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Spared the full horror of war, America can flirt with fascism

Marianne Thamm
By Marianne Thamm
6 Oct 2024
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Much of the world has deep ancestral memories of the ravages wrought by authoritarians. Donald Trump would not be able to play with fire if World War 2 had brought destruction to the US itself.

Anthony Scaramucci, the financier who was a former Trump adviser, offered an astute observation about the US’s current flirtation with authoritarianism.

The Mooch, who was White House director of communications for all of nine months during Potus 45’s term (until he was fired), told the Wall Street Journal that Democrat wartime president Franklin D Roose­velt’s successful countering of the German American Bund (established in 1936) and the America First Movement (launched in 1940) had deprived Americans of feeling the true burn of flirtations with fascism.

The US, instead, rushed to the aid of its Allies –the Soviet Union, France and Great Britain – to defeat Adolf Hitler’s disastrous Nationalist Socialist hallucination.

In the end, about 80 million human beings died in that war, more than are alive in South Africa today.

In Germany, Japan, Russia (the former USSR) and South Africa, and across Europe and other countries once ravaged and ruined by war, a “hereditary memory” of trauma keeps alive an understanding of the consequences and folly of anti-democratic populism.

“We do not have the memory of the violence. We don’t have the memory of the terror, the lack of certainty and predictability of law and the legal system,” Scaramucci told the Wall Street Journal.

Memory over forgetting


Scaramucci noted that in Japan schoolchildren visit Hiroshima, site of one of the US atomic bombings, to commemorate their ancestors.

In Germany, Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones” pockmark the cobble pavings across cities where persecuted Jewish families once lived.

Monuments exist to homosexuals and Gypsies who were also persecuted and exterminated.

In the UK and across Europe, the Normandy D-Day landings are celebrated with military pomp and ceremony and high-profile presidential visits in memory of the millions of young men slaughtered, some of them South African, in two European wars.

Vladimir Putin and the Russians have long harboured resentment for not being included in celebrations of the defeat of fascism in the West.

South Africa, with more than 400 years of imperialism, colonisation, land wars, institutionalised white hegemony and violence, as well as tension between Afrikaans and English speakers and indigenous inhabitants, provides a cauldron of trauma and memory.

Across the country there are monuments, old and new, to those held dear in the collective history.

In KwaZulu-Natal, history is relived and commemorated annually by both sides of the significant 16 December 1838 Battle of Ncome, as it is celebrated by Zulus, or the Battle of Blood River, as celebrated by some Afrikaners.

History professor André Wessels, who specialises in South African military history, opined that “we must not judge historical moments in isolation or from a single perspective. There are other sides to the story.”

He told writer Anja van den Berg for the magazine Taalgenoot that it was possible to celebrate the battle in an “inclusive manner”.

“Compatriots can walk in each other’s shoes and acknowledge the bravery on both sides, even celebrate a defeat and show respect for each other’s history. But it requires knowledge and adult insight,” Wessels said.

Today a “bridge of reconciliation” stretches from the bronze laager of wagons where the Voortrekkers fought across the spruit to Ncome where the Zulu warriors are honoured.

Scaramucci said that people who had been directly exposed to fascism understood that it always ends badly. When those with hereditary memory watch Donald Trump play with fire, they muse: “But it ended badly in my country.”

That the American public was shielded from the direct ravages of war deprived them of this hereditary memory.

It’s about immigration, stupid


Trump’s grandfather was a German immigrant. Sergei Brin, the founder of Google, arrived in the US penniless from Russia and is now a dollar billionaire.

Though the roots of illegal immigration are what should form part of US policy solutions, Trump has instead made immigration a single-issue campaign point.

Legal immigrants to the US are now being targeted by Trump’s Maga nativists who hold no history.

“I don’t like the demonisation of immigration,” said Scaramucci, born to Italian immigrants to the US.

The country needed to restate its “love affair” with immigration, and in this instance Scaramucci agreed with Elon Musk (also an immigrant to the US), who has opined that the US needs growth.

The US, said the financier, was “a beacon of freedom” for people who bring this growth. The flirtation now with the “Team of One” that is Trump was a response to the lack of a deep memory of terror and the loss of freedom.

Celebrating history, its wounds, its bandages, its lessons and, more importantly, its warnings is essential as we exit Heritage Month in South Africa and endeavour to understand and absorb the tributaries of history that run through us. DM

Marianne Thamm is the assistant editor of Daily Maverick.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

You may write a letter to the DM168 editor at [email protected] sharing your views on this story. Letters will be curated, edited and considered for publication in our weekly newspaper on our readers’ views page.



 

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