Hitlerism, Trumpism, Netanyahu, Lepenism, Macronism

A comparative and expressive approach

Emmanual Todd and posted at the The Francophone Saker Blog

(This was machine translated from French)

The references from the 1930s were multiplied. The degeneration of American democracy seems to bring us back to that of the German republic of Weimar. Trump, for his joy in violence and lie, for the exercise of evil, irresistibly ramen to Hitler. In Europe, the mountain of movements categorized as extreme-right obliges us to this return on our history.

Western societies, however, no longer resemble what they were in the 1930’s. They are aged, consumption, tertiary, women are emancipated, personal development ya replaces partisan adherence. What does it have to do with the societies of the 1930s: young, frugal, industrial, workers, men, inserted? It is this socio-historical distance that had led me to consider until today as a priori invalidate the parallel between the “Extreme Right” of the present and those of the past. But political doctrines exist, today as yesterday, and one cannot be content to postularize the impossibility, for example, of an old Nazism, a francism of consumers, a fascism of liberated women or an LGBTism Croix-de-Fire.

The time has come to compare the doctrines of our present to those of the 1930s. Here is the outline of what could be the comparative study of five historical phenomena: Hitlerism, Trumpism, netanyahi(u)sme, lepenism. I will add at the end of the course, briefly, macronism. The centrist and European extremism that leads France to chaos obliges us to this examination. Is this extremism so centrist?

It will be an impressionist approach, without prejudice to completeness or even consistency, the purpose of which is to open up leads, not to conclude.

Strength of the features and colors for pleasure – the concepts in relation to each other. I’m deliberately exaggerating, to catch up or even anticipate a story that is accelerating. Expressionist approach will be perhaps a more appropriate metaphor.

Let’s start with the general dimension of racism or xenophobia.

The rejection of a “Other” defined as external to the national community, with very variable levels of intensity, is common to Hitlerism, Trumpism and lepenism. In the case of Hitlerism and Trumpism, there is the notion of racism, explicit or implicit, which is common. The Jews were considered by Nazism to be a race, in the biological sense. Blacks, these barely hidden targets of the Trumpized Republican Party, are also biologically defined. To lepenism, on the other hand, we can only associate the concept of xenophobia. Arabs or Muslims are defined by culture. One of the characteristics of the French obsession with immigration remains its fixation on Islam and its inability to target blacks, whose massive arrival is the new element of the migration process. The rate of mixed marriages of black women is three years old in France, the insignificant remaining in the United States.

A common feature of “populisms” Westerners is of course their refusal of immigration: Reform UK, the Sverigedemokraterna (Democrats of Sweden), the AfD, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, pass, like Trump or the Pen, the test of this common denominator. Is it enough to define them as far-right, in the sense that Nazism and fascism were far-right? I don’t think so. A crucial difference opposes today’s populism to the extreme right of the Hitler or Mussolinian type: Nazism and fascism were expansionist, with the aim of projecting to the outside of the power of the German (Aryan) or Italian (Roman) people. They were aggressive, nationalist, conquerors. They were relying on mass shares. We can’t imagine the current populists organizing the Nuremberg-style parades. The aperitifs sausage-pinard of the RN are certainly anti-Muslim but, nevertheless, less impressive than the Hitler war ceremonies. From Nuremberg to Hénin-Beaumont? Really?

Western populism will pass 100% of Netanyahu’s cell expansion test. Colonies of the West Bank, genocide of Gaza: Establishing relationship a between Hitlerism and Netanyahu is inevitable.

The French, British, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian, Italian xenophobias are, in contrast to Nazism and fascism, defensive. We are not dealing with people who want to conquer but about people who want to remain masters at home. That is why the cultural dimension prevails today in Europe over the racial concept and why we can only speak here of xenophobia. This is xenophobia a conservative, where Hitler’s racism was revolutionary because it disrupted social organization. The notion of nationalism therefore does not apply to current European populisms, the notion of extreme right either, or we will have to introduce oxymorons like “Moderate Nationalism” and “moderate extreme right” . I to prefer of popular conservatism.

Personally in favour of controlled immigration, I must admit the legitimacy of thiste xenophobia because I accept the axiom that a human group with a culture, aware of existing as a community, in short a people, has the right to want to continue to exist. A person who controls the borders. Nazism, with its soldiers installed from the Atlantic to the Volga to serve or exterminate other peoples there was quite another thing.

