The following interview with Alberto Toscano was conducted by Thomas Ernest and Enzo Bodine on 24 June 2025 in Berlin. It will be published in German this Fall by Die Buchmacherei in a book titled Gegenwartsbewältigung: Kritik der deutschen Staatsräson, bringing together multiple critiques of the notion of Staatsräson in relation to the German State’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its severe repression of Palestine solidarity movements and anti-Zionist speech.  It is now published on Communis in its original form as part of Alberto Toscano’s Communis column Extrema ratio.

“Staatsräson is against a critical rationality that asks: Why exactly Germany’s ironclad commitment to the Israeli State and the Zionist idea and where’s the limit? Because of Staatsräson’s sacred, mythic character, it doesn’t leave itself open to the obvious question of whether Germany’s reason of State persists regardless of what Israel does. Germany’s support for Israel is unconditional and therefore not open to democratic deliberation, not subject to international law, not open to ethical debate. And yet the choice of the name is intensely ironic because the history of the term Staatsräson is explicitly a history of violence. It’s about all of these forms of behavior that are not moral but are politically necessary: lying, deceit, violence, expropriation …”

— Alberto Toscano

A conversation on German Staatsräson, Israel’s genocide, and fascism today

Thomas Ernest & Enzo Bodine

In our work on this book, we were struck by how amorphous the concept of Staaträson is or has become. In its current formulation it was brought to prominence by Angela Merkel in a speech in front of the Knesset in 2008. “Israel safety is part of Germany’s reason of State.” Since then, the concept had been invoked to justify, for example, an anti-BDS resolution. Since  October 7^th, 2023, it has been employed with a new fervor to justify Germany’s ongoing support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and its war of aggression against Iran. On the home front, it justifies the violent repression of protest, the curtailing of constitutional rights, and censorship through the invocation of the supposedly imported anti-Semitism among Arab and or Muslim migrants— also linking up to the virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric that is increasingly central to German politics. In Late Fascism, you describe such myths as powerfully vacant, capitalized signifiers. Can we think of Staaräson as a technicized myth?

 

Alberto ToscanoMy first observation is perhaps more in my capacity as somebody interested in the history of philosophical ideas and concepts. The first time I encountered this terminology in the context of the debate about Germany and its relationship to Israel and to Zionism, I was taken aback.

Raison d’état is a concept coming out of the tradition of political philosophy. I remember first encountering it through the works of Toni Negri, who actually writes a lot about ragione di Stato—its history and the concept is often framed within a broader debate about Machiavellianism and absolutism. And so actually — which is bitterly ironic in the current circumstances — the original raison d’état is always presented as a legitimation for sovereigns reproducing themselves through all sorts of actions that would otherwise be considered illegal, unjust, nefarious, immoral, etc. So, people talk about raison d’état in terms of lying, dissimulation, violence, and exception.

And there’s an irony there because of the way that this has been refunctioned. We move from an amoral or even anti-moralistic reflection on the reasons and the rationales for sovereign power and State violence to a question of legitimacy which is couched in implicitly or explicitly moral terms. In the German context, the reason of State also seems to answer to the question “Why should the State exist?” What justifies a unified German State in the wake of the genocide it perpetrated?

Staatsräson is a very odd term, given its history, to be used in a solemn world-historical sense. It serves to represent Germany as founded on its reparatory and unconditional fidelity and support — material, ideological and otherwise — for Israel.

The question of technicized myth is really interesting, vis-à-vis the term Staatsräson. Furio Jesi takes this terminology from the Hungarian mythologist Károly Kerényi, who really is talking about myths (Prometheus, Oedipus, Isis, or maybe Christ, etc.). Jesi theorizes the way myths enter into political and ideological projects in which they function as ways of organizing systems of power and domination and expansion. The case of German Staatsräson is quite unique. I don’t think it’s irrelevant to the issue of technicized myth, but it forces us to stretch or adapt the concept. One way of adapting it to Staatsräson would be in a chiasmic way, and to think of it as a mythologized political technology. So, a relatively technical or philosophical term, used in discussions about the operations of the State and the juridical and material groundings of sovereignty, becomes sacralized and then operates in a totally different manner. Sacralized in the sense that infringement of or questioning, or even abolishing, Staatsräson would ipso facto undo the basic foundations and the basic legitimacy of Germany as a State—or at least this seems to be the narrative or even the aura attached to the term.

