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0:46

As I was growing up, I heard the word fascist

0:48

quite often. That's partly because

0:50

my parents faced people who

0:52

belonged to an organisation called the

0:55

British Union of Fascists.

0:57

But also because the word was attached to

0:59

specific regimes that this country

1:02

had been at war with. Germany and

1:04

Italy.

1:05

Since then, the word has been used extensively

1:07

as a political swear word, which

1:10

then sometimes becomes a topic in itself. That's

1:13

to say, we see people accuse others

1:15

of falsely calling them fascists.

1:18

The term fascism itself is only a century

1:20

old. Mussolini first used

1:23

it in 1919.

1:25

In Nazi Germany, it's been said that there was

1:27

a linguistic fascism, a cult

1:29

of the mother tongue, with a xenophobic

1:32

horror of un-pure language.

1:34

One such impure language

1:37

being the one that my forebears spoke,

1:39

Yiddish. Today, we're looking

1:41

closely at the language produced when

1:44

fascism has ruled.

1:46

Is it possible to decide what is

1:48

and what isn't fascist language?

1:51

And does fascist language enable fascism?

1:53

Let's see. With me to unpack

1:55

this is Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowski

1:58

Professor at Yale University.

1:59

author of both How Propaganda

2:02

Works and How Fascism Works. Professor

2:05

Jason Stanley, welcome to the programme. Thank

2:07

you very much Michael. Now people are always

2:10

calling other people fascists these days,

2:12

it's thrown around quite liberally. How

2:14

can we accurately call out what

2:17

we might call

2:18

genuine fascism when we hear

2:20

it? Genuine fascism

2:23

is focused on a language of purity

2:26

that foments a politics of fear.

2:28

The idea is that the nation is pure,

2:31

the nation's racial stock, the nation's

2:34

language is pure and

2:36

subject to infestation or

2:38

corruption from foreign elements.

2:41

So how do you feel about a process

2:44

if you like of looking back at say

2:47

the language in Mussolini's times

2:50

or in during the Third Reich and in

2:52

a sense plundering it for

2:54

the kinds of words that were

2:57

used then? So I've seen for example

2:59

there are kind of glossaries, dictionaries

3:02

almost, written by modern Germans,

3:05

interested and concerned by the way in

3:07

which the Third Reich tried to change

3:10

the German language. For example

3:13

the Nazis had this word, try and

3:15

pronounce it properly, Azozia.

3:18

Yeah so a word like that, that was

3:21

a concept there that the idea that there were

3:23

people, and we were familiar with the word antisocial,

3:26

here was a word that was suggesting that people were somehow

3:28

or other outside or beneath

3:31

the society. They were completely

3:33

unsocial, of course they were talking about people

3:37

with so-called congenital illnesses, congenital

3:40

insanities, all with inverted

3:42

commas round and indeed intermention,

3:45

in other words people who they saw as being

3:47

subhuman. So can we

3:49

look at a word like that and

3:52

then map

3:53

it on to people using

3:55

words similarly now or

3:57

is that a very dangerous process?

3:59

It's a very dangerous process because fascism

4:02

is something that exists in all of our countries

4:06

and the language is going to be different

4:08

depending upon the national

4:10

character, as it were, of a country.

4:14

Fascism as a movement takes the country's

4:16

national character, creates this

4:18

ideal type of the national character

4:21

of the country and says that people who

4:23

don't fall into that national character

4:25

are somehow impure, they're somehow

4:28

distorting that country.

4:29

So you would expect

4:32

a fascist leader from Britain

4:34

to talk about the past very differently

4:37

than a fascist leader from Germany. I

4:39

doubt you would get a fascist leader from

4:41

the UK extolling

4:43

the Holy Roman Empire or Karl

4:48

de Gose or Charlemagne or you

4:50

know, you'd get different

4:52

reference points and different language.

4:56

There would be overlaps in

4:58

certain respects, there'd be focuses

5:01

on heroic figures,

5:03

heroic warriors of the past, heroic

5:05

generals, but there

5:08

would be a different language because

5:11

fascism is ultra-nationalism and

5:13

it would focus on ultra-nationalist

5:16

tropes that differ from country

5:19

to country. I mean, one thing would be common,

5:21

the kind of machismo,

5:24

the kind of focus on manliness,

5:28

the kind of focus on traditional gender

5:29

roles, that would

5:32

be an overlap between fascist

5:34

movements in different countries.

