APPEASEMENT PAST AND PRESENT PART II
Trump's Oceana as a Fascist State.
The Land of the Free..? Whoever Told You That is Your Enemy!
- Rage Against the Machine
Suffice to say that significant layers of the Left, as well as fallen Leftists in the academic world and media, still refuse to see Trump’s regime and his supporters in the UK and Europe as fascist at all (43). By using phrases like “Far Right” they help to normalise the new fascism within mainstream political discourse, arguing that people like Farage have a right to free speech and to function (or indeed breathe oxygen!) rather than be crushed by the bloody iron fist of red terror. This finds its compliment, as Ash Sarker has recently argued, in the “woke” or social liberal left disconnecting cultural issues from a core emphasis on class warfare against capitalism and for the conquest of state power (Sarker, 2025). Of course there were always those who, with varying degrees of significance, crossed to the dark side by self consciously rehabilitating the new fascism and even joining it. This includes cranks like Larry O’Hara and his handful of pitiful supporters in the Patrick Harrington fan club but also the Spiked group, formerly the Revolutionary Communist Party, which has transformed from an obvious secret state initiative involved in the wrecking of the Labour movement into the most dangerous of think tanks operating in a corrupt and market facing University sector (44). However, there are also layers of more genuine leftists who still refuse to recognise the new fascism for what it is because they frankly don’t have the poke to commit to extreme revolutionary violence when it comes to dealing with the threat.
Only very recently, a good friend of mine (who had actually supported Brexit!) tried to tell me that Trump was merely grand-standing, that America has had repugnant and Right Wing governments before and that somehow it’s all still business of usual out there in our dystopian present. Part of his argument revolved around the fact (which is actually correct) that Germany did not become a fascist state overnight when Hitler was elected in 1933 (Trotsky, 1971). Indeed, Trotsky himself makes the point that there were still protests and physical resistance against fascism after Hitler won a heavily intimidated election for all that the German Communist Party (KDP) were far too late in calling for physical resistance due to the Stalinist Third Period (Trotsky, 1971). In Europe today there are countries, like Italy, that have fascist governments or include fascists in their ranks but are not yet fascist states (45). In Poland for example, the fascists were voted out although one wouldn’t think so to hear the current government cuddling up to Trump and churlishly confusing defence of Europe with building its borders against the asylum seekers and refugees currently freezing to death in Belarus (46).
So what makes Hungary and the US different insofar that they have already become fascist states? Well, the criminalisation of dissent and stifling both of academic freedom and the media is common to both countries (47). In particular, in the US, this was amplified by a battery of repressive legislation, including the Patriot Act, which indeed extended surveillance along lines predicted by Orwell and also criminalised investigative journalism under the rubric of the war on terror (Risen, 2006). However, it is the extraordinary and grotesque powers invested in the Presidency as an institution that holds the key to America’s rapid transformation into a fascist state (48). As well as enabling the inclusion of figures like Elon Musk, who nobody voted for, in positions of authority, it places the President above prosecution and enables the pardoning of convicted criminals (including the President) at a whim (49). Then there is the sweeping ability to sign executive orders (50).
One of the two main watersheds in America’s recent degeneration into a fascist state was his appointment of hardcore reactionaries to the Supreme Court even before he secured office a second time (51). The second was the pardon and release of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to serve as a de facto freikorps (52). Ergo, even if Trump doesn’t suspend elections in four years by proclaiming a state of emergency, there can be no more free and fair elections in the US ever, if gun toting fascists are intimidating voters at the polling booths (53).
