Román Leão

Tag: fascism

  • 40–38 to 60: History Rhymes

    16–18.06.2026

    French president Emmanuel Macron dragged TFG* by the good ear to the Palace of Versailles to sign an Agreement to Accede, an Acquiescence, if you will, to bring a stop (a pause? a lacuna? a smoke break?) to open hostilities in the Persian Gulf that have pretty much fucked the economies of the entire planet sideways, killed thousands of innocents and less sos, and ensured that no conscious nation will never trust the United States again. I, for one, am very tired of winning.

    I am 100% certain that the import of the historical location was lost on our guy, even when he managed to keep his eyes open. Not much more than a century ago, a humbled Germany was dragged into the same room to sign the Treaty of Versailles that brought the first world war to an end and set the pot on high simmer in preparation for the next.

    Perhaps not being the alpha for a while will be good for us. America has always seen itself as the scrappy underdog, even while wearing the fat suit of empire. We could do worse than lose a few pounds. What we need to keep an eye on, however, will be those that take this international humiliation personally.

    We should look to the German Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 30s for a cautionary tale. Why did the postwar democratic government of Germany fail? It couldn’t have been because everyone was too busy learning Bob Fosse chair routines, could it?

    I seem to recall that rampant inflation was one reason. My German-American grandmother told me stories of citizens pushing wheelbarrows of reichmarks to go buy bread. That may have been hyperbolic—I should Google it—but regardless, the pillars of civility are already groaning under economic strain in this country.

    If people start falling through the massive holes that this administration ripped in the social safety net, the masses are going to start looking for a scapegoat. Never mind the extrajudicial police force already roaming the streets, looking for… who are we rounding up this week? Is it you? Is it me? Oh fuck, it is me, and probably you, as well.

    TFG signed national security directive NSPM-7 back in September, calling out “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-fascist” views as indicators of domestic terrorism. On any given day, I fall under one, probably two, of those categories. Three on a bad day. The ACLU slapped back, rightly stating that, “Nonprofits, their donors, and activists striving for a more equal, just, and fair country and world are core components of American civil society.”

    On Tuesday, ICE arrested 15 people in Minneapolis on spurious charges of “domestic terrorism,” stemming from their involvement in “Antifa-related” activities, while yesterday the White House posted an article on whitehouse.gov titled, “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network.”

    I’m going to say this once because I’m pissed that it even bears repeating at this point: Antifa means Anti-Fascist. It is an ideology—one that we, as Americans, should be in line with—not an organization. Seriously, if you are pulling people off the street for being anti-fascist, what does that make you?

    According to my limited, but curious, knowledge of German history, the Weimar Republic was beginning to make a go of it until the Great Depression came along and their economy, along with everyone else’s, screwed the pooch. That’s when the Hugo Boss outfits came out of the closet, so to speak.

    I would be surprised if the Democrats don’t take both houses in the November midterms, followed by the White House in 2028, but then what? Many of our former allies, as well as all of our adversaries, are tired of our shit. All it will take is one good economic downturn, and the blackshirts will be out in force, looking for someone to blame.

    Make no mistake, we’re in a tight spot, but is it too late to double down on our own humanity? I believe it was Wilbert Harrison who sang, way back in 1969, “Together we will stand divided we’ll fall / Come on now people, let’s get on the ball / And work together, come on, come on, let’s work together, now, now people / Say now together we will stand, every boy, girl, woman, and man.”

    I couldn’t put it any better than that.

    *This Fucking Guy

  • From Big Change to Big Crime in 229 Days

    In January of this year, two days after President Biden’s Farewell Address, I flipped on YouTube to catch up, having long given up on network news. The first thing I saw is what looked to be an agricultural landscape complete with a tiny tractor slowly moving under a text overlay reading BIG CHANGE in a distressed serif font.

    Ten seconds into the video, a squeal of feedback prompted the camera to reel back revealing the metal bars of a fence while the familiar tones of Old Black, Neil Young’s signature ’53 Gibson Les Paul, bashed out a three-chord stomp.

    Big Change is coming’, coming’ right home to you / Big Change is coming’ you know what you gotta do. Heraclitus himself couldn’t have put it better when he wrote in the 5th Century BCE, “Everything changes and nothing remains still,” or the more familiar, “Change is the only constant.”

    Young’s new song threw a bit of a curveball, however, when in the very next line he sang, Big Change is coming’, could be bad and it could be good. It is in this moment of leaving room for hope that I think elevates this song beyond the myopically political. Even the most news-adverse among us could feel that we were in for a tectonic season of shift.

    I’ve heard the Biden administration described as a Restoration presidency, referring to when the English monarchy was brought back in 1660, after Oliver Cromwell’s unsuccessful authoritarian stab at a Commonwealth.

    The reinstatement of a tired form of government, in England’s case, the monarchy, in our case, the gerontocracy, was a clumsy metaphor, but one must admit that it wasn’t just ol’ Joseph Robinette, God bless him, that was looking tired.

    The whole neoliberal worldview that has provided the country’s raison d’être, and slow suicide, since the 1970s, was creaking under global pressures and the weight of all the money that a new class of oligarchs had sucked up from the shrinking middle class.

    As much as I would like for Biden to have pushed through more of a progressive agenda, perhaps things just weren’t fucked up enough for that to have been an option. Like the animatronic Peter Pan says as he eternally jumps out the window into the darkness of his signature Disneyland ride, “OK, everybody, here we go!”

    Or as Uncle Neil says, Big change is coming’, could be bad, and it could be great!

    With Vladimir Putin’s Russia driving through Ukraine for a warm water port in the Black Sea and TFG threatening to seize the Panama Canal and the soon-to-be-thawed northern sea routes around Greenland, the world was looking increasingly less like a game of Risk, and more like Rock-em Sock-em Robots.

    Smash cut to Labor Day and Putin is still bombing the bejeezus out of Ukraine despite TFG having allowed the international war criminal to fly to Alaska, a place that the dotard repeatedly referred to as, “Russia,” leading some to worry that he was going to give the state back after almost 160 years.

    Israel is still systematically destroying Gaza and its people. Oh, and TFG is sending National Guard troops to American cities to do… what, exactly? This is all to admit that the tenuous hope against hope that everything “might be great,” was… let’s just go with overly optimistic.

    Seven months and change later, Big Change has been usurped by Big Crime, as desperate and close to punk rock as this soon-to-be octogenarian has ventured in a while. Don’t need no fascist rules / Don’t want no fascist schools / Don’t want soldiers walking on our streets / There’s big crime in DC at the White House!

    Why it has once again fallen to Neil Young to strap on the Gibson and man the barricades is beyond me. This should be a golden age for angry young bands, but as Donald Rumsfeld so famously said, “You go to war with the army you have.”

    I hope that when I’m 79 that I still have the gumption (and the freedom) to rail against things that I think are wrong. I also hope that if Neil gets rounded up by TFG’s masked mall-thugs, he ends up back in his native Canada, and not El Salvador, Eswatini, or South Sudan.

    The shit is hitting the fan and leave it to Shakey Deal and Old Black to sound the clarion. No more money to the fascists / The billionaire fascists / Time to blackout the system / No more great again