5:37

Yes, interesting in relation to language,

5:40

you quote the German philosopher Ernst Kocera

5:43

talking about the changes he had noticed

5:45

wrought on the language by the Nazis.

5:48

You quote him saying, new words have

5:50

been coined and even the old ones

5:52

are used in a new sense. These

5:54

words that formerly were used in a descriptive,

5:57

logical or semantic sense are now

5:59

used as magic words that are

6:01

destined to produce certain effects and

6:04

to stir up certain emotions. Do

6:07

you think that there's an emotional

6:09

quality that is crucial to fascism,

6:12

or is that generally part of politics anyway?

6:15

Emotion is part of all of politics,

6:17

but there's a particular structure to

6:20

the emotion that is evoked by fascist

6:22

language. It's supposed to be a kind

6:24

of fear and longing for

6:26

a mythic past that's been destroyed

6:29

by immigration, and

6:31

liberalism, and feminism. Do

6:33

you think there's a

6:34

progression from the early

6:37

language of a fascist movement, and

6:39

to later, if and when,

6:41

that movement takes power? Are the two

6:43

languages different, or do you think

6:45

they evolve?

6:47

That's a great question. Once

6:50

fascism moves into power, certain

6:53

things happen. It adopts respectability.

6:56

So now, when fascism is in power, it's

6:59

the people with the ties. They

7:01

make connections to the traditional

7:03

social conservatives. They represent

7:06

Christianity and Christian nations. They

7:08

become respectability. Because

7:11

they become respectability, they have to

7:13

cut ties to the sort of violent

7:15

street mafias that

7:17

brought them into power. If

7:20

that brings a change in language, you

7:23

start talking about yourself as

7:25

the state. Yes, I was thinking of that phrase,

7:27

the thousand year Reich. Clearly

7:30

on the streets in the late

7:32

20s, the Nazi Party couldn't describe

7:34

themselves as the thousand year Reich, and

7:36

I guess Mussolini couldn't wrap

7:39

himself in the clothes of the Togers,

7:42

we might say, of the Roman Empire until he

7:44

seized power. Exactly. More

7:47

besides, because

7:47

when you're in that violent push

7:50

for power, you have to have a broader

7:52

tent. So you're going to see more minorities,

7:55

but once they seize power, they can crack

7:58

down on those things.

7:59

I was once accused

8:02

of not being indigenous. I

8:05

was born in Britain and I thought, well, that's an interesting

8:08

use of language because indigenous can

8:10

sometimes be used about original

8:13

peoples of a land and

8:15

in the United States it has particular power because

8:18

of First Nation, the idea

8:20

that there were people, there are people,

8:23

who were there before the white man arrived. And

8:26

so it's quite interesting that it was used

8:28

against me here, but it probably,

8:30

I'm

8:31

guessing, might not have that

8:33

usage in the United States. That's just a guess. You'd be wrong.

8:36

I would suggest reading Madison

8:38

Grant's 1916 passing of

8:40

the Great Race, where he refers to Nordic

8:42

whites as the native population of the United

8:44

States. And one of his main

8:47

examples of people who threaten

8:50

this native population of Nordic

8:52

whites are Polish Jews.

8:54

So they're not indigenous because they've

8:56

just arrived, but given

8:58

that America celebrates

9:00

the arrival of white people in America,

9:03

and indeed Columbus before that,

9:06

how was he able to, as it were, get away with that?

9:09

He was able to get away with

9:11

it because it was 1916

9:13

and the term native referred

9:16

to our mythic past, which was a

9:18

mythic past of white Christian supremacy,

9:21

just as the mythic past of Germany

9:24

was a mythic past of German

9:26

Christian Aryan-ness.

9:29

I mean, Hitler celebrates the genocide

9:31

of the indigenous population as

9:34

a model for what he wants to do in, for

9:36

example, Ukraine and Eastern

9:38

Europe. He says

9:39

in his second book, Who Anymore

9:41

Speaks of the Red Indian? Now,

9:46

why have you written your books? Does this

9:48

come from your own family's experience? Oh,

9:50

yes. My father was

9:53

a German Jewish refugee who

9:55

came to the United States in July 1939 on a boat from Berlin.

10:00

and experienced a Kestal Nacht

10:03

in Berlin. And my mother

10:05

survived the Holocaust in

10:07

Siberia and was repatriated back to

10:09

Poland. Both of them experienced

10:12

the violence of European fascism. And

10:15

my children are black and Jewish.

