How Fascism Made a Fool Out of You
Why You Believed It Couldn't Happen Here — and Maybe Still Do
This is going to be a strange, difficult, and complicated essay to read. And yet, if I am successful, perhaps you will understand the world — and your part and place in it — a little better. But that is for you to judge. Let me begin here.
I used to say that the rise of fascism would be the defining event of our adult lifetimes. And I wouldn't blame you if, when I said it five years ago, you laughed and thought I was a little strange, when I said it three years ago, you frowned and rolled your eyes, when I said two years ago, you bickered, and when I said it one year ago, still, you nitpicked.
Glimpse the world today. Is there still really any doubt, my friends, that a a planetary mega-tsunami of fascism is roaring across the globe — wrecking everything in its path? A proud fascist just won the election in Brazil. In America, political mass violence by paranoid delusional fantasists — whose masters pretend to have nothing to do with it— is now a grim reality. (Do you see yet how these two things are linked? Denial — and impotence? Where does complicity's line lie, exactly? But my purpose isn't to make you feel ashamed, or to pretend I am especially smart — I am not. It is just to go on thinking, asking questions, forming crude, incomplete answers to share with you.)
Let me do so by way of another observation. This juncture of history, right now, is the fascist moment, the moment when democracy shatters for a generation, when the world's path to war and atrocity is sealed, when the future is written, the mouldering dead's graves already dug by the hand of folly. And so perhaps it is time to begin asking another question: why were you made such a fool of? So much so that you assented to minimizing and pooh-poohing the rise of fascism away — "come on, don't be hyperbolic! It can't happen here!" — at the precise moment you needed to safeguard your society against it most?
Enough of us, many of us, perhaps most of us have — if we are brave enough to admit our own folly — badly underestimated the swiftness, severity, and intensity with which fascism grows. Snap! Two years — and mass murders, genocide, infant trials, and camps are realities in America. Unimaginable — or predictable? What about in Brazil — the world's fourth largest democracy? We thought fascism would be like the flu — but it is more like Ebola. We thought it would be like a broken window, easily repaired — but it is more like a house burning down.
And so the simple truth is that if you feel frightened by all this, the truth is you are not frightened enough. If you feel angry about it, the truth is that you are not yet angry enough. You should be angry at them for the violence they do — but also at yourself, for the fool they have made of you. And you should be frightened not just of them, but also of your very own worse self, the lies it too eagerly believed, which were what allowed the monsters to rise out of the darkness.
(I say that as gently as I can — not to condemn, or to blame, or to belittle, but only to illuminate, and you are most welcome to argue that you are no such person. Let us then discuss the enough of us who were precisely such people — good and just and fair, no doubt, only perhaps not wise enough, or not told enough, to see how they were being played for fools, and why.)
Why did we think all this — that it couldn't happen here, at precisely the moment that we should have been on guard for precisely the opposite? That is, why were we made fools of? We fell victim to, as people so often do, a stupid, wicked lie — that because it was soothing, mollifying, relieved us of our fright. But our fright also carries our moral power, because hidden in that which we are frightened of is also the precise wrong we must overcome. The bad guys, then, fell prey to the lie of fascism — "those dirty subhumans are responsible for your decline!" — but that doesn't mean the good guys emerge from this wreckage absolved.
The good people, it seems to me, fell for another, different lie. "They won't come for you, and even if they do, what does it matter? You are not really threatened. Fascism is an overstatement — it's something that happens to other people,and you are not one of them. Lesser people." The point is that this kind of thinking is how is led to believe that "it can't happen here" — to believe that, one must first suppose that "they won't come for me, and people like me, they will only come for lesser people, and therefore, it can't happen here."
How strange, how funny, how tragic — do you see how this, "the lesser people", hidden in the good lie, is a precise mirror image of the other lie, the bad lie, the fascist lie? But I'll come back to that.
