APPEASEMENT PAST AND PRESENT
WHAT CAN THE 1930S TEACH US ABOUT MUSK AND TRUMP AND HOW TO DEFEAT A FASCIST AMERICA@
More and more, as I see Donald Trump’s fascist regime being appeased across the political spectrum, while he and Musk enable fascism both in Britain and Europe, I find myself looking back to the history of appeasement in the 1930s. In particular, I look at the extent to which the British establishment supported Hitler and his allies, and how the Left got it so very wrong. As a fawning Scab Starmer and his counterfeit Labour government continue to try and do business with Trump, betray both Ukraine and Europe, prepare the ground for a fascist coup in the UK and elsewhere, and put themselves on the wrong side of an inevitable trade war between Europe and the US, I also find myself looking back at George Orwell’s canon of both journalistic and literary work and at how so much of what he anticipated has proven correct. I also despair when even people whom I normally admire on the Left continue to blame NATO expansion for the war in Ukraine (which is also Trump’s position!) and oppose both the further military commitment to Europe’s Eastern flank and the establishment of a European standing army (1).
However, before looking at the current situation let’s revisit appeasement in the 1920s and 1930s.
Appeasement in its Context and the Imperial Policy Group
In the 1920s and 30s, appeasement of fascism on the part of the British and European capitalist class was a response to the greatest event in the history of human civilisation: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Amidst the Imperialist carnage of World War One, which we must indeed denounce on both sides, the Bolsheviks proved that capitalism is not a natural order of things, that it can be overthrown and that the working class can both conquer and hold onto state power, thereby laying the foundation for socialism and communism.
This, of course, is why the world’s ruling class, beginning with Russia’s gangster capitalists and Putin himself, have all but erased the Russian revolution from history. It’s also why I despair when bourgeois liberals accuse Putin of trying to re-build a Soviet Union whose collapse was a catastrophe for the whole world (2). In fact, Putin is trying to rebuild something much more venal, namely the Tsarist Empire, meaning that no territory with a Russian speaking minority or land border with Russia is safe and even the very existence of Ukraine as a country is disputed by Russia’s gangster-in-chief and his various apologists (3).
Although, as we shall find out below, Donald Trump did indeed enjoy murky deals with corrupt KGB as early as 1987, particularly including Kryuchkov’s Sixth Directorate and his contacts among the Tambov Mafia (such as Putin himself), these were in fact the very forces that deliberately set up the 1991 coup against Gorbachev to fail, thereby condemning the USSR to oblivion (4). Trump’s apparent support for the USSR, in short, was all about laundering dirty money, together with fellow sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein (and Robert Maxwell), through corrupt offshore banking and corrupt property deals in the West (5). These, as we already know, held the key to the rise of the Oligarchs who (like Trump himself) had absolutely no interest in defending even a degenerated workers’ state from the catastrophic restoration of capitalism that they helped precipitate (Bullough, 2019; 2022; Trotsky, 2004).
Fascism has always had its roots in political economy. In much the same way, appeasement of fascism has always been driven by fear of socialism and working class politics (Cuso, Anderton and Brauer, 2016; Mann, 1999). This was acutely the case after the Russian Revolution and found a former member of the Liberal Party, namely Winston Churchill, supporting both Mussolini and Hitler when they first came to power. We also still see a fossilised relic of this in the mainstream history curriculums of this day. As an example, we are told that Hitler’s rise was largely inevitable given the convergence of the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty with what was then the gravest crisis of capitalism in its entire history. In fact, what it created was a revolutionary crisis that could have been resolved through socialist revolution was it not for the Stalinist Third Period (Trotsky, 2004). It was the failure of the Left and of socialist revolution that made the rise of Hitler inevitable and this is the first lesson we must learn with relation to the dire situation in which we currently find ourselves. The second is that faced with a stark choice between fascism and socialist revolution, with absolutely no middle ground, most of the bourgeoisie will go with the fascists.
In 1934, however, a much more hard line and pernicious faction of appeasers than Churchill had come into existence in the form of Kenneth Hugh De Courcy’s Imperial Policy Group (6). These explicitly supported German Rearmament and sought to preserve the British Empire by agreeing to let Hitler take control of Europe. Directly or indirectly these were extraordinarily influential, prefiguring the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks of our own time, and there is substantive evidence that they actually shaped British Foreign Policy up to and including Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler over the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Actual members of the Imperial Policy Group included the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson, Stewart Menzies (the Chief of MI6), Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. That said, the majority of the Tory Party supported the appeasement of Hitler up to and including the route at Dunkirk, after which most of them wanted to sue for peace (Orwell, 2021).
