Sixty-seven

Today I read yet another article about The Third Reich. They keep appearing, but no longer with last year’s justification that it was the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army (Why would the US celebrate anything done by the USSR?) because the US’s love of fascism needs no justification.

Most Americans of my generation consider the defeat of the fascist nations in World War II to be the most important historical event of our time; and they believe that defeat was accomplished almost entirely by the US army. They see the ‘Cold War’ as a continuation of World War II, with communists replacing fascists as our enemy. They speak of the two ideologies as though they’re interchangeable, because both opposed what Americans call capitalism and/or democracy (also interchangeable).

What historians call the modern age was an age of revolution. The revolution that founded the USSR was not the last, but certainly the greatest, revolution of our time; and the counter-revolution that followed was equally great. 

At first capitalists welcomed the fascists as leaders of the counter-revolution against communism; but when the fascists proved too extreme, capitalists turned against them. 

The fascists were defeated, but fascism itself, in a less extreme form, became the ideology of the victorious capitalists. Not in the US, nor anywhere in a world dominated by the US, is there any ideology of change to rival fascism; not evolutionary, much less revolutionary, change. 

It may or may not be possible to slow the accelerated rate of change that we call revolution down to a manageable pace, as those we used to call conservatives sought to do; it is definitely not possible to stop change, much less reverse it, as those we now call conservatives seek to do. 

Change is inevitable. The more people refuse to change, the more certain it is that, when change finally does come, it will be violent. And fascists welcome violent change. Sick of this world, as are we all, they long to enter the purifying flames of the apocalypse, like swimmers into cleanness leaping.