10:18

And fascism in my work and

10:20

historically has strong

10:22

roots in the United States. Hitler read

10:24

Madison Grant's The Passing of the

10:26

Great Race, the American

10:29

who wrote that Nordic

10:29

whites would be replaced by

10:32

immigrants and supplanted

10:34

culturally and politically by black

10:37

Americans. America's Jim Crow

10:39

laws, which made black Americans

10:42

into second-class citizens, were the

10:44

basis for the Nazi Nuremberg

10:46

laws that stripped my father of his German

10:48

citizenship at the age of three in Berlin.

10:51

But if I said to you, those

10:54

are racist or, if you like,

10:56

white supremacist ideas, would

10:59

you distinguish those from fascism?

11:02

I mean, you've just described your parents'

11:04

experience, which was at the hands of fascist

11:06

regimes

11:07

or a fascist regime, the Third Reich.

11:10

It's American racial fascism. When

11:12

Langston Hughes, the great African-American

11:15

poet, came to Paris in 1937 to give speeches, said

11:18

you don't need to lecture black Americans

11:21

about fascism. He essentially described

11:23

fascism as Jim Crow with a foreign

11:25

accent. We know that the Nazi

11:27

lawyers closely studied the Jim

11:30

Crow laws. The Nazis explicitly

11:32

modeled themselves on our racial

11:34

fascism. The Ku Klux Klan,

11:37

Robert Paxton, the great scholar of fascism,

11:39

calls them the first

11:40

functionally fascist organization.

11:43

These black shirts were not the first to march

11:46

the streets dressed in

11:48

militaristic uniforms and columns.

11:51

This was all preceded in the United

11:54

States. Well, let me suggest something

11:56

else then, that

11:57

because the word fascism is a task,

12:00

attached to these two

12:02

particular states, Italy, the

12:04

Mussolini's Italy, that is, of course, and

12:07

Nazi Germany, the Third Reich. There's

12:09

an element, if

12:12

you like, involved in the word, which

12:15

is referring to a view of how the state

12:17

should be run over and above

12:19

their attitudes to

12:21

race that you've just described. Right.

12:24

So we can attach fascism to regimes.

12:26

We can attach fascism to parties.

12:30

We can attach fascism to social movements,

12:32

and we can attach fascism to practices.

12:35

We can also talk about fascist politics,

12:37

fascist rhetoric, fascist language,

12:40

the topic of this program. Fascist

12:42

regimes are few and far

12:44

between, but if we want to cut off fascist

12:47

regimes from emerging, we must

12:49

recognize fascism at earlier stages.

12:51

In its rhetoric, in

12:54

its social movement phase, the

12:56

literature on fascism clearly

12:59

separates fascism as a

13:01

social and political movement from

13:03

fascism in power as a regime. These

13:06

are, in fact, different chapters of Hannah

13:08

Arendt's book, Origins of Totalitarianism.

13:11

And so my goal is not to wait

13:14

around until there's a fascist regime, but

13:16

to warn in advance of

13:19

the emergence of fascist social and political

13:21

movements,

13:21

fascist leaders,

13:24

fascist practices in a society that

13:26

enable their rise to power.

13:28

But does this kind of speech,

13:31

does it actually enable fascism?

13:34

Does language have that power in your

13:36

view? It does have that power,

13:38

too. It normalizes it. Because

13:41

what happens is you get a sort of

13:43

race to the bottom. You start speaking

13:46

that way, and then there's a kind of impetus

13:49

based on the social and political movement

13:51

you've created to push it into

13:53

policy, to do something.

13:56

Now, I have an impression

13:58

from the 40s and the 50s.

13:59

when I was growing up, that people

14:02

in Britain here, we became very sensitized

14:04

to the notion of propaganda, that there

14:06

was propaganda and then there was something completely

14:09

different, which is news and the press. So

14:12

the very word itself seemed to signify something

14:15

suspect and dangerous and their reference

14:17

was quite often the kind of posters

14:19

and broadcasters and speeches that came out

14:21

of Europe, interwar Europe. Is

14:25

it your view that there is a sort of special

14:27

kind of fascist propaganda

14:29

that is distinct from the propaganda,

14:32

you know, Uncle Sam

14:34

needs you, you know, join the army during the First

14:37

World War and so on. Is there something

14:39

distinct about fascist propaganda from

14:41

other forms of propaganda?

