Posobiec’s “Unhumans”: a fascist rewriting of history

A new book came to our attention recently, first because our Party's logo is on the cover, alongside an image denoting the Black liberation struggle, and second because it was endorsed by Ohio's junior Senator JD Vance, now a Vice Presidential candidate. Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) was written by Jack Posobiec, alt-right One America News Network grifter known for his promulgation of the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory and his close ties to white supremacist and antisemitic forces. His co-author is Joshua Lisec, a ghostwriter from Dayton Ohio. The book was published this year by War Room Books and Skyhorse Publishing. Stephen Bannon, now serving time, wrote the Foreword.

Like the zealots of the Cold War (Joe McCarthy is one of his heroes), Posobiec finds communists everywhere: from ancient Rome to the Bastille to your local public school. Dehumanization reaches a new low here. There are two social groups in Posobiec's formulation: the "forces of civilization" on the one hand, where "normal humans" are found, and, on the other hand, the "people of anti-civilization," including communists, leftists, "cultural Marxists," and all manner of progressive people, who are labeled as "unhumans." No dog whistles needed here!

What is especially disturbing is that this far right program of action is openly endorsed at the highest levels.

Posobiec's book is not unique. A cursory glance at the catalogue of its publisher War Room Books shows that right-wing ideologues have been hard at work churning out what Togliatti called the "series of heterogeneous ingredients" that make up fascist ideology. What is especially disturbing right now is that this far right program of action is openly endorsed at the highest levels, evident in the vicious lies about Haitian immigrants that Donald Trump spouted during the recent debate and echoed down the line by JD Vance, Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, and others. More on that below.

One aim of Unhumans is to revise the broadest sweep of world history, from Plato to Ashley Babbitt, in a xenophobic and white supremacist frame. The historical sections of this book could have been written with the help of Chat GPT. The book's footnotes are a sloppy mess, with entire chapters omitted. Historical accuracy and careful scholarship clearly aren't the goals here. There have rarely been such carefully cherry-picked accounts of the Chinese, Russian, or Cuban revolutions. The authors had to practice strict cerebral hygiene to limit sources only to those that fall in line. In the discussion of the Spanish Civil War, for example, the authors admit that there has been a lot written about the subject, but, they complain, they could only find one they agreed with (a book called The Last Crusade written by the founder of "Christendom College"), so they relied on that one alone to tell their distorted history.

Other segments of the book are similarly painful to read. The Civil Rights Movement, the authors say, was engineered by "unhumans" with the aim of having no-whites-allowed rallies and open use of antisemitic propaganda. The "white flight" from the cities that characterized the period was "really state-backed ethnic cleansing" of whites. January 6, 2021 is described as if it occurred in an alternate universe. In this account, peaceful protesters were lured into the capital by "subversives" and were only labeled insurrectionists because they were "largely white, Christian, and Republican." Those are the groups with a legitimate claim on victimhood in this narrative.

A recipe for insurrection

A major assertion made by the authors is that the final showdown between normal people and the "unhumans" is already underway. The authors want to convince their readers to be suspicious both of their neighbors and co-workers and of social institutions which have been infiltrated by "unhumans." Instructions are provided to loyal followers about how to deal with the unhumans in their midst. This is a recipe for insurrection and supports the proposed action of Project 2025 to fire all federal civil servants ("unhumans") and replace them with Trump devotees ("normal humans"). Needless to say, this would be a devastating development for all working people, especially women, African Americans, and members of other oppressed groups.

Posobiec writes, the U.S. "is likely in the throes of a gray-zone communist revolutionary war." The battle is already engaged, which the right needs to "win before fighting," by which they mean short of violence, but with the constant threat of future violence. The year 2020 was a period of victories for the "unhumans." First, "many black mobs went hunting" for white people, and then Trump was unseated "in a highly dubious election." This is the evidence that the war is on right now.

An equally alarming argument the authors make is that democratic and civil rights, might have to be sacrificed to a new social order needed to control these "unhumans." Democracy is only for homogeneous cultures. If migration "dilutes and unbalances a shared culture," then the only thing that can hold it together is an "all-powerful state," that is, one without civil liberties.

"Democracy," they declare, "has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won't."

What happens when the "unhumans," with their silly ideas of equality and justice, gain power? Here Posobiec borrows a term from another right-wing ideologue, Samuel Francis. "Anarcho-tyranny," writes Francis, is "the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety." Posobiec uses a simpler formulation: "selected overenforcement of laws against a target population alongside selected nonenforcement of laws on another target population." In other words, whites like Derek Chauvin, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are targeted while Blacks get away with breaking the law. Conservatives are prosecuted and progressives get the benefit of the doubt. The idea of "anarcho-tyranny" provides the sense of victimization and grievance that permeates both this book and so much political rhetoric on the far right.