Do you still feel that way? That all of this will never really affect you? Or are now beginning to suspect, to feel deep in your bones, to know, that they will come for you, no matter who the "you" is — the immigrant and refugee, for being a parasite, the gay and woman, for being filthy and dirty — and even you, the proud, strong man, the moment that you dare to say that all that is reprehensible, wrong, and repellent. Are you beginning to know, despite not wanting to know it, that they will come for you, too?
Wham!! Fascism means you are to be met with violence for not accepting and endorsing and conducting violence — and nobody, my friends, is given a pardon or an exemption in this grotesque war against civilization, freedom, and decency. Is it clear yet that they will come for you, and those you love — no matter how safe and protected you imagine yourself to be? But why did it take you so long to know this? Why did you resist this knowing so much, so often, so intensely — when it is what history was shouting for you to understand it?
The lie that they would never come for us, when "us" meant those above the immigrant and refugee and migrant and other — now that they are mass murdering elderly, peaceful Jews and beating people on the streets — should feel like just that. A stupid and terrible lie, which made fools of us. One which we allowed to make fools of us — if we wish to be morally accurate. But what does it really mean? Why did we believe it?
We believed it because hidden in it is another lie, still. It is the formative lie of this age. It is capitalism's lie. We are never to care for another person. It is every person for themselves — in a brutal and vicious race for domination, mastery, and power. If they cannot afford safety — healthcare, education, transport, shelter, food — well, then that is their problem, not mine. It means they are weak, and the weak must perish, so that the strong can survive. WE are just little individualistic atoms in a Darwinian machine of violence — but that is how fitter humans are produced, isn't it?
Wrong, my friends. The despair of those failed by capitalism is not just their problem at all. It is everyone's problem — because that despair is what ignites the fascist implosion. And that is what we are learning the hard way. When people feel genuinely threatened, exposed, fragile, they will turn to strongmen, and the whole fascist sequence — which is utterly predictable, demagogues, demonization, scapegoating, camps, mass murder, laughter, all of which America has followed with eerie, unerring, precise accuracy so far, since it never changes — will begin.
Capitalism degenerates into fascism, time and again. Why? It teaches the good people, too, that everyone is a self-reliant individual. But if that is true, then the weak are parasites, and the infirm are predators. Wait — aren't we already in the realm of fascist logic? Do you see how, at an intellectual level, there is scarcely any difference between capitalism and fascism whatsoever?
The only difference, really, is that fascism twists capitalist logic upon itself — as a form of self-preservation. The fascist comes along and tells falling middle classes, proles from the supreme tribe, who expected to be rich and powerful and dominant, but ended up poorer and less powerful, that they are not the weak — they have just forgotten how to be vicious and cruel enough. If only they abuse those even more powerless than them — then they will be strong and respected, and maybe even rich and fortunate. Bang! The sequence starts — but can it be stopped? See the point: all the prole has to do is switch positions in the mental framework he has been taught. Anyone needing assistance, help, succour, support is a predator and a parasite. But such a person is now, thanks to the demagogue, not him — it is the one below him. Now, having a target to hate, perhaps to murder, he can prove he is fearsome. First, with dehumanization. Then, with rage. And finally, through violence.
(Yet all along the prole has been taught by capitalism that the weak must perish, for the sake and benefit of the strong. Only he was the weak one — and capitalism was therefore unsurvivable for him. Bang! Along comes fascism and tells him all that he has to do is make the weaker perish, whether by killing them, or applauding and tolerating their murder, and he will be the strong, feared, and mighty one. He will then have the power, respect, and status capitalism promised him all along. Do you see what a simple, elegant, and wickedly beautiful solution this is? Nothing has to really change at all — except the crossing of one last line, which is violence.)
Snap! Democracy begins to judder and break now. The rule of violence is being established now, as the sole organizing principle of society. The most violent men rise — and to prove that they are, they must inspire, demand, command, violence that is a little more gruesome, widespread, visible, and terrible every day.
