The philosopher Hannah Arendt, the chronicler of totalitarianism in the 20th century, defined fascism as the temporary alliance of the mob and the elite. She also coined the phrase, ‘the banality of evil’ when describing the unthinking, routine way in which Nazis like Adolf Eichmann, whose trial she reported, committed the most horrific crimes against humanity.

When it comes to trying to understand, and respond to, the recent outbreak of racist, fascistic violence on the streets of cities across different parts of the UK, and the recent electoral breakthrough of fascistic parties and leaders across the world, it is important that we examine both ‘the mob’ and ‘the elite’. It is also imperative that, as teachers, we remain committed to building a world founded on the ‘banality of goodness’.

The banality of goodness could be said to be the most basic and essential, but often overlooked or unspoken, aim of education. If we view fascism as a virus – which can adapt, mutate, infect rapidly and globally, and then of course kill in huge numbers – then education is society’s greatest, most powerful antidote to that virus, and investment in education is its most necessary programme of vaccination.

Whether we see it in terms of things such as our own EIS Education for Peace policy, or of the four core values of CfE, (Wisdom, Integrity, Justice and Compassion), or of the core values within the GTCS standards, (Social Justice, Trust, Respect, Integrity and Professional Commitment to learning which is aligned to achieving a sustainable and equitable world), Scottish education is inherently anti-fascist.

There is still much to be done before we manage to achieve what Finland has with its society-wide media literacy programme to help all citizens, not just children, to spot fake news and resist the fascists’ attempt to manipulate them. And there is still room for our system to improve wider political education at all levels.

But working with those GTCS values embedded in the system means that, with every lesson we teach, with every young person we support, we are anti-fascists, and our society is healthier, stronger and more resilient against infection because of us, its teachers.

Before we become too self-congratulatory, however, we have to accept that the logic of the analogy is that cuts to education, the chronic underinvestment in teachers and schools that we’ve been suffering for 14 years, are a dilution of the antidote, a dangerous limiting of the vaccination programme.

It is deeply disturbing that many of the rioters in England and Northern Ireland were children, mostly boys. While we did not witness those scenes on Scottish streets at that time, we have to remember that Scottish teachers, mostly women, are victims of regular violence and aggression, often misogynistic in nature, by boys in their schools.

That is what happens when the antidote is diluted. And that violence will inevitably worsen and widen into the community if proper funding is not ploughed into schools to give teachers the capacity to meet those learners’ needs.

And that is why our Stand Up for Quality Education campaign is of such critical importance right now. Of course it is a campaign about the need to support and protect teachers, of course it is a campaign about meeting the needs of the children we teach, especially the needs of those boys so in thrall to misogynistic influencers, but it is also a campaign about protecting and strengthening the very fabric of our society.

Proper investment in quality education is the best preventative spending to ensure social cohesion.
Austerity, on the other hand, is the guarantor of societal breakdown. It has created the conditions that have led to the ‘mob’, as Arendt described them, taking to the streets.

Proper investment in quality education is the best preventative spending to ensure social cohesion.

And when the fascists try to take the streets, the anti-fascists have to turn out in vast numbers to take them back. That was why we in the EIS, along with the STUC and many other Unions, joined Stand Up to Racism in Glasgow on 7 September, and why many thousands across the UK did the same in early August.

But dealing with the ‘mob’ and getting them off our streets is not enough. We also have to deal with ‘the elite’ who support them – or, rather, manipulate them. And this is where we need to examine another definition of fascism, because ‘the elite’ we should be worried about are not simply the Andrew Tates, Stephen Yaxley-Lennons or Nigel Farages of the world, but the super-rich who back them, give them a platform and amplify their message.

In 1938 in his address to Congress on curbing monopolies, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

By this definition, the world is already firmly in the grip of fascism. In the past decade the world’s richest 1% have plundered $43 trillion from the rest of us. To understand the scale of that gush upwards of enormous wealth, you have to realise that if those rich people had taken merely one dollar every second, it would have taken them over 494,000 years to accumulate it, but it took them only ten.

That sickening wealth accumulation by a tiny minority of individuals and corporations is the evidence that austerity is the Great Lie of our age. In imposing it, our politicians have become the butlers to the billionaires, but the billionaires are now the bankrollers of the fascists. They are the framers and the peddlers of the ideologies that motivate the mobs.

Too many of the world’s billionaires love their Ayn Rand, their Friedrich Nietzsche and their Social Darwinism – they believe they are the new 21st century supermen and they believe democracy needs to die to allow them unfettered freedom to accumulate more wealth.

We have to stop them. But how?

One way would be to strengthen legislation against hate speech online. As Paul Mason puts it in How to Stop Fascism, “The most effective way to attack 21st century fascism would be to classify all internet platforms as publishers, making their owners responsible for the content.”

But the new Technofeudalists, as Yanis Varoufakis calls them, also have to have their power curbed through wealth taxes.

We’re often told that defeating fascism means that the Left must compromise and unite with the centrists, with politicians like Kier Starmer and Emmanuel Macron. But if those centrists are also serious about stopping fascism, then they need to unite in good faith with us and they need to make compromises too.

And their key compromise has to be to end austerity and rampant inequality and to embrace the imposition of wealth taxes as a moderate, mainstream policy, rather than allowing it to be painted as some sort of extreme Marxist ideology.

That was why we in the EIS voted along with other Unions to demand exactly that from Kier Starmer’s Labour Party at the TUC Congress in early September, and why we will keep campaigning with our trade union comrades for austerity to be ended.

We know it will not be an easy battle to wrestle that compromise, to get the full level of wealth distribution that we want and need, but the banality of goodness isn’t just the basic aim of lessons in classrooms – it needs to be the guiding principle of our whole economic system. So, we won’t give up. As campaigners across Latin America have often expressed it, “La Lucha Sigue!” – the struggle continues – and, when we stand together against the fascists and their billionaire backers, “No Pasaran!”

– A version of the text of this article was delivered by EIS President Allan Crosbie as a speech at the Stand Up to Racism rally on 7 September.