any possible Christian universalist element within ultra-right-wing nationalist movements in Europe. Not to mention what is going on in the USA, a country that only appears in Traverso’s analysis because of its foreign policy, and not at all because of its own increasingly popular, ultra-right-wing movements.

Instead, it seems rather obvious to me that all the neofascist movements in Europe, as well as those in the rest of the Western world, most definitely depend on abundant support from within the various different branches of Christian fundamentalism. Post-Protestant, fundamentalist churches such as those belonging to the enormously large Pentecostal spectrum are also extremely active all over Latin America, as well as in many different parts of Africa and Asia. They certainly contribute a great deal to the popularity of ultra-right-wing movements in every one of those places. The former Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, for example, is still receiving widespread support from those ultra-religious people long after its official demise, the Lord’s Liberation Army in Uganda is still spawning various spinoffs all over the central part of Africa, and large sections of the Maronite churches in Lebanon are still faithful to the old Phalangist variety of classical fascism. There are dozens of other such examples to choose from all over the non-Western parts of the world.

Even France’s National Front, cleverly pretending to uphold republican laicity as part of its populist assault on Muslim influence inside that country, is still very closely connected to ultra-right-wing Catholic circles in Europe, which are every bit as politically active as any of the (post-Protestant) fundamentalist churches. The hugely popular French Catholic movement against same-sex marriage is a major contributor to National Front support at the polls. Ultra-reactionary governments in Europe, such as those in Poland and Hungary, are also intimately connected with mainly Catholic forms of Christian fundamentalism. Not to mention the extremely tight links between Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and the Christian Orthodox Church in that country. Greece’s neofascist political party, the Golden Dawn, is also tightly intertwined with similar Christian tendencies. Overlooking the links between Christian universalism and neofascist movements inside majority-Christian (or partly Christian) countries all over the world, is a major weakness in Traverso’s analysis.

Antediluvian religious movements are also highly important in any attempt to analyze ultra-right-wing tendencies in non-Muslim and non-Christian countries. Ultra-orthodox Judaism, for example, is obviously a major influence on the extremely reactionary Netanyahu government in Israel, as well as on political opinion among Jewish diaspora populations in many other places. The Hindu-nationalist movement currently controlling India is an even more important example, which also applies to the Hindu diaspora elsewhere, not to mention ultra-right-wing factions among India’s minority religions, such as Sikhism. Reactionary Confucianism has become an increasingly important element upholding the post-communist government in today’s China, while equally reactionary varieties of Shintoism also have considerable influence among leading political factions in Japan. Ultra-conservative forms of Buddhism are also extremely influential in such still very authoritarian regimes as the one that has long ruled Myanmar (Burma). Even though many of those “regional” religions may not have the same universal pretensions as any of the different kinds of monotheism, ignoring the link between ultra-conservative politics and ultra-conservative branches of any of the world’s major religions, is incredibly foolish.

Still, the main weakness in Traverso’s analysis of Islamic fundamentalism, also known as Salafism, is to be found in his second argument. Instead of acknowledging that ultra-right-wing Islamism is also just another form of contemporary neofascism, he came up with the ridiculous idea that we have no right to make that link because “many Muslims” consider such groups as the Islamic State movement to be anti-colonial movements struggling against Western imperialism. Indeed, he goes to great lengths in his book to root all Muslim resistance to any sort of Western influence, including what he considers to be the exclusively “Western” idea of republican laicity, as constituting an integral part of the anti-imperialist struggle. This particular aspect of his analysis is exceptionally odd, given the extremely well-known examples of recent as well as longstanding efforts on the part of the British, the French and the American empires toward using the most reactionary forms of Islam as allies in the Western assault against nationalist and communist tendencies inside every Muslim-majority country in the world. Among many other such examples, how can anyone nowadays refuse to recognize the existence of such officially acknowledged, real-world conspiracies as the USA’s alliance with Osama ben Laden’s mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?

