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Debating Fascism and Understanding Mogg

Two articles that could be considered related that I wanted to write about at slightly longer length than the usual Sunday Reads.

Aleksandar Hemon : Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight

I remember in the early 90s the self published comics of Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian cartoonist whose autobiographical accounts of the war that divided his country rang out with a warning to those in the rest of Europe. This is not some alien place, he said. This was a modern, European country with a relatively cosmopolitan culture. And within a few short years we are killing each other. This could easily happen to you.

I thought of Zograf’s 25 year old warnings while reading this powerful piece by another Aleksandar, a Serbian writer who moved to American in 1992. Aleksandar Hemon frames the current rise of the far-right in the USA with what happened to his friend Zoka who slowly became a Serbian nationalist, supporting the likes of Radovan Karadzic and eventually joining the military efforts to eradicate Muslims. By the time he realised what was happening, it was too late. His friend was lost to fascism.

I’d not heard the Serbian regime of that time described as “fascist” before, because we like to save that term for Hitler, even though the Nazi’s weren’t the only fascists. But by any definition Slobodan Milosevic’s regime was fascist.

And so it’s in our interests, as the ingredients of fascism appear around us at an unnerving frequency, to listen to those who have suffered the outcomes and try to benefit from their hindsight.

Hemon’s big regret is that he attempted to debate fascism as if it were an idea that could be defeated through reasoned argument. But it is better seen as a collection of actions that will destroy people who are different. The ideology is relatively unimportant. If the ideological discussions we’re used to having under the post-war consensus are a game of chess, fascism is the upending of the board. The game is won by eradicating the game.

You cannot argue with fascism.

The next time you see some charismatic figure espousing nationalist rhetoric about “us” and “them”, be it Farage, Robinson or Bannon, being invited on to some media platform to “debate”, think of Serbia and how that turned out.

How to explain Jacob Rees-Mogg? Start with his father’s books

Jacob Rees-Mogg is many things but he’s probably not a fascist. What is he then? This insightful piece looks at the writing of his father, William, that predicted a chaotic future, accelerated by technology.

For 380 breathless pages, Lord Rees-Mogg and a co-author, James Dale Davidson, an American investment guru and conservative propagandist, predicted that digital technology would make the world hugely more competitive, unequal and unstable. Societies would splinter. Taxes would be evaded. Government would gradually wither away. “By 2010 or thereabouts,” they wrote, welfare states “will simply become unfinanceable”. In such a harsh world, only the most talented, self-reliant, technologically adept person – “the sovereign individual” – would thrive.

While dismissed in the UK as a bit of a crank, his book became one of the texts of libertarian Silicon Valley disruptors and we’re now seeing that “Mystic Mogg” might not have been quite so wrong. We’re also seeing his son pushing the borderless “disaster capitalism” ideology along.

Which might seem weird for a passionate Brexit supporter who appears as a paragon of English pride, and I’m still not sure exactly what Jacob is, other than massively objectionable bundle of seeming contradictions. But one thing’s for certain - his personal investments will only benefit from the hardest, most disruptive of Brexits, because that’s what his daddy taught him.