It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the rise of intolerance in Europe. Jewish groups warn that anti-Semitism has returned to mainstream political discourse, often under the banner of opposition to “Zionism”; meanwhile, the Left prefers to focus on the wave of Islamophobia unleashed by 9/11 and subsequent Islamist terror attacks in Madrid and London. And indeed there is plenty of evidence to back up these fears, if you look for it; antisemitic incidents show a year-on-year increase, Muslim war graves are defiled in French cemeteries, and mosques seem to cower behind ever-higher fences, their windows protected from vandalism by ugly wire grilles.

"Who Comes Last?": Vote Northern League and the darkeys won't cut ahead of you Meanwhile, across Europe, parties of the far right seem to be doing well in countries like Belgium and France, Austria and Poland. Italy’s Northern League provides the most chilling example; the party that set up uniformed vigilante patrols to “police” immigrant areas in Turin and Piacenza last autumn now finds itself a key player in coalition negotiations following Silvio Berlusconi’s victory in the recent Italian elections. Led by Umberto Bossi (whose idea of a humane immigration policy is to insist that naval vessels coming across boatloads of illegal migrants fire a warning shot before sinking them), La Lega Nord hope to see the post of Deputy PM go to stalwart Roberto Calderoli, who last year suggested a “pig day” to prevent the building of new mosques in Italy, taking swine along to proposed sites to “walk up and down on the land where they want to build, after which it will be considered ‘infected’ and no longer suitable”. Combined with Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance, a “post-fascist” party which draws its support largely from the south of Italy, it would be British understatement to say that Berlusconi’s new government will contain men and women of extremely questionable views.

And yet, as egregious as these instances of intolerance are, they should be put in their proper context. Antisemitic incidents in Britain certainly show a worrying upward trend, but the 547 such incidents recorded in 2007 included 328 instances of “abusive behaviour” as against 114 “assaults,” of which one was categorised as involving “extreme violence.” An additional problem is that the incidence of such attacks tends to be linked to “trigger events” in the Middle East, such as the war in Iraq or the Israel-Hezbollah conflict of 2006, and often seem to be carried out not just by neo-Nazi skinheads but also by Muslims. This scarcely makes them less serious, but it does mean that mainstream politicians have an interest in downplaying the gravity of antisemitic incidents for fear of seeming Islamophobic. Many European Jews feel marginalised and fearful as a result.

On the political front, the most recognisable far-right leader in Europe, Jean-Marie Le Pen, embarrassed France by making the Presidential run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002, but his Front National has collapsed as an electoral force, as did Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria after their brief spell in the limelight at the turn of the century. In summary, there is plenty of intolerance to be found, in Europe as everywhere else, but it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that it is on the march.

The relative electoral success of fringe parties can certainly be attributed in large partJörg Haider: No threads are too fine for the master race to fears about immigration, particularly Muslim immigration from Turkey and North Africa, and justifiable fears about terrorism combine with distrust of a political elite that seems to ignore the concerns of “ordinary” voters --- and a helping of good old-fashioned racism --- to tempt many into the arms of extremists. But just as crucial, the electoral systems in many European countries tend to give fringe parties a key role as kingmakers in unwieldy coalition governments. The publicity this attracts is often wildly disproportionate to their actual influence; a party that gains 5 or 6 percent of the vote can, thanks to proportional representation, find itself hogging the cameras for weeks after an election. In some cases, mainstream political parties agree that they will not go into coalition with extremists come what may; the Flemish Vlaams Belang, for example, is the object of a self-denying ordnance among other parties called the Cordon Sanitaire, and the governing Fianna Fail party in Ireland resolutely refuse to contemplate coalition with Sinn Fein --- for the time being at least. Many others, such as Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, are not so discerning.

Furthermore, fascists (however defined) are just smarter than they used to be. Far-right leaders in Europe these days sport sharp suits and college degrees; the Holocaust deniers, lunatics and skinheads haven’t gone away, of course, but by and large they’ve been relegated to the shadows. Incendiary rhetoric tends to be the exception rather than the rule; soothing bromides about preserving the British/French/Italian “way of life” sit cheek-by-jowl with the sort of motherhood-and-apple-pie inanities common to all political manifestoes. This smooth evolution has seen parties like the British BNP softpedal their historical antisemitism in favour of an aggressive anti-Islamic message; indeed, and with admirable chutzpah, they are currently courting London’s Jewish vote in the run-up to local and mayoral elections on Thursday. (They’re unlikely to get very far with such tactics; memories of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Battle of Cable Street run deep.)

