OPINION

Fallism is NOT Fascism

The comparison between the two is ahistorical and unfair, argues Adv Diaboli SC

The disruptions and shutdowns of South Africa’s universities over the past several weeks by student protesters calling for “free decolonised education” has seen a number of commentators label the Fallists as “Fascists”.

This relates to both the tactics of the Fallists – art, book and library burnings, the mob disruption of lectures, the throwing of academics out of their offices - and their virulently anti-white sentiments - “Fuck the whites” and “Kill all whites” being two favoured slogans. The call for “decolonisation” meanwhile at once defines the white minority as a racially alien element in society, and demands the extirpation of their heritage, influence and presence from higher education (and ultimately from South Africa as a whole).

UCT Vice Chancellor Max Price has thus been accused, for all his efforts to reach out and seek compromise with the Fallists, of “abandoning UCT’s progressive‚ liberal and internationalist tradition in favour of a narrow‚ anti-intellectual‚ anti-democratic and essentially fascist African nationalism.”

The labelling of Fallists as Fascists is, however, a deeply unfair and ahistorical comparison, as this article aims to show. To understand why it is necessary to first carefully go through the case for the ‘prosecution’.

The Cohn Affair

When people equate Fallism with Fascism they are undoubtedly harking back, at some atavistic level, to Germany’s “national revolution” in the first half of 1933 and, more particularly, the “Cohn Affair” which preceded it.

For those unaware of the story, the basic facts of this affair are as follows. In early to mid-August 1932 – so just after the National Socialists had won a plurality in the Reichstag but before they entered into government in Germany - Dr Ernst Cohn, 28, a brilliant young Jewish-German academic, was appointed Professor of Civil and Commercial Law at the University of Breslau, in the province of Silesia, in what was then the eastern part of Germany.

The national socialist student movement in Breslau vehemently objected to this appointment, claiming that it had been un-procedurally made. On 13the August 1932 an article in the Schlesische Nationalsozialistische Beobachter - headed “A Jew-German Law Professor” - warned that if the appointment was not revoked there would be no choice but for “a fight to the utmost” against it. It stated: “The Breslau student body will not tolerate Mr Cohn spouting his Talmudic wisdom in Breslau. If the scandal becomes so great that the University has to be closed then so be it: It would be better to lose one semester, than for Mr Cohn to be allowed to talk for an hour. The time for paper protests is over. There are other ways.”

At 9 am on the 10th of November Professor Cohn was met with shouts of protest in the auditorium when he tried to deliver his first lecture at the University. Among the chants were “Juden raus!” and “We want German professors!” He was prevented from speaking by the uproar and after fifteen minutes the university’s Rector, Professor Carl Brockelmann was forced to step in. He too was unable to unable to make himself heard. With the protestors becoming ever more threatening some police officers were called in to clear the lecture hall.

The police were able to restore some measure of calm, after considerable reinforcements were brought in. But when Professor Cohn, accompanied by the Rector and a police officer, tried to deliver his next scheduled lecture at 11 am he was again prevented from speaking. The protesters were then cleared from the university building and they proceeded to clash violently with police outside of it. Cohn was able to complete his lecture to the remaining students.

Cohn then had to be escorted out of the university by a heavy police guard. A crowd of yelling and screaming students, along with a group of SA members who had joined them, followed them all the way to near the Town Hall where he was eventually able to make his get away in a taxi cab.

When Professor Cohn again tried to lecture on Thursday 17th of November protesters, this time armed with tear gas, again tried to force their way into the lecture hall and assault members of the audience. This disruption led to the decision by the Rector and the Senate to close the university until the following Tuesday.

The next week strong security measures finally allowed Professor Cohn to deliver his lecture, despite the best efforts of student protesters to disrupt it. However student protesters and SA members gathered in the grounds of the University and police had to be called in to disperse them. Cohn was only able to leave a number of hours later once order had been restored. In the early hours of the morning firecrackers were thrown at his home.

On 3rd December 14 students were brought before the academic senate over their disruption of the lectures of the 10th and 17th of November. After a number of academics appealed for clemency during the hearings they received relatively mild punishments. Four received reprimands, nine suspended expulsions, and one was excluded from the university for the rest of the semester.