To be sure, Traverso’s book was published several months before some whistleblower inside the Trump regime in the USA “outed” the Manchester bomber, Islamic terrorist Salman Abedi, as having been given freedom of movement in and out of Britain ever since he became a British intelligence “asset” back in 2011, during the coordinated Western/Islamic assault on the nationalist Gaddafi dictatorship in Libya. Still, anyone doing research last year or the year before on Islamic terrorism’s links with Western imperialism should still have been able to have found out a lot about the Western/Islamist alliance against nationalism and communism. How can Traverso presume that the Islamic State in particular cannot be seen as a neofascist movement, therefore, just because “many Muslims” have decided that Daesh is in fact fighting against Western imperialism, rather than being intimately involved in something altogether more sinister?

Like many other utopian leftists, Traverso seems entirely caught up in an extremely naive attempt to make excuses for Islamic fundamentalism, as part of a totally misinterpreted fight against populist Western Islamophobia. Certainly there is no doubt that, under the influence of right-wing populist and neofascist politicians such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, millions of Westerners have come to believe that all Muslims are terrorists, in spite of the extremely well-known fact that such is not the case. It is also true that those Westerners, as well as millions of other people all over the world who are neither Muslim nor Western, often think that way for racist reasons. People such as these, in every part of the world, have apparently concluded against all evidence to the contrary that all Muslims, or at least most of them, also belong to some kind of Islamic “race”, rather than in fact belonging to a universal religion that, in spite of its extreme theological and political divisions, accepts believers coming from every possible cultural community.

Traverso, however, along with millions of other people practising multiculturalism as a system of belief rather than as a simple refusal of traditional racism, believes instead that all Westerners are equally and collectively guilty of having supported modern Western imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, from way back in the fifteenth century all the way up to the present day. As a result, they feel that all Westerners therefore have to atone for their sins by supporting, or at least refusing to attack, any Asian, African or Latin American attempt to free their peoples entirely from any modern, corrupting, exclusively “Western” influence of any kind whatsoever. From the hyper-reductionist, multiculturalist point of view, even universal ideas like the scientific method, or the separation of politics and religion, or any other concept that they falsely believe is entirely Western in origin, has no place whatsoever in any non-Western culture nowadays (such as the Muslim culture).

Hence these people’s completely ridiculous reverse amalgam, equating the fight against Islamophobia in the West with support for, or at least neutrality towards, any kind of anti-Western movements whatsoever coming from the non-Western countries, no matter how inherently reactionary they may turn out to be. Just like the old Nazi party in Germany, today’s political multiculturalists have collectively adopted an essentialist or communitarian approach to culture, believing that every distinct group of people in the world possesses certain particular characteristics that they can never shake off, nor share with any other distinct group. In their case, they seem to be reacting against the fact that they themselves probably feel the same racist rejection of non-Westerners, buried somewhere far down in their own subconscious psyches, as do the much more transparent, up-front, ultra-right-wing populists in the Western countries. As a result, they feel that they must therefore cleanse themselves of that sin by accepting only the most ultra-conservative definitions of Islam as genuine. Which, in fact, proves exactly the opposite of what they set out to prove. In reality, they are just as racist as the fascists are, even though their racism has masochistic rather than sadistic origins.

Personally, I find this kind of collective guilt syndrome to be inherently abhorrent. This is like saying that all the non-Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, during the Second World War, supported antisemitism equally, not just the Nazis and their allies, but also all those heroic individuals, of whatever religious or political persuasions, who risked their lives, and often lost them, trying to protect as many Jews as they could from the fascist onslaught. By the same token, it is totally ridiculous to assume nowadays that even people in the West who have condemned Western imperialism throughout their entire lives, should somehow be guilty of all the same atrocities that the governments and the leading investors of those countries committed, just because those Western anti-imperialists dare to also say something critical about Islam.