When the far right swaps the goosestep for the soft sell, many would argue, the need for vigilance is only redoubled; and I wouldn’t disagree. But the evidence tends to show that so-called electoral breakthroughs by “post-fascist” parties are usually one-off events, triggered by dissatisfaction with “politics as usual”, and rarely sustained. The situation varies from country to country, but so long as governments address their citizens’ concerns rather than merely paying lip service to them, there is unlikely to be a concerted shift in support towards these groups. Extremists in Europe are not so much resurgent as merely repackaged.

So, Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart have this series of webcast debates that have been going on for some time now, and the latest one was about American imperialism. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I'm guessing the discussion dovetailed the issues in the exchange between Ron Paul and John McCain in last night's debate --- quick summary: McCain accused Paul of having a pre-1939 mentality --- because Jonah posted (approvingly, one assumes) the following bit of wisdom from Evelyn Waugh that a reader sent to him, wondering how a Paul supporter would respond:

It is in the nature of civilization that it must be in constant conflict with barbarism. Very few empires have been the result of a deliberate ambition. They have grown, inevitably, because it has been found necessary to expand in order to preserve what is already held. The French had to annex Algiers because it was the only way in which the Mediterranean could be made safe from pirates. Empire moves in a series of 'incidents,' and these 'incidents' mean that it is impossible for a country to live in isolation. Barbarism means constant provocation.

Or, more succinctly, take up the white man's burden. Anyway, the reason this snippet caught my eye is not the facile, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-sophisticated jingoism Goldberg is endorsing --- that's pretty much his wheelhouse --- but the title of the piece Goldberg's correspondent excerpted. It's called "We Can Applaud Italy," and came out in 1935. "What did Italy do in 1935," I asked myself, "that Evelyn Waugh would want to applaud?" That's right. The Mussolini regime annexed Ethiopia in an act of naked aggression, using chemical weapons in contravention of the Geneva Convention, bombing Red Cross tents, and slaughtering 30,000 civilians in a reprisal for an attempt on the life of General Graziani. ("Avenge me! Kill them all!", he is supposed to have said.) You know, just another non-deliberate "incident" that a "civilized" nation was unwillingly forced into, in the face of "barbarism."

Now, Waugh is not the only great artist to have found The Maximum Leader to be a model worth imitating. However, if your magnum opus, instead of Brideshead Revisted or The Cantos, is Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton The Totalitarian Temptation From Hegel To Whole Foods The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, it might pay not to be so, shall we say, liberal in using explicitly pro-Duce propaganda in the service of cheap point-scoring.

As I've mentioned before, National Review has a long tradition of standing squarely for clerical fascism against "barbarous" Reds, but recycling an encomium to an actual member of the Axis must be an innovation even for NR. Several questions worth pursuing: Does Jonah Goldberg read all the way to the bottom of his correspondents' emails? If he sees something likely to piss off liberals, does he give any thought to the context in which it emerged? Shouldn't someone who claims to be in the midst of writing "a very serious, thoughtful, argument [about the origins of fascism] that has never been made in such detail or with such care" know the basic facts of the history of fascism?

Never mind that. Andiamo avanti, Jonah Goldberg! Forza Italia!

UPDATE: Jonah updates: "Update: Just for the record, the above post does not, in fact, constitute an endorsement of Waugh's applause for Italy. I just thought the quote was interesting. "

Well, there you go. He thinks the Waugh's rationale for supporting Mussolini is insightful, but does not, himself support Mussolini. Like I said, andiamo.

[Following in the vein of Jewcy's resident Sufi ex-Trot Stephen Schwartz about a working definition of "fascism" as it relates to Islamic militancy, here is -- or was -- my take on the question. Published a few months ago.]

When Orwell, in his imperishable essay "Politics and the English Language," said that the term fascism had degenerated in the hands of the correct-thinking but sloppy-writing public to mean anything that is undesirable , he was surely onto something -- in 1946. But there came a moment in history when fascism dropped out of the lexicon of abused catchwords, indeed, out of the lexicon entirely. After Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, and after the postwar dictators -- Franco, Salazar, even De Gaulle -- died off naturally, who wielded the epithet except a few graying manes on the left who'd experienced fascism first-hand, or a new generation of pseudo-radicals who'd simply wished they had for enhanced credibility?