This begs the question, if Mandelson and Starmer, both of whom are completely compromised, are already fawning to Trump in Washington, how quickly could Britain be transformed into a fascist state if a heavily manipulated election delivered a fascist and Musk sponsored Reform Party into government? The answer, I fear, is very quickly, given Starmer’s commitment both to failed and discredited neo-liberal economic policies, and fiscal restraints imposed by the previous Tory administration, as well as to a trade agreement with Trump that puts us on the wrong side of an inevitable trade war between Europe and the US (53). This, at the very least, will mean the end of the NHS, which Right Wing media in the UK is already trying to frame as a toxic brand, and exactly the same kind of fire sale gutting of public services that one sees with the Department of Government Efficiency (an example of Newspeak if there ever was one) and Musk’s slash and burn in the US (54).
At the same time, by completely following a fascist agenda on immigration, since the race pogroms that greeted Counterfeit Labour on assuming office, and fawning to Trump on Foreign Policy, Starmer also paves way for a fascist victory (55). The fact that Starmer has taken his cue on immigration from Giorgia Meloni in Italy is particularly disturbing (56). So too, however, was the grotesque spectacle of both Mandelson and Starmer, in the US, fawning to Trump like Nevile Chamberlain’s step-children, claiming to represent the defence of Europe when Trump has just sold Ukraine down the river and is threatening our allies, Denmark, Greenland and Canada (57). Within days of this Trump was also humiliating Zelensky in public, in Washington (58). Perhaps it was a coincidence that during this very same time frame, charges against Andrew Tate and his brother were dropped in Ukraine and this evil pair of rapists and sexual predators were given quarter in Trump’s America (59). It reminds us how both Mandelson and Starmer are totally compromised by their role in the cover up of Grenville Janner, Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile (60). This after all, can be the only explanation for the grotesque obscenity that is Starmer’s Far Right economic and political agenda, built on the equally obscene purging of the Labour Left fuelled by false charges of anti-Semitism (61).
Meanwhile, the path to fascism in the UK has also been paved in various other ways. Building on the anti-trade union laws established in the 1980s, which Counterfeit Labour has failed to overturn, legislation such as the Police, Courts and Sentencing Act already finds environmental protesters facing more punitive sentences than for rape and armed robbery (62). Disregarding the draconian National Security Act, investigative journalists in the UK also face attack by way of weaponised defamation laws as identified with the scurrilous practice that is SLAPP (63).
Back to Orwell – The Problem with the Left
If there is hope it lies with the Proles
- George Orwell, 1984
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As George Woodcock and others remind us, George Orwell had issues with much of the British Left, long before his bitter experience in Spain sharpened and refined his critique of Stalinism (Woodcock, 1970). As early as The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1936, Orwell had commented on the complete disconnection between a middle class and Stalinised Left and the wage-labouring proletariat itself (Orwell, 2001; Woodcock, 1970). This intrinsic mistrust is reproduced and reinforced in subsequent essays, right up to the Second World War, where so much of the Left collapsed into support for the Hitler-Stalin Pact (Orwell, 2021).
Orwell’s patriotism and misgivings about middle class socialists have indeed inspired various attempts to combine aspects of left and right wing politics, beginning with Anthony Giddens and the whole New Labour project in the 1990s through to the much more sinister agenda of Frank Furedi’s Spiked group (Furedi, 2005; Giddens, 1994 ). One sees this in criticisms of the “woke” middle class Left for supposedly turning its back on core concerns of working class people, thereby playing into the hands of Farage and the fascist Right (Goodwin, 2018). However, a closer look at the recently revived Social Democrat Party, first founded by David Owen as a CIA front, shows where this kind of thinking can lead (64). While nominally to the left of Starmer’s counterfeit Labour on the issue of the economy (which frankly isn’t difficult), this vehicle for Frank Fuerdi’s Spiked Group focuses most of its energies on attacking immigration and waging a culture war against all things “woke” and the fact that it has secured a pre-election pact with Reform speaks volumes (65).
