First they came for the communists

Today is the International Day of Memory. We remember not just the six to eight million Jews killed by the Nazis but all of those who died in the gas-chambers and work camps, in the massacres, in the torture chambers. They included communists, socialists, anarchists, anti-fascists, gay and transgender people, Roma, intellectually and physically disabled people, Slavic peoples and Russian prisoners of war, among others.

But let us also remember that they came first for the socialists, communists and anarchists.

When we think of fascism we tend to think of Nazism, its most most murderous iteration, but it didn’t begin with Nazism. Fascism began in Italy and apart from minor skirmishes, its first proper action was the destruction of the farmers’ cooperative societies in Forlì and surrounding areas. 

Before ever there was a theory of fascism, there was a practice of fascism, that is to say the first fascists were not thinkers but members of action squads and their actions were directed against trade unions and cooperatives which were either anarcho-syndicalist or socialist and in defence of the rights of property owners, large landowners and industrialists.

To be sure there was a foundational theory but it mainly arose out of a sense of shame at how Italy had been treated in the postwar negotiations, because Italy had hoped to expand its borders to include much of what became Yugoslavia. Italy, they felt, had made a terrible sacrifice of its young men in the mountains in the war against Austro-Hungary and they were not be suitably rewarded for it. In other words, whatever baggage of corporate state and totalitarianism eventually accrued to fascism, the initial impulse was chagrin.

Given that the driving force behind the fascist squads was the demobbed officer class, the leaders were mostly members of the bourgeoisie and they naturally directed their ire against the Left. And so the first people to die were those who organised the workers to demand better pay and conditions, who helped the farmers to form cooperatives so they could make a decent living from their land, the people who demanded social justice.

To be sure the fascists soon moved on to other targets. In Italy, the race discourse was late coming to importance, though Mussolini made a distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans very early in his career. And squadrismo was always a form of toxic masculinity and therefore violently anti-gay. Initially it was anti-clerical but very soon they came to a comfortable agreement with the Catholic Church, and thereafter the bishops were their strongest supporters – after all, the fascists were fighting godless communism!

Hitler, on the other hand, had the Jewish people in his sights from the beginning, though in Germany too the initial actions of the brownshirts were against socialists.

So let us remember pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem in full:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me