In the late 80's, Susan Sontag's notorious formulation that Soviet Communism was "fascism with a human face" did a great thing for reviving the term with ironic dash. Then came 9/11 and the democratic call of the hour was to fight "fascism with an Islamic face," as Hitch termed it, or "Islamofascism," the portmanteau -- and slightly denatured -- version of this.

Eustonistas, myself included, now use the term fascism with consistency and, I hope, specificity. Yet rarely has a working definition of the phenomenon been offered. The danger here becomes that overuse will again bring us to a point where an invaluable and arresting term begins to connote anything undesirable. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah are surely undesirable, ergo, they're all fascist. (You can judge the energy of any side in a world-historic struggle by the anemia of its rhetoric.)

In "Democracy and Fascism," Trotsky battles the self-negating and improvisational Stalinist definition and offers a proper anatomy of the ideology:

At the moment that the "normal" police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized Lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings from finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital gathers into its hands, as in the vise of steel, directly and immediately, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it doesn't only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini--the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role--but it means, first of all for the most part, that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.

Useful here are the Marxist categories, which the modern left has either forgotten or ignored in its attempt to equate Bin Ladenism with liberation theology. Roughly translated, Al Qaeda is the vanguard or militant wing of the latter-day wretched of the earth in the Middle East. Yet as any sociological study of Islamic terrorist groups will attest, most Al Qaeda members are well-educated and quite "petty bourgeois" in background. They might try to exploit working class, or better say impoverished, sensibilities in their propaganda, but one has only to remember Bin Laden's famed relationship to Communism to see that his is hardly an attempt to empower those who aren't Saudi industrial billionaires or believers in the One True God.

As for other militias and terror groups saddled with the f-word, it's interesting that leftists overcome with nostalgia for old struggles fail to remember the platforms upon which those struggles were waged. Nor do they apply the materialist lessons of the past to the present. Tariq Ali, for instance, celebrates Trotsky, yet thinks of Haniyah, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad as champions of the downtrodden, not bothering to spot the contradictions in their economic imperatives and the class segments of their populations to which they most appeal.

Indeed, Ahmadinejad's toughest opponents are the Iranian proletariat, which are organized into exactly the kinds of democratic-civil trade unions mentioned above. In December, prominent members of the Public Bus Transportation Company Union in Tehran were jailed for their dissidence. Organized labor in Iran has also been out front in its denunciation of the mullah regime, and has likewise paid a high price for it. But of course you won't hear a peep from the old comrades about this stifling of democracy, which is homegrown and not in the least influenced by American intervention.

Hamas -- or its precursor organization, the Mujamma' -- more or less sprung right out of the Palestinian university system and aims to control the entire apparatus of the state, including the army, press, municipalities and education of the Palestinians. (Sharia law mandates such comprehensive integration of civic and religious institutions.) As for its relationship with the workers, just a few days ago the Deputy Secretary General of the Palestinian Federation of General Trade Unions had his home attacked by terrorist gunmen. Of course, the current PA is not lifting a finger over this domestic crime. Might it be because the PFGTU, internationalist in scope and solidarity, has been resistant to infiltration by Hamas, a "national" liberation organization?

All of which doesn't even address the "declassed and demoralized" gangster and criminal elements which comprise these groups' natural and most violent constituencies. Plus, the main thrust of Trotsky's great polemic was to discredit the Comintern's shabby and sinister moral equivalence of Bruning with Hitler. The official Stalinist line during the rise of Nazism (when German social democrats were known as "social fascists") can't help but remind of what you now hear about Bush being the identical twin of Bin Laden...

Of course, one doesn't have to buy into every facet of a dead revolutionary's analysis of a 20th century political pathology. But a left that fails to see certain classical trends recapitulating themselves in the 21st century is a myopic and doomed left, to say the least.

During the six years I was marooned in the British Isles, I became, by necessity, an amateur taxonomist, like those dilettante Victorian naturalists who poked around looking for new types of dung beetles or butterflies. I wasn’t after dung beetles, though; I was cataloguing the diverse forms of obeisance with which American liberals try to elicit the condescending approval of Europeans, that sublime reassurance that “You, you’re not quite like most Americans, are you? You’re rather…European.”