In that sense, Staatsräson also differs significantly from the ways that this identity (ontological identity) of interests or of horizons regarding Israel is articulated in the US context or even in other European countries. It’s a fairly unique mythification of a technical term or a political technique. This suggests a further reflection on the curious character of the current German ideology, which simultaneously appears to be committed to the idea, because of an understanding of its own fascist or rather Nazi history, that political myths are bad—that everything must be presented in a procedural, communicative, rationalist, enlightened, and perhaps also technical language. But it has twisted these terms, originally intended to demithify and enlighten, to give them a sacral character. The term Staatsräson and its uses appear very strange because a dry term of political or juridical philosophy has been made auratic. And thus, it resists being the object of rational political critique.

So, Staatsräson is against a rationality or at least a critical rationality that asks: Why exactly is this the case (Germany’s ironclad commitment to the Israeli State and the Zionist idea) and where’s the limit? Because of its sacred, mythic character it also doesn’t leave itself open to the obvious question of whether Germany’s reason of State persists regardless of what Israel does. Germany’s support for Israel is unconditional and therefore not open to democratic deliberation, not subject to international law, not open to ethical debate etc.

And yet the choice of the name is intensely ironic because the history of the term Staatsräson is explicitly a history of violence. It’s about all of these forms of behavior that are not moral but are politically necessary: lying, deceit, violence, expropriation. They’re part of Staatsräson.

So, Staatsräson already includes exceptionality and a logic of violence in it, which will then make one think of a whole other dimension of the mythic, which would be Walter Benjamin’s question of mythic violence and the State’s relationship to that.

TE & EB:  At the core of this sacralization/mythification in Germany obviously, but in Israel as well is the Holocaust, which gives Stastsräson its sacral character. And in this regard Israel and Germany are quite weirdly intertwined. On one side you have Germany — the former perpetrator — which promises, to the world, to itself and to its citizens to never again become a perpetrator. And on the other side you have Israel — the former victim — who as well promises to the world and to its citizens to never again be led to the slaughter.

AT: To never again be the victim.

TE & EB: And through this relationship, these two nations are really strongly intertwined and became allies. And through this relationship Germany became rehabilitated by Israel and since at least the 1960s when the Palestinians and the Arabs supposedly became the new perpetrators.

AT: Inversely proportional to the denazification of the Germans, at least. Symbolically speaking. The more Nazi the Arabs are, the less Nazi the Germans are.

TE & EB: The Germans accepted the Arabs as Nazis. The Zionists kind of accepted it as well— or promoted it. Apparently it started while Eichmann was in court in Jerusalem when mainly Israeli politicians and the media started claiming that there are so many more Eichmanns on the other side of the border—we have to be careful. So, Germany was rehabilitated through this weird process. I’m interested in how this process of coming in terms with the past — on both sides — lead to the extreme violence we see today— regarding Gaza and Israeli apartheid but also, regarding Germany’s repression against the Palestinians and Germany’s affirmation of what is happening—or denial of what is happening in Gaza right now. In his essay «The Shoah after Gaza,» Pankaj Mishra says that, since the horrors of Gaza, the Holocaust has lost its positive content as reference of memorialization. Would you agree that the Holocaust has lost this positive memorial content, and how can we understand this connection between the defense against the return of the violent fascist past and the simultaneous return of violence and fascism in both countries?