Now. I am not saying that you fell for that terrible, repugnant logic.Probably, you didn't. You found it repellent and grotesque, whenever a demagogue proclaimed it, and their throngs cheered, like mindless automatons, beginning to celebrate and applaud more and more vehement calls for ritualized violence.
But the point is this. Even at that very moment, you probably still thought "it can't happen here!" And that is because beneath that, you probably stull thought "they will not come for me — they'll come for the weak, the powerless, lesser humans." The lesser humans. How funny. Isn't that precisely what the demagogues were training their masses to believe? That they had to come for everyone, beginning with the lesser humans, to prove that they were strong and ruthless, not weak and insignificant — in order to make the moral law true: the strong should survive, and the weak should perish.
So while you might not have fallen for the logic above, that was not nearly good enough — because you were probably still quite happy believing it would never happen to you, that such a thing was impossible, that fascist violence would never arrive on your doorstep, which is precisely how it did.
It would have been wiser, I think, to unpick all the above. But America does not have intellectuals of that caliber, really — sadly. It's thinkers only really study capitalism and violence as desirable and permanent solutions, not as epic and society-wrecking problems. So who was teaching people to see how the downwards spiral of fascist violence really worked?
Let me sum up how it does. The fascist can only prove his moral law by doing violence, in the end, to you, too. So violence gathers force, vehemence, and rage, the kind that is intent, lethally, on arriving at your doorstep, too. And yet good people believing that only "lesser beings" will receive such violence is exactly what legitimizes it. It is the belief that "violence will never affect me, only those others" that normalizes, tolerates, and ignores it — so that it races upwards, rises like a great fire burning down a society. When the lesser being is a thing to whom fascist violence is acceptable, then violence grows in intensity and frequency, until it is murdering you, too, and raping your wife — or demanding your submission and obedience to carrying out, tolerating, and cheering such things. And at that point, is there much of a difference between the good and bad people?
They came for the refugees, then they came for the Mexicans, they came for the Arabs. Then they came for the Jews, and the women. They will come for you, too. They were always going to. Why would you be exempt? They have to — because their moral law demands that you are the sacrifice by which their demon gods are made real. The name of their gods are murder, rape, genocide , my friends. Let us spare no quarter for the foolish lies we have been told, and arrive upon the shores of an unfamiliar reality. They will kill you, laugh, and say, "why, we had nothing to do with this? Us? We are innocent! We are not violent people, we are peaceful ones! We only wish a land of the clean and the pure!". And then they will celebrate openly while your fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and wives and children lie bleeding in the streets, and you cradle their bodies in your helpless arms, your soul shattering into a million pieces. Just as they have done all weekend long.
So now you have a choice. You might not believe the lie of the bad guys — "those dirty, filthy animals, they're the problem!" But that is easy. It is not nearly enough. Too low a bar for an intelligent and thinking person to use, and too convenient and easy a moral test to pass. It absolves us of complicity, folly, and stupidity, at precisely the moment we must examine ourselves for it much more deeply and seriously. The real question is this. You don't believe the vicious lie of the bad guys — so what? — do you still believe the soothing lie of the good guys? "It can't happen here — because they'll never come for me, and the people I love. Not me! Not us. We're above this. Violence? By fascists? That's something that happens to other people. Mexicans, refugees, immigrants. You know, lesser people."
Uh-oh. Do you see how perilously close we have come to believing just the same lie as the bad guys — not out of malice, but out of reassurance? How strange, how funny, how terrible. Two lies, which seem so different one the surface. Yet they bring us to shores of the same river. Violence is something that is happens to them, not me. Violence is something to be done to them, not to me.
Aren't these exact mirror images of folly — the kind that leads a society straight down a bottomless abyss of violence? The problem is that many of us in America, if we are honest, have bathed ourselves in such folly until we lay paralyzed, neck-deep, in ignorance. This is where we are now, my friends. And so the choice to grow and mature into wisdom, as always, is yours.
Umair
October 2018
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