David Neiwert: The Ascendancy of Fascism

Backup copy for future reference. 

Formatting is not good but content remains legible.

How fascism ascends: 2020 election may be the crisis of democracy that opens the door to a coup

David Neiwert
Daily Kos Staff
Thursday September 24, 2020 

American democracy almost certainly faces a real crossroads this year: If Donald Trump—who just this week refused to say that he would make a peaceful transition, and threatened to “get rid of the ballots”—loses the popular vote on Nov. 3 to Joe Biden, as polls currently indicate, he appears poised to dismiss millions of mail-in votes. He would likely do this through the courts that he has assiduously packed over the past three years, particularly via the Supreme Court seat he and his fellow Republicans are intent on seizing just prior to the vote. The legitimacy of both our system of elections and the foundational courts that embody the rule of law will have been not just undermined, but potentially destroyed.

Fascism, historians tell us, has only ever arisen in mature democratic states, and the main condition that permits it to seize power is a crisis of legitimacy for its major democratic institutions. The election of 2020 may well bring the crisis that does the trick for America.

Many observers—notably including authors Jason Stanley and Jared Yates Sexton—have remarked that the nation’s path under a Trump presidency has much more than a passing resemblance to the descent into fascism that has befallen other societies, the best-known examples being prewar Germany and Italy. The correlations are powerful:
Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal, and has been from the start. His opening salvo in the campaign—the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race poll-wise and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (using, of course, the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. Significantly, the language he used to justify such plans—labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists,” contending that they bring crime and disease—was classic rhetoric designed to demonize an entire class of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. This became more refined and pronounced over the course of his presidency, as when he attacked four women Democratic congressmembers of color: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave!”

• Trump’s palingenetic ultranationalism is his central theme. After the race-baiting and the ethnic fearmongering, this is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidency and its neverending campaign, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming: “Make America Great Again.” (Trump himself puts it this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.”) That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis—that is, the myth of the phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes of an entire society in its “golden age.” In the meantime, Trump’s nationalism is evident not just in these statement but in the entire context of his rants against Latino immigrants and Syrian refugees.
• Trump’s deep contempt not just for liberalism (which provides most of the fuel for his xenophobic rants, particularly against the media) but also for establishment conservatism. Trump’s biggest fan, Rush Limbaugh, boasts: “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.”
• Trump constantly proclaimed America to be in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world during the 2016 campaign, and insists that this occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians. During his presidency, the crises varied according to Trump’s political needs—an immigrant caravan’s arrival on the border with Mexico was portrayed hysterically by Trump during the 2018 midterm elections as an existential threat, while this year, America is in grave danger (according to Trump and his fellow Republicans) from a largely imaginary “antifa threat.” The coronavirus pandemic that the world knows his incompetence allowed to kill 200,000 Americans—not so much.
• He himself embodies the fascist insistence upon male leadership by a man of destiny, and his refusal to acknowledge factual evidence of the falsity of many of his proclamations and comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event.
• Trump’s contempt for weakness (another classic fascist trait) is manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of former GOP presidential candidate John McCain (a former prisoner of war) as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his mockery of a New York Times reporter with a disability, and more recently to his decision not to attend a ceremony at a World War II gravesite near Paris because the American soldiers there who had died in the war were “losers” and “suckers.”
Some of have argued—myself included—that Trump is not a fascist ideologue in the classic mold, but rather a living model of a right-wing-populist demagogue. But fascism, properly understood, is itself a species of right-wing populism: one that has simply turned metastatic, a cancer raging out of control in the body politic. If, as it seems, he is nonetheless leading America into fascism, it would be a distinction without a significant difference

But, as one Twitter wag adroitly observed recently: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” Conservatives (see, for example, claims by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and right-wing pundit Candace Owens that the threat of white nationalism is a hoax concocted by Democrats) and centrists have unsurprisingly dismissed such observations as undue alarmism and hyperbolic exaggeration. But then, movement conservatism, as I explored in some depth more than 15 years ago, is in many regards the source of the problem, as it has been the all-too-hospitable host for the fascist cancer. Centrists and some liberals, meanwhile, seem so emotionally wedded to a belief that underneath our ongoing chaos all these things are still normal that they’re incapable of comprehending that there is nothing remotely normal at all about them.

Even within a certain bandwidth of progressive thought—primarily Glenn Greenwald and his million-plus-follower Twitter cohort—the response to the rise of a fascist threat to American democracy is greeted with a kind of sneering dismissiveness. Recently, that was how Greenwald and Co. reacted when Max Berger, the cofounder of the Jewish anti-Israeli occupation organization If Not Now, tweeted: “The most surreal part of living through a fascist coup is that we’re not even talking about it as such.”

