At the End of Capitalism, There Was Hitler — and Now Wilders
Introduction
On November 21, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and (now former) Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for the (probably already deceased) leader of the Hamas Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif. After exactly six months of deliberation, the six-member judge panel of the ICC (among which a Holocaust survivor) found reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza against the Palestinian people.[1] The first response of Geert Wilders, the leader of the biggest, far-right party in the Dutch parliament and the de facto leader of the country, was that “the world has gone mad” and that he was “proud to meet my friend @netanyahu soon”,[2] clearly violating his obligations under international law even though he had signed the so-called ‘rechtsstaatverklaring’[3] (statement of concerning the rule of law) earlier this year, which committed him to upholding international law. Wilders, however, was not alone in defying the ICC: the governments of the US and Hungary — an EU member state — openly rejected the decision of the ICC, whereas Germany, Britain, and France all remained shockingly ambiguous. In other words, even as the ICC finally proved itself to be not just a neocolonial institution targeting only non-Western leaders,[4] Western leaders immediately withdrew their effective support for it.
In this paper, we will dive deeper into the interlinked critical concepts of racial capitalism, genocidal colonialism, and purity fascism, taking the work of Aimé Césaire as a starting point. Second, we will analyze the way these notions find their correlate in the online rhetoric of a far-right politician who won the most votes in the Netherlands’ most recent elections, Geert Wilders. We will find that the common thread in the aforementioned notions is dehumanization by means of racist othering.
1. The Links Between Racial Capitalism, Genocidal Colonialism, and Purity Fascism
The age of modernity, which is indelibly marked by capitalism, colonialism, and fascism, is the age of ‘instrumental reason’ (to use the term of the Frankfurt School[5]), which, when systematically applied to nature and to humans, has destructive effects (and ultimately for both parties involved). Aimé Césaire’s work provides a good entry point for further exploration of these links.
1.1 Racial Capitalism
In his Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire writes jarringly that “[a]t the end of capitalism (…) there is Hitler.”[6] Before we arrive at Hitler — in other words, fascism — we need to understand the nature of capitalism as instrumentalizing (and thus dehumanizing) people, and specifically on a racial basis. As Césaire writes, the ‘iron law’ of capitalism is that “economic development” is only made possible by “regression of the natives”.[7] In more concrete historical terms, the ‘progress’ of the West was built on the extraction of resources from oppressed people groups who are constructed as racially inferior. Nowadays the term ‘racial capitalism’, coined by Cedric Robinson,[8] is used to broadly make this point. The claim of critical scholars is not just historical, i.e. that capitalism as it developed within the contingencies of European history was or became racist. Rather, the claim is that capitalism is intrinsically racist; it can only carry out its exploitative functions by racializing people groups. Not only, then, does capitalism structure the world in terms of class — the proletariat being oppressed by the bourgeoisie — but also in terms of race — certain racialized groups being oppressed by others (Fanon’s famous move beyond Marx). In other words, capitalism constructs people as racial subjects who can then be oppressed for the sake of economic profits.[9] This racialization found its roots in the feudal society of Medieval Europe, on which basis modern capitalism was constructed, and with it an expanding system of racial oppression, within and outside of Europe.[10]
1.2. Genocidal Colonialism
Capitalism, then, brings us to colonialism, our second critical notion, and back to Césaire. The West has its own narrative of what colonialism was: a benevolent project of philanthropy that extended the civilization of Western countries and its science, law, humanism, and religion to the rest of the world. Césaire, however, forces the West to confront the hard truth that colonialism was first and foremost a project of economic “appetite and force”.[11] Even though the colonizers justified their project in terms of ‘Christianity = civilization’ and ‘paganism = savagery’, colonialism was essentially barbarism, a violent project of conquest, slavery, systematic abuse and torture, and genocide.
