Fascism did not vanish. It refined itself. It removed its militaristic costume and adopted new languages and institutions. Its imperial ambitions survived, hidden beneath the fabrics of civility and coated in the rhetoric of progress and development.

What we confront today is not the afterlife of fascism but its metamorphosis. It is fascism without spectacle, clothed in diplomacy, policy and market orthodoxy. It calls itself good governance and international order. It hides behind rating agencies, consulting firms or the Big Con, as Mariana Mazzucato calls them, and think tanks. It speaks of stability yet cultivates instability for profit, as we have seen in Congo DRC. It builds consensus by saturating the world with the idea that there is no alternative to Western universalism.

It no longer shouts. It administers. It no longer burns books. It shapes algorithms and commits epistemic violence. It no longer stages parades. It stages wars of humanitarian necessity. It wages violence through law, bureaucracy and debt. In this form, it appears rational, even inevitable and therefore more dangerous than its earlier expression.

This logic extends into culture, now aided by large language models. As colonial officials once codified African culture and languages to discipline communities, so too do the platforms of Silicon Valley flatten our speech into big data points. They claim neutrality yet carry the same impulse to command meaning. I have argued before that these digital tools rewrite our idioms into monotones and turn flames into ashes. They repeat, in a more sophisticated form, the colonial act of stripping knowledge systems of their sovereignty.

This is the fascism of our age: hegemonic statecraft.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/11/19/hegemonic-statecraft-as-contemporary-fascism-dis-membering-the-world-to-govern-it/