The image, a veritable spectacle, of Julius Malema appearing on a dais rising slowly — slowly, to dramatise his stature and project a sacerdotal presence — emphasised, as if it had not done so over the past 10 years, the horripilating rise of fascism in South African politics.  

The spectacle that played out at the First National Bank Stadium was a reminder, at least to viewers with a sense of history in a widening field of cognition, of Adolf Hitler’s rallies in the 1930s and of Nazi gatherings in New York City in the months before the Second World War. 

It was also a powerful reminder of the power of propaganda, of how a pliant, docile public seems happy to surrender their emotions, hopes and fears, with the media going about their day stating “facts,” but rarely reflecting on the significance of facts — other than their meanings within a field of cognition that starts and ends in the same place. This idea of a narrowing field of cognition (the things that we observe, know and understand) can be understood in the context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s statement: “We animate [only] what we can, and see only what we animate.”  

In September 1938, the German journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich lamented: “Every day millions of pounds of printed paper go rolling out of this building [media publishing house] vomiting a torrent of National Socialist propaganda over mankind. And yet there’s hardly one person under our roof who agrees with what he writes, sets, prints, edits, or carries from office to office.” 

This was a reminder of how the public can be lulled into complacency by a disinterested media (social media in particular) and become prone to having their impressions of potentially dangerous people transformed into believing them to be people of high moral fortitude and trust. The 1930s, the era of Hitler’s rise (and of Benito Mussolini’s, for that matter) were marked by a celebrity culture brought on by the talkies in film. 

In the 2020s we are, somewhat similarly, in an era of celebrity culture, and of people positioned as “influencers” brought on, this time around, by social media. On social media, which has fewer ethical constraints than respectable news outlets that are held accountable by institutions like the South African National Editors’ Forum and the Press Council of South Africa, EFF members and loyalists are typically very vocal, vengeful and vituperative — with a reverence of Malema as the saviour of South Africa. 

Spreading fear and loathing from the dais 

Malema has left very little doubt, in most of his statements of the past 10-15 years, about his violent opposition to “others”. This, too, has powerful homologies with early interwar fascists. In the 1930s, Nazi propaganda glorified Hitler’s profile and “heroism”, while creating and reproducing loathing of homosexual people, Roma, Jews and others considered to be “undesirables” and “enemies”. With Malema’s cries to shoot and kill “boers” and “farmers”, the subtext here being white and “non-African” people, he replicated Hitler’s belief that his struggle was a racial struggle against a biological enemy, and victory would lead to a new social order.  

The selective African identity (only African nationalists and ethnonationalists have the privilege of defining African purity) as presented in EFF rhetoric is an important marker that has solid homologies with Hitler and his propaganda machinery. Hitler believed that not all Germans — only ethnic Germans — could be part of a new order, and they (pure Germans) would sacrifice their lives for the racial state. 

The 25-point Nazi Party platform of 1920 was explicit: “Only a national comrade can be a citizen. Only someone of German blood, regardless of faith, can be a citizen. Therefore, no Jew can be a citizen.” 

Parenthetically, the next time we see the EFF’s “ground forces” attack cultural institutions and destroy or burn artworks (because they were created by “non-Africans”) it’s useful to remember that the Nazis considered the artwork of its “enemies” (Jews) as “degenerate” and held that they ought to be erased from German society. 

The politics of hate, revenge and killing 

Malema has consistently preached and spread the politics of revenge (biblical punishment for past injustices inflicted on Africans), and hatred of racial groups whom he, specifically, considers to be “unAfrican”. It’s also important to note that African nationalists who have been in the government for the past three decades reproduced the most offensive racial classification system of apartheid.

The African nationalist ANC and the ethnonationalist EFF share a hatred or at least dislike of “non-Africans” the way that the majority of Germans passively or tacitly endorsed discrimination of Nazi “enemies”. A 1936 report by the Social Democratic Party in exile noted: “The feeling that the Jews are another race is today a general one.”

In South Africa today, the EFF is normalising and encouraging exclusory measures targeting “non-Africans” with overt messages of demonisation in preparation for harsher measures (recall that Malema said he has not called for genocide — “yet”). Mussolini and Hitler wanted only strong, virile young men among their youth. In October 2022, Malema asked his followers to prepare for killing and appealed to strong (men): “Cowards are not for the revolution,” he told his followers. 