For emotional reasons, people like Traverso refuse to recognize that the Muslim world is currently living through a period of history that is in some respects analogous to the period that the Catholic Church went through when Pope Pius IX was in power (1846-1878). During those years, Catholics all over the world were largely under the influence of an ultra-conservative mode of thinking propagated by most church leaders, denouncing everything modern that existed, not only socialism and communism, but also democracy, industrialization, technology and urbanization. Many Catholics succeeded in resisting those ultra-right-wing tendencies, but most of them did not. At least not until the new pope, Leo XIII, took over (1878-1903).

Islam today is going through a similar transformation. The atavistic golem unleashed inside the Muslim world, both in the Sunni majority and in the Shiite minority, has been steadily gaining strength in recent years, reversing earlier attempts at modernizing the face of Islam. For several decades now, ultra-conservative forces in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, even while hating each other intensely, have nevertheless been spending billions of dollars on propagating the most antediluvian interpretations of Islam possible. They accomplished this task as part of a largely successful attempt to hang onto power by physically eliminating all the nationalist and communist movements within the Muslim-majority countries, as well as within their own overseas diasporas.

Once again, those ultra-reactionary forces inside Islam have also been helped along in a major way by the most important Western empires, also interested in reinforcing their own neocolonial control of many of those same countries by helping to wipe out the same nationalist and communist movements targeted by their Islamist allies. Like the Catholics back in the nineteenth century, many of today’s Muslims are still resisting those atavistic golems, but no one can deny that the Muslim world as a whole is steadily drifting toward the right, and the extreme right, just like all the other regions on this benighted planet are also drifting in the same direction. The fact that most Muslims nowadays are not terrorists does not mean that many Muslims do not mistakenly believe that ultra-conservative Islam nevertheless acts as a useful bulwark against excessive Western influence on their culture.

So far as I can tell from having tried to read between the lines in his often elusive analysis, Traverso also seems to believe that because there is a large Muslim minority in many different Western countries, especially in France, there is henceforth no way that anyone can ever again have any progressive political influence in such countries, if any “Western” person (citizens of non-Muslim origin) criticizes Islam for any reason whatsoever. More or less in the same way than many contemporary Zionists feel that any criticism of Israel, for any reason whatsoever, is necessarily antisemitic. People suffering under the influence of this modern ideological disease (fanatical belief in multiculturalism as some kind of new religion) are convinced that no progressive ideas will ever take hold in the West again, unless and until every single non-Muslim person refrains forever from saying anything with which some Muslim person might not agree. In spite of the fact that, notwithstanding the general drift within that system of belief towards the ultra-right, there are still almost as many varieties of Muslim belief in this world as there are individual Muslims. Even the fundamentalist Muslims are always fighting among themselves for political hegemony, just like the fundamentalist groups inside all the other religions.

So, I definitely feel that Islamic terrorism is only the most extreme form of ultra-conservative Islam (Salafism), which as an entire political ideology constitutes a kind of spectrum, from somewhat less fascist on one end of the spectrum, all the way out to a whole lot more fascist on the other end. As do all the other varieties of ultra-right-wing politics all over the world, Western and non-Western, such as Hindu nationalism in India. I do not agree with any of the overly restrictive interpretations of history that confine such concepts as fascism, science, democracy, individuality and capitalism exclusively to Western civilization. The term neofascism ought to be able to be used, particularly in an increasingly globalized society like the one we all live in nowadays, to describe any deliberately backward political stance in any part of the world that consistently rejects all forms of modern social progress in favour of a return to extreme varieties of elitism, misogyny and essentialist (or culturalist) racism.