These punishments gave the national socialist students a new source of grievance. In mid-December a protest in honour of those students who had been disciplined turned violent, and the police again had to be called in.

In late December the Schlesische Zeitung, a newspaper which had been siding with the protesters, dug up an answer Professor Cohn had given to a Berlin paper as to whether Leon Trotsky – who had been deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929 - had the right to asylum in Germany. Although Cohn´s response was fairly innocuous the University leadership panicked. The Rector and Senate hastily convened a meeting and issued a statement rebuking him for unnecessarily “aggravating the situation” and saying that, in the circumstances, it would no longer be possible for Cohn to carry on with his teaching.

This capitulation, and the feeble grounds on which it was based, provoked an outcry from liberal opinion in Germany, and it was roundly denounced as an attack on academic freedom. At a meeting on Saturday 14th January 1933 the Senate reversed its position. In a statement it reaffirmed its support for academic freedom and expressed its support for Professor Cohn continuing with his teaching duties. Rector Brockelmann appealed to students to protest peacefully.

Although Cohn was supposed to resume his lectures on Monday 16th these were suspended to allow for negotiations with the students. At the instigation of a number of lecturers a special commission was set up on Sunday 15th January to hold discussions with student groups and associations, over the course of the following week, in an effort to head off any further unrest on the campus.

This were not successful. Professor Cohn´s two lectures on 24th January, though not themselves interrupted due to the special precautions taken, were met with violent protests elsewhere as students threw tear gas and stink bombs in the corridors and clashed violently with police. The police eventually had to clear the streets outside the university, making liberal use of their rubber truncheons, and about twenty arrests were made.

On the 26th January Cohn was able to deliver his two lectures without any real disturbance. At the end of the week nine students were then brought before the Senate on charges relating to the violence of the 24th of January. The main culprit was punished with expulsion from the University while another was ejected for the Semester. Six received suspended expulsions, and one was cleared.

This represented the calm before the capitulation by university management. On the 31st of January, the day after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Hindenburg, two representative of the national socialist student movement met with Rector Brockelmann. They presented him with a number of demands: He was to withdraw guards from campus; keep the police out; lift any disciplinary sanctions against students; and put a stop to Professor Cohn’s lectures.

The meeting did not last long and the students returned to the awaiting crowd and triumphantly announced that Brockelmann had agreed to withdraw the police from campus and lift all security measures. He had also promised them that where he was unable personally to meet their demands he would do everything he could to ensure that their wishes were acceded to. In turn the national socialist students declared that they were willing to give the Rector their full support again, and added that Cohn would disappear as "the last exponent" of the "old system".

With all his protection withdrawn Professor Cohn put up a notice the next day stating that his lectures were suspended. It was no longer possible to guarantee the safety of his students as the national socialists had promised to throw anyone attempting to attend his classes out the window.

“The National Revolution”

It was evident to observers early on that the objection to Cohn was not driven by a dispute over an academic appointment, but was really a party political demonstration by the National Socialists of a larger agenda. In the national socialist imagination they were involved in a heroic struggle against an immense demonic power which had taken possession of the entire country, seized all key positions, and dominated scientific, intellectual, political and economic life.

As the “national revolution” unfolded over the next few months– with all opposing forces vanquished or vanished “as if from the face of the earth” – the national socialist dictatorship was soon able to put into effect its plans for the “Entjudung” (de-Judaisation) of higher education. The slogan of the time was “Juda verrecke!” (“Perish Juda!” Or, to use the Afrikaans, “Juda vrek!”) The power of the mob on display in the Cohn Affair was now joined with the power of the state and the power of the ‘law’.

At the beginning of April the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was issued which mandated the expulsion of any Jew not belonging to one of the exempted categories from the civil service. As the schools and universities fell under the civil service law this allowed for the dismissal of Jewish teachers and lecturers. One of the first professors in Prussia to be placed on enforced leave of absence was Professor Cohn of Breslau University. At the end of the month the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities was issued by decree, which sought to limit the percentage of non-Aryans in any high school or university to their (minute) percentage of the total population.