Greenwald quote-tweeted Berger in reply:

Liberal stars have spent 4 years convincing their followers of 2 claims:
1) Their domestic opponents are Nazis, fascists, and White Supremacist Terrorists.
2) Russia is lurking everywhere, an existential threat to US democracy.
Ponder what that means for how they’ll wield power.

Greenwald’s colleague at The Intercept, Lee Fang, appeared to chime in later that day:

What motivates the ruling class is a routine desire for maintaining power and self-interest. But political storytellers need lurid emotionally driven narratives, so the far left invents a white supremacist elite in charge of the country, just as the far right imagines a pedo cabal.

This line of argumentation is nothing new for Greenwald, who has previously dismissed concerns about the rising tide of white nationalism by suggesting that the politicians and activists raising those concerns were analogical to the right-wing “neocons” who used Islamophobic rhetoric to bash Muslims after 9/11. In these tweets, he’s extending that argument to suggest not only that the threat of white nationalism is an imaginary concoction existing solely as a club to bash the right, but that Democrats are the real fascists, or at best loony-tunes conspiracists, as does Fang

This is nothing short of an outright denial of established facts. The reality we are confronted with daily—that the United States (and the rest of the world, with no small assist from Russian interests) are awash in a tide of white nationalism and its attendant violence, and that moreover this tide has been enabled, encouraged, and empowered by Donald Trump, both on the streets of America and within his administration—is not something that can be erased with a sneer.

Predicated by his mutual embrace of the far right in the 2015-2016 campaign, Trump’s election to the presidency unleashed a Pandora’s box of white-nationalist demons, beginning with a remarkable surge in hate crimes during his first month, and then his first two years, in office. Its apotheosis has come in the form of a rising tide of far-right mass domestic terrorism and mass killings, as well the spread of armed right-wing “Boogaloo” radicals and militiamen creating mayhem amid civil unrest around the nation.

Trump’s response all along has been to dance a tango in which, after sending out a signal of encouragement (such as his “very fine people on both sides” comments after the white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017), he follows up with an anodyne disavowal of far-right extremists that is believed by no one, least of all white nationalists. Whenever queried about whether white nationalists pose a threat—as he was after a right-wing terrorist’s lethal attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he answered: “I don’t really, I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems”—Trump has consistently downplayed the threat of the radical right.

More recently, the appearance at the very least that Trump is deliberately encouraging a violent response to his political opposition has been growing. When far-right militiamen have gathered in places like Richmond, Virginia, and Lansing, Michigan, to shake their weapons in an attempt to intimidate lawmakers and other elected government officials, Trump has tweeted out his encouragement. When a teenage militiaman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, two fatally, Trump defended him while mischaracterizing the shootings. When far-right conspiracy theorists created a hoax rumor that antifascists and leftists were responsible for the wildfires sweeping the rural West Coast—resulting in armed vigilantes setting up “citizens patrols” and highway checkpoints, sometimes with the encouragement of local police—Trump retweeted a meme promoting the hoax.

The reality currently confronting Americans is that the extremist right has been organizing around a strategy of intimidation and threats by armed “Patriots”—embodied by street-brawling proto-fascist groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, American Guard, and the “III Percent” militias, along with their “Boogaloo” cohort, all of them eager to use their prodigious weaponry against their fellow Americans in a “civil war.” And what we have seen occurring as the 2020 campaign has progressed is that the line of demarcation between these right-wing extremists and ordinary Trump-loving Republicans has all but vanished.

Finally—and perhaps most importantly—Trump has empowered far-right white nationalist and conspiracy theorist elements within the walls of his administration, and pursued an agenda friendly to extremist elements. The architect of Trump’s immigration policies (not to mention his eliminationist scare campaigns about immigrant caravans and refugees from the Middle East) has been senior adviser Stephen Miller, whose deep ties to white nationalists were exposed last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Trump’s resulting policy agenda has been a white nationalist’s dream.

Trump’s see-no-evil approach to white nationalism meanwhile has translated into a deliberate blind spot within federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the Department of Homeland Security, where a whistleblower recently revealed that he was directed to skew intelligence assessments to minimize the threats of both white nationalist terrorism and Russian interference in American elections.