14:43

Well one has to try, I think

14:45

there is, but one has to tread carefully here because

14:48

Hitler is and Goebbels are both very explicit

14:50

that they're copying a part of

14:53

Nazi propagandas copied from allied

14:55

propaganda in World War One that

14:57

painted the Germans as monsters.

15:01

Fascist propaganda is based on wartime

15:04

essentially. The core

15:07

of fascist ideology is

15:10

a friend-enemy distinction representing

15:13

the other as an existential threat.

15:16

Its internal existential threat are

15:19

Marxists and communists, a

15:21

label that fascists use to describe

15:25

anyone seeking to sort of speak

15:27

about the nation's problematic aspects

15:30

of the nation's past, feminists,

15:33

labor union advocates. These

15:35

are all communists and Marxists who seek

15:37

to destroy the nation and

15:40

then there are external enemies that

15:42

are chosen

15:43

selectively. Yes

15:45

and that's essential, is it? That there

15:47

are these external enemies? You could put

15:49

that in amongst the essential ingredients

15:52

that we're gathering together here. Internal

15:54

enemies is the most essential because

15:56

purifying society, returning

15:59

it to the ground,

15:59

great past, protecting it from

16:02

this threat that these internal enemies

16:04

are bringing in. And those internal

16:07

enemies were for the Nazis, Jews,

16:09

and they were for the Ku Klux Klan Jews. They

16:11

were the same internal enemy. In fact, you

16:13

trace some of the origins of what you're

16:16

talking about back to the propaganda

16:18

of the Confederates. Is that right?

16:20

The Confederates are certainly influenced

16:23

Hitler. Hitler wasn't a historian, but from

16:25

what he knew about it, he admired

16:28

it. It was the model he sought to impose

16:30

on Ukraine, as historian Timothy

16:32

Snyder has shown. He wanted German

16:35

farmers to have large

16:39

plantations with Ukrainian slaves,

16:44

and that was his model. And yeah, the

16:46

antebellum South, I wouldn't call

16:48

it a fascist regime because

16:50

it precedes communism

16:52

and Marxism, and fascism needs

16:55

Marxism as its enemy because it needs to

16:57

paint anything that disagrees with

16:59

it as really Marxist. But

17:02

the Confederacy had many elements,

17:05

non-accidentally, of Nazi

17:08

Germany because these

17:10

were models. And is

17:12

there any parallel, or again, is this very dangerous

17:15

to say it, that as we know, there

17:17

was this notion in those mid-20th

17:20

century

17:20

regimes to think of this

17:22

word again, untermention, the idea that there

17:25

are subhumans, that

17:27

the Confederates, was their

17:30

view of slavery based on

17:32

that notion that African

17:34

Americans who were enslaved,

17:36

that they, in a sense, deserved

17:39

it because they deemed them

17:41

to be an inferior being?

17:43

Subordinate. They deemed them to be subordinate.

17:47

And Alexander Stephens in his Cornerstone

17:49

speech said the Confederacy

17:50

is based on this great truth, that

17:53

racial hierarchy, that

17:55

whites are the

17:57

deserved masters.

17:59

and should rule over blacks. And that

18:02

was something that deeply, deeply affected

18:04

Hitler. Hitler was incensed

18:07

by the loss of Germany's African colonies.

18:10

So racial hierarchy is key

18:13

to fascist ideology. And here

18:15

we get more rhetoric. The idea, you

18:17

always describe the supposedly inferior

18:20

group as lazy,

18:22

lazy and criminal.

18:24

Slavery was supposedly justified

18:26

because black Americans were

18:28

lazy. And so they would starve

18:30

if left to their own devices. And so

18:33

you must force them to work for free.

18:36

And the non-accidental lineage

18:38

here should be self-evident from

18:40

the emblem on the gates of Auschwitz. Abeit

18:43

macht frei. Work shall make you free.

18:46

But of course, there's no sinister layer

18:49

to that slogan in the sense that many

18:52

of the people who entered those gates, including

18:55

my father's aunts and uncles,

18:58

never got out again. They

19:00

were killed. So they weren't working. They

19:03

were being massed. They were death camps. That's right.

19:06

There were large labor components.

19:09

Auschwitz was a death camp, but there were large labor

19:11

components. They became death camps in 1941.