AT: Vis-à-vis Mishra’s observation, this is not an original remark of mine at all, but it’s evident that the support for Israel at all costs and also very much the demonization of both Palestinian resistance and Palestinian solidarity around the world, especially in Europe and in and the United States, because of the cynical and almost entirely arbitrary way in which the accusation of antisemitism is deployed — it should be noted: very frequently against Jews — has not necessarily tarnished or deactivated the moral or political force of the memory of the Holocaust, but it has certainly evacuated some if its force. But it’s no coincidence that, of course, some of the most virulent proponents of this kind of narrative — the projection of Nazism or fascism onto Palestinians and their supporters — are rabid anti-Semites. The bulk of the European far Right, but also figures who definitely played a massive role in promoting all sorts of antisemitic conspiracies like Elon Musk and so on. So that’s one of the things that we need to confront. Of course, the question of the Holocaust, both substantively and discursively has not gone away. It’s a term that in actual fact is rather present in the discourse of Palestinian solidarity. And certainly not in the mode of denial or minimization. Far from it. I think there’s an obvious argument to be made that the memory of the Holocaust in the sense of the anti-fascist imperative “Never again!” is obviously present in Palestine solidarity movements and ultimately insignificant to or undermined by Zionist advocacy. I think there’s a deeper reflection to be had, though, about the relationship between the memorialization or the framing and the uses of the Holocaust and that relationship between Zionism/Israel and Germany and more broadly.

This can be periodized as well: whether we’re thinking about the Eichmann trial, whether we’re thinking of the ’67 war, which many historians see as a watershed,  and how the memory of the Holocaust and the idea of transcending the status of the victim was mobilized, as well as the Hitlerian analogies made about Nasser and others. This is a key moment. One of the things that happens both in Israeli and Zionist discourse, but also very much in many European countries and in the US as well, is the disjunction of Holocaust memory from anti-fascism. Or the distortion of theories of fascism and understandings of anti-fascism so that they are contained by or reduced to the question of the Holocaust. This operation makes the Holocaust unthinkable in many respects, not least that of its origins, causalities and methods. Because it is treated both ideologically and materially as a phenomenon that has no relationship to other forms of domination, to other genocidal practices, German or otherwise. What is the relationship between the six million and the other millions?

This is anecdotal — but I still remember it as a moment of negative illumination — when I was a teenager I went to what I think was the first screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in Rome. And he came to present the film, in retrospect unfortunately, because it’s an important film, though it has been the subject of interesting critiques. In the Q&A afterwards, this young man politically involved with the movement for rights for Roma people in Italy said: “Given that hundreds of thousands of Romani people were murdered by the Nazis, were I to make a film about this what would you recommend?” Lanzmann first questioned the numbers, which was definitely not a good start. But then he went on to say that these two events had nothing to do with each other. And that gesture stayed with me. The gesture, the argument was not even about singularity or exceptionality but about disconnection. And there’s sophisticated and complex arguments to be made about singularity or exceptionality, obviously not just about the Holocaust, but about the transatlantic slave trade, about all sorts of different phenomena. But this was not about the uniqueness or the specificity, it was about the disconnection, which I thought was a disastrous political and historical but also ethical proposal because it just made all of these phenomena ultimately incomprehensible—historically, politically, materially, even morally. You can make the same argument and claim the T4 program, the killing of disabled and neurodivergent people had nothing to do with anything else. Then nothing is connected. And it’s also a question of sacralization.

And that to me is a broader issue because it’s really about how even the terminology of fascism operates. Is thinking about fascism and thinking about anti-fascist praxis, about forms of totalization, to use that old dialectical terminology, totalization that is nevertheless open to unevenness and difference and singularity? Or is it about this treatment of phenomena as exceptional, aberrant and disconnected? That move is crucial for a whole number of political projects, including, Cold War or even post-Cold War liberalism. It creates a narrative whereby you don’t have to address the potentials and causal dynamics and tendencies and potentials for fascism within normal liberal democratic society, etc. You just have to name and eliminate the next Hitler, right? Who could be hundreds of thousands of people, including their children. And that’s that we’re seeing these days. But it’s that logic — rather than a logic that thinks about fascism as this complex process and phenomenon — that then can give rise to the most disastrous behaviors. At the limit the presentation of a genocide as absolute, unique, morphs perversely into an apologia for genocidal policies, which are always presented as pre-emptive.