That being said, it has become abundantly clear in recent years that the Western world is also most definitely on the same ultra-right-wing trajectory. Ever since the neoliberal counter-revolution that started back in the 1970s, based on a contemporary radicalization of old-fashioned laissez-faire ideas left over from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, government “interventions” into economic and social policy have not just been privatized one by one. Government as a whole has been deliberately replaced by “governance”, a neoliberal invention in which all governments nowadays are expected to act like private corporations and to make a profit at the expense of their underprivileged clienteles (students, patients, union members, welfare recipients, small merchants, etc.). “Moderate liberal” regimes like the former Obama administration in the USA, as well as current governments like the Merkel regime in Germany, Macron in France and Trudeau in Canada, have all been focused for the past forty years on gradually transforming the previously Keynesian outlook of the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975) into a Hayekian “brave new world” of libertarian elitism.

As I have pointed out in several other blogposts, neoliberalism, the hegemonic world ideology since the late 1970s, is responsible for having created the economic and social conditions necessary for the current rise of the once moribund neofascist movement. Reactionary, elitist decisions like the one that Bill Clinton made in 1999, getting rid of the Glass-Steagal act of 1933 (that had separated investment banking from deposit banking), led directly to the world-wide financial crisis of 2008. Which still has an enormous negative impact on the world economy nowadays, among other things by making huge geopolitical crises like the one involving North Korea, extremely dangerous for economic as well as for military and humanitarian reasons. This kind of atavistic decision-making, adopted at first all over the Western world and then copied everywhere else, has now succeeded in bringing right-wing populism back into the political mainstream, especially by enormously increasing the income gap between a very small number of ultra-rich people and a very large number of much poorer people.

In other words, Henry Ford’s idea of increasing wages so that his own workers could afford to buy the cars that they were making, has been completely abandoned, notably by giving most of the new industrial jobs in the world to low-wage, non-Western labour. As a result, millions of people in the West have reacted by returning to the kind of explicitly racist, sexist and ultra-elitist ideas that everyone thought were supposed to have disappeared forever from mainstream politics. In spite of some non-Western countries having received most of the new industrial jobs in the world, most non-Western peoples and cultures have also drifted back toward the same kind of atavism, following the complete and total breakdown of the old ideological alliance between the nominally communist (state-capitalist) countries and the anti-imperialist movement, all over the non-Western world.

To be sure, as in the Muslim part of the non-Western world, this return to populist fascism in the West did not come about just because of the new economic and social circumstances initiated by neoliberalism. It was also financed by the expenditure of billions of dollars, through such channels as the USA’s ultra-right-wing political action committees (PACs), on agitation and propaganda promoting the deliberate return of 1930s style ultra-conservatism. Of course, other competing billions were also spent by liberal billionaires like George Soros through PACs supporting the Democratic Party campaigns in the USA, and similar kinds of funding elsewhere, enabling regular liberals to win a few races, such as Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote victory in last year’s presidential election.

But the even larger pots of money spent by billionaires like the Koch brothers enabled ultra-conservative populists like Donald Trump to capture not only the White House (in spite of the popular vote tally), but also both houses of Congress. As a result, the USA is currently dominated by an administration that supports both neoliberalism and neofascism together, at the same time, with an opposition that also supports neoliberalism (ultimately engendering more neofascism) but does that not (directly) support neofascism. A somewhat similar scenario, involving the expenditure of huge sums of money, and the division of mainstream politics into two partly competing, and partly collaborating tendencies, also dominates current European politics, as well as politics in the other, less important, parts of the Western world, such as Canada and Australia.

The neoliberal aspects of Trump’s program include such policies as his very complicated fiscal plan, with its heavy accent on giving much larger tax breaks to the ultra-rich than even the extremely generous breaks already granted to such people by all the previous administrations since 1981. While the neofascist aspects of Trump’s program include all the various methods so far divulged of making things even more difficult than they were before, for all the minority populations in the USA, such as Blacks, Latinos, native peoples and the various different categories of immigrants. This combination of neoliberal and neofascist aspects of the same political program is somewhat less obvious (but not by much) in Europe, affecting both national agencies and regional ones (such as the various branches of the European Union).