Not surprisingly, the real water-shed in the growth of the ruling class appeasement lobby in the UK was the Spanish Revolution and Civil War from 1935, when MI6 worked with Admiral Solaris and others to arrange Franco’s return to Spain (Day, 2012). In his own memoir, George Orwell reflects how the spectacle of British Tory politicians, in Parliament, applauding the sinking of British aid ships to the Republican side, during the civil war, was a decisive factor in convincing him to go to Spain to fight. We now know that MI6 colluded in the sinking of these ships and of others, including one close to the British Coast in 1938 (Loni, 2014). In that same year Solaris, having collaborated with MI6 in the crushing of the Spanish revolution, asked Menzies and MI6 to back a military coup against Hitler and was spurned (Parssinen, 2004)).
If one projects forward to the present one sees the position of Chamberlain and Menzies being reproduced almost precisely and as tragic farce. On the one hand Trump, as a fascist who owes his very position to Putin and his Oligarchs, in a deal dating from at least 1987, has been resolved to sell Ukraine down the river from the very outset. This provides the background to his direct negotiations with Putin, in Saudi Arabia, over the future of the Ukraine, from which both Ukraine’s President Zelensky and Europe were excluded (7). It has since found Trump denouncing Zelensky as a dictator and demanding mineral rights with menaces (8). By contrast Starmer, who is also appeasing fascists at home through his racist immigration policies, simply says that a European defence of Ukraine (and itself) from Putin isn’t possible without an American backstop (9). In this way Starmer deliberately torpedoes the need for a European standing army as quickly as he refuses to rejoin the European Customs Union, wage economic war on the US, and invite Canada, Mexico and much of Latin America to join in the economic strangulation of a fascist USA.
Indeed, what we’ve recently seen with Starmer’s sickening visit to the US is quite the reverse.
As ever, all of this has a rationale that is rooted in political economy. Putin’s Russia, whose economy is on the brink of collapse, needs to dominate Europe’s oil and gas market and destroy the EU to this end. That is why it bankrolled the manipulation of the BREXIT vote via Cambridge Analytica, which also made the Russian invasion of the Crimea possible (10). In addition, in order to function, the Russian murder machine still needs Britain’s offshore banking system which is actually the largest money laundering operation on the planet (Bullough, 2019; 2022; Saxshon, 2012). Meanwhile, just as Robert Mercer’s connection to Dimitry Rybolovlev was integral both to BREXIT and the manipulated Trump votes, as well as the origins of the Ukraine war in Crimea, so Trump’s price to even recognise a rump of a partitioned Ukraine is access to the country’s minerals from which Britain and Europe will also be excluded (11). That these include the rare earths necessary for the development of AI might be significant. Starmer, of course, knows this but still hopes, vainly, to secure a deal on the reconstruction of Ukraine under a partition deal and so appeared (albeit it briefly) to distance himself from Trump’s mud-slinging against Zelensky, while in practice selling both Ukraine and Europe down the river (12). Far from defining Trump’s USA as an existential threat he is currently fawning to Adolf Hitler’s stunt double in Washington.
Orwell, Spain and Appeasement: A Problem for the Left
Although Starmer is a Right Wing Thatcherite whose disgusting neo-liberal government is Labour in name only it has to be said that much of the Left, while generally principled e.g. on Palestine and Zionist genocide, have been lukewarm at best in their support for Ukraine (13). It has found them all too often singing from the same hymn sheet as Hitler’s stunt double in the White House on the issue of Ukraine, now that the chickens have come home to roost. This is a legacy of Stalinism and its role in the rise of the new fascism, which large swathes of the left refuse to recognise as fascism at all (14). In some extreme cases, such as those of Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges, they have actually crossed over into the fascist camp, openly supporting Russian genocide and praising Trump’s appeasement of Putin (15). Much wider swathes of the Left, however, from Labour List to the Pabloite New Left Review, have blamed NATO expansion for the war in Ukraine (as does Trump!) and chastised Starmer as a warmonger for any semblance of military support for Ukraine and belatedly giving them some of the weapons they need (16). This is mistake and in fact, when it comes to Putin and Trump, Starmer the Right wing capitalist scab is neither hawkish nor warmonger enough! Indeed, the only problem with Starmer offering more military support to Ukraine is that he won’t support a European standing army independent of NATO and wants to keep within scorched earth Tory fiscal limits, attacking services and foreign aid to finance military expenditure instead of taxing and expropriating the rich.