These are all established factual realities—in stark contrast with the utterly fantastical world of QAnon and other conspiracy theory universes that Fang seems to think they are comparable with—though Greenwald, who after all resides in Brazil, appears unfamiliar with them. Certainly his well-established blind spot for far-right extremism contributed to his decision to continue harping on Berger’s remarks a few days later, tweeting:

The United States is currently living under a “fascist coup,” and we must destroy the Nazi dictator who has seized power by spending the next 60 days vigorously campaigning against him and then obtaining more votes than he in the regularly scheduled election to be held Nov. 3.

Greenwald’s subsequent tweets in the thread laid out his argument further, pointing out that even though the Nazi party won a plurality of votes in the 1933 German election, paving Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship, “once in power, he wasn't susceptible to being removed by a democratic election because he was a fascist dictator.”

This is a remarkably simplistic approach to historical fascism, both in the 1930s and currently. First, as historian Robert O. Paxton explained in his definitive text The Anatomy of Fascism, neither Hitler nor Mussolini ever even won their positions of national leadership through election. Rather, they were appointed by conservative establishment powers because their democratic states were mired in significant crises of legitimacy—crises they had major roles in inflaming themselves.

Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted.

Moreover, as Paxton pointedly observes: “We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.”

Greenwald’s formulation of the history completely misapprehends the nature of fascism itself, as well as how it spreads and seizes power. As Paxton explains, fascism is not a single, readily identifiable principle but a political pathology, best understood (as in psychology) as a constellation of traits. He defines it thus:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Fascism is moreover highly mutative, changing shape and appearance as well with each successive phase of its development. Paxton identifies these five stages:

1. The initial creation of fascist movements
2. Their rooting as parties in a political system
3. The acquisition of power
4. The exercise of power
5. Radicalization or entropy

In each phase, fascism behaves differently and pursues different agendas, often in sharp contradiction of the ideals and policies it had previously embraced. What Greenwald is describing with regard to Hitler is fascism in its fourth stage, exploiting the powers Nazis already had obtained—while the “fascist coup” Berger describes, and indeed what we are currently experiencing in the United States, is the process: namely, fascism in its third stage, that is, in the process of acquiring enough political power to declare a dictatorship.

This process can vary according to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the established democracies that it infects. The fascists in prewar Germany and Italy—where the systems of democracy and their institutions were both comparatively recent developments and accordingly unstable—were able to rise to power through discrete and explicitly fascist political parties, seizing the political stage from outside the normal parameters of the established democracy, as it were.

In the United States, Paxton explains, fascist elements have always been present—and indeed, many threads from American history contributed powerfully to the ideologies of European fascism—but there has never been the “political space” for them to form discrete fascist parties capable of winning broad support.

The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a hot of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, seemed even more "un-American" after the great anti-Nazi war.

Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around and anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic messages broadcast from his church on the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-the-wealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L.K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the "Judeo-Communist conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a "politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.

As Paxton explains, in the United States, as in France and elsewhere, fascism typically failed in the second stage because it failed to become a cohesive political entity, one capable of acquiring power. But make no mistake, he says: It can happen here.

It would, true to its mutative nature, adapt its shape, appearance, rhetoric, and agenda to its peculiarly American audience:

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans. No swastikas in American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

Around such reassuring language and symbols in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in the schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

Similarly, the mechanism by which fascism can acquire power is more likely to adapt to the nature of the nation it infects. Whereas both Italian and German democracies were relatively new and unstable when fascists overwhelmed them, American democracy is the most robust and mature in the world, with over 200 years’ history behind it. Its democratic institutions are more deeply established and less susceptible to attack—which is a large reason why fascism has failed to previously obtain the political space required to attract a large enough following to succeed as a discrete party.

I have contended for many years—since at least that 2004 Orcinus series on what I then called “pseudo fascism”—that in America, fascism is far more likely to worm its way under the foundations of our democracy by taking over an established party, “the transformation of an existing party into a fascist entity from within — not necessarily by design, but by a coalescence of political forces already latent in the landscape.”

As I explained then, this mechanism was suggested by one of the significant American fascist "intellectuals" who arose in the 1930s named Lawrence Dennis. He penned an ideological blueprint entitled The Coming American Fascism. Dennis predicted that eventually, the combination of a dictatorial and bureaucratic government and big business would continue exploiting the working middle class until, in frustration, it would turn to fascism. What's especially noteworthy was the political path he foresaw for this to happen:

Yet how infinitely better for the in-elite of the moment to have fascism come through one of the major parties of the moment than to have it fight its way to power as the program of the most embittered leaders of the out-elite.