You see a logic of exceptionality, singularity and sacralization also repeating itself in these very virulent debates in Germany on the arguments of Michael Rothberg, Dirk Moses and others, the so-called “Historikerstreit 2.0.” It’s ever present in debates about the connection between colonialism and Nazism, and again the gesture is always that of disconnecting or singularizing in order to make certain operations possible. I am struck by the logic whereby Germany perpetually cleanses itself or atones itself via Israel — but only via Israel and not via Namibia or via other places of its past in order to then make its raison d’état possible — in the pragmatic sense of its military force and its economic force. It made me reflect on the fact that Germany also created a kind of model that was then sort of miniaturized or rendered portable by many of the far-Rights throughout the world. In the Italian case, for instance, if you want to draw the longer arc of how we get to having Giorgia Meloni as prime minister: a key moment in the process of turning the postwar successor party of Italian fascism, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, into Alleanza Nazionale was the visit of its secretary Gianfranco Fini to Yad Vashem, turning his party — even beyond the post-fascist label — into a “normal” right-wing party. Because if you went to Yad Vashem, you could not be a fascist. Of course, now, plenty of out-and-out fascists have been to Yad Vashem and you have Israeli ministers who call themselves fascists. So, this dynamic has also been rendered a little bit different since then. But this process, the dynamic you’re pointing to is really key.

It reminded me of a passage in an essay about black radical theories of fascism by Cedric Robinson, where he talks about the heroic narrative form of liberal Eurocentric anti-fascism, which disconnects it from the history of colonialism, and instead treats it as this narrative in which heroic European civilization, which is an unalloyed good, nevertheless gave birth to this internal aberration but then cured itself of it, thus proving its ultimate superiority, its ultimate spiritual and historical supremacy: “Only we could have created the abomination of the worst evil that there ever was. But because we’re the ones that have transcended it, we’re also superior to all of these people who are never spiritually sophisticated or civilizationally complex enough to create evil at this scale.” Or who are simply barbarians or savages, but not evil in this civilizationally significant way which we can present ourselves as having overcome. It’s a delirious trick but a very powerful one.

TE & EB: We overcame fascism and national socialism because we are more civilized.

AT: And that gesture also has the following troubling element: Germans arguing that only Germans could have done something this evil—in a way that does not quite express pride but something related. And this makes me very uneasy— as in “don’t talk to me about capitalist crises or the histories of colonialism.” And it also suggests this Christian matrix again, maybe it’s another kind of technicized myth: being able to overcome, remember and repair. It’s the idea of sinking into radical evil and then overcoming it, which then makes you somehow superior. This then becomes the narrative that Germany can — as “memory culture” — teach others. The national character or identity comes to be based around this narrative. Of course, “naturalized” or second- and third-generation Germans, with histories from all sorts of other part of the world, do not have that link. In this framing, they are not quite German, because to be German is to be able to identify with this narrative of radical evil and redemption. The grotesque obverse of this is the simple projection of antisemitism onto the racialized migrant, as when, for example, the German chancellor claims that antisemitism was imported to Germany ten years ago by immigrants from the Arab and Muslim world.