As a case in point, I am generally a huge admirer of The Guardian’s Owen Jones who is often compared to George Orwell, and whose sub-stack blog I closely follow. This is particularly true when it comes to the media framing of social exclusion through the Spectacle, which Owen reveals in his important book, Chavs (De Bord, 2000; Jones, 2020). Owen is also spot on when he says that Starmer’s Counterfeit Labour government, by embracing free market austerity and adapting to the fascist agenda on immigration, paves the way for a Trump backed fascist coup in the UK (17). At the same time even Owen implies that a robust military response to Putin and the building of a European Army to replace NATO has to result in even more cuts to vital public services (18). This is a far cry from what Orwell advocated in The Lion and the Unicorn, when it came to a Peoples’ War against Fascism (Orwell, 2021).
In fact both defence and public services can and must be financed through wholesale expropriation of the capitalist class, largely without compensation, through sweeping nationalisations and a steeply progressive income tax. This, I would have thought, was the alternative both to the appeasement of Putin (that can be likened to the British government position during the Spanish Civil war and the prelude to World War II) and a trade deal with Trump’s fascist regime, against Europe. Such a trade deal, suffice to say, that Scab Starmer still endorses, would mean the end of the NHS and most of our public services, which would then face the same kind of slash and burn currently being waged by Elon Musk in the US (19).
In contrast, by waging economic war on the US, with the intention of destroying its economy and precipitating regime change, we could place the whole of Europe on the kind of war footing that already quite rightly exists in countries like Denmark (20). This, would provide the best ever opportunity to lay the basis for a planned post capitalist economy and the end of the free market altogether, much as state management of Britain’s wartime economy paved way for the limited but significant reforms of the Clement Attlee government (Addison, 1994).
Most important, however, the preparation for physical war would enable the deployment of anti-fascist militias on the streets, answerable to councils of action similar to those established in the French General Strike of 1968 (21). This would create de facto parallel state or dual power, comparable to what Trotsky called a “workers’ government” in 1938 (Trotsky, 2011). In the event of a potential coup or manipulated election that might deliver Reform UK to power, an enabling act could transfer power to the councils of action until the crisis has averted and both Reform UK and the English Defence League, together with all other fascist elements have been physically exterminated as domestic terrorists and agents of a hostile power (by which I specifically mean the USA) and their leaders hanged.
Spain: A Different View from the Left
“There was always something fishy about Orwell”
- Christopher Hill, Stalinist historian
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During the 1990s I attended an interesting if flawed talk by Michael O’Riordan in Parnell Square, Dublin, on the Spanish Civil War. O’Riordan had led the James Connolly Battalion of the Abraham Lincoln International Brigade of which my grandfather was a part (O’Riordan, 1979). At some point during the talk someone mentioned the name of George Orwell. This angered O’Riordan, who immediately denounced Orwell as a British agent (22). The claim was utterly ridiculous and based on an entirely scurrilous article in The Telegraph, that tried to link Orwell to the Foreign Office Information Research Department in 1948 (Newsinger, 2018). In this way, O’Riordan followed Christopher Hill and other Stalinists, in seeking to justify and rehabilitate the nefarious role of the Stalinist PSUC in decapitating the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona as described by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (Orwell, 2000). This ultimately paved the way for Franco’s victory, heavily supported by the Axis, in 1939. However, it also altered the international balance of class forces, in the struggle against fascism in a way that was also underestimated by the Fourth International when it was founded in 1938 (Trotsky, 2011).
In fact the history of Spain’s revolutionary struggle against fascism dated from at least 1922, when the paramilitary arm of the anarchist CNT found itself in violent struggle against the Pistoleros, who were a proto-fascist death squad mobilised by the Spanish Bourgeoisie (and British capitalist interests in Spain that included Rio Tinto) to physically exterminate the class struggle Left (McHarg, 2011). The CNT had been the original Spanish affiliate to the Commintern, up until 1924 and the Spanish Communist Party (the PSUC) were very much Johnny-come-latelys where the Spanish class war was concerned, completely committed to a Popular Front with the Republican bourgeoisie.