This indeed is what has occurred. Rather than being guided consciously, this transformation has happened almost spontaneously as the forces that fascism comprises gradually have come together under their own gravity. As I explained, the takeover really occurred within the realm of movement conservatism, which by the 1980s had almost completely subsumed the Republican Party:

The primary impetus has been the change under which conservatism became a discrete movement intent on seizing the reins of power. In the process, the means—that is, the obtaining of power—became the end. And once the movement became centered around obtaining power, by any means necessary, then ideology became fungible according to the needs of its drive to acquire power, just as it was with fascism. This virtually guaranteed it would become a travesty of its original purpose. The nature of today's "conservative movement" is no more apparent than in how distinctly un-conservative its actual conduct has been: busting budgets, falling asleep at the wheel of national security, engaging wars recklessly and without adequate planning.

Two things occurred to the conservative movement in this drive for power:

• It increasingly viewed liberals not merely as competitors but as unacceptable partners in the liberal-conservative power-sharing agreement that has been in place since at least the New Deal and the rise of modern consumer society. Ultimately, this view metastacizes into seeing liberals as objects to be eliminated.
• It became increasingly willing to countenance ideological and practical bridges with certain factions of the extremist right. This ranged from anti-abortion and religious-right extremists to the neo-Confederates who dominate Republican politics in the South to factions of the Patriot/militia movement.

The combination of these two forces exerted a powerful rightward pull on the movement, to the point where extremist ideas and agendas have increasingly been adopted by the mainstream right, flowing into an eliminationist hatred of liberalism. In the process, their own rhetoric has come to sound like that on the far right. A lot of the dabbling in far-right memes has been gratuitous, intended to "push the envelope" for talk-radio audiences in constant need of fresh outrageousness.

Back in 2004, however, the primary reason not to fear the ascension of fascism directly was that there was not, at that point, a crisis of democracy and its legitimacy, even though George W. Bush’s 2000 victory via the Electoral College decidedly set the stage for the current crisis, as did the right-wing authoritarianism his administration and its cohorts unleashed. Paxton agreed that the danger was not imminent despite the growth of far-right groups in the American body politic: "Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setback and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream,” he wrote.

However, that caveat has vanished because the 2020 election is unmistakably a looming crisis with effects we are already feeling. And that crisis has, historically speaking, always been the trigger that opened the door for fascists to seize power, as Paxton explains:

Fascism can appear wherever democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillusion. That suggests its spatial and temporal limits: no authentic fascism before the emergence of a massively enfranchised and politically active citizenry. In order to give birth to fascism, a society must have known political liberty -- for better or for worse.

… In other words, it's clear that the "crisis of democracy" necessary to create a genuinely fascist dynamic is a real potential that lies around many corners on our current path. The key, then, is to finding the path that does not take us there.

Paxton concludes The Anatomy of Fascism with this warning:

Fascism … is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries—not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions,” especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past.

While there is no shortage of voices denying the reality of the fascist threat we now face, American democracy really does stand on the precipice in the 2020 election. Should we step off, then only the abyss awaits.

Turkey's Alevis & Myths of the Mountain Goats

 I came across this treasure at Middle East Eye & realized if I didn't save it at my blog it might vanish into the bottomless web archives. There are more images at the link and hyperlinks are the same.

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Turkey's Alevis and the myths of the mountain goats

Turkey’s long-oppressed Zaza Alevi minority have a mystical connection to nature, especially the sacred mountain goats of Dersim

By Nick Ashdown in Dersim
7 December 2020 10:19 UTC

Ali Ekber Frik, a 74-year-old dede, or spiritual leader, tells an old story in a low, raspy voice, his plump fingers playing with prayer beads. He’s in Ovacik, a small town in Turkey’s Tunceli province, known by locals as Dersim, in eastern Anatolia.

Behind him a shepherd watches over his flock of sheep near a graveyard as the late afternoon sun envelops green rolling hills in its warm glow.

“Perhaps 150 years ago, three people came from Kemah [a nearby town] to the foot of the Munzur Mountains, and they were very hungry,” he says.

“Seeing a fire in a cave, they approached and saw that four or five people had butchered a mountain goat, and were waiting as it cooked. The travellers said: ‘We are very hungry, we came here for a piece of bread, but we don't eat mountain goat and if you ask us, you shouldn't either,’ and they immediately left, even though they were starving.”

Ali Ekber Frik explains the significance of Dersim’s
mountain goats in Ovacik, Turkey
(MEE/Nick Ashdown)

The travellers, like Frik, were Alevis, Turkey’s largest religious minority, and they consider the mountain goats sacred. Dersim is chiefly inhabited by a long-persecuted people who are a minority of a minority.