Trumpism represent a mixed form that seems to combines a central defense element, anti-immigration, with a strong potential for aggression in the foreign world. This is not about expansionism. It is the earlier expansion of the US military apparatus and the role of the dollar in imperial predation that have made possible the violent Trumpian acts directed against other peoples and nations: Venezuela, Iran, we, the Western European subject peoples, and of course the Arabs, with the Palestinians as the main target. The gradual integration of Israel into the Empire, from 1967, makes that by 2025 we can hardly distinguish the Trumpism of Netanyahuism. But Trump, beyond his nobelizable antics, is indeed the chief culprit of the genocide in Gaza by his long-term encouragement to Israel’s violence: this so simple fact makes Trumpism fall on the side of Hitlerism. Trump is still behind the wheel: US accelerators and brakes regulate Netanyahu’s genocidal aggressiveness. I am lucky: as I write, Trump, frightened by the reaction of the Arab peas to the Israeli raid on Qatar, and in particular by the strategic alliance between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, is retreating. He ordered Netanyahu to apologize for the bombing in Qatar and he executed. Trump imposes on Israel an agreement with Hamas and Netanyahu. Then? Trump is perverted, impossible to say.

The concept of Trumpo-Netanyahism, rather ugly I admit, makes it possible to identify the Jewish question as a common point in the American crisis of the years 2000-2035 and the German crisis of the years 1920-1945.

The radical pro-Israel stance of Trumpism masks in my opinion a visceral and vicious anti-Semitism: the identification of all Jews with netanyahism, a historical phenomenon effectively monstrous, canker in Jewish history, will only lead to renewing the Nazi conception of a monstrous Jewish people. I am talking about anti-Semitism 2.0.

I am aware that few actors will follow me on this point. But here I am only speaking like a banal prophet of the Old Testament. ” We were not chosen to be on the side of the powerful. History never ceases to set this trap for us . How many times the Jews thought themselves saved by the strong, by the powerful, by power, by an empire, designated even by a privilege – financial, intellectual success, importance in the Bolshevik party – to be finally thrown into fray to furious peoples… My heart bleeds When see you so many French Jews, who are believed on the sleeve, Netanyahu’s politics. But the children of a child who are on the train are very good. Thanks to Trump, the planet has anti-Semitic. American Jews, the majority of whom reject the Netanyahu line, are wiser and more just. But already, the Jews hostile to Netanyahu, academic or not, are suspected by the power of being anti-Semitic. Perversity reigns. Trumpism reigns.us .” How many times the Jews thought themselves saved by the strong, by the powerful, by an empire, even by designated a privilege – financial, intellectual success, importance in the Bolshevik party – to be finally be thrown into fray to furious peoples… My heart bleeds when I see so many French Jews, who today believe themselves on the side of the round, Netanyahu’s policy. But it is the jaws of a trap that are opening. the majority of those who reject the Netanyahu line, are wiser and more just. But already, Jews hostile to Netanyahu, or academic not, are suspected by the power of being anti-Semitic.

When is the close of the trap? One day, the Christian nations will inevitably make their peace with 1.6 billion Muslims. The Jews will then be abandoned by their fans and, now alone, thrown into the pasture to other furious peoples.

The promised land succeeds, disasters follow them. Nightfall, the first novel by Isaac Asimov, is the third great author of American science fiction, and seem to metaphor for the long suite of dramas that constitutes that the last story: within a civilization, a remnant of prophecy announces a mysterious catastrophe… it arrives, surprising… civilization. collapses… then slowly, it is reborn, it flourishes… a resumption of prophecy announces a mysterious catastrophe… it arrives, surprising…

In truth, the mere return of Jewish obsession to the heart of the West validates the hypothesis of a threatening continuity between the past and the present.

Zombie Protestantism and Nazism, Zero Protestantism and Trumpism

The economic crisis of 1929 was a determining, well-known factor in the Hitlerization of Germany. 6 million of the unemployed escaped Germany society from any ideological recall force. Hitler’s liquidation of unemployment in a few months sealed the fate of liberalism.

The religious context of the rise of Nazism, all also important, is less familiar: between 1870 and 1930, the Protestant faith vanished in Germany, first in the working world, then in the middle and upper classes. The Catholic regions resisted. In 1932 and 1933, the Nazi vote card was reproduced, with fascinating and literacy. Protestantism did not believe in the equality of men. There were the elect, appointed as such by the Lord even before their birth, and the damned. The metaphysical belief Protestant once it disappeared, what remained of it was the hysterization by the fear of the void of its unequal content, with the Jews, the Slavs and so many others as damned. In the United States, Protestantism of Calvinist origin targeted blacks. The Calvinist people, made on the Bible, themselves identified in Hebrew, and who born the anti-Semitism of America in the last few years and my open judgments. Finally…safe until the recent emergence of evangelical fixation on the state of Israel.