19:14

But the idea of slave labor was

19:16

the initial point. And

19:19

slave labor was, of course, with the Nazis inflicted

19:22

in Ukraine and across Eastern Europe.

19:25

And this idea of slave labor is,

19:28

of course, ancient.

19:28

But the Confederacy

19:31

brought it into full bloom in the modern

19:33

world justified by the structure

19:35

that certain groups were lazy. And Nazi propaganda

19:38

represented us, that is,

19:40

we European Jews, as lazy. And

19:43

so just to stick with that slogan for

19:45

a moment, for the person who isn't being

19:47

enslaved, who isn't being taken there, and

19:50

we must remember those Eastern Europeans

19:52

who weren't Jewish, as well, of course, who were

19:54

taken to Auschwitz, many Poles, and so on, that

19:58

in a way, frightening, though, it is. to

20:00

say it, it's a feel-good slogan.

20:03

It's work, Arbeit, which is a nice

20:05

word in German, and it's making

20:07

you free, freedom. What could be better than freedom?

20:10

So there's a sense that in a way

20:12

you could look at that and think, well, finally

20:15

now we have a regime who's getting things

20:17

sorted, these bad people,

20:20

you know, they're finally being put to work.

20:22

So you have to add in

20:25

this feel-good factor, don't you? Absolutely.

20:27

And the language of freedom is probably the most

20:30

abused here. The Confederacy,

20:33

of course, used the term freedom

20:35

constantly to defend the

20:38

practice of slavery, freedom

20:40

to carry on, freedom from

20:42

federal intrusion on

20:45

our practices. And what were those practices?

20:47

Those practices were slavery. So

20:49

the idea that equality

20:52

runs opposite to freedom is central

20:55

to this ideology, because under freedom,

20:57

the powerful group rises

21:00

above in struggle, and

21:03

equality is a kind of imposition that

21:05

blocks that.

21:06

Now, I know you've also

21:08

looked into the rhetoric in Rwanda in

21:11

the years leading up to the genocide there

21:13

in 1994. So I wonder,

21:16

can you talk us through the use of

21:18

some of the terminology there? Tell us a bit about

21:20

that. So now we're shifting into genocidal

21:23

speech, the basis of genocidal

21:25

speech. When you start to talk about populations

21:28

as cockroaches and snakes, as they,

21:31

those were the two terms most frequently used

21:33

to describe Tutsis. So this is characteristic

21:36

in

21:36

pre-genocidal moments. Preparing

21:39

a population for massacre, you have

21:41

to represent them as an existential threat

21:43

and a grotesque existential threat. In

21:46

Rwanda, poisonous snakes are

21:48

a public health threat. So

21:51

when a boy is given a machete for the first

21:53

time to kill a poisonous snake, it makes

21:55

him into a man. It's a sort of signal that he's

21:57

a man. So calling Tutsis snakes,

21:59

What does that signal? It signals

22:02

that if you kill a Tutsi with a machete,

22:05

you're a man.

22:07

Frightening enough. Yes interesting digression

22:10

here. In Franz

22:12

Kafka's book Metamorphosis,

22:15

at the beginning of the book it's usually described that

22:17

the man Gregor has turned into

22:19

a Cockroach. In actual

22:21

fact the German it isn't that

22:24

specific. It's actually vermin.

22:26

Now as we both know Franz

22:28

Kafka was Jewish and I've

22:31

often thought that some or other he almost prefigured

22:33

the description given out by racists

22:35

towards Jews but this

22:37

notion of self disgust as

22:40

well as the disgust heaped on people does

22:43

seem to attach itself to these

22:45

creatures that we try to get rid of

22:47

in order to make us safe. That

22:49

word vermin is a sort of collective word

22:52

is a horror for the human race more often

22:54

than not.

22:55

Absolutely, and it's crucial

22:58

for mass killing. Let's

23:00

remember that Himmler was dubious

23:03

that that Germans would be able

23:05

to perform the mass killings of

23:07

Jews in Eastern Europe. But

23:10

the Nazi education system had prepared

23:12

them well, so they were able to murder them

23:14

over pits including seven

23:16

or eight of my great aunts and uncles. None

23:19

of them who made it made it to camps. Germans

23:22

because of that education ordinary

23:24

Germans were able

23:25

to perform this kind of mass

23:28

killing over pits in Eastern Europe. Now

23:31

this brings us to something that's quite tricky

23:33

maybe for me and you to face up to which

23:37

is that

23:39

for fascism to succeed it has

23:41

to be popular. Absolutely,

23:44

and though we can find examples of fascist

23:47

or fascistic regimes that came to power say

23:49

through an army coup or a pooch or some such

23:52

There have been others we know where the fascist

23:54

party has been voted in as the largest

23:56

party, so

23:58

if you like tied

23:59

to these words that you've been

24:02

talking about today is that

24:04

they work.