They are Zaza Kurds, otherwise known as Kirmanc, speaking a dialect different from Kurdish peoples found elsewhere in Turkey and the region. Their form of Alevism is also different from that followed by the related Bektasi Alevis, who are ethnically Turkish and have been more influenced by Shia Islam.

Ferociously independent, Dersim was never fully under government control until an uprising in 1938-39 was crushed by the state.Alevis suffered repression, surveillance and massacres under the Sunni Ottoman sultans who considered them heretics.

These same mountains that protected the Zaza Alevis before the advent of modern warfare became the site of their massacre. Soldiers dropped bodies from cliffs into the Munzur River and lit fires at the mouths of sealed caves, sucking the oxygen out of the people trapped inside.

They consider not just mountain goats, but all living things sacred, and all things that contribute to life, such as the sun and water. They worship nature itself. Older generations in Dersim say prayers to the sun and moon, but they say this practice is now being lost.

The Zaza Alevis’ heterodox, mystical belief system known as Raa Haqi, was influenced by pre-Islamic Anatolian shamanistic practices, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Armenian Christianity, and only later by Shia Islam. Unlike most members of Turkey’s other Alevi communities, many Zaza Alevis reject the label of Muslim.

Dersim, particularly in the Munzur Valley National Park, has the most diverse ecosystem in Turkey. The Park is teeming with over 1,500 plant species, 43 of which are endemic, and is home to animals such as the brown bear, Eurasian lynx, wildcat, gray wolf, and wild boar.

“We call mountain goats, honey bees, and weasels in the mountain sacred. Because they don’t harm anyone, they are sacred. We don't kill them,” explains Frik.

To show the value of nature in their beliefs, he recites an old poem about the sacredness of trees, and the role that wood has played in holy objects, such as the cradle of the Kaaba (the holiest site in Islam) or the saddle of the Imam Ali, whom Alevis revere.

“That is how much we value trees, since time immemorial, and the trees love us back. Even though our forests burn, they never give up on us,” Frik says. Turkey, as elsewhere in the world, has experienced an uptick in forest fires due to climate change.

This reverence for nature is why Dersim residents are so disturbed by the hunters who sometimes come to take their sacred mountain goats as trophies. The goats, some species of which are endangered, are protected by Turkey’s Ministry of Forestry and Water Affairs, but the government says older animals are allowed to be hunted in limited quantities, and that 60 per cent of the money earned from the tenders goes back to local villages.

This past summer, activists launched a campaign to ban mountain goat hunting in the region and the Dersim Cultural and Natural Heritage Conservation Initiative filed a lawsuit requesting cancellation of the tenders. The ministry responded by suspending a tender it had opened to hunt 17 goats, and promised to conduct an investigation, taking into consideration local customs and beliefs.

Local environmentalists don’t particularly care whether the hunting is done legally or not, they are horrified by it, and want it forbidden without exception. “We’ve watched as killers coming from outside the province and from different European countries hunt Dersim’s most important species,” said activist Hasan Sen of the organization Munzur Protection. “The authorities close their eyes to massacres.”

‘The property of saints’

For the Alevis, killing such holy creatures isn’t just senseless and immoral, but a dreadful sin. Transgressors are traditionally outcast and labelled as duskun, or "fallen". “In the old days when people did this, they would be sent into exile,” says 68-year-old dede, Zeynel Batar, in the village of Kedek.

“There was a guy in our village who’d go after the mountain goats. We warned him many times not to. One day he plunged off the rocks and died. They didn't even wash his body in the square.”

Though Zaza Alevis consider all wild animals holy, mountain goats, of which there are several local varieties, are especially sacred. “They are the property of saints,” Batar explains.

“These goats eat special grass but when it’s wintertime the mountains are full of snow and what do they eat? Their food comes from the unknown, brought by the saints.”

Three mythical saints are said to be the goats’ shepherds - Sarik Sivan, Sıx Ahmet Dede, and Duzgun Baba. Duzgun - which might be a Turkicised version of a Zaza word meaning sharp rocks or cliffs - is the most famous of them.

On Duzgun Baba mountain, near the town of Nazimiye, 27-year-old dede Kaya Celik climbs the stairs carved into the mountainside and recalls the legend of the holiest of the shepherd saints.

Though there are many versions, according to most, Duzgun’s original name was Sah Haydar, and he was the son of an important religious leader, Kures Baba. Haydar was known for having well-fed goats, even in the winter when food was scarce, and this made his father curious.