But they are also just as obvious in other parts of the world, such as within the so-called, “moderately Muslim”, Egyptian military dictatorship as well as within the elected government of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi in India, not to mention inside the post-communist governments in falsely democratic Russia and deliberately anti-democratic China. Meanwhile, practically every government in the world has abandoned any further attempts at installing social democracy (the welfare state) anywhere, while gradually dismantling most of the programs adopted in days gone by. Barack Obama’s feeble attempt at slightly expanding public health care in the USA is also on very shaky grounds these days.

In the USA, the ideological return to fascism, which was only adopted regionally during the 1930s (notably in Louisiana, under Governor Huey Long), has been largely based, as could have been expected, on the lily-white ideas of the old Southern Confederacy. As the recent Charlottesville riots indicated, Southern racism, old-fashioned sexism, extreme elitism and old-time religion, have now taken over a huge segment of American politics, North and South. Egged on by a right-wing populist administration bent on giving cover to neofascist attempts at “making America great again” by once again further degrading, or expelling, all the non-white “foreign elements” from the country.

Donald Trump himself criticized all recent attacks on the great Southern “heroes” of days gone by, as well as greeting flood victims by waving the “Lone Star” flag of 1837-1845 Texas independence, thereby underlining his at least implicit support for the return of “Jim Crow” policies towards Black people, anti-Mexican and anti-Catholic rhetoric, and so on. The only way he seems to differ ideologically from the most extreme right-wing elements in the USA nowadays is in his oblique refusal to adopt antisemitism as well, probably because of the importance of Christian Zionism within his own political base. At least until his son-in-law trips up badly enough in his dealings with Russia to provide Trump with an opportunity to go even farther down the same neofascist road than he already has gone.

Several years ago, when I was doing research for both my master’s and my doctoral theses in history, I found out a little bit about the links that existed during the nineteenth century between the reactionary, racist Confederacy and its support for free trade and for economic liberalism in general, the laissez-faire policies of that period anticipating the neoliberalism of our own period. In those days, the Democratic Party in the USA was much closer to the Confederate point of view than the Republican Party was, the Republicans supporting industrialization and protectionism, as well as an end to slavery.

Back then, the British and the French monarchical empires supported the South for neocolonial reasons, the USA being much easier to control when it was divided into two separate parts, one of which was quite content to forever continue shipping freely-traded American raw materials to help build up industrial wealth in Great Britain. The French empire (Napoleon III) even invaded Mexico in 1862 and stayed there until 1867, benefiting from the temporary weakness not only of republican Mexico, but also of the republican USA during the Civil War. Here in Montreal, leading bankers in “British America” helped the South as much as they could, sponsoring early plotting against the life of Abraham Lincoln in the basement of the Bank of Montreal, as well as inviting Southern “patriot” Jefferson Davis to their fine city after the war.

A plaque to that effect was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy during the civil rights agitation in the USA during the 1950s, on the wall of what is now the Hudson’s Bay Company building in Montreal. Following the publication of a recent book by Barry Sheehy, all about Montreal’s numerous connections with the Southern Confederacy, that plaque has recently been removed. Thereby mirroring the current movement in the USA toward taking down statues of Southern, Civil War “heroes” (traitors to the USA), most of which were also erected as a negative history lesson during the civil rights movement of the 1950s. As they say in French, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Another book that I read recently was of an entirely different nature from Traverso’s book, at least at first glance. This was that all-time classic written by Primo Levi, called If this is a man (also published in the USA under the title Survival in Auschwitz), that first appeared back in 1947. It is the extremely disturbing story of Levi’s year in a German concentration camp inside occupied Poland, and is different from most of the other such accounts by focusing entirely, and also very thoroughly, on everything that actually happened to Levi himself during that period. Levi is extremely good at describing precisely how very different were the reactions toward enforced slavery, in unbelievably wretched working conditions, of many different kinds of concentration camp inmates.