It’s a redemptive narrative but with this other character: the State of Israel—without whose participation the redemption collapses, because only the State of Israel can continuously vouch for the fact that Germany is redeemed or that Germany has been cleansed or purified or has to constantly purify, it’s an endless work. But the endless work requires that counterpart. And I think there’s a discursive and symbolic element to this as well: the endpoint of this, which is proving itself very evident, is that there is no such thing as genocide. There is only the Holocaust. Because genocide as a juridical, forensic but also historical and interpretive category is by definition not sacralizable or singularizable. So, if one follows a certain logic, which is unfortunately very pervasive, you could end up with the claim that the term genocide itself is antisemitic because it questions the uniqueness of the Holocaust by just treating it as a category, notwithstanding the fact that, of course, the history of the term’s coinage by Raphael Lemkin and others lies partly in the attempt to think very seriously about the conditions of replicability (not to mention earlier genocides, namely the Turkish genocide of the Armenians). This is very evident if we read some extremely prominent figures that people still turn to for their insights into this topic: Theodor Adorno, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, etc. We’re not talking about obscure, neglected Marxists or anti-colonial thinkers. What’s present in their work from 1945 on, is a very explicit elaboration of the fact that notwithstanding their singularity — which they all in different ways try to articulate, think through and philosophize — fascism and genocide are totally replicable and repeatable. And so, I think the mechanisms and the procedures, but also the legal and ideological ways in which the exceptionalization has taken place are really striking. In such a way that even the thinkers I just mentioned are often misrepresented or selectively presented, to make sure one does not hear their postwar argument that the Nazis are gone, but Nazism isn’t. Or that the fascists have been defeated but fascism hasn’t. Which, just to put it very plainly, is present throughout all of their work. Hannah Arendt writes a piece in 1945 called “The Seeds of a Fascist International.” And she indeed did use a term like “Jewish fascist” — together with Einstein in ‘48 — with no compunction at all to talk about the Herut, the precursor party of the Likud.

TE & EB: Something related happened to a Jewish comrade. She was protesting, holding a sign saying “Stop the Genocide” on Hermannplatz and was arrested by the German police and was charged with antisemitism until the matter was cleared up after a month.

AT: Yes. It was similar with the antisemitism accusations against Jeremy Corbyn—by some counts, Jewish Labour party members were three times as likely to be accused of antisemitism than non-Jewish members …

TE & EB: And it’s quite common for Germans to insinuate or even outright say that they understand antisemitism better than anyone else, even including Jews. Where the claim is: we were the world champions of practicing antisemitism once.

AT: It’s a very perverse logic.

TE & EB: In your book you argue that we shouldn’t necessarily understand fascism as the opposite of liberalism, but as its Other or its dark side. And now in Germany, the way the fascist drift articulates itself is also in reference to classic liberal values like freedom and even the protection of minorities—with Jewish people as the chosen minority in that case. How do we think about this liberal neoliberal fascism, which also does not really play the authoritarian tones of the old fascism so much? It is almost technocratic or “enlightened.”

AT: I think that here the national characteristics that you speak of are probably quite significant. On the one hand, we can have a much broader, maybe more systemic argument drawing either on certain Marxist theories or someone like Karl Polanyi about the ways in which economic liberalism, but also aspects of liberal political philosophies, have had intimate or interlocking relationships with fascism, even when they might have manifested in largely antithetical ways. There’s also a historicity to this. So, for instance, you have both philosophical and economic liberals in Italy being both inaugural supporters of fascism and then, for various reasons, eventual opponents. You have Mussolini himself explicitly presenting himself as somebody who was using first the violence of the militias and then the organized violence of the State to accelerate, make possible and secure society for economic liberalism with very explicit references to the Manchester State, the minimal State, the nightwatchman’s State and so on. So those are the overlaps—again, partly because liberalism, perhaps even more so than fascism, is a polysemic and historically complex term.

The use of concentrated forms of State violence and lawfare against dissidents and as a means for preventive counter-revolution — to use the nice terminology advanced by Marcuse and Angela Davis (and coined in the 1920s by the anarchist Luigi Fabbri), which has recently been revitalized — which also applies to liberal practices of government and ideology.

It is definitely true that most varieties of contemporary far or extreme Right politics, whether we wish to call them in some form fascist or not, do draw on and often refunction or morph liberal terminology—especially that of freedom. Though, of course, freedom is hardly the monopoly of liberals, even as a term; moreover, there are political forms that might be usefully analyzed through the lens of fascism, which nevertheless, at least in their discourse, present themselves as antidotes to the hard Right or as enemies of fascism. All that makes for a very complex situation. Even now in the US, the policies that I think are aptly grasped through the language of fascization nevertheless also directly reference civil rights legislation. Again, the protection of minorities: Jewish students that are presented as victims of discrimination by campus protests and so on and so forth. There is never any clean discontinuity between liberalism and fascism. And it’s true that if we think of fascism as defined by the horizon of a clean and total rupture with representative democracy and liberal ideology, I’m not sure that’s on the agenda anywhere. Ironically, you could say, at least looking at a good chunk of the Netanyahu’s cabinet, possibly only in Israel. If you consider Smotrich and Ben-Gvir — people who are happy to say, “I’m a homophobic fascist” and the like — then fully going beyond anything that could be even remotely called liberalism is fairly explicitly on the agenda. Much more so than situations that are still somewhat curtailed, as in Hungary.

