03-July-2022 –
17-July-2022
Fascism is the violent maintenance of a belief in hierarchy.
This violence is as obvious as it is hidden and spectacular as it is mundane. It looks like: the men who get guns and murder kids for attention; the cop who goes to work believing the police are walls guarding the naive from the truth that humanity is fundamentally evil; the Christian whose presence outside the abortion clinic is meant to shame all those inside; the mother who refuses to call her adult child by the name they choose. (Yes, speech can be violent. Anyone with a stomach knows this.)
Yet the habit of fascism is revealed most clearly by institutions.
Our age's most explicit fascism has been built. It runs daily and turns a profit. The forces which animate it have been studied and named and catalogued: surveillance, cops, courts, bureaucracy, and capitalism.
In the United States, the institution I'm describing is the network of concentration camps at what we call our borders. The euphemisms accepted as their names: Detention Facility, Correctional Center, Processing Center. The last name is closest to the truth. These buildings and the people who fill them—people with nametags, badge numbers, and pensions—subject people to a process which makes them forget their dignity, lose hope, and want to die. The concentration camps and the people who fill them turn kids into corpses and render adults invalid. We know this from those who have survived the American concentration camps. We know this, too, from their lawyers and family members and friends. The kids murdered in the American concentration camps, of course, can't tell us anything.
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How do American concentration camps in 2022 work?
Journalists and entertainers have briefly become enraptured with their horror. Despite its brevity, we learned plenty from their attention.
The basic fact is that capitalists and lawmakers keep paying for American concentration camps, builders keep building American concentration camps, and cops keep filling the American concentration camps up. The cops do this because they're paid to find people without the correct paperwork then torture those people by kidnapping and jailing them. Lawyers keep visiting the American concentration camps, persuading the torturers to let them speak with the torturers' victims (detainees to the torturers, clients to the lawyers; names are avoided because names remind us of the politically impractical fact that every living being is irreplaceable and infinite in its dignity). The immigration judges—who are beholden to the tastes of the Attorney General, who is beholden to the whims of the American President, who is beholden to the praise and counsel of the nearest, loudest, and most persistent freaks—work each day through their dockets. The judges speak with the lawyers in the arcane tongue called the law; this exchange of jargon forms a spectacle in which morality is caricatured and destroyed. The victims of this process often cannot understand the ritual by which they're deemed worthy of torture. (Sometimes the victim asked to assent to the immigration court's sage proceedings is too young to know how to use a toilet.) The judges pronounce their verdicts, scribbling down or typing up their little pictures of reality. The victim with a name and a history is kidnapped again and tortured some more, or they're let free (much less often). The docket is one lighter. The managers, executives, and owners receive their payments. Repeat.
This system of torture is sustained, too, by surveillance. The operators of the cameras, databases, and search engines can construct any kind of story about any person or group of people. Life to the spies is an array of incriminating events: locations, products, interests, transactions, and communications are all crime scenes. Any event may be isolated to condemn. And luckily for the spies, they tell these stories to an audience of shills: cops. Cops are shills for stories of guilt because cop ideology is premised on the lie that humans are fundamentally violent, debased, and cruel; a cop craves a spy's story because that story says cops are right about the world. The target pickers pick targets. There are only hunters and prey. (No surprise: most of the spies and most of the cops are white men.)
To complete this description of American concentration camps in 2022, we need only to add the fucked incantations of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is what pacifies the builders, owners, and workers of horror into doing their daily work. Bureaucracy does this by distancing people from reality. One phrase reminds us of the efficacy of this distance: enhanced interrogation techniques.
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The primary institution of American fascism is profiting from abducting, caging, and torturing people who crossed an imaginary line without certain pieces of paper. American fascism hides lives in mazes of cruelty.
Most of the media have looked away. The public had its moment of seeing and pretending to care, but grew tired of the banal brutality; we got convinced to fear something else. And the cops keep putting people in cars.
In every age the people in power must experiment to find what makes their fascism sustainable. The concentration camps on the American borders work well for their owners and keepers; the experiment has been successful. Those in power have learned what it takes these days to obscure mass violence. The people who fund, run, and promote the American concentration camps likely believe that the unseen must be brown and poor for the whole thing to work; that the calamity of this dual cursedness justifies the whole enterprise. Yet we know that fascist institutions expand and multiply because they are incredibly lucrative. Other than the lethal prominence of financial profit, fascist institutions serve as an ideological backstop to those with a sense of purpose or mission: "If we cannot do this, then we mustn't believe we are just. Thus we must do this." (Fascism, like other cowardices, is often tautological.) Color of skin and measure of account limit who gets tortured for only so long.
It seems plain that if they want to get you, you're got. Such is 21st century power.
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The force, centrality, and profitability of today's fascist institutions invite us to rethink our position within and against them.
Fascism is firstly physiological. Belief and desire are contorted away from love and dignity. This violence becomes overt, becomes practical, whenever someone acts to intensify that feeling of superiority or blessedness. One could counteract this by believing rarely and desiring less, sure. Distaste for hierarchy helps. But that’s private work of small social consequence. Better, one can think and act in anti-fascist ways, namely and simply by loving others and being kind regardless of decree, circumstance, or demand. But the question still lives: how can we countervail fascism at a large scale?
This will sound morose and I'm sorry for that. But given the peculiarities of our day: I don't think we can countervail fascism at a large scale—at least not in ways we're used to imagining. Past mass protest involved combat and/or the sympathy of strangers, but the sophistication of power's weaponry and the public’s widespread addiction make both tactics impractical. So what’s left?
A person can still live apart and away from the systems—financial, legal, and social—by which fascism is animate. Money yokes most to diffuse cruelties for a yield of continual comfort; going without is hard. Living beyond law and cops and relying on communal problem-solving can feel messy and arbitrary and intractable. Hungry people tend not to be peaceable—with others and themselves—and a life apart from fascism is usually a hungry one. Those whose illnesses require complex medicine and care can't stay alive for long outside fascism's systems (at least until medicinal formulas and medical practices are distributed widely and freely). There are so many reasons and excuses. The path away from home is always painful.
But what else is there? Is there a way of living that deeply undermines fascism?
I'm thinking now of the power of speaking—a power whose proof, even in 2022, is shown by the fate of dissidents who've shared power's secrets. I'm imagining a growing number of people like that: of those who speak plainly about power, who refuse to lapse into euphemism, who say and name fascism when and how it is. One could imagine this group growing stronger by a special kind of meekness—a righteous vulnerability not yet named—even as its members are made to disappear.
You can imagine a time in which disappearance only reveals.