Most of them, apparently called “Muslims” for some strange reason, did exactly everything that they were told to do, without trying to fend for themselves “illegally” (from the Nazi point of view), and died off very quickly. Others, the kapos, collaborated with the Nazis by helping them control the other prisoners in various devious, and thoroughly immoral, ways. Levi was in the other group of survivors, those who did not collaborate, but instead relied on their own devices to work out what were often ingenious ways of stealing, trading for food and doing whatever other “illegal” activity that was necessary to be still alive when their Russian liberators finally showed up.

Connecting my reading of Levi’s book about “classical” fascism with my analysis of Traverso’s book on the current rise of neofascism, is a simple interrogation. Why would anyone in his right mind, nowadays, possible want to do such an incredibly stupid thing? It certainly does seem as if history is repeating itself in several different ways, people all over the world repeatedly refusing to learn the lessons of the past. In the case of those Muslims who directly or indirectly support ultra-right-wing Islamism, they seem to have totally ignored the fact that the more antediluvian interpretations of their religion inevitably tend to reinforce rival forms of imperialism instead.

In the case of those Westerners who have succumbed to either neoliberal forms of ultra-elitist atavism, or to the neofascist kind (combining racism, sexism and ultra-elitism), they also seem to have totally ignored other equally pertinent facts concerning their own empires. Such as that it is never a good idea to give into big-business attempts, particularly among the world’s largest banks, at making enormous gobs of money without giving anything back to the rest of society in the form of any investment that could be useful to someone besides the world’s leading investors. Or that dividing the nation into “good” citizens (Aryens or lily-whites) and “bad” citizens (non-Aryens or non-whites) is maybe not the best way to make this world a better place in which to live. Similar comparisons could easily be made for all the non-Muslim and non-Western societies mentioned above.

One last case in point was the confrontation in Quebec City, a few weeks ago, between a group of white supremacists who call themselves “La Meute” (“the wolf pack”) and a group of anarchist anti-fascists. The supremacists managed to get a lot of good publicity for their cause by playing the card of “respecting law and order”, while the anarchists got a lot of bad publicity by using “Black Bloc” tactics based on smashing any property, public or private, that they happened to find nearby. The Quebec anarchists were probably following the lead of similar movements in France, especially the self-proclaimed “Invisible Committee”, in whose books (“L’insurrection qui vient” from 2007 and “À nos amis” in 2014) they underlined how wonderful it has been to watch populist rebels all over the world smash things as a way of letting off steam. For some reasons, the world’s anarchists still seem to think that all such popular violence somehow results in improving the world immensely, in some kind of nebulous, spiritual way, but only if those rebellions remain totally spontaneous.

As for the Quebec supremacists, they reminded me a lot of the ridiculous posturing of several hundred pro-fascist citizens in the Lower St. Lawrence region of Quebec during the 1930s, as depicted in the recent Quebec television program, “Le Cormorant”. That show seems to have used the cormorant, a large black water bird that can be seen anywhere along the St. Lawrence River even nowadays, as a kind of symbol for the black-shirted proto fascists who paraded around for awhile in the Rivière-du-Loup region of Quebec 80 years ago, before completely disappearing during the Second World War.

I think that the only way to conclude this article is to emphasize how thoroughly inappropriate it is to prepare for the future by constantly reliving the past. Does anyone out there really believe that reviving failed ideologies from days gone by, such as anarchism, laissez-faire (also known as libertarianism and/or neoliberalism) and most especially, all the different varieties of neofascism, is really the best way to prepare ourselves for solving all the ecological crises, the financial crises, the geopolitical crises and the social crises currently afflicting this godforsaken planet? Instead, permanent, world-wide progress on all those different fronts seems to be the only thing that human beings never seem capable of achieving. In order to get anywhere at all in the future, we need to free ourselves from the tyranny of hope, on the one hand from naively believing that “our” kind of neofascism will ultimately triumph over all the other kinds, and on the other hand from naively ignoring the rise of neofascism in some other part of the world, thinking that it will somehow magically go away all by itself.