These are times of confusion when the racist right depicts itself as democratic while falsely presenting fascism as an ideology of the left-as Trump did at Mount Rushmore and Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has done for years. He was a man of letters, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a soldier and a public intellectual. Once the war was over, he immigrated to France in 1946 and then to Israel in 1951. He escaped the Przemysl ghetto and disguised himself as a gentile-posing as an altar boy and eventually converted to Catholicism. This is why Sternhell’s death should be not only a time of sorrow for the loss of a great mind and an engaged citizen but also an opportunity to learn from his life, during which he escaped fascism and then sought to explain it.īorn in Poland in 1935, Sternhell survived the Holocaust, but his mother and sister were killed by the Nazis. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in fascism, which has become a clear and present danger across the globe rather than simply a historical problem. Sadly, a week before Trump’s tirade, the world lost Sternhell-its most important historian of fascism.
Had he lived to see the speech, the late Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell would have no doubt recognized that Trump was perpetuating a lie that he’d spent his career discrediting. In fact, Trump echoed a classic technique of past fascist leaders fascists always deny what they are and ascribe their own features and their own totalitarian politics to their enemies. It’s not going to happen to us.”Īs with the fascist leaders of the past, there was in Trump’s speech a contradiction between his words denouncing tyrannical invisible forces and his actual dictatorial leanings. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. President Donald Trump warned about the threat of a novel fascism: “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.
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