By the time that Orwell arrived in Barcelona, in 1937, the POUM were very much in charge of the city and wider Catalonian province, carrying through a revolutionary program potentially as significant as that of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 (Orwell, 2000). This led to the Stalinists vilifying the POUM as “Trotsky-Fascists,” thereby preparing for their bloody suppression by the PSUC later in 1937, when Orwell was recovering from his injury in Barcelona (23). However, the POUM had broken from Trotsky and the Left Opposition quite early on and were aligned to Victor Serge’s London Bureau, whose affiliates also included the Independent Labour Party in Britain founded in 1931 (Bornstein and Richardson, 1982; 1986).
At first the leadership of the POUM were unconvinced that the PSUC would physically attack them despite the arrival of several armoured units in Barcelona. Later, when the POUM had seized control of the telephone exchange in Barcelona, they believed that the Durruti Brigade would arrive in the City to support them. However, the Durruti Brigade was tied down in the mountains fighting the fascists (Richardson, 2007). Just before the massacre started Juan Garcia Oliver, an anarchist leader who had joined the Popular Front government after Durutti’s death, arrived in Barcelona to try and talk the CNT and POUM down but to no avail (24). The subsequent massacre which Orwell witnessed, before barely escaping with his life, would eventually win him to the position that fascism and Stalinism were effectively the same, even before the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and before Orwell read Schachman on the subject in Victor Serge’s The Partisan Press (25).
Of course, Trotsky condemned the bloody suppression both of the CNT and POUM, in Barcelona, which he saw as a continuation of Stalin’s Great Purge of 1935 (Conquest, 1990; Deutscher, 2004b). However, there was considerable bad feeling between Victor Serge and Trotsky, dating from the latter’s role as Commissar for War and founder of the Red Army during the crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion in 2021 (Deutscher, 2004; Trotsky, 1970). To Serge, incorrectly, the role of the PSUC was a continuation of that of the Bolsheviks 14 years before (26). As a result, Trotsky diminished the significance of what the CNT and POUM had achieved and the consequent shift in the balance of class forces that arose from the decapitation of the Spanish Revolution by Stalinism. That this was one year before the founding of the Fourth International is significant.
Before the Spanish Revolution was defeated there is no doubt that the entire of Europe’s bourgeoisie would have united behind Franco and the Axis, first in trying to crush the revolutionary working class and then attacking the Soviet Union. We have already discussed the extent to which the British ruling class supported appeasement and the idea of them waging any significant war against Hitler and the Axis would have been ridiculous if there was a genuine workers’ state in Spain, in Western Europe. Once the Spanish Revolution had been defeated, however, real divisions opened up within Europe’s ruling class if only because figures like Churchill and De Gaulle saw the Axis as a threat to their own Imperialist interests.
To amplify matters, Trotsky and the Fourth International elevated defence of the Soviet Union to a fetish which found them giving de facto support to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, at least before the invasion of France (Trotsky, 2019). By this time, Trotsky himself had been murdered by Stalinist agents in Mexico. I believe this wrong footed the Fourth International in its formative years and, in particular, when the Revolutionary Communist Party was established in Britain in 1944 (27). Had Trotsky followed Orwell, and Max Schachman, in calling for a Peoples’ War Against Fascism from 1939, it would have been in a much stronger position than simply supporting a wave of strikes from 1944 – after the war in Europe was won (Bornstein and Richardson, 1986). Demands for a Peoples’ War against Fascism would have included complete nationalisation of the war economy, under workers’ control, which would have precluded the need for strikes e.g. against dangerous working practices in the coal mines in 1944. In particular it would have involved transforming the Home Guard into a workers militia as advocated by Orwell (Orwell, 2021). This would have put the Trotskyists in a position to actually lead a revolution during the revolutionary crisis between 1944 and 1948, instead of disintegrating into warring factions even before the fragmentation of the Fourth International itself in 1953 (Bornstein and Richardson, 1986)
Orwell, Schachman and the Myth of Bureaucratic Collectivism
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism
- George Orwell
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In my view, Orwell was far too much of a libertarian ever to have completely embraced the vision of Max Schachman that Trotsky denounced in his last significant work, In Defence of Marxism (Trotsky, 2019; Woodcock, 1970). Once Stalin entered the war and after it ended, the Schachmanites withdrew from any manifestation of class struggle with which Stalinists might be remotely connected (28). This flowed directly from their belief that fascism and Stalinism were basically the same and also represented a higher form of class society beyond capitalism. Schachman himself supported the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War while other Schachmanites joined the World Anti-Communist League that had actual fascists in its ranks (29). By the 1980s, several Schachmanites had seamlessly mutated into Neo-Cons, e.g. in the Heritage Foundation. I do not believe that had he lived, George Orwell would have joined their ranks on any of the above issues.