In the French Catholic Church, (in the Parisian Basin and on the Mediterranean facade in particular), the collapse of the faith and practice made 1730 to mutate the equal opportunities for access to paradise (obtained by baptism, which washes original sin) into equality of citizens and the emancipation of Jews. The republican idea of a universal man replaces that of the universal Catholic Christian (katholikoss universal in Greek). A very different program than Nazism but which had represented, long before it, the first massive replacement of a religion by an ideology. In both revolutionary and Nazi Germany, however, the potential for social and moral leadership of religion had survived the belief: the individual remained a member of his nation, his class, bearer of a work ethic and the sense of obligations towards the members of the group. The capacity of collective action is strong, ten-fold. This is what I call the zombie stadium of religion. The Nazis corresponds to this zombie state, which, due to unhappy, is and militarily effective.

I could complete this religious explanation of ideology with an explanation of religion itself, influenced by the underlying family structures, unequal in Germany and egalitarian in the Paris Basin. But we can be satisfied here with a continuity of Protestantism in Nazism and Catholicism in the French Revolution.

We find Protestantism in Trumpism. We then find the inequality associated with negrophobia. However, we are no longer at the zombie stage of religion but at its zero stage. The common morality has disappeared. Social efficiency has disappeared. The individual floats, particularly in this America of absolute nuclear family structure, individualistic and without a well-defined rule of inheritance. So it is to be expected as a Trumpist ideology: inequality always, but less stability in delirium, from brutal oscillations that do not, fundamentally, come from the brain of a vulgar and vicious president but from society itself. The capacity for collective, economic and military action is, fortunately for us, greatly diminished.

Note in the case of Trumpism the emergence of pseudo-nusely nihilistic forms that include an obscene reinterpretation of the Bible, such as a glorification of the rich. Significantly weaker than Nazism in the dimension of racism, Trumpism goes further in economic immorality.

Nazism is simply and anti-Christian. Trumpism is intended to be religious but in the manner of a satanic cult, by the inversion of values. Evil is good, injustice is justice. Hitler was only the Führer, guide of the German people to his martyrdom; Trump is not Satan but I suspect that for his Satanist fans his red cap is that of the Antichrist.

In the case of lepenism, no unequal Protestant inheritance. This is the real mystery of the National Rally: xenophobic, he was born in Catholic land. Worse still, its first zones of strength, on the Mediterranean facade and in the Paris basin, were that of the Revolution: egalitarian on the family and de-Christianized level from the eighteenth century. So, then? Inequality the National Rally? Egalitarian? Mystery to us, the RN is probably also for itself. They are rejected from the other results from a perverse egalitarianism that a rapid assimilation of immigrants rather than it feels them as different in essence. Above all, the RN, strongly determined by the rejection of immigrants, and even their children, is nevertheless constantly reminded of the French egalitarian tradition because its voters hate the ultra-rich, the powerful, in short our idiot elites, and not only the Immigrants. This is why the union of the right is struggling to succeed in France. In one form or another, the union of the oligarchs and the (white) people against the foreigner does not pose problems in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Scandinavia, where conservative popular forces and classical right-wing forces are easily agreed. In France, the coalition of rich and poverty against foreigners is dismantled.

However, do not underestimate the potential violence of a xenophobia of universalist essence. It can become racism. If a man thinks a priori that men are everywhere the same and that he is confronted with men bearing different customs, he may very well conclude that they are not men.

The RN is the product of a zero Catholicism, like the Revolution of a zombie Catholicism. That is why it will not give birth to any collective project. I refer the detailed examination of the RN and its relationship in the future to a future text, neither impressionist, nor expressionist, which I will devote entirely to the internal logic and dynamics of French chaos.

Psychiatry of the most advanced classes

I now turn to a crucial difference, which should be obvious to all and recalled by the political commentators who constantly refer us back to 1930 by their vocabulary. Understanding the religious, or post-religious, dimension of Hitlerism, Trumpism or lepenism, presupposed historical knowledge that one cannot demand from TV platter political scientists. On the other hand, we can demand from them that they know how to socially locate the ideologies of the past and the present, that they relentlessly bring together by the term extreme right. The difference between past and present is here very clear.

Nazism and pre-war far-right movements found their social epicenter in the middle and particularly middle-upper classes, threatened by the workers’, social-democratic or communist movement. These middle classes were feverish, very busy locking up their wives and persecuting homosexuals. Today, the so-called far-right movements find, on the other hand, their epicenter in popular circles, especially in an impoverished working-class world, shaken or destroyed by economic globalization, threatened by immigration. Today’s middle classes, largely defined by higher education, are less or even weakly affected by “The Extreme Right” . The most advanced classes, which combines higher education and higher education, are particularly immune.