Recently, however, much more credible voices have referenced the Left’s own failed and discredited indulgence in “identity politics” and the fetish for Gramsci’s “war of position,” that ultimately have their basis in Stalinism, and which amount to an abandonment of working class politics altogether (66). As Ash Sarker has recently pointed out in her important new book, Minority Rule, the logical conclusion of this failed popular frontism was ever going to be the “culture wars” waged by the fascist Right, who are always going to be better at this sort of smoke and mirrors than the liberal left (Sarker, 2025). Does this mean we adapt to a fascist agenda on immigration, as Starmer is busy doing, or abandon our obligation to fight racism and fascism and defend the rights of women, gays, trans and other vulnerable layers of society? Of course it doesn’t. But it does suggest that we need to connect these authentic democratic concerns to the core interests of the working class and root them in the language and organs of class warfare itself. By this I obviously mean the trade unions but also workers councils as described below.
As an example, the whole issue of immigration is inexorably bound up with the housing crisis in the UK and the fact that Starmer won’t even introduce rent controls speaks volumes on this issue (67). The public perception, amplified by the framing of the media, is that homelessness in Britain exists because of immigration and immigrants jumping the housing queue (68). The Left response should be that it is the capitalist property market, landlordism and the so called property ladder that is the problem: that absentee landlords need to be expropriated and their property seized and the building industry needs to be nationalised – mostly without compensation. This of course needs to be linked to the mobilisation of anti-fascist militia to combat the fascist menace physically, with these in turn being answerable to councils of action as established during the French General Strike of 1968 (69).
In The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell cites World War Two as being the first and only period in contemporary history in which one has to be a revolutionary in order to be a patriot and a patriot in order to be a revolutionary (Orwell, 2021). Personally, I still would have issues with using that kind of argument today despite the blatant hypocrisy of those supposedly patriotic fascists who first used Russian money to engineer the Brexit vote and now want Britain, as Airstrip One, to be the vassal of Trump’s Oceana (70). Was this what they meant by wanting their country back? However, where we can indeed take a leaf out of Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn is when it comes to defence.
With Trump now abandoning both NATO and European security despite Starmer’s puerile and pathetic efforts to appease this fascist monster, the Left should be to the fore in demanding Britain rejoin the European Customs Union and help to build a European standing army. What we rather find, however, is much of the Left denouncing Starmer the appeasement monkey as a “war monger,” as if it’s still protesting the illegal war in Iraq (71). Of course, such a policy of hawkish aggression towards both Putin and the US must not be at the expense of public service in the UK or Foreign Aid as all should be funded through extensive and sweeping nationalisation, progressive taxation and expropriation of the capitalist class. Meanwhile, we can go further than this by arguing to extend membership of the Customs Union to Canada, Mexico and other countries, in order to pre-emptively initiate a trade war with fascist America and throttle its economy in order to facilitate regime change. Further, by putting ourselves on an actual war footing with both Russia and the US we can seize the lion’s share of the economy under state control, denouncing all opponents of such a policy as traitors and mobilise to crush the fascist Right by lethal force as fascists, traitors, domestic terrorists and agents of a hostile power. Further, should a Musk and Trump backed coup by Farage or Reform, backed by the EDL, look likely, an enabling act should be passed to transfer power to the councils of action indefinitely until the crisis has passed.
How ironic that at a time when the Left, hampered by the pacifist and Stalinist baggage of its own history is still fighting past battles (like the war in Iraq) that we should need to look back to Orwell in 1941-42 to see a way forward. Let’s not make the same mistakes the second time around.
