Fearing Trump, academics worldwide issue anti-fascist manifesto

Washington Post

a day ago

LONDON — In the spring of 1925, a group of academics, researchers and writers in Italy published an open letter in multiple newspapers, hoping to ring alarm bells over the creeping authoritarianism of Benito Mussolini and his Fascist party. It called for 'intrinsic goodness' and recognizing the value of 'liberal systems and methods' over 'violence and bullying and the suppression of freedom of the press.'
Spoiler: It didn't work. Mussolini wasn't stopped, fascism plunged Europe into darkness, and the letter signers were variously fired, sidelined and beaten.
But exactly a century later, a modern group of academics, researchers and writers around the world is giving it another go — fearing that the world is once again sleepwalking into dictatorship and violence. More than 400 scholars from dozens of countries, including at least 30 Nobel laureates, are reprising the 1925 Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals to warn that 'the threat of fascism is back.'
'In the past two decades we have witnessed a renewed wave of far-right movements,' the new letter states, 'often bearing unmistakably fascist traits: attacks on democratic norms and institutions, a reinvigorated nationalism laced with racist rhetoric, authoritarian impulses, and systematic assaults on the rights of those who do not fit a manufactured traditional authority.'
Organizers said the open letter — published Friday by media outlets in Britain, France, Italy, Australia, Argentina and other countries — was inspired by rising influence of, as they see it, a growing roster of would-be demagogues and dictators around the world and their followers.
The essay does not name names. But in interviews, organizers cited Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine; the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by rioters trying to block the peaceful transfer of power; and myriad crackdowns on press, protesters and professors in Hungary, Brazil, Israel and other democracies. Their fears have been supercharged by the early actions of the second Trump administration, they said.
'What we are witnessing at the moment is extremely concerning for people who want to defend democracy,' Andrea Pisauro, an Italian professor of neurology at the University of Plymouth in England and one of the organizers, said in an interview. 'It looks to us like authoritarianism is on the march throughout the world and now in the United States.'
The group timed the specific release of the letter to coincide with the military parade that President Donald Trump planned to roll through Washington on Saturday, his 79th birthday, which organizers of the letter characterized as a ritual of authoritarian pomp.
'We thought, 'That's perfect. A person is trying to be a king and wants a parade,'' said another organizer in the United States, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. 'It's the classic mix of ridiculous and scary.'
Publication of the letter also coincides with the Trump administration's ongoing push to exert greater control over universities, including Harvard, by cutting research grants, seeking to block the enrollment of international students and threatening to raise taxes on school endowment funds.
The idea of an updated manifesto began mostly among hard-science researchers from Italy, who were familiar with their country's own descent into dictatorship and the noble, if futile, efforts by intellectuals to stop it.
Support for it quickly spread to other disciplines and nationalities. Dozens of political scientists, legal scholars, historians and economists added their names. The list is growing, and the organizers plan to keep the letter open for new supporters.
Those already signed up include some renowned thinkers, among them historian Garry Wills, New York University's Ruth Ben-Ghiat — the author of 'Strongmen,' a history of authoritarian rulers — and tyranny expert Timothy Snyder of Yale.
'I think it's important to remember that there is a history of university professors and other intellectuals taking risks in the name of principles,' Snyder said in an interview about why he joined the signatories. 'Secondly, it was important to me for people to have this historical reference to fascism, that things today might be more explicable when we have clear references to the past.'
The project was launched in February by a loose confederation of academic colleagues who had been wary of rising autocracies for years. They saw Trump's moves to deport international students, threaten sanctions on unfavored law firms and ignore judicial restraints as another check-engine light on democracy's dashboard.
The Trump administration has also pulled research funding for the National Institutes of Health and other scientific bodies, they noted, and has co-opted federal watchdog agencies long viewed as independent monitors. Among the most concerning, Pisauro said, were actions by Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service to erase decades of irreplaceable research on climate change, sexuality and other suddenly taboo topics.
'We are researchers,' Pisauro said. 'That really shocked us.'
Fully aware that academics were already in the crosshairs of powers from Washington to Budapest, they decided to reprise the 1925 letter, which condemned Mussolini's 'bizarre mixture of appeals to authority and demagogy, of proclaimed reverence for the laws and violations of the laws.'
The modern version was largely written by an international medical researcher at an American university, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He said the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that has enveloped academic institutions under Trump makes him afraid to go public.
He isn't alone. Several signatories of the letter opted to remain anonymous. That alone should be seen as a warning sign that the United States is descending into the wary chill that characterized the former Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes, said the researcher, whose identity and credentials were verified by The Washington Post.
'I don't want my colleagues to know what I'm doing,' he said. 'That is definitely not something I thought would happen when I moved to the United States many years ago.'
The organizers are quick to say that current events in the U.S. and elsewhere are not exact parallels to the rise of dictators like Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. By 1925, many opposition figures were imprisoned and a growing number of dissidents were dead, part of a wave of violence that grew to engulf Europe.
Still, even though there is debate over the definition of 'fascist' — a label easily deployed in political arguments — the letter writers see echoes of it in the actions of today's strongman leaders and the conditions that enable their rise.
'These movements have reemerged across the globe, including in long-standing democracies, where widespread dissatisfaction with political failure to address mounting inequalities and social exclusion has once again been exploited by new authoritarian figures,' the letter states. 'True to the old fascist script, under the guise of an unlimited popular mandate, these figures undermine national and international rule of law, targeting the independence of the judiciary, the press, institutions of culture, higher education, and science.'
Some of those who signed the manifesto did so while also arguing for universities and institutions to address their own shortcomings. Among them is a widespread intolerance of political and cultural views that many academics don't like when it comes to hiring experts and setting curriculum, said Pippa Norris, a longtime political scientist at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
'We need to make sure all viewpoints are heard and taught,' Norris said. 'At present we don't have the balance right.'
Norris said she signed the open letter because she also recognized the rising threat to academic freedom coming from governments. Her institution has seen federal funding stripped by the Trump administration and its international students blocked from applying for visas.
'Everyone can speak up in different ways,' she said. 'And this is something I can do.'