Okay, everybody, we're talking today the general conversation about how we're supposed to respond to this moment. And according to nonviolent philosophy, nonviolent political philosophy, as articulated by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, educating ourselves is a large part of the process. Knowledge is power. So one of the things that I think is so important for all of us to educate ourselves about right now is fascism. I love history. I've read a lot of books about World War II, read a lot about FDR. So I have pretty rudimentary knowledge of we were fighting the fascists, and Mussolini, and Hitler, and what they did. But it never occurred to me in a million years. I don't think it would have occurred to any of us that this would become a critically relevant subject to our own place and time. I saw a lot of name calling on social media. I think it was Newsom, I'm not sure, called Miller Fascist. No, you can't call somebody a fascist. It was like children on a playground. Fascism is notcalling. It's not an accusation alone. It's a description of specific behavior. And sometimes when we know it and I got, oh, that's fascist. Yeah, you can know it in your gut, but that's not going to be enough to handle this thing, to stand up to what's happening. So I have a very special guest here today, John Lestrange, who you might have seen online, I've seen of them as the history wizard, historian and author specializing in genocide studies. They graduated with a master's degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies from Keene University in 2017. Since then, has been using their degree to provide free and accessible education,

free of jargon as possible to people through social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram. John, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You know, I think your bio says it all. You make it very accessible. It's not some high and mighty academic topic. It's like, what is it and what does it look like? look like. You know, I've talked to people John about a book I read several

months ago, Madeline Allbright's book, Fascism a Warning. And I appreciated that book because it was simple. It laid out what it is. This is what authoritarianism is. This is what totalitarianism is. This is what fascism is. She talked about Mussolini, she talked about the

fact that Hitler sort of idolized Mussolini. Mussolini did begin, really, would you consider him the first political fascist in terms of beginning a political movement? So Mussolini was the politician who more or less coined the term fascism. The things that we look at when we consider fascism certainly existed within various regimes prior to Mussolini, but he was the one who was the first right about fascism as a distinct ideology. He was the first person to do something and then just flat out call it fascism. So yeah more or less Mussolini, you know, is the progenitor of this particular modern movement? First of all, I have to have two questions. First of all, to lay it out for people, what is it? And second, you just refer to something that I've always found so curious, he brought me by being a fascist. Hitler brought me by being a fascist. When Hitler said they call his barbarians, we're honored by the title. So would you talk to us about exactly what it is? And number two, what is the psychology of people who like brag about it like it's an okay thing? Yeah, so Mussolini had originally actually been a socialist and then decided that it wasn't good enough. It didn't do enough of the things that he wanted it to do. So he sort of developed the... so fascism, right, as we can define fascism generally, and then we can define fascism very specifically. Generally speaking, fascism is just a, right, it's a far right authoritarian political ideology that revolves around extreme nationalism and generally near the end of its run puts corporations in charge of your political organizations. It marries very heavily your economy and your politics in a way that doesn't put your government in charge of your industry, but it puts your industry in charge of your politics. And everything sort of revolves around this extreme nationalism and this extreme sort of corporatism is the easiest way to define that. Okay, so I want to ask you a couple questions. Yeah. First of all, you talked about how you've been a socialist first. Usually we associate socialism with the left. So isn't it, wouldn't it be correct to say that there's left wing fascism and right wing fascism? So it's, this is an area where a lot of people tend to get confused on because you do write when you talk about socialism as

it's developing, especially in places like South America where we've seen it a lot, especially with things like Operation Condor from the United States and our attempts to stop that during the Cold War and overthrow those regimes that talk of nationalizing industries. The best way that I found to sort of sum up the difference between fascism and socialism to make it understandable to the average person is that in socialism, the government is in control of your industry and in fascism, your industry is in control of your government. Well, that's what the whole corporatism issue is, that the corporatism is the step towards fascism, in that it is a step towards the marriage of, you know, the political system and the government. Right, so you have to look at whether your political systems are using industry to create infrastructure that will benefit people or whether your industry is creating infrastructure that will benefit them through government assistance. I think that once you get to the point where you are putting the interests of industry above the interests of the people you've moved away from being left-wing and you've moved into the right-wing? Yeah, that's interesting.

And that's exactly right.

And that's why it's how the most famous fascists started out as left and sort of flipped to far right. And I think that Mussolini would be an example of that. Yeah. Now the second thing you brought up there was nationalism, nationalism as well as corporatism. We talked about corporatism a little bit, which has been an issue in the United States, even within neoliberalism.

I mean, anytime you start saying that corporate profit

should be the guiding principle of your economy, and thus your society, you're basically in a corporatist territory, moving towards the potential for fascism, which is what has been happening in the last 20 years in the United States. Would you agree with that? Yeah, definitely no. The The United States has been just really since Reagan, the United States has been like that's probably the clearest defining moment of the U.S.'s slow descent into what we would consider pure fascism. Yeah. Well, and we were at fact, we hung around fascism adjacent for far too long and did not heat the warnings. This warped nationalism is a big one because you know I was always brought up to believe that nationalism is not a good thing. It's patriotism is a good thing. It's love of your country but not at the expense of other countries. Nationalism is where you're sort of, it's like America's supremacy. That's what I see the America First movement about. It's not great among great nations. It's first and above all and at the expense of. Is that how you would see nationalism? So nationalism is one of those terms that has more nuance to it than we generally expect it to. when you see nationalism in your dominant cultures,

your dominant economies, then it tends to be a bad thing, it tends to be that supremacist

ideology that you mentioned previously. But then when we talk about nationalism, we also see

that just in the context of like Irish nationalism and Irish republicanism, right? You know, which is generally seen as a, you know, liberating? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Irish nationalism and Irish republicanism is generally seen as, you know, pushing back against British, you know, imperialism and colonialism against, you know, the areas nearest to them. So amongst those, there's a term in genocide studies called subaltern, which generally refers to when we're looking at the Haitian revolution and then the massacre that occurred against the French after it. We're looking at the lower end of the socioeconomic groups, right? So like the Hutu versus the Tutsi, who were the dominant, the Tutsi were the dominant economic group in Rwanda time, right? And then the Hutu, you know, committed the genocide against them. So that kind of, you know, from the, from beneath coming up that kind of, you know, revolution revolt genocide that can occur sometimes. Right. It can, right, veer into a bad area when we see it as, you know, only us and no one else, but, you know, right, there are a lot of nationalist movements and existing areas amongst marginalized communities that are generally considered to be good things except amongst the, you know, who benefit from that unequal power. Yes. So what you're saying is there's a spectrum, but I would suggest it would be good if we just had another word. For instance, Christian nationalism, the idea that one religion should be lifted and exalted above all others is in my mind, or one people exalted above all others is never a good thing. You did mention the word genocide, and I think we should move on now to the topic of Hitler. Many people now bring up the topic of Hitler.

You know, I would love it.

I would say something. I would love it. So the black cat, it's a fully black cat, right? That's Harry in the background. She's a tortoise shell cat. She's very needy. And she will be in the background for a bit. She doesn't want to cooperate right now. Okay, maybe she will before the interview is over.

A lot of times people talk about,

we don't use the Hitler analogy, but sometimes I feel that people who say don't use the Hitler analogy don't know enough about Hitler. So if you could take us through some basic steps, first attempt at the coup in 23, night of the long

knives or like, exact fire.

These are all terms we throw around, but I think a lot of

people could really use some basic education.

Yeah. So just to start off the reason why we use the, you

know, Hitler as an analogy, right, for, you know, fascism and

ultra-nationalism and all of these things is because he's probably

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