Endnotes
1. “Zelensky Calls for European Army as US Backing Questioned,” The New Arab, February 15, 2025
2. Oma Seddiq and John Haltiwanger, “Biden Says Putin’s Invasion of the Ukraine Shows he has Much Larger Ambitions and Wants to Re-establish the Former USSR,” Business Insider, February 24, 2022
3. Isaac Chotimer, “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the US for the Crisis in Ukraine,” New Yorker, March 1, 2022
4. Catherine Benton, “IMF Was Told of FIMACO Years Ago,” Moscow Times, July 7, 1999
5. Harding, L. (2017) “The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow,” Politico, November 19, 2017
6. Kenneth Hugh De Courcy, “Imperial Policy Group [papers] 1934-1942,” Online Archive of California
7. Ian Marlow, “US and Russia Move to Revive Ties While Ukraine is Cut Out,” Bloomsberg, February 18, 2025
8. “Zelensky and Trump Trade Insults as US President Launches Blistering Attack on Modestly Successful Comedian,” The Independent, February 19, 2025
9. Patrick Wintour. “US Backstop Vital to Deter Future Russian Attack on Ukraine, Says Starmer,” The Guardian, February 17, 2025
10. Carole Cadwalladr, “The Great Britis Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy was Hijacked,” The Observer, May 7, 2017
11. Patrick Gayle, “What Are Ukraine’s Critical Minerals and Why Does Trump Want Them,” The Guardian, February 17, 2025
12. “Trump Demands $500 Billion in Rare Earths From Ukraine for Continued Support,” Politico, February 11, 2025
13. Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecula, “Why the Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, July 4, 2022
14. To her credit, and bucking the trend of much of the Left, Carole Cadwalladr recognises the new fascism for what it is, identifies the Trump regime as fascist and correctly sees his seizure of power as a coup comparable to that of Hitler in 1934. This position is well defended both in her important Substack blog, The Power, which I avidly follow and, for example, “A New Era Dawns: America’s Tech Bros Now Strut Their Stuff in the Corridors of Power.” The Observer, November 10, 2024
15. Ido Vock, “Noam Chomsky: Russia is Fighting War More Humanely Than the US Did in Iraq,” The New Statesman, April 29, 2023
16. Paul Rogers, “Negotiations or Nuclear War: The Crisis in Ukraine?” Declassified UK, February 23, 2023
17. Peter Walker, “More Than 900 Labour Figures Decry Party’s Migration and Asylum Policy,” The Guardian, February 17, 2025
18. Owen Jones, “Starmer’s Plan to Cut Services to Fund War,” Battle-Lines, Sub-Stack, February 18, 2025
19. Nick Robins Ealy, “How the World’s Richest Man Laid Waste to the US Government,” The Guardian, February 44, 2025
20. Ketrin Jochecova, “Russia Could Start a Major War in Europe Within Five Years, Danish Intelligence Warns,” Politico, February 11, 2025
21. Sean Matgamna, “France 1968: When Ten Million Workers Took Capitalism by the Throat,” Workers’ Liberty, April 30, 2010
22. When he was on his death bed, having completed 1984, Orwell interviewed three women to be his prospective second wife, to look after his adopted Moroccan son, following the death of Eileen O’Shaunassey. One of the women (not Sonia Bronwen Orwell!) was a member of the Foreign Office Information Research Department and asked Orwell to compile a list of writers and intellectuals sympathetic to the USSR. The information was in the public domain and at this point, prior to the Korean conflict, the McCarthyite witch hunt had not yet begun – certainly in the UK. Orwell was enraged by how many British and Western based writers, including Isaac Deutscher, had defended Stalin’s betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising and other repressive measures throughout Soviet occupied Eastern Europe but had not become disillusioned with Marxism or “turned Tory” as the Daily Telegraph relentlessly tried to claim.
23. He was shot in the throat by a fascist sniper.
24. Durutti himself was shot at close quarters during the battle of Madrid and Juan Garcia Oliver joined the Popular Front government shortly afterwards. McHarg (2011) believes the circumstances of Durutti’s death were suspicious and that he wasn’t killed by a fascist bullet. Juan Garcia Oliver died in Sweden in 1980.
25. In fact, despite what Orwell and other Schachmanites believed, the Hitler-Stalin Pact had nothing to do with any convergence of ideologies. Rather, the Red Army had been purged and depleted by Stalin following Tucachevsky’s failed coup attempt in 1937 for which Trotsky was falsely blamed. This is not to justify the Hitler-Stalin Pact as Isaac Deutscher and other Pabloite Trotskyists were later to do.