24:05

They work. It's a powerful kind

24:07

of politics and rhetoric. That's

24:10

why we see it surging

24:12

across the democratic world today.

24:15

I don't think there's any doubt at all that

24:17

Donald Trump used fascist rhetoric

24:20

and politics in his campaigns describing

24:22

the United States as, you know, burning

24:25

cities and ruin and were

24:28

ridden by immigrants in crime. There's

24:30

no question that he was employing fascist rhetoric.

24:33

Now, this has been central to our racial

24:36

fascism. So Americans, since the civil

24:38

rights movement, our politicians have avoided

24:40

it. But Trump used it.

24:42

It's very popular. It's very powerful. It

24:45

works. You know, we can look at specific

24:47

examples like the campaign against critical

24:49

race theory, which mirrors point

24:52

by point the Nazi campaign against

24:54

cultural Marxism, the way that the Nazis

24:57

vilified Marxism, the idea that

24:59

Jews were behind this

25:02

theory to radicalize people

25:05

and that it somehow

25:05

threatens the nation. So

25:07

we're seeing this politics. The politics is very

25:09

popular. Far right authoritarian, ultra-national

25:12

leaders, fascist leaders like Vladimir Putin

25:15

are often extremely popular,

25:17

much more popular than democratic leaders.

25:19

So while you're on

25:21

Putin there, do you read in

25:23

what Putin is saying about Ukraine?

25:27

Do you find that in Putin's language?

25:29

Yeah. And we find explicitly genocidal

25:32

speech. We find the development of

25:35

Russian identity as what I call in

25:38

my work an antagonistic social

25:40

identity formation, where

25:43

to be Russian means to

25:45

extinguish Ukraine, means

25:48

to subordinate and destroy Ukrainian

25:50

identity. The idea that there's a distinct

25:52

Ukrainian identity Putin represents

25:55

as fundamentally existentially

25:58

threatening to Russia.

25:59

If there's a separate Ukrainian

26:02

identity, there can be no greater

26:04

Russia, there can be no great

26:06

Russian nation.

26:09

Do you think that in the

26:11

past, I mean, again, let's take the example

26:13

from Germany, I think it was Tiesen,

26:16

the big steel baron, who recounted how

26:18

he gave Hitler microphones

26:22

and loudspeakers and fast

26:25

cars to zoom around Germany to

26:28

spread the message of the

26:30

National Socialist Party. But it was

26:32

very centrally based. I mean, very

26:34

thrilling at the time because people hadn't seen fast

26:36

cars turning up in their little villages and someone standing

26:38

there with a microphone, hard to think of now

26:41

as being sort of exciting, but this was in the very

26:43

early, late 20s and early 30s. But

26:46

now we have social media, you

26:48

know, has this changed? Do

26:50

you think this kind of language

26:53

and how it spreads? Well,

26:55

the Nazis made sure that every household

26:58

had a radio

26:59

because mass communication is vital

27:02

for mass politics. So the radio

27:04

was an essential feature for

27:06

the spreading of Nazi propaganda.

27:10

What you have with social media is you have

27:12

sort of instantaneous mass

27:15

messaging possibilities. You

27:18

also have counter mass messaging possibilities,

27:20

which you don't have with the kind of state-controlled

27:22

radio.

27:23

One effect they have

27:26

is to target journalists. So

27:29

democracy requires a free and independent

27:31

press when you have journalists

27:33

being fired for making critical comments.

27:36

Well that's, you really have to

27:39

fear for your democracy. But another

27:41

method to threaten

27:43

journalists is mass mobbing. And

27:46

social media allows that. It

27:48

allows a kind of punishment on

27:51

both sides, of course, on every side.

27:53

But this mass mobbing I found

27:56

is very difficult. It's an extra

27:58

additional burden.

27:59

for free voices. Well,

28:02

we've sadly run out of time, but thanks very much

28:04

to you, Professor Jason Stanley, for taking

28:07

us through the language of fascism today. Thank

28:10

you very much. It's been an honor to be on

28:11

this program.