Ur-Fascism

The Rhinoceros, Enea Vico after Albrecht Dürer, 1548 (CC-0 Public Domain)

Berenger: Calm down, Jean, you’re being ridiculous! Oh, your horn’s getting longer and longer–you’re a rhinoceros!

Jean: I’ll trample you, I’ll trample you down!

Berenger: He’s a rhinoceros, he’s a rhinoceros! I never would have thought it of him–never!”

-Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros

In Dark Times is anti-fascist. This is not a happenstance anti-fascism. We created In Dark Times with the express purpose of resisting what we see as alarmingly fascist overtones in the neo-nationalist movements growing throughout the world, and particularly in Europe and the United States.

We are aware that fascism is word that is simultaneously provocative and imprecise. Many who share our worries for the world prefer to use the less burdened term authoritarianism, noting the tendency of people to associate fascism with jackbooted Nazis. The worry is that unless 21st Century fascism arrives in the familiar ideological, tactical, and aesthetic garb of the Third Reich (which it almost surely will not), people will fail to recognize and oppose it.

Remove the Nazi frame of reference and a nearly inverse problem arises. It suddenly becomes unclear if the word fascism means anything at all. George Orwell already noted in 1944 that “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” The use he had in mind is its application to socialists, conservatives, liberals, communists, nationalists, Catholics, pacifists, or essentially any person or group that one happens to dislike or disagree with. After years of careless and indiscriminate application, Orwell notes, the word has been degraded “to the level of a swearword”.

As the heading Ur-Fascism suggests, we agree with Umberto Eco who argued in a 1995 essay by the same name that, despite fascism’s conceptual “fuzziness” (he described it as “a synecdoche,” a “beehive of contradictions” with “no quintessence”), Ur-Fascism (Eternal Fascism) has discernible features (14 of them), the recognition of which are of direct practical import. By practical in this context (and still thinking with Eco), we do not simply mean useful, but also moral. “Our duty,” Eco writes, “is to uncover [Ur-Fascism] and to point our finger at any of its new instances–every day, in every part of the world.” We would add that the practical aim is not just to point our finger, but to also do something to stop it.

In this regard we are reminded of two perennial questions asked in a spirit of genuine moral perplexity by school children–questions for which they receive no satisfactory answers. Those questions are: “How could they let this happen?” and “Why didn’t they do anything to stop him while they could?” These questions are provoked by learning that Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust, came to power through the legal parliamentary process of a democratic republic.

As Donald Trump rises to power to test the 240 year old democratic institutions of the most powerful nation on earth, those who oppose his Presidency–a majority of American voters–and their elected representatives look on anxiously. As the National Front grows in popularity in France, as the far-Right AfD challenges Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party in Germany, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán behaves more like a fascist dictator with each passing day, as the Neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement gains momentum in Scandinavia, we worry that the school children of the future–assuming we provide them with a future–might ask the same perplexing questions about us. In the posts collected under Ur-Fascism we seek to transform those questions to confront our own present: How (and why) is this happening? How do we stop it while we still can?