I lovingly collected my specimens, and identified the occasional species—for example, Declinatio pessumus absurdus (Kurtzman, 2003), the warbly faux-British intonation with which the American Europhile triumphantly peppers the end of any sentence in which he’s asking a question. Or the dreaded Fellatio iratus michaelmooricus (Kurtzman, 2003), which sees the disgruntled American lecturing his European hosts on the exquisite sophistication of their own culture, and the hopeless barnyard vulgarity of American culture.

But every so often I would be so mesmerized by some virtuoso performance, some unclassifiable peacock display of American self-loathing, that I’d pine for a systematizing genius, a sociological Linnaeus who would catalogue the entire fauna of overseas American life and just hand me the multi-volume taxonomy necessary to describe the whole writhing ecosystem.

I mention all this because Naomi Wolf has a mindblowing new article in the Guardian, and it’s the first time since I’ve been back in the States that I’ve felt that way. Fascist America In Ten Easy Steps is Wolf’s Cassandra cry that America is headed very truly and quickly down the road to fascism.

The piece is a mandatory read for everyone, if only because it’s such a jackpot of delightful absurdities, little gems of rhetorical lunacy, that it’s likely to get you weirdly excited and shouting “No she didn’t! No she didn’t!” until your irritated wife wakes from her nap, walks into your office, and hisses at you to shut up, freak. It’s that good.

Wolf knows that the American government is not yet slicing off the eyelids of religious nonconformists or shutting down all small liberal arts colleges, as per Sinclair Lewis’s classic vision of a totalitarian America. But just you wait. Wolf’s got an inexhaustible arsenal of fatuous Hitler allusions to prove that we’re well on our way. For example, you know that little word “homeland” that Bush uses? Hitler used a similar German word! QED.

But even if you’re not as pleased as I am by egregious reductios ad hitlerum, fear not. There’s plenty more here. Wolf identifies ten steps by which a free society is made into a dictatorship, and then asserts “it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these ten steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.” The fun is in the way she tries to demonstrate that that the steps have been “initiated” in America.

For example, step number 3: Wolf argues, reasonably enough, that any successful fascist movement must have a “thug caste” to physically intimidate political opponents.

When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

All well and good. But who in Bush’s America could possibly correspond to the SA, the profoundly thuggish Brownshirts who disappeared early German opponents of Naziism and instigated Kristallnacht? Open your eyes, Polyanna:

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000.

Wolf is referring here to an incident in which Democrats claimed that Republican protestors harassed the three members of the Dade County canvassing commission during the Gore-Bush recount. The angry protestors chanted “Fraud! Fraud! Fraud!” because the Democrat-dominated commission had relocated the vote recount from a public setting to a private one where neither media nor anyone else could observe the process. One of the three members of the commission described the event as a “noisy, peaceful protest,” and none of the three agreed that they had been “harassed” by the protestors. But for Wolf, when a protestor is a Republican, they cease to be a protestor. They are instead a sinister thug, a threat to the very right to protest, and, amazingly, a sign that fascism is nigh.

And what about that classic outfit of a fascist militia, the “identical shirts and trousers” worn by the protestors? They were novelty t-shirts ordered by Republican activists, and featuring punny recount-related slogans such as “Sore-Loserman.” When done by a Democrat, this sort of thing would be plucky activism. But because it’s done by a Republican, Wolf tells us in utter seriousness that it’s a sign that America is undergoing a “fascist shift.”

The entire article is as ludicrous as this. Every one of the ten points. This sort of puerile Manichaean fantasy belongs on a LiveJournal page. And that’s without mentioning some of the annoying factual promiscuities that should never have gotten past the Guardian editors. For example, Martin Niemöller’s endlessly misquoted comments about “First, they came for the Communists/Jews/Cubs Fans/any other group of your choosing” get the treatment yet again here, with Jews winning the spot at the front of the line. Niemöller almost certainly never put them there.

Anyway, I’ve got libertarian inclinations and a suspicion of any state’s motivation for undercutting civil liberties. But this article is not about civil liberties. It’s an entertaining but disturbing postcard from the fantasy world of secular urban lefties like Wolf, who cannot accept that they must share this country with 150 million mostly decent, rational people who just happen to disagree with them about a great many things.

