Fascism Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Fascism’s Body Politics

A conversation with Dagmar Herzog on disability under fascism in her new book, The New Fascist Body

November 25, 2025 • by Dagmar Herzog and Adam Koehler Brown

"How do we recognize a fascism when we see one?" This is the opening line from Dagmar Herzog's new book, The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025). A leading historian of sexuality, disability, and German politics, Herzog now turns her attention to the frightening continuities between past and present authoritarian forces. ...

Europe & Central Asia

Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

October 6, 2025 • by Bruno Heidlberger

On May 2, 2025, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that Germany was “not a democracy, but a tyranny in disguise.” True extremism, he said, lay not in the “popular AfD” but in the “deadly immigration policy of the establishment with open borders, which the AfD rejects.” Rubio's ...

Film & Performing Arts

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

A conversation with German novelist Daniel Kehlmann

June 17, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Daniel Kehlmann

Mitchell Abidor interviews Daniel Kehlmann about examining the curious saga of Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst in his new novel, THE DIRECTOR....

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

Film & Performing Arts

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

April 9, 2025 • by Sonali Chakravarti

Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where ...

In <em>I’m Still Here</em>, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Europe & Central Asia

The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron

How recognizing the heroism of past immigrants serves as cover for a nation’s anti-immigrant present

April 8, 2024 • by Mitchell Abidor

It was striking that a center-right president like Emmanuel Macron, who has recently hardened his position on immigrants and immigration, would grant such a high honor to two immigrant Communists. ...

The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron

Interviews

Artists Against Colonels

In Shades of Resistance, unexceptional people take exceptional risks

December 5, 2023 • by Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham

Joseph Matthews and Evangeline Riddiford Graham chat about using fiction to unravel fascism, and why the “regime of the colonels” found the Greek underground counteroffensive of poetry and music so difficult to control....

The Right

Wildfires, Rhodes, and the Legacies of Fascism

It was a sad irony that the island’s destructive wildfires this summer began in an area intensively reforested under Italian fascist rule

September 25, 2023 • by Pamela Ballinger

Among the cultural patrimony threatened by the wildfires on Rhodes was that left by the Italian fascists....

Wildfires, Rhodes, and the Legacies of Fascism

Activism

The Pro-Nazi Artist Behind the Brooklyn Public Library’s Facade

German-American sculptor Carl Paul Jennewein, who designed the library’s iconic entrance reliefs, participated in Nazi exhibitions and espoused white supremacist beliefs

June 6, 2023 • by Daniel Fernandez

Brooklyn Public Library’s entrance artwork propagates a colonialist, white supremacist vision that is inseparable from Nazism....

The Pro-Nazi Artist Behind the Brooklyn Public Library’s Facade

Finance

Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

January 9, 2023 • by Clara Mattei

Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...

Politics

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Italy’s formerly fascist party aligns itself with American Republicans, British Conservatives, and Likud in Israel

October 3, 2022 • by Lucas Dolan

Giorgia Meloni now represents a cadre of European far-right leaders whose views are fully legible to the American Far Right. ...

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Europe & Central Asia

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Preaching to Ukrainians that there are “good Russians out there who are also victims of Putin” is the same as saying “all lives matter”

April 11, 2022 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

Despite what I regard as obvious parallels with Nazi Germany, I still find it very hard to break the wall with my international colleagues who urge us Ukrainians to remain open to dialogue and even sympathy with ordinary Russians—the good Russians—who they say are “also victims of Putin’s regime.” ...

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Europe & Central Asia

Nobody Knows What Russians Want, Not Even Russians Themselves

Can a kleptocracy have national interests?

April 6, 2022 • by Nikolay Koposov

Russia has no national interests, not even in Ukraine. Russians are denied subjectivity, the means of making rational and responsible decisions. Instead, they have state-sanctioned propaganda, rigged elections, pretend patriotism and a profoundly inhuman leadership....

Fascism

Fascism’s Body Politics

A conversation with Dagmar Herzog on disability under fascism in her new book, The New Fascist Body

Germany Holds Up a Mirror for America

The rise of the AfD, “Alternative for Germany,” now the nation’s most popular political party

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

A conversation with German novelist Daniel Kehlmann

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron

How recognizing the heroism of past immigrants serves as cover for a nation’s anti-immigrant present

Artists Against Colonels

In Shades of Resistance, unexceptional people take exceptional risks

Wildfires, Rhodes, and the Legacies of Fascism

It was a sad irony that the island’s destructive wildfires this summer began in an area intensively reforested under Italian fascist rule

The Pro-Nazi Artist Behind the Brooklyn Public Library’s Facade

German-American sculptor Carl Paul Jennewein, who designed the library’s iconic entrance reliefs, participated in Nazi exhibitions and espoused white supremacist beliefs

Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

Giorgia Meloni and the Far Right’s Transatlantic Turn

Italy’s formerly fascist party aligns itself with American Republicans, British Conservatives, and Likud in Israel

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Preaching to Ukrainians that there are “good Russians out there who are also victims of Putin” is the same as saying “all lives matter”

Nobody Knows What Russians Want, Not Even Russians Themselves

Can a kleptocracy have national interests?

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