Regarding whether or not we think the language, the theory, the terminology of fascism is apt: there’s a frequently very opportunistic and very cynical, but at times also just genuinely complex relationship between the contemporary far Right and the very polysemic and layered phenomenon that is liberalism. This leads people to all sorts of seemingly oxymoronic but actually not oxymoronic formulas, because “authoritarian liberalism” is not an oxymoron or a paradox. Most liberalism historically, whether in 19^th century Spain or mid-20^th century US, has involved substantial levels of State violence. In fact, I was thinking in terms of Staatsräson and having this conversation in Germany that there is a really interesting moment in political and intellectual history that seems very relevant to these questions, which is the break between Deleuze and Foucault over the German State’s policy of repression against the RAF, and of all the repression of the extra-parliamentary and armed left, in which a lot of these terminological issues come to the fore. In ‘77 Foucault is writing about Klaus Croissant—the lawyer of the Baader-Meinhof group. The German State accused him of having used his attorney-client privileges to create opportunities for his clients to plan kidnappings or assassinations and that he was therefore an accessory to these crimes. At this point, Croissant is in France, and the German State has him extradited. Around the same time, you have similar repression taking place in Italy, too, for example, so it is a broader European phenomenon. Foucault is writing about this hyper-securitization, including the fact that it is a massive step-change in surveillance practices—this is when you start having widespread computerized surveillance and massive police blocks. Foucault is writing about these national security and anti-terrorism dimensions as representing neoliberalism, as something that is not easily flattened onto fascism but nevertheless, has these extremely repressive features. There’s recent article that came out in Foucault Studies called  “Foucault’s ‘German Question”’, by Matthew Hannah, which points to the break between Foucault and the pair of Deleuze and Guattari, who are backing this intellectual movement and protest that refers to the German State as fascist. In ‘79, Foucault gives his famous courses on the birth of biopolitics at the College de France. In his discussion of German ordoliberalism he actually presents neoliberalism as something radically other than fascism. This is an interesting moment to think through, even vis-à-vis the present. Because, of course, the links between the German extra-parliamentary Left and armed struggle Left and the Palestinian resistance movements are the prehistory to this moment.

But that was also a key moment in the debates amongst radical critical thinkers about what the State was, what its security logic was and how these questions relate to the matter of fascism. And Deleuze and Guattari had a more capacious theory of fascism than Foucault.

TE & EB: Miklós Tamás’ essay “On Post-Fascism” is quite useful and interesting for thinking about the new and emerging fascisms and their relationship to liberalism. He uses the concept of the dual State, originally developed by Ernst Fraenkel in the 1930s and 1940s in his work on the Nazi-State. Tamás argues that fascization under democratic conditions is aimed at excluding people from the community of citizens. We were reminded of this while reading your book — Late Fascism — and especially the chapter on black radical theories of fascism. And also, if you look at what is now happening to pro-Palestinian activists here, especially the Palestinians themselves, and also to the migrant Left more broadly. This fascism at the fringes of society, aimed at those who don’t really have a lobby, don’t have citizenship or, if they do have citizenship, it is threatened by these new repressive measures. But for the average German, talk about fascism must sound weird: if you walk around, say, Berlin, it does not look very fascist. Should we even still use the word fascism? Is it not too historically overloaded?