American democracy is not threatened by Wolf’s fantastical “fascist shift”; it’s threatened by her intensely parochial unwillingness to grapple with a worldview different from her own, and the impoverishing effect this has on public dialogue. Democracy doesn't require her to agree with Republicans, but it does require that she engage them as fellow citizens and not as jackbooted strawmen. When she’s done basking in the praise and sympathy of the European left, she might try getting serious about democracy and having some real discussions with members of the American right.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Szyk because famous skewering the Axis on paperRuth and Naomi: Szyk's Haggadah now goes for a quarter of a million

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Whether making the desert bloom or fighting Nazis, Szyk's Jewish men were hot.Did you know illustrators used to be big stars? Norman Rockwell could buy a house on his fees from doing one magazine cover. Little Nemo creator Windsor McCay got to trod the boards on the vaudeville stage, just cause of his overwhelming celebrity.

It's like how we let Britney Spears act.

Now, illustrators are mostly underpaid drudges, being rapidly edged out by stock photography. But I  still pine for our lost status.

At the Holocaust Museum, I found another star of illustration’s Golden Age. Arthur Szyk was a book illustrator and anti-fascist, Zionist artist whose work drips with such exoticism, such sensuality and venom, that I’ve got to show it to you now.

"Eclipse of the Sun": Grosz's thoughts on Hindenburg, etc.Laurel Snyder's Faithhacker post about Jewish artists reminded me that I’d been wanting to comment on the Met’s terrific exhibit, “Glitter and Doom.” It’s a retrospective of Weimer impressionism, featuring the works of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – without whom David Lynch is pretty well unimaginable.

I doubt I can improve on Ian Buruma’s excellent essay in the New York Review of Books about the paradoxical lure and repulsion of Germany’s brief Second Reich. Suffice it to say, a thin veil of decadence was draped over a ravaged society reeling from horrors of the First World War and well on its way toward the Second. Art cleverly (if scandalously) inverted this effect by embellishing the pathological the expense of the decadent. The central tropes here were not far removed from those of our own Gilded Age, plus sex. Blimpish, cigar-chomping tycoons; frivolous bourgeois playing cards or cutting a rug; graying Prussian aristos selling themselves and their country; hideously mangled and prosthesis-patched veterans; and whores – whores everywhere you turned.

Grosz was a rara avis, even for such a vertiginous time. He changed his name in 1916 to from Ehrenfried Groß out of an abiding enthusiasm for America, derived from his reading of James Fenimore Cooper (his judgment on the canvas far outmarshalled its counterpart on the page).

Through A Glass Darkly: Otto Dix's prostitute themeSomething of a Luxemburgian socialist by nature, he was arrested during the Spartakus uprising – or abortive German revolution – of 1919, the same year he joined the Communist Party. Five months in Russia was all it took to disillusion him on this sordid affiliation. After adding more than his fair share to the prevailing Weimar aesthetic, he hopped it for the states shortly before Hitler became Chancellor, an eventuality Grosz and others of his set saw coming.

If you’ve read Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, or perhaps seen Cabaret, you know about the whistled nihilism of the German twenties. Don’t think we’re quite “over” that decade’s cultural impact just yet. I remember being equally amused and shocked to discover in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind the true origins of the song “Mack the Knife,” whose shark teeth were so winningly yanked out by Louis Armstrong in his pop standard of 1954.

This cheery, Anglicized jazz number, used to great effect in closing scenes of Quiz Show, was composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for their Threepenny Opera, which is now in revival on Broadway with ex-Cabaretman Alan Cumming in the lead role. Mackie Messer was a character based on a highwayman in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. He fatally slashed those who failed to pony up. Sort of a Natural Born Killer before his time.

"Cain, or Hitler in Hell": Grosz saw Nazism comingBloom thus traced the lineaments of our postmodern fascination with murder and celebrity sociopaths to a Europe dangerously poised “between the wars” and just at the cusp of world-historic disaster. Auden, who spent some time in Berlin with Isherwood, knew what he was talking about when, in summarizing Whitehead in the Portable Greek Reader, he wrote:

"Civilisation is a precarious balance between barbaric vagueness and trivial order. Barbarism is unified but undifferentiated; triviality is differentiated but lacking in any central unity; the ideal of civilisation is the integration into a complete whole and with the minimum strain, of the maximum number of distinct activities."

The philosophical hysteria of a tweedy cultural conservative this may be, but I wonder if “Mack the Knife” were re-written today that its title wouldn’t be, “If I Did It.”

January 23, 2007 To: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tehran, Iran Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim, blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and upon his House, peace. I write in response to your letter dated 29 November 2006 and directed to the people of the United States. As an ordinary American citizen, with no official responsibilities, I will address you similarly, without titles or salutations referring to your political status in your country. You have taken to sending pretentious communications to Americans,