In the decades after the Second World War, the West came to portray the Holocaust as the prototypical genocide, but in doing so contributed to a collective Western amnesia regarding centuries of genocide in colonized areas. In Césaire’s words, the West forgot that “before they were its [Nazism’s] victims, they were its accomplices”.[12] Here it is worth citing Césaire in full: “[A]t bottom, what he[13] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such,” which Western, bourgeois, Christian humanists would lead you to think with their talk of ‘human rights’. Rather, “it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he [Hitler] applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa.”[14] Indeed, there is hardly collective consciousness, remembrance, let alone guilt, about, for example, the Congo atrocities — millions of Congolese people killed by the Belgian colonial regime about the turn of the twentieth century — or the Namibian genocide — tens of thousands of Hereros and Namas killed by the German colonial regime in the early twentieth century. So, the Western response to the Holocaust poisoned both the collective consciousness about what a genocide is, priming people to look for Nazis and gas chambers instead of (also) colonial regimes, and about particular genocides committed by their governments in their colonial history, as if the Holocaust qua genocide were an unrepeatable exception in the otherwise exemplary history of the West. At this very moment, Gaza provides daily evidence to the contrary, and the post-Holocaust Western philosemitism has contributed to these present atrocities by giving unconditional support for the settler colonial project of Israel, founded on ethnic cleansing and now executing a genocide.[15]
So, not only is capitalism intrinsically racializing and racist, but also violent and genocidal in its colonial projects. At the heart of genocide is dehumanization[16]: racialized groups are seen as less-than-human (i.e. ‘savages’ or animals) and consequently treated as less-than-human. Césaire points out, however, that this barbarism, this proto-Nazism, involves the dehumanization of both parties. In terms of the Frankfurt School, again, the ‘instrumental reason’, the objectifying and exploitative thinking and practices of modern capitalism, also objectified and dehumanized the perpetrators. As Césaire put it, with each little girl that is raped with the acceptance of the West, “a gangrene sets in” and, slowly, but surely, the West descends into savagery.[17]
1.3 Purity Fascism[18]
Finally, then, we make the connection with fascism, our third critical notion. Fascism tends to arrive when capitalism, in its imperial stage, is in crisis.[19] And indeed, at this very moment, capitalism in mainland Europe is increasingly in crisis — or at the very least, people are made to feel like it is in crisis — since the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, leading to increasing political instability and the steady rise of proto-fascist parties. For the sake of our purposes here, however, it suffices to make three points about what I call ‘purity fascism’.[20]
First, purity fascism, like capitalism and colonialism, is intrinsically racist and violent. It is racist in that it propagates and carries out a body politics of purity[21] in which ‘the people’ are said to be infiltrated, diluted, and thus weakened, by racialized ‘others’, who become scapegoats for the failings of government and capitalism; and it is violent in that it seeks to eradicate this ‘vermin’ or these ‘parasites’ by any means necessary. In other words, if you do not belong to ‘the people’ (an ideologically constructed category), then you are not truly human and not treated as such.
Second, fascism justifies its racism and violence through systematic lies and propaganda, controlling the media and ‘manufacturing consent’[22]. Just as Césaire pointed out that people “shut their eyes to it [Nazism], legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples,” so George Orwell famously stated in his dystopian novel: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”[23]The 21st century has arguably facilitated the rise of ‘post-truth’ politics like fascism by means of insufficiently regulated social media.[24] One of these, X (formerly Twitter), is now owned by the richest man of the world, who is the foremost spreader of misinformation on his own platform.[25]
Third, fascism is often facilitated by political and economic elites who wish to maintain their position of power and privilege or even expand it. Elon Musk is, again, the most blatant example.[26]
Fourth, fascism revolves around a ‘strong man’ who will bring the country in crisis back to its ‘golden age’ (invariably imagined and constructed), in which the ‘body’ of the people was yet pure and not invaded by, say, immigrants. To one such leader we now turn.
2. Analysing Tweets of Wilders
In this short but, hopefully, incisive section, we will analyze recent tweets of Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the biggest party in the present Dutch parliament. These tweets exemplify the dynamics of the three notions spelled out above and their common thread, namely dehumanization through racist othering.
2.1 AI-Images, Racial Capitalism, and Purity Fascism
First, I want to consider four AI-images posted by Wilders himself, which have the following captions:
First, we should note the significance of the use of AI-technology in its connection to (racial) capitalism. There has been a notable trend in the right-wing political sphere of using AI-generated images for media campaigns; Trump and Musk are the two most obvious examples, whom Wilders seems to have imitated. The use of such technology could be interpreted as a show of weakness; apparently, there are no real images available that would convey the same point, so a reality has to be constructed (i.e. generated). However, it is more properly interpreted as a modern equivalent of ‘propaganda art’ such as was used, for example, in Nazi Germany. AI is a technology that is widely propagated by the elites of Silicon Valley (cf. point 3 of fascism above). Not only does it function on exploited labor[27] and replace human artistic labor for the sake of profit,[28] it also contributes to global warming,[29] a development that disproportionally threatens non-Western countries. Thus, we see the connections begin to emerge here between racial capitalism and fascism.