More than an ideological foundation, Posobiec provides a playbook for "normal humans" to pursue to fight back. He urges people to embrace social hierarchies, mocking the crazy idea they call "relativistic multiculturalism," or the "belief that no one culture or society is better than another." Local elected officials are pressed to "contain evil where it is and stamp it out immediately and resolutely." Another recommendation is to locate the "great men" and cultivate them to be like the "great men" of the past, namely Francisco Franco and Joe McCarthy. Their suggestion? Elon Musk, hero of free speech, who has been subject to "cruel and unusual" persecution by "unhuman bureaucrats and activists." Poor, poor Elon!

Even before this election cycle's slurs against Haitians, I read the section on the Haitian revolution with special interest because it is a subject I've studied in the past. How was the 1804 founding of the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere a communist revolution, you may wonder? For Posobiec, people of African descent are the "unhumans" in that case. Posobiec describes Haiti as having been "stocked with slaves from West Africa" who eventually became "enraged mobs of sword-wielding, gun-toting blacks" who opened their murderous rampage against colonists with a ceremony where a cup of animal blood is shared (are we sensing a theme?). Using (in one case misusing) only two obscure sources to narrate the Haitian Revolution, the authors tell it as another tale of "white genocide" at the hands of "unhumans." They sum it up with this: "And that has been the history of Haiti ever since: robbing and killing. A country founded on unhuman revolts ends in chaos and cannibal warlords."

Exactly these sentiments have been echoing throughout southeastern Ohio and the nation this election cycle, but they aren't new. Springfield Ohio is a rustbelt town that is enjoying an economic comeback. In the 1980s and '90s, the town lost thousands of manufacturing jobs and more than a quarter of its population. In the past four or five years, manufacturing jobs are on the rebound, and Haitian immigrants who have Temporary Protected Status have migrated to Springfield in substantial numbers, adding an estimated 15,000 to a city with a total population of about 60,000.

Ohio's Senator JD Vance has been trying his best to drive a wedge between the migrants and the native Springfielders. He apparently picked up this idea from one neo-Nazi group that has been very active in rural Ohio, the "Blood Tribe," which had stoked rumors about Haitians in Springfield eating pets on niche social media sites. The day before the Harris-Trump debate, Vance tweeted, "I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?" That lie was amplified by the hero of free speech himself, Elon Musk. Trump then repeated the lie about pets during the debate, for which he was fact-checked by the moderator and laughed at by his opponent. Within a few hours, Trump's outrageous claims were pilloried mercilessly on TikTok and people were marking themselves "Safe" on Facebook from having their pets eaten.

Vance and Trump's comments have caused disruption, fear, and hardship in Springfield as residents grapple with bomb threats (at least thirty-five since the debate) against schools, hospitals, and grocery stores, as well as a Proud Boys march through town, and threats against migrants fueled by the kind of rhetoric Posobiec offers. At the same time, community and faith leaders and others have come together in demonstrations of solidarity, including a Peace March and people making special efforts to support Haitian-owned businesses.

Capitalism's dehumanization

Posobiec's book is just one more codification of fascist ideology in the form of material books that someone might buy for your MAGA Uncle Chuck for Christmas. The reinforcement of these ideas in politicians' everyday discourse is even more dangerous and raises serious questions. How can we protect our fellow Ohio residents from racist hatred, and how can we avoid these despicable politicians from gaining higher office? How should we, as members of a broad anti-fascist movement and as Communists, counter the dehumanization of our class and people and the attempts to divide us?

Dehumanization is at the core of the capitalist system, which depends for its survival on the exploitation of some humans by others. Here it is being revived just in time for the 2024 election, to prop up the MAGA forces and to divert people's attention from the real source of their pain, namely the ruling class structures that support fascism. To counter this, we need to fight for the recognition of the humanity of everyone, even those fighting against us and using inhumane tactics. We need to respond to screeds like Posobiec with ideological struggle and organizing for a people's agenda of working class democracy.

As far as the CPUSA logo gracing the cover of this menacing book? That's curious, seeing as Posobiec sees the party as "the least of our worries" because it has "no meaningful influence." And yet, the party still seems to be in the sights of government and right-wing groups alike. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service cares about your membership in only one party, the Communist Party USA. The recent disruptive activity around and after the CPUSA's 32nd National Convention this year showed that we are a target of some quite determined provocateurs of indeterminate motivation. So it is not a surprise, after all, that old-fashioned anti-communism - along with its partner white supremacy - is on the cover, and at the heart of, this stupid, dangerous book.

Images: Book review by Fred Barr / CPUSA; Unhumans book cover (Amazon media file); Haitian immigrants protesting Trump immigration policies by Fibonacci Blue (CC BY 2.0)

Comments

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.