It is for reason this that I prefer to talk about popular conservatism than extreme right. They are anchored in the group of dominated explains the defensive character of popular conservatism. They are an electrician cannot imagine conquering Europe or the world if it thinks of its own life as a survival.

The real intellectual mistake would be to stick to that. Let us continue to move forward, let us even turn down the problem of the association between ideology and class. We now compare the ideas of the present to the cells of the past, compare the main classes of the present to the cells of the past.

Some European middle classes of the interwar period went into madness. The world today is more reasonable. But the most recent classes, the most advanced classes, are they reasonable? Are they peaceful? What are their dreams?

They’re crazy. The construction of a post-national Europe is a hallucinatory project when we know the diversity of the continent. It led to the expansion of the European Union, tinkered and unstable, in the former Soviet space. The EU is now Russian-speaking, warmongered, with aggressiveness renewed by its economic defeat against Russia. The EU is trying to drag the British, French, German and so many others into a real war. But what a strange war it would be, in which the Western elites would have adopted the Hitlerian dream of destroying Russia!

The comparison between the social classes does not allow us to a major intellectual breakthrough. Europáism, and therefore macronism, falls, through their external aggressiveness, on the side of nationalism, on the side of the pre-war far-right. If we add sprains to freedom of information and the expression of popular suffrage, increasingly massive and systematic sprains in the EU space, we are getting even closer to the notion of the extreme right. Founded as an association of liberal democracies, Europe is moving into far-right space. Yes, the comparison with the current years is useful, essential even.

We find in the grandiose European project a psychopathological dimension already observable in Hitlerism: paranoia. European paranoia is concentrated in Russia. That of the Nazis made the Jewish threat a priority, without neglecting Russian Bolshevism (known as Judeo-Bolshevism).

Today as yesterday we can analyze a psychopathology of the Europeans classes. The bizarre sequence loved by Trump’s election, with the president’s unstable desire to discuss Putin allow, us to live in the real world of our lives. Let us summarize our delusional process. It began around 2014, before, during and after Maidan, this coup that disintegrated Ukraine, a coup remotely guided by American and German strategists. The Now Suite:

014-2022: Let us provoke Russia, which had warned that it would not tolerate the annexation of Ukraine by the European Union and NATO.
It’s done. Putin invaded Ukraine.
2022-2025: Let’s forgive the resulting economic war for us.
It’s done. Our societies implode.
2022-2025: Let us forgive the war in the strict sense waged on our behalf by the kyiv regime.
It’s in progress. The change of European governments in a parallel reality will begin in 2025.

Let us draw from our defeat the idea that we can finally impose our will and install our troops in Ukraine, to annex to the EU what will remain. But how can we not think to Hitler locked in his bunker in 1945, to give orders to armies that no longer exist.

We have today in Europe dealing with fools, or rather with a collective madness that has grasped en masse the individuals of the dominant social circles. In France alone, thousands of journalists, politicians, academics, business leaders, senior officials, participating in the collective hallucination of a Russia that would like to conquer Europe (paranoia). Such a person cannot be held to be personally responsible. Our thoughts are on a collective dynamic psyche.

I am convinced that the diminución of the individual born of the ero state of religion birth these schools of Russophobic fish.

As I explained in The Class Struggles In France in the 21st century, the disappearance of collective beliefs – religious beliefs and then ideological beliefs of the zombie religious state – led to a collapse of the human superego. Unlike the activists of the liberation of the self, I do not define the superego as only or even mainly repressive. The superego, as the ideal of the self, anchors in the person of positive moral and social values. The notions of honor, of courage, of justice, of honesty find their origin and strength in the superego. If it weakens, they weaken. If they shoot, they shoot. The man who was not at the end was freed by the end of religion and the most contrary diminished ideologies. These are men and women who are highly educated but morally and intellectually narrowed by the zero state of religion who are, en masse, carriers of the Russophobic pathology.

Nazi anti-Semites had a completely different psychic constitution. The death of God, to speak like Nietzsche, had certainly launched them in the quest for a Führer but they were hardly in deficit of superego and remained capable of collective action. The tragic performances of the German army during the last world war in testimony. Who are we to imagine today in our most advanced classes at death, in the face of people, in kyiv and Kharkov? Our war in Ukraine is for laughter, a product of the emancipation of the self, daughter of personal development. Only Ukrainians and Russians will die.

Unless…

The thermonuclear changes can happen to heroes.

Emmanuel Todd