Recently came across this, really gesturing toward the content of a democratic anti-fascism, from Henry E. Sigerist's 'War and Culture', in the January 1942 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, obviously trying to intervene in a particular moment.

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.

doi.org/10.2307/2003...

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.

“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.

(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.

doi.org/10.2307/1947...

@apsrjournal.bsky.social

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.