[D66] Steve Bannon: A fascist in the White House

[J.N.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/15/bann-n15.html

Steve Bannon: A fascist in the White House
By Tom Carter
15 November 2016

On Sunday, Trump announced the appointment of Steve Bannon to the 
position of “chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.” 
This corresponds to the position previously held by John Podesta in the 
Obama administration.

The appointment of a fascist scandalmonger to serve as the president’s 
chief strategist epitomizes the “gutter to West Wing pipeline” that is 
funneling racist, far-right, and religious fundamentalist figures into 
senior positions in the Trump administration.

Bannon is a fascist, and fully warrants the label. As a political 
operative, Bannon is a specialist in scandal mongering, provocation and 
innuendo. His online rag Breitbart News serves as a platform for white 
nationalists, anti-Semites, and the so-called “alt-right.” He is a 
person who manages, with his own biography, to combine nearly all the 
reactionary trends in American political, economic and social life.

Bannon began his career as a Surface Warfare Officer in the US Navy’s 
Pacific Fleet, and went on to serve as a special assistant to the Chief 
of Naval Operations at the Pentagon.

After leaving the military, Bannon took a position at the investment 
bank Goldman Sachs, where he worked in the “Mergers and Acquisitions” 
department. At the height of the “hostile takeover” phenomenon, this 
department specialized in the wholesale looting and plunder of 
corporations for short-term gain, employing various legal fictions and 
transactional frameworks. After becoming immensely rich, Bannon founded 
his own investment bank in 1990, “Bannon & Co.,” through which he 
acquired in one deal a stake in five TV shows, including Seinfeld.

 From there Bannon made his way to Hollywood, where he became a minor 
player. In 2004, Bannon produced an anticommunist documentary about 
Ronald Reagan: In the Face of Evil. The film purports to explain 
Reagan’s entire life as a personal struggle against the “evils” of 
communism, beginning with Hollywood unions and continuing through his 
years at the White House. Another film, pretentiously titled Battle for 
America (2010), exalts the Tea Party. Another, Occupy Unmasked, is a 
rabid and bizarre fantasy according to which the encampments of the 
Occupy Wall Street movement are envisioned as sinister dens of rape, 
drug use, and conspiracy.

“In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct,” wrote Joshua 
Green for Businessweek. “His films are peppered with footage of lions 
attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into 
glorious bloom.”

The man behind the propaganda is deeply cynical. “To me, Washington, 
D.C., is a little bit like professional wrestling,” Bannon told Green in 
an interview. “When I was growing up in Seattle, I’d turn on Channel 13, 
the public-access station, and watch wrestling. At first I thought, 
‘Man, these guys hate each other because they’re beating the crap out of 
each other.’ But I eventually realized they’re actually business partners.”

 From March 2012 to August 2016, Bannon served as the executive chairman 
of Breitbart News, which he transformed into a hate rag in open 
solidarity with the so-called “alt-right.” He left that position to 
become Chief Executive and “generalissimo” of the Donald Trump 
presidential campaign.

An article entitled, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The 
Alt-Right,” published on Bannon’s Breitbart web site, is remarkably 
candid in its embrace of fascist ideology: “The origins of the 
alternative right can be found in thinkers as diverse as Oswald 
Spengler, H.L. Mencken, Julius Evola, Sam Francis, and the 
paleoconservative movement that rallied around the presidential 
campaigns of Pat Buchanan. The French New Right also serve as a source 
of inspiration for many leaders of the alt-right.”

The references to Spengler and Evola are euphemisms for German and 
Italian fascism. Spengler was a major influence on Nazi philosophy, 
within which his doctrine of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) was an 
integral component. Evola’s 1941 racist diatribe, “Synthesis of the 
Doctrine of Race,” so impressed Mussolini that he invited Evola to an 
in-person meeting. Afterwards, Mussolini helped Evola publish a journal, 
Sangue e Spirito (Blood and Spirit).

Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News functioned as a 
round-the-clock jet of filth. The articles published by this “news” 
agency are so flagrantly hateful and bigoted that it is hardly necessary 
to deconstruct them in order to expose their content.

Headlines scream about “Muslim rape culture” and “mass Muslim 
immigration.” “By bringing in these migrants, we are creating an 
American refugee crisis,” one article declares. A “swarm” of American 
Muslims was alleged to have been celebrating the September 11 attacks. 
Bill Kristol is accused of being a “renegade Jew.” Other headlines 
reference “trannies” and a “trans hate machine.” Another headline reads: 
“Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy.”

Breitbart also serves as a platform for promulgating various right-wing 
conspiracy theories. Hillary Clinton is accused of being in league with 
the Muslim Brotherhood. Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, presumably because 
of her appearance, is accused of being a “Saudi spy” with connections to 
a “global terrorist entity.”

Bannon’s own writings are infused with the reactionary militarist jargon 
of blood and honor. In May, Bannon penned an inflammatory open letter to 
Obama praising the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Purporting 
to speak for all the American soldiers who would have died in an 
invasion of Japan, Bannon alleged (falsely) that Obama had “apologized” 
for the war crimes and declared that Obama has “not a shred of honor.”

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke celebrated Bannon’s appointment as 
Trump’s chief strategist in an interview with radio host Don Advo, a 
neo-Nazi sympathizer. Reacting to the news of Bannon’s appointment, Advo 
commented, “We appear to have taken over.” Duke agreed.

Bannon’s personal anti-Semitic prejudices were publicly confirmed by his 
former second wife Mary Louise Piccard. In January 1996, Bannon was 
charged with misdemeanor crimes related to the abuse of his spouse: 
domestic violence, battery and dissuading a witness.

The sex scandal is another of Bannon’s specialties. Bannon lent his 
full-throated support to the reactionary campaign over the allegedly 
lenient sentence for Stanford student Brock Turner, who was convicted of 
sexual assault following a fraternity party earlier this year. Bannon’s 
tendentious headline read, “Stanford Rape Case: Public Outrage Over 
Lenient Sentence.” The most recent “sexting” scandal involving Anthony 
Weiner also involved Bannon’s handiwork.

As a scandalmonger and inciter of racial hatred, Bannon recalls no 
historical figure so much as Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, a 
comparison already made by Republican strategist Rick Wilson as well as 
numerous other reporters and commentators. In an interview, Wilson 
described Breitbart News as “acting like Der Stürmer in Germany in the 
1930s more than actually a legitimate conservative media outlet.” Wilson 
described Trump as “the human avatar of the Breitbart comments section: 
stupid, vulgar, racist, anti-Semitic, vile in almost every aspect.”

Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer, was found guilty at the 
Nuremberg Trials of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity 
for “his 25 years of speaking, writing and preaching hatred of the 
Jews.” The judgment continued, “In his speeches and articles, week after 
week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of 
anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution.”

The Democratic Party—including figures such as Barack Obama, Hillary 
Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—is currently devoting all its efforts to 
discouraging protests, pledging to “work with” Trump and urging the 
population to “give Trump a chance.” Millions of people, on the other 
hand, instinctively sense the immense dangers involved in the prospect 
of a Trump administration. The entry of figures like Bannon into the 
West Wing, without so much as a peep of protest by the outgoing 
administration, points to the fact that there is a consensus within both 
the Republican and Democratic Parties for a dramatic shift to the right 
in American politics.