“One day, Kures Baba follows his son and the flock and sees that when Haydar touched the oak trees with his staff, the trees would turn green. This was a miracle! When his father sees this, he is both proud but also shocked that his son has surpassed him,” Celik says.

But then, one of Sah's sheep picks up the scent of the shepherd’s father and sneezes. Sah Haydar chuckles and says, “What’s wrong little sheep, did you smell my dad Kureso Khurr?”, using a nickname with which a son shouldn’t call his father in a culture where elders are revered. He turns around, and seeing that his father really is there, leaps to the top of the mountain in shame, disappearing into another realm. After that, he was remembered as Duzgun Baba, and the mountain bears his namesake.

“A couple of animals followed Sah, and his father brought the rest of the flock down. We believe that the goats wandering around this mountain right now are those that followed Duzgun Baba, and are therefore divine,” Celik says.

Higher up on the mountain, past the Alevi shrine, or ziyaret, with a fountain pouring ice-cold water into the mouths of grateful pilgrims, a young man named Murat Babayigit nimbly scales across the jagged rock surface, pointing to a very narrow cave, just large enough to crawl through.

“Duzgun Baba’s bed is in this cave,” Babayigit says. “It’s a sacred place. You feel content up here, happy.”

Still higher, at the very top, lies Duzgun’s grave, a large pile of grey stones, surrounded by various smaller cairns. The sun and moon - both sacred to the Alevis - are presiding together over opposite ends of the early evening sky.

Powerful bond

The endless, jagged mountains seen from here have protected the people of Dersim and other marginalised communities for hundreds of years during various waves of persecution.

In the 1990s, thousands of villages and hamlets in over a dozen provinces in the east and southeast were emptied and scorched by the military, in government operations against the armed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The Turkish interior ministry later launched a project to return Kurds to their homes, called the "Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project". The government-funded project ran from 1999-2015 at a cost of 200m Turkish lira, which at the time was the equivalent of $72m, but was criticised as ineffective by Human Rights Watch.

According to the Interior Ministry, during the fight against the PKK, 62,448 houses were emptied and 386,000 people were forced to emigrate. Now just 28,834 houses are occupied by the people who used to live in them. A total of 187,000 people returned to their villages in 14 provinces, including Dersim.

Over the years, sporadic tensions and clashes have been reported in the province - in 1994, six teachers in Dersim were killed by PKK fighters. Last year during clashes between the PKK and the Turkish military, one soldier was killed and three others wounded.

But this long history of unrest has only strengthened the people’s bond to the land, the animals and each other. “Alevis went to the mountains to run away from tyrants, and when they got there, they saw the mountain goats,” Frik said.

“Every time we go there - when we take our flocks there, when we plant garlic, when we pick mushrooms - we are together.”

Umair Haque -- American Democracy’s Broken Because Minorities Have to Keep Saving It From White People

American Democracy’s Broken Because Minorities Have to Keep Saving It From White People

In case you hadn’t noticed, yesterday, Donald Trump posted a 46-minute long video demanding that the election results be “overturned…now!” That came shortly after Bill Barr admitted that Trump’s attempts to legally tamper with results were both baseless and absurd — and the Attorney General is a die-hard Trumpist if ever there was one.

So why is Trump persisting with his coup? Hasn’t it failed? 

Well…yes. But also…no. Coups can succeed or fail on several levels. And Trump might not have walked away with the ultimate prize — but he’s not walking away empty-handed, either. The proclamations of the outright triumph of American democracy are premature.

It’s true that Trump’s coup has failed at any coup’s primary goal, which is to seize power. Trump’s legal challenges have mostly all been thrown out, by dumbfounded and irate judges, no less. For Trump, losing a crony like Bill Barr is like the first mate of the Titanic heading for the lifeboats. His electoral college tampering is looking increasingly unsuccessful, too. The reality, at this point, is that Trump isn’t going to be in power for another term.

Not now, that is.

Yet Trump’s coup has been remarkably successful on two other levels. 

Levels which themselves have torn a hole in the already tattered fabric of American democracy. He’s accomplished something as ugly as it is bizarre as it is ominous.

The first level on which Trump’s coup has succeeded is with the Republican base. 

70% of Republicans believe the election was rigged. That’s not just a majority — it’s a massive supermajority. That’s not, say 50.1% of them, which would be bad and sinister and foolish enough. It’s 7 out of 10 of them.