26. This is not to say that I was ever comfortable, even when I was a Trotskyist, with the circumstances of the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion or with the sequence of punitive measures that led to it. In an article in New Interventions in 199, which was only shortly after I left the Workers Revolutionary Party, I mooted that elections to a Constituent Assembly should have been held (much as Serge advocated) in 1921, after the white forces of counter-revolution had been defeated.
27. The Revolutionary Communist Party founded in 1944 was the original Trotskyist Party in Britain, before the split in the Fourth International in 1953. Whatever its shortcomings it is not to be confused with the deranged cult founded by Frank Furedi in 1979, which has since degenerated into the most dangerous fascist think-tank currently operating in Britain’s corrupt and market facing University sector, namely the Spiked group. Recently, Socialist Appeal re-branded itself as the RCP. While I continue to buy The Communist at solidarity price I warned the members of the Watford Branch that I know not to take up a name associated with Furedi and his filth.
28. Actually, as Bornstein and Richardson point out, the Communist Party (who canvassed for a coalition government under Winston Churchill in 1945) broke strikes in the post-war period as well as opposing anti-fascist mobilisations e.g. at Railton Road in 1947. My good friend Charlie Pottins has also revealed how the Communist Party helped MI5 spook on the Trotskyists and authentic Left prior to the outbreak of the Korean War.
29. Robin Ramsay, “The World Anti-Communist League and its British Connection,” Lobster, Issue 12, 1986
30. George Orwell, “Prophecies of Fascism,” Tribune, July 1940
31. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Orwell Foundation, no date
32. Jane Mayer, “The Reclusive Hedge Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency,” The New Yorker, March 17, 2017
33. Carole Cadwalladr, “The Tech Gods Arise to Power,” The Power, Sub-Stack, January 19, 2025
34. Sergio Olmos, “Key to White Survival: How Putin has Transformed into a Far Right Saviour,” The Guardian, March 5, 2022
35. Carole Cadwalladr, “A New Era Dawns: America’s Tech Bros Now Strut Their Stuff,” The Observer, November 10, 2024
36. Peter Jukes, “From Murdoch to Musk: Hacking the State,” Byline Times, February 17, 2025
37. George Monibot, “You Want it Darker? The Remarkable Story of How the Far Right Koch Brothers Backed a Trotskyist Splinter Group,” The Guardian, November 7, 2018
38. John Bird, “Social Media Noise is Quickening our Slide Towards Fascism,” Big Issue, January 15, 2025
39. Peter Jukes, “From Z to X: How Russia’s Information Warfare Prepared the World for Trump and Musk,” By-Line Times, January 25, 2025
40. Hillel Ticktin, “Political Consciousness and its Condition at the Present Time,” Critique, Volume 34, Issue 1, April 2006
41. David Smith, “The Perfect Target: Russians Cultivated Trump as an Agent for 40 Years,” The Guardian, January 29, 2021
42. Carole Cadwalladr, “The Great British BREXIT Robbery: How Our Democracy Was Stolen,” The Observer, May 7, 2017
43. In contrast e.g. to Carole Cadwalladr, who at least recognises the fascist regime in the US for what it is, even groups like Socialist Advance (who have regrettably re-branded themselves as the Revolutionary Communist Party despite that title’s provenance) insist on saying that the “Far Right” isn’t actually fascist while also following the Pabloite line that NATO expansion caused the war in Ukraine and that a ramped up military response to Putin is bad. This reminds us that during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Ted Grant’s RSL were to the fore in opposing war with Hitler, collaborated with Harry Pollit’s Stalinists and were one of the main reasons so many Trotskyist leaders were interned.
