Perspective: Why far-right populists are at war with history
In this April 9, 2019 file photo, Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro attends a swearing-in ceremony at the Planalto Presidential Palace, in Brasilia, Brazil. By Federico Finchelstein Federico Finchelstein is professor of history at the New School and author of the new book,"From Fascism to Populism in History." April 23 It’s no longer just American conservatives like Dinesh D’Souza and Jonah Goldberg who are promoting the false idea that the Nazi Party was a left-wing movement.
Why do populist leaders want to forgive or displace the actual history of Nazism? Because as these leaders draw from the well of fascist ideology, rhetoric and tactics, they have to neuter the history of fascism to normalize their politics. Revising the history of fascism then renders it mythical rather than historical, presenting the fascism of the past as not that bad — or not even fascism at all.
Normalizing, even celebrating, such deadly regimes is not just limited to his take on Brazilian history. Bolsonaro has heaped praise on a number of dictators, including the Chilean president Augusto Pinochet, who was ultimately arrested for numerous human rights violations, and the Paraguayan president Alfredo Stroessner, who kept the nation under martial law for almost all of his 35 years in power.
As rulers, Hitler and Mussolini invented a mythical past that identified emperors and heroic warriors as mere predecessors of their rule. Perhaps with less grandiosity than the Duce and the Führer, Bolsonaro aims to link his rule with that of the Latin American dictators of the past. If the fascist leaders created a myth of fascism that established them as living incarnations of an invented golden past, Bolsonaro invents and personifies a mythical age of Latin American dictatorships.
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