Who are Republicans, anyway? Well, here I have to share a truth with you that’s funny, ugly, telling, and…you’re not going to like it. Republicans are white people who like to lie because they’re ashamed of being Republicans. I know that sounds harsh, so let’s look at some basic statistics together. 51% of White voters say that they “lean Republican.” That seems like a pretty even split, right? But the problem is that they’re not telling the truth. Over the last fifty years, an average of 55% percent of white people have voted Republican in every electiono. No Democrat — not one, from JFK to Obama — has ever won a majority of white voters.

So to say that “70% of Republicans believe the election of rigged” is, more accurately, to say this: 55% of white people voted for Trump, the precise historical average, and 70% of that 55% believe that the election was rigged. That’s not an outright majority of whites — but it’s pretty close. It’s a massive, massive number of Americans. How many, to be precise? Well, you can simply put the number at about 70% of the Trump vote. That’s at least 52 million people.

Now, it’s worth bearing in mind the context for all this. It’s not as if the last four years have been…normal. They have been the worst four years in modern American history, by a very long way. First, there was the fascism…the concentration camps, Gestapos, purges, (actual) Nazis, “family separations,” and so on. Then there was the failure even for “real” Americans, whose incomes fell, suicide rates soared, and mobility cratered, as America became a nation of poor people. Finally, there was what fascism and stupidity and hate and ignorance tend to result in, which is mass death. How many Americans are dead of Covid today? Two hundred and seventy four thousand.

That’s the context in question. To call Trump’s Presidency a failure is the understatement of the century — yes, really. 

America has the worst Covid outcomes in the world. And it’s exploding all over again. And yet 70% of Republicans, most of whom are white people, believe that the election was rigged…against the worst President in American history…the worst leader on the face of the globe, apart from maybe the kinds dictators of failed states Trump longs to be. (That’s not just my opinion, by the way, but from 200 political scientists.)

Think about that for a moment. Because when these “voters” say “the election was rigged!” they’re also saying: “None of the above matters to me. Not the mass death from Covid, not the fascism, not the kids in cages, not even the skyrocketing suicide rate amongst the only people I consider to be ‘real’ human beings, white people. None of that matters. I don’t care!”

So what does matter to them? Their political preferences and priorities are crystal clear by now. Here’s what Republicans don’t want. Any kind of public goods, from public healthcare to higher education to retirement — that’s not so odd, by the way, because even Democrats don’t want that. That’s troubling enough — that both sides in American politics agree it shouldn’t be a modern, functioning society.

But what’s really ominous is how far backward Republicans want to rewind the clock of modernity. To the Wild West? This faction believes that carrying a gun is the right that matters most. To the Taliban? Sure: that faction believes that religious law should rule civil society. To… Handmaid’s Tale? Sure: Amy Coney Barrett, Justice of the Supreme Court, belongs to a fanatical religious sect in which men make all the decisions, and there’s no separation between private and public life, which, if Americans saw it in a Muslim country, would be called something like “Iran.”

Even democrats don’t think America should be a modern, functioning society, like Canada or Europe. That’s why Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders didn’t win the primaries then — and are being loudly, publicly snubbed by Biden now. But Republicans go way, way further than that. They seem to believe — genuinely, in a heartfelt way — that America should be some strange cocktail of a fascist state, a theocracy, and an apartheid state. They seem to want to create a medieval dystopia, where women have few rights, minorities are hated subhumans, the chosen people carry guns everywhere, and purity of faith and blood are what decide a person’s fate and destiny.

(We minorities call that “Hillbilly Elegy.” That’s a joke. If you get it, you get it.)

In that context, Trump’s coup has been super successful. 

Republicans — meaning American whites have never wanted to live in a modern democracy. They have voted, historically, as a social group — meaning a majority of whites — and as a political bloc — meaning “Republicans,” which is what they call themselves to put a polite gloss on “white people” — against all the following things: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, desegregation, public education, healthcare. The list goes on and on and on.

Let me distill that.

“Republicans” is a euphemism for “white people,” and as a social group and political bloc, American white people have, in their majority never — never wanted to live in a modern democracy. A society of equals, where minorities and women and so forth have the same rights as everyone else, a truly free society, where everyone has the basics, a society that’s fair and just, where everyone is treated with dignity and gentleness and respect. They have never wanted to live in such a place.

Never. Not since the days of JFK — who eked out a narrow win, thanks to minorities — right down to now.

What Trump has done is give license to white people — aka “Republicans” to openly stop believing in democracy. 