44. Gian Volpicelli, “From Trotsky to Brexit to Orban’s Attack Dog: The Man Leading Hungary’s Fight-back Against the EU, Politico, May 9, 2023
45. Alexander Stille, “The Shape Shifter: Who is the Real Giorgia Meloni,” The Guardian, September 19, 2024
46. Aaron Kovewa, “What to Expect from Poland’s EU Presidency and its Focus on Security Europe?” New Atlanticist, June 6, 2025
47. “Hungary’s Sovereignity Law is Viktor Orban’s New Dangerous Power Targeting Independent Media,” Reporters Without Borders, no date
48. Whatever its limitations classic bourgeois democracy was a meaningful improvement on its predecessors and alternatives because it guaranteed a formal separation of state executive, legislature and judiciary as well as a fourth estate to hold power to account. With the exception of press freedom, which is actually guaranteed in the US constitution, America never really had any of these because of the President’s power to appoint both government members who are not elected and the Supreme Court.
49. Moira Dongan, “Who’s the Boss? An Unelected Chaotic Millionaire Thinks he is,” The Guardian, February 28, 2025
50. Peter Stone, “Trump’s Blitz to Expand His Power is Clear Threat to Democracy, Experts Say,” The Guardian, February 7, 2025
51. Michael Sozal and Ben Olinsky, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the US System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency,” American Progress,com October 1, 2024
52. Rachel Leingay, “Proud Boys Leader Thanks Trump for January 6 Pardon and Vows Revenge,” The Guardian, January 24, 2025
53. Richard Hall, “Trump’s Pardons Have Revitalised a Weakened American Militia Movement,” The Independent, January 23, 2025
54. Ryan Boyle, “DOGE Staffers Resign Refusing to Dismantle Critical Public Services,” Rolling Stone, February 25, 2025
55. John Rentoul, “Kier Starmer’s Secret Letter Reveals That he Sees Nigel Farage as the Real Leader of the Opposition,” The Independent, February 22, 2025
56. “UK PM Starmer Seeks Immigration Lessons From Italy’s Meloni,” Al Jazeera, September 16, 2024
57. Andrew Roth, “Starmer Tries to Woo Trump – But Has the US-UK Relationship Lost its Spark,” The Guardian, February 28, 2025
58. Andrew Kurkov, “A Humiliation at the White House and What Does it Tell Us? Trump Would Make a Colony of My Country,” The Guardian, February 28, 2025
59. Mike Wendling and Kayla Epstein, “Did the White House Help Lift the Tate Brothers’ Travel Ban,” BBC, February 28, 2025
60. Rajeav Syad, “Lord Janner Escaped Prosecution Due to CPS and Police Failings, Report Finds,” The Guardian, January 19, 2016
61. Ken Loach Claims Anti-Semitism is Being Used to Oust Labour Left Politicians,” The Independent, June 3, 2023
62. David Maddox and Archie Mitchell, “Climate Protesters Should Not Get Longer Prison Sentences Than Rapists and Far Right Says Greens Co-Leader,” The Independent, September 7, 2022
63. “Silencers of the Press: What Are SLAPPS?” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, no date.
64. Martin Rosenbaum, “CIA Fears About 1980s Labour Threat Revealed,” BBC, January 20, 2017
65. “Reform UK and SDP Agree General Election Pact,” SDP Website, no date
66. Kenan Malik, “Racism Rebranded: How Far Right Ideology Feeds Off Identity Politics,” The Guardian, January 8, 2023
67. “Khan Denied Chance to Bring in Rent Controls for London by Labour Government,” Harringey Community Press, August 16, 2024
68. Alan Travis, “Alleged Jumping of Housing Queues by New Arrivals is a Myth, Research Reveals,” The Guardian, April 21, 2008
69. Sean McGamna, “France 1968: When Ten Million Workers Took Capitalism by the Throat,” Workers’ Liberty, April 30, 2010
70. Peter Geoghegan, “The Dark Money Linking Donald Trump to the British Right,” Prospect, November 8, 2024
71. Andrew Murray, “Joe Biden and Keir Starmer are Warmongering Internationalists,” Jacobin, April 2021