Second, let me discuss the captions and import of these images, which will bring us, most immediately, to connections with purity fascism. The slogan ‘The sun will shine again’ (images 1–3) is, not incidentally, resonant with Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’. As we noted above, fascists construct a ‘golden past’ to which the strong leader will return the country — and in this case, Wilders literally ‘constructs’ this ‘ideal’ image of the Netherlands through his AI-prompts. The White supremacy in this image could not be clearer. At present, the Netherlands is supposedly unsafe, with the clear implication being that non-Whites have made the country unsafe (a so-called ‘dog whistle’). Prototypical Dutch people, according to Wilders, are young, White and, not seldomly (or incidentally), blond (see images above). All of this is eerily reminiscent of Aryanism. Wilders uses this propaganda to cast himself as the ‘strong man’ who will give the innocent Dutch people back their safety and prosperity.
2.2 Netanyahu, ‘Terrorists’, Post-Truth Fascism, and Genocidal Colonialism
Finally, for the connections between Wilders and genocidal colonialism we need to look at Wilders’ tweets in support of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Wilder’s domestic rhetoric about immigrants and his foreign policy statements concerning Israel are two sides of the same coin — Islamophobia. When Wilders stated that Netherlands had to be made safe again (see above), it is clear that he did not imply Jews as the ones who are making the Netherlands unsafe, but Muslims. Whereas Jews are supposedly naturally part of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ society that is the Netherlands,[30]Muslims represent for Wilders the big enemy in the ‘clash of civilizations’[31]. This battle between the West and Islam is currently being fought out by their respective proxies, Israel and Palestine.
In fact, however, Muslims, whether in Amsterdam or Gaza, do not represent civilization at all for Wilders cum suis. Rather, Muslim religion or ideology is said to be fundamentally hateful and violent,[32] and any Muslim who dares to fight back is called a ‘terrorist’, which is a subhuman label, implying that diplomacy is no longer viable and that the only means left is violence. Netanyahu, on the other hand, — wanted for crimes against humanity — is said to represent the forces of good, civilization, and life — typical colonial rhetoric.[33] Moreover, the state of Israel is said to represent ‘the Jews’ (a profoundly antisemitic move), which means that Wilders’ unconditional support for Israel makes him ‘the biggest friend of the Jewish people’[34] (a philosemitic expression that, again, is antisemitic[35]).
Finally, Wilders represents post-truth fascism by asking us to reject the evidence of our eyes, whether it is videos of Maccabi fans beating up people in the streets of Amsterdam or vlogs of Israeli terrorists blowing up whole neighborhoods in Gaza. In doing so he engages in profound doublespeak: a genocidal army becomes the side of life, innocent civilians become terrorists, and ethnic cleansing becomes liberation.[36]
Concluding Thoughts
In this paper, we have investigated the interlinked notions of racial capitalism, genocidal colonialism, and purity fascism, and analyzed social media posts of Geert Wilders through their lens. We have found that the common thread to these notions and the associated politics is dehumanization through racist othering.
Along the way, we have seen that capitalism is not dead, colonialism is not dead, and fascism is not dead. In fact, they are not even dying; they are alive and well, and on the rise again. What may be dying is liberalism instead, before it has even been truly and consistently applied or practiced anywhere. Accordingly, liberalism has to face up to the challenge: will it transition into a true postcolonial, socialist, and anti-fascist movement, centered on anti-racism, or will it succumb to, or morph into, fascism, with all its disastrous, exploitative, and murderous consequences? 2024 was not promising.
[1] International Criminal Court, “Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant,” November 21, 2024. https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges.
[2] Geert Wilders, “Imagine you lead a democratic nation etc,” November 22, 2024. https://x.com/geertwilderspvv/status/1859841136480735579.
[3] Also referred to as the ‘gemeenschappelijke basislijn’ (common baseline); see “Aanbiedingsbrief en eindverslag informateur Plasterk,” February 12, 2024. https://www.kabinetsformatie2023.nl/documenten/verslagen/2024/02/12/aanbiedingsbrief-en-eindverslag-informateur-plasterk.
[4] As frequently noted especially by African states. Cf. The Washington Post’s Editorial Board, “The International Criminal Court is not the venue to hold Israel to account,” November 24, 2024, and its telling opening sentence: “The ICC is needed to help resolve war crimes in Russia, Sudan, Myanmar. Targeting Israel makes that harder.”
[5] E.g. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason.
[6] Trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2001), 37.
[7] Discourse, 57.