See the process of decay: during the Reagan Revolution, American whites had to at least pretend to pay lip service to democracy, and so, too during the Bush years. But now they don’t. Trump has let them openly begin to state what they have always really believed and voted for — against democracy, because a modern, functioning society wasn’t something they ever wanted to have.

Basically, if you look at the numbers, maaaybe about 25% of Republicans aren’t white. 

What a coincidence! That’s roughly the same number that believes the election wasn’t rigged. White people are still 77% of America. It’s a very, very bad thing when 70% of a political side —almost entirely made up of a single ethnic group, which is a society’s majority —openly stops believing in democracy, just because they didn’t get what they wanted. Which, incidentally, was less democracy in the first place.

If we saw all this happening in another country, what would we call it? What would we say if, for example, 70% of conservatives in a Muslim country thought an election was rigged because it didn’t result in dictatorship and authoritarianism — coincidentally, the same 70% who hated other religious groups? If, for example, 70% of one kind of ethnic group, the majority, who hated the rest, stopped believing in democracy, just because they’d lost an election in which they sought the right to repress and subjugate everyone else even harder? We’d call it what it is: a racist meltdown. A social collapse made of bigotry and hate.

That is still where America is.

Yes, Biden won the election. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. 

It revealed just how racist, bigoted, and frankly idiotic the vast majority of American white people really are. They didn’t seem to care about the horrors of the last four years, they gave all that a free pass, if not cheering encouragement, and then when they didn’t get the right to inflict more damage on everyone, including themselves, they threw a massive baby tantrum, and threw all the toys out of the crib.

Biden’s victory is a vivid demonstration of just how broken America really is. Minorities won the election for Biden — a story that white pundits aren’t telling because they don’t want it told. They’re telling the opposite story — of a handful of minority communities in which Trump’s support, predictably, increased. Like Cuban exiles, who lean arch-conservative. So what? The larger story —and the truer one — is that minorities saved America from fascist collapse.

But let me tell you something you probably don’t know.

That’s what they’ve been doing for half a century now.

Who gave JFK his historic victory? Minorities did. And without that, America would probably never have had desegregation. Remember — whites have never voted for a Democrat as a majority. If American whites had had their way, if their preferences had prevailed, America would still be a segregated society. To this very day.

Stop and think about that for a second. It’s chilling and eerie to us minorities, and it should be to you, too.

Let me put all that much more bluntly.

Minorities have been saving white America’s stupid ass from authoritarian fascist collapse for half a century now.

And at every step of the way, American white people have resisted. They have refused to learn a damned thing. They have voted, over and over again, to keep democracy as limited and backward a franchise as humanly possible. As a social group, in their majority, they have never wanted anything but what Trumpism has promised them.

America’s white people are it’s biggest problem. They do not live in the modern world, and they don’t want to.

Trump’s coup has been massively successful in that regard. It has taught white Americans that they can keep on pulling backward, resisting the arc of history, the gravity of modernity, that they can keep on hoping to live in a backward, medievally ignorant, broken, crushingly poor, authoritarian society — as long as they get what they always wanted: supremacy.

That’s no small feat. Maybe it was always on the cards, if you understand the cruel history I’ve tried to tell above. And it doesn’t bode well for the future. Because either Trump is going to run again, or his kids will run, or someone even more stupid and evil and grotesque will. Before you ask if that’s possible, go ahead and imagine President Ted Cruz, or President Tom Cotton.

A nation cannot survive, often, when it has become like America. 

When its majority hates everyone else, because it hates the idea of everyone else being a person, being a human being, being free and equal, pursuing life and liberty and happiness, because what it really wanted, all along, was to be above them, dominating them, enslaving them, owning them. And if it can’t have that, it won’t accept any kind of social compact at all.

That is the perilous place America finds itself in. Just a tiny number of minorities less, the ones who’ve saved its ass from total implosion for the last fifty years, and America would be even more of a third world country than it is now. An authoritarian state, and probably an apartheid state to boot, not to mention vastly poorer. Its white people, as a majority, appear to be every bit as ignorant, remorseless, and cruel as the majorities in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. If they can’t have it all — they don’t want anyone to have anything at all. There is no social contract they will agree to whatsoever, which is what “Wahhh! The election was rigged! I don’t believe in democracy!” really means. American white people have nothing in common — nothing whatsoever — with their cousins in Europe or Canada, who agree happily to modern social contracts where everyone has the basics, and then plenty beyond that, no matter their color, race, or creed.

America’s white people seem to truly be different — deeply, gruesomely so. They never accepted modernity and democracy. And they still don’t.

Umair
December 2020