In fact, Orwell first read Schachman’s analysis of the USSR in Victor Serge’s journal, The Partisan Press, shortly before he resigned from the Independent Labour Party at the outbreak of World War II. Clearly, the idea that both Nazi Germany and the USSR were species of bureaucratic collectivism (as Schachman claimed) was an important influence on 1984. This was to become Orwell’s crowning literary work. That Orwell called the regime in his novel a species of Oligarchic Collectivism (rather than Bureaucratic Collectivism) was no doubt a nod towards an earlier dystopian novel by Jack London, The Iron Heel, which Orwell had subjected to quite vigorous critique (30). That being said, for all that Schachman’s analysis of the USSR was ultimately wrong, and it remained a degenerated workers’ state until 1991, it is much more than the development of surveillance culture and the corruption of language that makes 1984 so relevant today (31).
As early as 1936, Trotsky had mooted that should capitalism be restored to the USSR a fragment or part of the Stalinist bureaucracy could indeed transform itself into fascism (Trotsky, 2004). That this has since happened in Serbia and Putin’s Russia should now be accepted as a given (Motyl, 2016). More important however, and as Carole Cadwalladr in particular seems to grasp, is how Russia’s regime of Oligarchs, on which the new fascism in Putin’s Russia undeniably rests, has not only helped facilitate the rise of the new fascism in the West (e.g. by way of Cambridge Analytica and Big Tech) but anticipated the rise of a similar fascism e.g. in the US, that rests on the Oligarchies of people like Charles Koch but more especially on that of Tech Billionaires like Elon Musk (32). Indeed it is in Musk, as the real life Big Brother, as well as the richest and most dangerous man on the planet, that we see the new fascism exemplified as the merging of unbridled capitalism with coercive state power, even as all other aspects of government are hollowed out and destroyed, with far reaching damage to society as a whole (33).
Moreover, while the ideology of the new fascism would scarcely describe itself as Ingsoc, it borrows from Stalinism as surely as its political economy is rooted in Stalinism’s demise. This is important insofar that until very recently, with the establishment of a fascist regime in the USA itself, the principle facilitator of the new fascism was indeed Vladimir Putin’s Russia, both in terms of financial support and the ideological framework that the fall of Stalinism has provided (34). On the one hand, the Bukharin-Stalin dogmas of State Monopoly Capital and Socialism in One Country not only wrong-footed the anti-capitalist movement that emerged from 1999 but fed into various Right wing conspiracy theories about globalist elites once that movement was physically defeated in Genoa and, more decisively, by the capitulation of Greece’s Syriza government on the issue of austerity (Varoufakis, 2017). Meanwhile Gramsci’s “war of position” reaches its ultimate and most consistent expression in the culture wars waged by the new fascist Right
The New Fascism and the Spectacle
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
- George Orwell
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Of course, there are important differences between the fascism of the 1930s and 40s (and even the 1970s and 1980s) and the fascism that has emerged from the ruins of Stalinism, and on the shoulders of Oligarchs today. There are differences in terms of its roots in political economy, a sociological constituency that extends to a significant layer of the working class and an ideology that derives both from Stalinism and from Stalinism’s demise. There is also a fundamental difference in terms of its relationship to media and the manufacture of consent (Herman and Chomsky, 1995).