This echoes Hitler’s express ideal that: “The weak must be chiselled away. I want young men and women who can suffer pain. A young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather and as hard as … steel.”  

Hitler’s propaganda was carefully crafted to dupe women, rural and urban people, as well as ethnically pure Germans. Malema is fond of claiming personal persecution as the inspiration for his activism and demands for loyalty. It would be wrong to traduce whatever he or his family may have suffered. His manipulation of emotions, individualised as he is used to presenting it, is straight from Hitler’s playbook. 

Mussolini, too, felt that he had been unreasonably persecuted since childhood. (Among other traits, Mussolini was a thug and a “swaggering bully”.) In search of support, the Nazis claimed that other parties marginalised blind people. The Nazis tapped into a story that Hitler himself had been blinded by a poison attack during the First World War — and therefore understood their plight.  

This individualising tendency was a hallmark of fascism, at least if we read Nietzsche and his break with the European Enlightenment. We come to realise that what is known and felt (by any despot or dictator) is tied almost exclusively to individual experience. Still in Nietzschean terms, Malema, elevated to the status of a “great leader” and saviour, draws not so much on his own ego, as he does on “the phantom of his ego”, as it has been “formed in the heads of those around [him] and communicated back to [him]” in a “wonderful world of phantasms”. 

Phantasm and the spectacle at First National Bank Stadium 

Music, literature and visual arts played important roles in the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler during the 1920s, and did not disappear entirely after the end of the Second World War. The fascism of Donald Trump has seen a return of politics of spectacle. There is some irony in hosting the EFF’s spectacle at a venue sponsored, at least nominally, by First National Bank… It makes sense, nevertheless, for reasons of proximity. When, for instance, the organisers chose Nuremberg for Hitler’s annual rallies from 1933, they tapped on tradition and support from party members in the region.  

At the First National Bank Stadium spectacle, Malema told his loyal followers that the EFF would be better in government than the African nationalists. With this, he presents himself as some kind of superhero and expects some kind of authoritarian idolatry. In this sense, he is “like the fascists and authoritarian populists” that preceded him, Doug Kellner wrote (of Trump) in 2017. Trump brought to politics the spectacle that made him a successful businessperson and reality-TV personality. 

Early fascists, Hitler in particular, were prepped and their performances were stage-managed (like Malema’s rising dais) and became a spectacle that may have students of media studies, propaganda, fascism and authoritarianism busy for a long time yet. Hitler’s publicists effectively “sold” him to the German public. 

The celebratory responses to Malema’s rise on the dais at the First National Bank Stadium were consistent with the brainwashing that Hitler sought, and expressed in Mein Kampf: 

“All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.”  

There was a moment, after the rendition of the “Kill the boer” song at the First National Bank Stadium last Sunday, when Malema cried “Attention!” and the audience fell relatively quiet. This highlighted the deeply authoritarian spectacle, and was a reminder of the propaganda of the Nazis at Nuremberg. 

Filmmakers and photographers (notably Heinrich Hoffmann and Leni Riefenstahl, who made the film Triumph of the Will) worked to make Hitler’s propaganda successful. The Malema-First National Bank Stadium show was a perfect display of the EFF’s propaganda objectives. Like the Nuremberg rallies, spectacle was a portrayal, “of an ideal rally, imbued with nothing but enthusiasm, discipline and perfect execution”. (See the Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds of Nuremberg Municipal Museums) 

The theatrical, almost sacerdotal rising of Malema on a dais was near perfectly consistent with historical symbolic representations and sacralisation of politics by fascist and totalitarian leaders from Mussolini and Hitler to Trump (who has been described as godsent), and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, for that matter. Malema’s “style” — depicted at the First National Bank Stadium — draws on myth-making and established the EFF as a cult.  

Like the Cult of Il Duce, Malema is presented, and the cult around him is aimed at building popular appeal to fix the gaze of opponents in bright lights, and foreground him as a superman. Mussolini was presented, by Thomas Edison, as “a genius of the modern age”. Winston Churchill pledged to stand with Mussolini in his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism”. And Italian newspapers referred to him as “the incarnation of God”.  

Mussolini went from seducing the Italian people to his corpse hanging upside down, beside his mistress, Claretta Petacci, from a girder in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. His death, by some accounts, led to Hitler’s suicide. Fascism did not end with them. It simply changed shape, renamed and concealed itself. DM