Then, most infamously, on the evening of the 10th of May 1933 German students across the country’s university towns and cities engaged in a ceremonial burning of “the un-German spirit.” At the event in Berlin where books and pamphlets were heaped on a giant bonfire by thousands of parading students Minister of Propaganda Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, 35, delivered a speech praising the racial fanaticism of the youth. “Jewish intellectualism is dead,” he told the crowd. “National socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can express itself. These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old era, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. If the old men do not understand what is going on, let them grasp that we young men have gone and done it. The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts.”

Debunking the Fallism is Fascism thesis

At this point some proponents of the “Fallism as Fascism” thesis may start raising various points of similarity between our young race fanatics, and those of Germany in 1933. Apart from self-evident similarities in tactics used by young National Socialists and Fallists, they would no doubt argue that there seems to be the same nationalist spirit at work in both movements; one which recasts useful and productive ethnic or religious minorities as “painful and abnormal bodies which, unless ejected or made to conform with the majority, must harm or perhaps destroy the body politic.”

There is too the ruthlessness directed towards wholly unrealisable ends, the perception of being “abominably persecuted”, the attribution of gigantic powers to the adversary, and, the same passionate belief that they are involved in a final apocalyptic struggle against the old order.

There are three points which could be raised in response.

Firstly, while facile analogies with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany are a widely accepted, if not particularly esteemed, part of British and American public debate there is a strict and necessary taboo against the drawing of certain non-spurious comparisons with the Nazi-era; stemming from the understandable concern that this may lead to some or other unloved racial minority avoiding the harm that is seen as its due. As the philosophers have warned: “Those who remember the past risk avoiding its reoccurrence.”

Secondly, the spirit and sensitivities of our age are very different. For one thing, in 1933 there were not the powerful and well-funded network of social justice orientated Human Rights Organisations, that there are today, willing and able to assist German youth in their struggles against racial imbalances and alien influences on campus.

Nor were progressive British and American journalists and intellectuals “woke” back then to the frustrations of young Germans at continued minority ‘domination’ fourteen years into democracy. As a result the actions of young national socialists attracted a great deal of critical reportage in newspapers like the Manchester Guardian and the New York Times; a burden today’s Fallists do not need to bear, as they go about their important work of burning books, disrupting lectures and throwing white academics out of their offices.

However much merit the first two objections may have, it is the third which is really decisive. It is important to remember that up until 1933 and for a certain period after the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was seen as leading the A-team of European Fascism.

In March 1933 the Italians were as shocked, as anyone, by the new National Socialist regime’s actions against the Jews. This is reflected in inter alia the dispatches sent back to Rome by Italy’s ambassador in Berlin, Vittorio Cerruti. These were quite as critical as those sent back to Washington DC and London by American and British diplomats respectively.

Indeed, Mussolini tried to intervene with Hitler to try and get him to moderate his behaviour. Cerruti met with Hitler on the 31st of March 1933 to pass on the Italian leader’s message appealing for restraint. After the war Cerruti recalled that Hitler was unable to contain his irritation at this effort, as he saw it, to interfere with his historic mission:

“At first he [Hitler] answered calmly, then began to get progressively excited until he was screaming like a man possessed. ‘You know what great admiration I have for Mussolini, whom I consider the spiritual head of my own movement… For the past three years, the bust of Mussolini has been placed on the mantelpiece in my office in the brown house in Munich, facing my own desk. Have said this, allow me to state that MUSSOLINI DOES NOT UNDERSTAND A THING ABOUT THE JEWISH PROBLEM which I know intimately, having studied it for years, from every angle, like no one else before’.”

As is evident from the account above the racial fanaticism of the National Socialists – which is where any real points of comparison with the Fallists lie - was not shared, at that time*, by Mussolini and the Italian Fascists. It is self-evidently wrong then - both as a matter of fairness and historical fact - to compare or equate Fascism, broadly understood, with Fallism. This “fallacy of composition” really needs to be avoided by commentators into the future.

Adv Diaboli SC

* In 1938 Mussolini would himself implement a policy of “rassismo” in Italy. This was a capitulation to rising German power, and the tide of anti-Semitic type racialism sweeping through Europe at the time.