Ben Rosenzweig

On some familiar aspects of the context of the victory of the French electoral Left referred to above, comments of a prominent French Left politician, Edouard Herriot, from his 'The Future of French Democracy', in the July 1934 issue of Foreign Affairs.

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Much of the impetus came from people having experienced a great deal of recent profiteering by those providing weapons to fascists in Spain and elsewhere, and the inability of people and refusal of some governments to prevent this trade.

Excerpt from discussion of efforts by governments to negotiate restrictions on the international arms trade in the '20s and early '30s, from Constance Drexel's 'The Munitions Traffic', in the July 1933 issue of The North American Review.

Excerpt from Henry E. Sigerist's 'War and Culture', in the January 1942 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

“Anti-fascist demonstrators, who advocate that despite the failure of the British government to meet the political demand of India, the British people should be helped to defeat fascism, have been arrested in large number.”

As was so often the case in coverage of large industrial struggles in Indian newspapers at the time, it was impossible to discuss a strike without simultaneously discussing questions of colonial control, police repression, and struggles against fascism.

Amongst the most prominent strike leaders was Begum Sakina, a daughter of Persian revolutionaries who had been forced into exile following the royalist crushing of the Constitutional Revolution.

Her father was given asylum by the British on condition that he remain in Calcutta.

Excerpt from an article on the strike of thousands of scavengers working for the Calcutta Corporation in colonial India, in the 3 September 1940 edition of the Indian newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika.

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From the 'They Say' section of the November 1936 issue of the journal Current History, on the epoch at which capitalism must inevitably arrive, which does sound quite a lot like where we're heading right now.

(That assessment of the failure of polite, legalist, bipartisanship-seeking social democratic opposition to fascism in Austria, incidentally, is from a 1938 University of Toronto Press volume co-edited by the almost legendary Canadian economist Harold Innis.)

And clerical fascism wasn't only an external enemy of people in North America; in the '30s in particular, clerical fascism was a visible tendency in parts of the official institutional machinery of Catholicism, infamously in Quebec.

Excerpt on the rise of fascism in general, and disastrous failure of social democracy faced with rising clerical fascism in Austria in particular, from Lorne T. Morgan's 'The Origins and Development of Fascism', in the 1938 collection, Essays in Political Economy: In Honour of E.J. Urwick.

The notable weight of clerical fascist states allied with or puppets of the Nazis, of that 'Christian Patriotism' here invoked, had a strongly Catholic character, from Pavelic to Tiso, which, Vance aside, is theologically distinct from the current 'Christian nationalism' so prominent in US fascism.

Of course, to gesture toward a fuller context in a way maybe relevant to aspects of this present moment, an excerpt from Arnold J. Zurcher's 'Austria's Corporative Constitution', in the August 1934 issue of The American Political Science Review.

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@apsrjournal.bsky.social

Opening paragraphs of the editorial in the 2 February 1945 edition of the Catholic Standard and Times, a US Catholic newspaper.

A circus to persuade people that efforts to subvert any possibility of representative democracy are in defense of electoral integrity, for example.

So now it's a question of how to understand a parallel process now to be applied internally: how an existing administration will seek to entrench an authoritarian regime and assure the domestic population of benevolent intent.

Then, as expressions of US policy notably in the '80s, the demonstration election was defined as:

"A circus held in a client state to assure the population of the home country that their intrusion is well received. The results are guaranteed by an adequate supply of bullets provided in advance."

From forty years ago, illustrating in detail the US government's long history of providing this service to authoritarian regimes, in order to decorate pretend democracies and help prevent anything approaching an actual one.

We currently see how the US Right wishes to redefine the public existence of queer people, and especially trans people, as obscene and pornographic, to enable criminalisation, push queer people from public spaces and public life, and they hope reverse the trend towards people being less bigoted.

Section 28 in the Local Government Act and section 25 in the Criminal Justice Bill were direct assaults on the visibility and legal rights of queer people.

The broadest interpretation of the law would criminalises staying in your partner's bed overnight if that involved sex, chatting up another man in public to propose sex in private, and having any form of gay sex with more than two people under any circumstances.

Redefining kissing in public as effectively a public sex act and hence crime, if the people involved are of the same sex, goes a long way toward pushing people out of public existence, and reasserting that gay existence is shameful and obscene.

For example, Section 25 included as crimes "indecency between men" and "procuring others to commit homosexual acts."

"Procuring" could include me publicly saying to someone "hey, want to have sex?"

That's me procuring.

In 1990, the Conservatives introduced a Criminal Justice Bill proposing many repressive, sometimes bizarre things, including a section which re-classed as "serious sex crimes" forms of private and consensual gay sex, and increased prohibitions on same-sex affection in public; for example, kissing.

But after the Tories enacted section 28, after 1988, they predictably tried to keep going.

And AFTER Thatcher-era homophobia seemed absurd and despicable to almost everyone - before the US Right started trying to seriously reverse any decline in homophobia - the phrase came to refer to how the post-Apartheid South African Bill of Rights guarantee children access to a variety of services.

Also, before the Local Government Act, the phrase 'Section 28' was more likely to be thought to refer to repressive laws permitting ‘preventative detention’ enacted and widely used by the state during Apartheid-era South Africa in the infamous Internal Security Act

Before the Local Government Bill became law, this section was referred to as ‘Clause 28’, though changes in the bill while it moved through parliament altered the number to 27 and 29.

,"...(b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretend family relationship by the publication of such material or otherwise; (c) give financial assistance to any person for either of the purposes in paragraphs (a) or (b) above."