[8] See Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, rev. and updated 3rd ed. (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). See now also Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, e.a., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2022).
[9] For the construction of the Black subject, and the interiorization of the projected inferiority, see Frantz Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (Penguin Books, 2021).
[10] Cf. Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, January 12, 2017. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/.
[11] Discourse, 32–33.
[12] Idem, 36.
[13] I.e., “the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century” (ibidem).
[14] Ibidem.
[15] For a history of Israel’s founding and ethnic cleansing (i.e. the Nakba), see Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017, repr. ed. (Metropolitan Books 2021). For Israel’s present genocide in Gaza, see, besides the recent reports by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders, the legal analysis by the University Network of Human Rights, “Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of International Law and its Application to Israel’s Military Actions since October 7, 2023”, May 15, 2024, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66a134337e960f229da81434/t/66fb05bb0497da4726e125d8/1727727037094/Genocide+in+Gaza+-+Final+version+051524.pdf.
[16] Cf. the title of the recent Amnesty report, “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza”, December 5, 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/.
[17] Idem, 35–36.
[18] This is a term I’ve coined to be able to distinguish varieties of fascism that embody a body politics of purity (like Hitler) and those that don’t (like Mussolini).
[19] See Ken Kawashima, “Fascism Is a Reaction to Capitalist Crisis In the Stage of Imperialism,” Historical Materialism, March 31, 2021. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fascism-is-a-reaction-to-capitalist-crisis-in-the-stage-of-imperialism/.
[20] On similar characterizations of fascism, see, e.g., Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House, 2018).
[21] Daniel D. Miller, Queer Democracy: Desire, Dysphoria, and the Body Politic (Routledge, 2021).
[22] Cf. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 1988).
[23] See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, accessed through Project Gutenberg Australia, August 2001, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt.
[24] To be sure, social media has also allowed for the democratization of media, allowing people to see, e.g., the daily atrocities perpetrated daily by the Israeli army in Gaza, which would not otherwise reach people’s eyes and ears. In other words, Musk’s statement that “[y]ou are the media now” works both ways (see Elon Musk, “You are the media now,” X, November 6, 2024 [https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1854045379408326909]).
[25] See e.g. Kanishka Singh and Sheila Dang, “Musk and X are epicenter of US election misinformation, experts say,” Reuters, November 5, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/wrong-claims-by-musk-us-election-got-2-billion-views-x-2024-report-says-2024-11-04/.
[26] Cf. Anthony Zurcher, “Musk flexes influence over Congress in shutdown drama,” BBC, December 20, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rqv248pxpo.
[27] Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru, “The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence,” Noēma, October 13, 2022. https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/.
[28] See e.g. the choice of Peter Jackson to AI-deage established actors for his upcoming Lord of the Rings-movies instead of giving opportunities to young emerging actors (as is done with The Rings of Power).
[29] By Melissa Heikkilä, “Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone,” MIT Technology Review, December 1, 2023. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/.
[30] Cf. “Verkiezingsprogramma PVV 2021–2025: Het gaat om u” (accessed December 6, 2024): “Het is zeer belangrijk dat grondwettelijk wordt vastgelegd dat onze Joods-christelijke en humanistische wortels de dominante en leidende cultuur vormen in Nederland” (p. 11).
[31] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996).
[32] See “Verkiezingsprogramma PVV 2021–2025”.
[33] See e.g. the following statement in a tweet from October 5, 2024 (“The hatred of extreme left-wing agitators etc”): “I will always continue to point out their cowardice. And stand up for our values, culture and traditions. That also distinguishes us from the hostile killing machines of Hamas cum suis and the defenders of all their evil. They love death but we love life. And we defend our way of life with everything we have.” See https://x.com/geertwilderspvv/status/1842466560893460657.
[34] E.g., as said in parliament on July 3, 2024: “Wij zijn hier in dit huis zo ongeveer de grootste vriend van het Joodse volk en de staat Israël.” See Tweede Kamer, 91e vergadering, woensdag 3 juli 2024, https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/plenaire_verslagen/detail/2023-2024/91.
[35] Cf. Hannah Rose, “The New Philosemitism: Exploring a Changing Relationship Between Jews and the Far-Right.” For a recent application see Marcel Möring, “Ranzige liefde — Rellen in Amsterdam: De ‘verdedigers van de joden’”, De Groene Amsterdammer, November 20, 2024, https://www.groene.nl/artikel/ranzige-liefde.
[36] The notion of doublespeak is derived from Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The most famous example is the party slogan: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”