AT: To answer the last point first I have taken the stance — not explicitly articulated as such in the book — to distinguish between the question of naming fascism and that of theorizing fascism. I think theories of fascism are indispensable in terms of the historical illumination they provide and then in the possibility for us to draw on and amend, reshape and revise them in view of the conjuncture in which we find ourselves, in view of our political practices. At the same time, I think that the naming or the identifying as fascist of one’s political adversaries or even of certain phenomena may at times be counterproductive or maybe even irrelevant or ineffective. This maybe also ties back to the whole question about thinking about fascism as a way of connecting and totalizing a set of different phenomena and thinking about fascism as a kind of exceptional logic because through pedagogy, in the discursive spheres that we inhabit, a liberal Cold War common sense is still so deeply entrenched that it’s very difficult to transcend the notion of fascism as aberration or exception in a way that kind of immunizes or retroactively legitimates the status quo of the liberal capitalist State as it exists. So, the US case is very striking because you had politicians and commentators drawing on this language of fascism in order to not address all the phenomena that would make me want to theorize fascism, above all mass deportations and imperialist support for genocide. Instead, fascism was: here’s Trump and what he’s going to do to broadly middle class, respectable liberal opinion in the United States. And that is the priority and because it’s fascism we have to fight it and ignore genocide. An extreme and obscene situation. It is not a Statement which was made explicitly, but it was basically the content, the subtext of much of the Harris campaign. I think that in that context banging on about Trump’s fascist threat had very little resonance with people’s everyday consciousness about their political predicament, their fears, their hopes. That’s why I think so much of the public debate about fascism is hampered by its obsession with naming. But whether you name someone or something fascist is then almost a question of political tact and not a simply or principally a consequence of analysis or interpretation.

And it could be that the AfD, or MAGA or Trump fit to your revised theory of fascism under neoliberal capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that you’re going to put it on the placards, right? That’s a totally different question. Conversely, I would also want to argue that there’s all sorts of political practices, including very much the Palestine Solidarity movement, but also various forms of abolitionist politics as well as various forms of radical organizing around borders and migration, etc., that to my mind are uncontroversially and incontrovertibly forms of anti-fascist politics. But they don’t necessarily operate with fascism as a key term. And for me they’re anti-fascist politics precisely because they are materially and ideologically addressing those dimensions of liberal-democratic States where both the potentialities but also the realities of fascist politics are generated.

In the US case, obviously the immigration system is the critical apparatus, ideologically, political, and theoretically, for the whole fascist drift. And the argument that Obama or Biden deported more people than Trump is important and poses questions that one has to keep in mind. One striking difference between so-called progressive neoliberalism and this increasingly fascistic form of national-chauvinist authoritarian neoliberalism (or perhaps no longer neoliberalism?) is the way in which the violence of the State operates with this constantly movable frontier—between the normative and the prerogative, between those within and those without the magic circle of belonging and citizenship. This takes us back to the problem of the dual State.

Processes of fascism can and in many ways do engage in a reflexive, explicit, spectacular, and I would even say enjoyable affirmation of that duality. Whereas the liberal tradition treats it as an unfortunate necessity—“We’re just going to do it in the gentlest and most procedurally and most humane way possible” (the word humane is generally very important to the liberal imaginary as relates to the maintenance and management of the duality of the State). The centrality of cruelty and its  enjoyment is very apparent in the banners calling for mass deportations (at MAGA rallies) and also in the White House X (formerly Twitter) account posting weird pornographies of cruelty—AI-generated images of migrants crying in the style of Miyazaki, “ASMR” videos providing pleasure from the sound of the rattling chains of deportees, etc. This extreme aestheticization of the dual State is also the point of enjoyment and of identification for the MAGA base.

This is the question I deal with in the chapter about racial fascism. At the forefront of black radical critiques of the liberal theories of fascism is this differential experience.