In the 1980s the historical defeat of the working class, particularly but not exclusively by way of the miners’ strike in the UK, paved way for a structural shift in the nature of a stagnating capitalism, away from surplus value production towards wealth appropriation (Beckett and Hencke, 2009; Marx, 2013; Milne, 1994). For reasons that Machiavelli would have understood, however, it also disconnected an alienated, defeated and demoralised working class from its own history of struggle enabling a further integration of an ever more alienated and backward working class into its own enslavement through the Spectacle, as anticipated by Guy De Bord as early as 1967 (De Bord, 2000; Machiavelli, 2014). Permanence and force was lent to this by the misrecognition of Stalinism’s demise as a failure of socialism and the emergence of racist nationalism as the only strategy for survival available to the bourgeoisie (Tiktin, 2006).
The material basis for the new fascism was provided by the rise of the Oligarchs, first in the former East, appropriating elements of the former Stalinist state apparatus as well as aspects of its ideological framework and methods. By the time that a complimentary class of Oligarchs had emerged in the West, first by way of the hedge funds, financial institutions and mineral extraction sectors, they quickly became precociously concentrated in the tech and therefore social media sector, providing a false community of belonging that goes still further than that described by Owen Jones in 2020 (Jones, 2020). In this sense there truly is a seamless thread from the ghost of Rupert Murdoch past to the ghost of Elon Musk as dystopian future (36).
In reality, Chomsky never provided an adequate theoretical framework for his “five filters” even before his defection, by way of support for Putin, into the fascist camp (Herman and Chomsky, 1995). His notion that corporate media simply served the capitalist elite because they were held hostage through advertising revenues was rendered obsolete the moment that Murdoch forged his axis with Margaret Thatcher (Chippendale and Horrie, 1990; Davies, 2015; Hickman and Watson, 2012). The whole point about that axis is that the media moguls became an integral part of big capitalism as well as being Oligarchs in their own right (35). The idea of Rupert Murdoch choosing every British government from the 1980s through to 2024, addressing the Davos summit, and meeting Prime Ministers more often than they met their own Cabinets would have been unthinkable under Chomsky’s obsolete model (Watson, 2012). Cross subsidised from Murdoch’s other interests The Sun was sold at a loss, not as a newspaper but as a psychological warfare and opinion forming platform within the Spectacle and this is amplified a hundred times by Musk’s ownership of X (36).
Suffice to say that by the early 1990s the rules of the manufacture of consent had been transformed particularly by the Koch Brothers with their roots in the mineral extraction industry (Mayer, 2016). This explains why climate change denial is so important to the new fascism and how Frank Furedi’s Spiked Group (as global warming deniers) first came to be financed by Charles Koch (37). Under the three phase strategy formulated by Robert Fink, the think tanks and foundations funded by dark money, inside a corrupt and market facing University sector, serve the opinion formers both in corporate media and on the internet and increasingly important social media platforms where conspiracy theories and algorithms come into play (38). This was the point at which a hedge fund boss like Robert Mercer took over from Charles Koch, as the principle enabler of fascist propaganda online, through Cambridge Analytica, his connection to Dimitri Rybolovlev (that involved mineral extraction in Crimea), as well as the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg (39).
In a sense, Orwell and Schachman were almost correct, not because the USSR was a higher form of class society than capitalism, but because the kind of capitalism that emerged from Stalinism’s collapse anticipated that which would eventually emerge in the West the moment that free market neo-liberalism ran out of road. In earlier decades, before the Age of the Spectacle, this would have precipitated a revolutionary crisis (40). It was amplified by the extent that the new fascism, which rests on the economic power of the Oligarchs, borrowed from the theories and practice of Stalinism, with Gramsci’s “war of position” becoming the “culture wars” and “war on woke” of the fascist Right (Gramsci, 1973). However, this was always a two-way street insofar as the rise of the Oligarchs depended not merely on the corrupt activities of the KGB’s Sixth Directorate under Kryuchcov (Benton, 2020; Krasnov, 2025). It also relied on their links to Western capitalist interests including those of the Columbian Cali Cartel, Jeffrey Epstein, Robert Maxell and Donald Trump (41).
Maxwell it was who sold the stolen PROMIS software to Kryuchkov’s corrupt KGB cabal that further facilitated the rise of the Oligarch’s at the USSR’s expense, before a coup against Gorbachev that Kryuchkov deliberately set up to fail (Thomas and Dillon, 2003). That self-same PROMIS software was in turn used by Cambridge Analytica to manipulate both the BREXIT vote (itself integral to the new fascism) and Trump’s first election victory (42). Now, however, the Tech fascists are even more directly represented in Trump’s fascist government through Elon Musk.