Alona Ferber, senior editor: Your book is called End Times Fascism. You argue that this is a very particular strain of an old movement. How can we tell we’re living in a time of rising or resurgent fascism?
Naomi Klein: We don’t throw the word around. But we also understand that fascism has stages and that if you wait until it is totalising, and it has completely taken over a society, it’s too late.
Astra Taylor: You can just look at the headlines. You can see young men in black marching around, bashing immigrants and slashing boats. You can see the ICE agents snatching people off the streets in the United States, or the power grab of our political and economic elites.
Naomi: The sharply defined in-group and out-group; an open embrace of a hierarchy of humanity; increasingly two sets of laws for those people; a loss of rights; the battles over stripping citizenship.
Astra: The merging of corporate power and state power, the hatred of the left and of labour unions are other key through-lines.
Alona: How is it different from the fascism of the early 20th century?
Naomi: There is a long arc to fascism. We reject the idea that the fascism that emerged in 1920s and 1930s Europe, particularly in Italy and in Germany, was a rupture in the history of western civilisation.
Before fascism got a proper name, many of these hierarchies, the apartheid, even the camps, were being used by the Americans and Canadians against indigenous peoples in the Americas and in Africa by the British. The Nazis studied the Jim Crow laws when they were writing the Nuremberg laws. And, of course, the German experience in what is now Namibia—what is now recognised to have been a genocide against the Nama and Herero in the early 1900s—had a huge impact.
The Nazi application of these earlier techniques had a great deal to do with the technology of the day. With industrialisation, they could implement a Fordist version of fascism that was not available to their predecessors.
Fascism always surges during times of systemic crisis. But the reason why we call this “end times fascism” is that we are confronted with real planetary-scale risks that were unimaginable to the fascists of the early 20th century, who did not know a world with nuclear weapons, did not understand the reality of climate change, and certainly didn’t know about AI.
These threats have changed our society, all of us, including our fascists who are taking the end of our world for granted and are focused on making sure that their in-groups survive.
Astra: There are three main components, three “bunkers”: the religious end-timers, the tech end-timers and the ethnonationalist end-timers.
[The religious end-timers] feel it’s incumbent on them to accelerate end times prophecy, so they are actively lobbying for wars in the Holy Land in the Middle East. Christian Zionists in the US are spreading the gospel to the UK and to Europe and making common cause with messianic Jews in Israel who are now key figures in the government.
Then there are the ethnonationalists who position immigration and other cultural changes as existential threats and civilisational erasure.
Naomi: Increasingly, for [them], it’s the nation itself that is imagined as the bunker. It’s the nation that is the lifeboat as everything goes down.
This explains the absolute fixation with casting migrants as invaders; there is an awareness that we have entered the age of collapse, [but] rather than address the reasons for that—poverty and climate change and endless wars—you fortress the state, expel the outgroups and you bring in supplies.
We are confronted with real planetary-scale risks that were unimaginable to the fascists of the early 20th century
Imaan Irfan, assistant editor: We also need to understand the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco’s idea that fascism is characterised by an “Armageddon complex”. Can you tell us about how that manifests today?
Astra: Umberto Eco was a child during Mussolini’s reign and wrote an essay called “Ur-Fascism”. He said fascism always has an Armageddon complex: there’s always this drive to a final battle. “Us” versus “them”. But at the end of it, there’s something for the in-group on this earth. The Nazis would give you a home stolen from the Jews or a farm stolen from the Slavs.
There was a kind of apocalypse, but it was of specific worlds. This is something [philosopher] Gunther Anders said: there was destruction of specific people, specific cultures, specific worlds.
Anders observes that with the advent of the nuclear bomb, suddenly we have to imagine the end of the entire world. We go from a genocide to the possibility of omnicide.
Now we’re in a world where these tech executives are talking about the odds of mass extinction. They are tapping into the idea of space as the last frontier and the promise of colonial expansion into outer space.
Naomi: For Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, apocalypse is living within limits.
It isn’t true that it is inevitable that the Earth must become uninhabitable, but it is true that it is incompatible with the kind of frenetic growth and devouring of the natural world that is the source of their wealth.
We describe fascism as capitalism’s worst mood. Its threat response. It emerges and surges in Europe after the Russian Revolution, when there is a real threat to capitalism, and fascism protects it. That is happening now, but at the expense of the Earth.
Astra: End times fascism has not just an Armageddon complex, but an “Armageddon industrial complex”, in the sense that so many of these leaders and tech executives are profiting from the destruction that they then fuel and profit from some more.
They’re not building digital gods. They are building tech that can hack vulnerable critical infrastructure.
We should think about the dangers that exist in the here and now, like the intensive use of fossil fuels to power the data centres and the theft of knowledge [used to train large language models].
Fascism is capitalism’s worst mood. Its threat response
Imaan: If end times fascism is about treating the apocalypse as inevitable while a chosen few escape, then the alternative to that is to stay and struggle on behalf of the living world. This is what you call the politics of “hereness”.
It reminded me of the concept of sumud (“steadfastness” in Arabic), which is used by Palestinians living under occupation to describe the daily resistance of staying on their land. Why do you think “hereness” is the answer to the dystopian realities you describe?
Naomi: The vast majority of humans on this planet understand how much there is to cherish here. You know, [Astra and I] draw on a Jewish tradition from the history of the Jewish Labour Bund, which was very powerful before the Second World War. It was a response to Zionism and it was the rejection of the idea that safety lay “over there” in Palestine. In response to the rampant violence and antisemitism in Eastern Europe, the [Bund] said, “here where we live is our country”—that’s the title of our friend Molly Crabapple’s book—and, “we have a right to stay and to make here better in coalition within the working class, across faith and ethnic lines.” It was a different vision of safety. It was one rooted in solidarity.
What we have seen in the resistance to data centres and in the surge of political movements like Zohran Mamdani’s in New York or the Flamingo Revolution, the uprising in Albania to protect a nature reserve from the billionaires—it feels like all over the world people are standing up and saying, “we love it here, let’s stay, and let’s protect this from all of these maniacs who just can’t wait to get out of here.”
Astra: We did not write this book to just revel in how strange and powerful and mercenary the fascists of today are, but to analyse their weaknesses, their fractures, the way that they are overplaying their hands, and the resistance to them. This is a beatable phenomenon. It’s deeply unpopular. And if we get organised, we can win.
This is an excerpt of a longer interview that has been edited for clarity and length. The full interview can be heard on Prospect’s brand new podcast ‘Tell Me Why’.
‘Ends Times Fascism’ by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is published by Allen Lane.