In an essay I wrote in October 2023, I tried to deal with the nature of the debate about fascism in Israel itself as it manifests itself in the liberal Zionist press—Haaretz’s English-language edition in particular. It seems from a distance and, again, through the filter of the English language, that (liberal-Zionist) Israeli public discourse often breaks the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism, with the proliferation of analogies to German fascism and even talk of “Judeo-Nazis.” But that question of the dual State is again very relevant and intriguing here because in the few years before October 7, the debate about fascism was revitalized through the mobilization of Jewish Israelis around the incursions of the Netanyahu government into the power and autonomy of the Supreme Court. There was this very liberal idea that the right-wing’s coalition’s overreach into the autonomy of the Supreme Court was leading Israel down the path of fascism—very explicitly, there were numerous articles asking the question whether Israel was already fascist or on the verge of becoming so. Stuff that would lose you your job at a German University, I imagine. It was staggering how much this argument disavowed the very existence of Palestinians; it was almost ludicrous. There was one interview with an important Israeli historian where he said that Israel seemed to be going down the path of fascization and if it crossed a certain threshold people would be able to bust into your house in the middle of the night and abduct you, soldiers will be walking around the streets with guns and acting with impunity. And he was just describing life for Palestinians right now or at any given point after ‘48 as the terminal dystopian fascist future (for Israeli Jews). This is not to exceptionalize Jewish Israelis in that regard. In “advanced” liberal Western democracies, in the “overdeveloped” world, we also live in or adjacent to spaces of extreme rightlessness that we neglect or ignore, not least in regard to the massive amount of arbitrary and prerogative power that’s exercised against migrants, whether documented or not, against racialized people, etc. I always find it somewhat symptomatic when people bring up that famous Martin Niemöller sermon: “First they came for X and I did not say anything.” Because many societies and many polities are organized around a lived experience that makes it clear or at least plausible that they’re not coming for you. And the sequence will not be: first they came for the undocumented migrants and then they came for the CEOS. It does not work like that.

We can also think about the dual State in terms of its stability and mutability. I recently did an interview with these two really sharp theorists and researchers — Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes — who work on the US far Right, especially on the multiracial character of the far Right. One of the very interesting things there, which also obviously defines so much of the history of the nexus of class and race in the United States, is the issue of mutability: How the Irish became white, and so on? How do you get to the other side of that racial frontier? Sometimes those who’ve recently made it over the frontier, both the literal border but also the juridical and ontological border, are the ones who might be very keen on policing it. There’s a whole book by American historian Bill Mullen called We Charge Genocide! American Fascism and the Rule of Law about the relationship between law and American fascism. And it interprets Ernest Frankel through the lens of both black radical theorists, but also movements, including the 1951 “We Charge Genocide” petition that black civil rights groups brought to the United Nations. In the US but also in other contexts we can think about the discontinuity but also the continuities between liberalism and fascism in terms of different relationships to the dual State and different imaginaries about it. So, either, in the liberal case, we will try to keep the prerogative part as small as possible — but we must alas maintain it — or in the fascist case, we witness the attempt to gradually move the prerogative into the normative. Fascist power is rooted in celebration of this duality and the self-definition of fascists and their people as those who keep the prerogative power alive. This is linked to fascist freedom and fascist subjectivity. It’s also about the State finding ways of delegating or distributing the policing of that relationship between the normative and the prerogative. In the US, a settler colony, this differential is of course very deeply entrenched because the settlers are precisely the ones who themselves establish, police, and manage the prerogative power over the native. This also touches on the relationship between fascization and Israel, both in the reality of that society and State, but also the way that the far Right, notwithstanding its often extreme anti-Semitism, projects itself onto or identifies itself with Israel because of its historical affinity to that kind of imaginary of settler violence. On the other hand, the liberal Zionist critique coming from Europe is becoming increasingly absurd. In the last few days, we had Canada and Norway, alongside Australia, New Zealand and the UK, sanction Israeli settler politicians because their violence is singled out as illegitimate—this goes as far as differentiating within the Israeli cabinet: Smotrich and Ben-Gvir get sanctioned, but you still have phone calls with Netanyahu even though he’s a wanted war criminal. States like Greece and Hungary just ignore their ICC responsibilities to apprehend him. So that’s also a border of sorts: even those who are defined as criminal by your own legal standards cannot be apprehended. They exist in a space of immunity and impunity.

Featured image: New homes under construction along the fence of the Israeli settlement of Emanuel, in the West Bank, on January 31, 2024. Photo: Lucas Barioulet/Le Monde.

Alberto Toscano