“Fascism now is not going to be like tranditional fascism”

Ángeles Díez, PhD in Political Science and Sociology from Complutense University.

News / 04.10.22

Ángeles Díez, PhD in Political Science and Sociology from the Complutense University.

She spoke at A Changing World: European Workshop on Geopolitics a 3 days event in Santiago de Compostela.

At the moment there is a lot of talk about the far right and democracy. Everyone is warning us of the danger of the far right.

I believe that we have to start calling things by their proper name.

We must talk about fascism and democracy; and the fact that these two concepts are not antagonistic.

In fact, we have to start thinking that democracies are on one side and fascism on the other.

And we have to analyse where we are, whether democracies or our system is getting closer and closer to being authoritarian and fascist regimes.

We have to distinguish between fascist regimes and fascist policies.

Fascism now is not going to be like traditional fascism.

We’re not going to have warlords, we’re not going to have all those symbols. But we’re already very close to having authoritarian regimes where all rights are lost, where all guarantees are lost, especially for the working classes.

Because we are in a global crisis, that leads to capitalism needing to increasingly control social dissent, social discontent, and living conditions.

So we are getting closer to having systems we will still call them democracies, but which they bear very little resemblance to democracy.

In addition, we have to analyze the conditions that have brought us to this point.

And within these conditions we can talk about the policies implemented for some time now, like for instance migration policies that dehumanise a significant part of the population.

Policies in which the economy takes precedence over needs and politics.

The economy has become the emblem of the modern world and this is making it so that those who run governments and those who generate these living conditions are certainly not the politicians or our system, but the central banks.

And on the other hand, we have all this generalised fear that they are already putting into us to try to stop us from moving, to reset the system,

These policies that focus on security, that’s the other mantra of this world, security.

Energy security, security from external threats, security from pandemic, bio security.

So we are living in a world in which the most important thing is that we start to analyse ourselves, to clarify where we are and start to put measures in place so that we are not fooled by all this, all this smoke and mirrors that are being created by all this generalised fear.

Let’s break that fear and start to organise ourselves.

If you are interested on fascism and the rise of extreme right in democratic systems, you can download our publication “Facing the New Far Right in Southern Europe” here.

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Coppieters Foundation is financially supported by the European Parliament. The European Parliament is not liable for the content of the conferences, events or the opinions of the authors of our publications.

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