How to fight fascism like a clown

An uncomfortably relevant essay from 2019

Dear H,

I hate to use the word fascist, not just because it's unfair, but because it's uncool. Like literally, diversity, equality, and bigot, it's a word that used to have a meaning, and even a useful meaning; but eighty years of use by tricksters, slanderers, and dimwits has run it into banality, and now when I hear it it says much less about the thing being spoken about and much more about the person who's using it. Winston Churchill was called a fascist for wanting to fight the fascists. George Orwell, in another one of his passages which ought to have been famous, said he'd heard Gandhi, Catholics, Boy Scouts, and pet dogs called fascists; and that the term meant anything you didn't like, and beyond this most usually a bully. This was at the beginning of the word fascism, and it will probably be this way to the end.

Nevertheless, sometimes the shoe fits. China, a country where industry is managed by the state, where ethnic and religious minorities are hunted down and put into camps, where free speech is verboten, where the all-seeing eye of Orwell's 1984 is a reality, where a social credit system bans people from life for not stepping in line, where political prisoners are killed and their organs are put on sale, where de facto slavery powers factories, where the military runs over protesters and a tightly controlled propaganda system dictates what people hear — this China, I tell you, a place closer in zeitgeist to Nazi Germany than anywhere else today, very few leftists have dared to call fascist. The man who wants us to hold China accountable, mostly with tariffs*? They call him the new Hitler. The people who want us to bend over for China? They call them The Resistance. And the Antifa, a downright fugly horde of Marxists and anarchists, are here to save us from Nazis — "Nazis” who love free speech and capitalism, and worship men like Winston Churchill.

Along these lines, Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale and studier of Eastern European dictatorships, wrote a short book On Tyranny and it was a huge success — with people who don’t own mirrors, or understand what words mean. I don't recommend it because the best books on tyranny have already been written, and written above a level for eighth graders** (he recommends, in one section, that all anti-fascists read Harry Potter). But failures can be instructive too; and we can learn much more about our society from Tim Snyder than he actually intended.

For instance, he says the swastika and the MAGA hat are two peas in a pod, and that fascists are big fans of enforcing their symbols. But if you work at a corporation or in a college or in the movies, nobody can wear either, and the closest thing we have to the swastika is the rainbow flag. The New York Times, in fact, which loudly praised Snyder's book, ran an article on the subject during pride month and asked a lot of scary questions. Chief among these were 1) is it okay for a business to not fly the rainbow flag? 2) Is it enough for a business to just fly the rainbow flag? And 3) Is it okay for people to take their rainbow flags down after pride month? All totally normal if gay pride, like the swastika, is your only insignia of human dignity.

Snyder speaks of fascists dehumanizing the enemy, but nothing in America dehumanizes the enemy like calling them fascists. It gives the speaker a license to punch. He speaks of the tyranny of virtue signalling, without realizing that 90% of all virtue signalling in the West is done to prove you're not "racist," or "sexist," or "homophobic;" and that the biggest enforcers of such group-think are our corporations. In short, the law (in the event of a lawsuit) requires them to prove these things about themselves, and so they do prove it — by constantly proclaiming their allegiance to “social justice,” and policing the opinions of anyone who disagrees with it. You can defend illegal immigrants in the break room, but try defending deportation and see how things end up.

Snyder says we ought to speak up for the little guy. But left-wing Big Tech decides, many times, to shut out the unpopular dissident***. He says the president's bullying of news outlets is unacceptable — but fails to see that left-wing news outlets, which control much of the thoughts of the nation, are capable of bullying the president. He praises “honest” judges who stand up for the law — but fails to mention the activist judges who subvert it. He says

It is impossible to carry out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the state also have access to violence. For just this reason, people and parties who wish to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations that involve themselves in politics.

No mention is made of antifa, or Black Lives Matter. He says he supports the right to speak, but believes leftists have a right to yell over speakers. He says

It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks.

Tommy Robinson? Milo Yiannopolous? Christian bakers? No mention — but categorically implied, in Snyder’s book, as the "oppressors.” He says “The people always meant some people and not others” without admitting nobody ever uses the people, regarding public opinion, about everybody. He says One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary. He neglects to mention that “illegal immigration,” “homeless,” “Islamofascism,” “hysterical” and “thug” have all recently been scrubbed — and that these scrubbings are just the tip of the iceberg. The left is the party of doublespeak and censorship and the thought crime. Probably the result of what they like to call neurodiversity.

Much of his book makes sense if taken impartially, but unfortunately none of his loudest fans understands what words mean. He says electronic privacy is important, but leftists are the world's most notorious doxxers. He says Be alert to the use of the words extremism and terrorism, but none of his fans blink when these terms are applied haphazardly to white people. He says truth dies when there's “open hostility to verifiable reality.” Nobody bothered to tell him how trans activists react to a “misgender.” He says The way to destroy all rules [...] was to focus on the idea of the exception. When did he write this? Shortly after Obama let grown men into little girls’ locker rooms, and right before half of Central America claimed asylum at the border.

I said there was something to learn from this book and I meant it. Aside from the fact that Trump made a better, less fascist person than half the people who accuse him of being Hitler, the lesson here is the same one Christ taught us 2,000 years ago: that our eyes face outward. This means we're likely to find faults in others first, and if we're going to criticize our neighbor, we ought to take the thing we hate about him and ask ourselves if we're doing it first.

Snyder quotes Christ too; but, laughably, he quotes the passages about rich men not getting into heaven, and about the truth setting everyone free. Snyder believes he has the truth, just like everyone else who quotes the verse and bothers to put it in their books. But does he really have it? Could it be possible he's the blind man leading the blind — and that he's driving us all into a ditch?

The evidence says yes. Nobody has ever heard of a poor professor teaching at Yale, after all; and if he says wealth qualifies him for hell, I for one would rather not go with him.

Yours,
-J

September 13th, 2019

*It’s worth mentioning here that in 1930's Britain, one of the major objections to arming against the Nazi was the budget. In our day we ignore the budget, arm ourselves up the ying-yang, and turn a blind eye to the dangers of the Chinese — for the sake of bobblehead dolls, Livestrong bracelets, and throw-away sneakers. We live at the extremes of both stinginess and profusion. We won't keep from indebting our great grandchildren, but we sure know a hot deal on a cheap hat when we see it.

**Chesterfield advised his son, Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote. I don't know that I’m entirely on board with this program; but if you haven't read The Federalist or Orwell's essays I say save Snyder for later — when you're wiser, and can get a good laugh at him. The New York Times didn't wait long enough, apparently, and they just ended up swallowing him.

My belief is that reading constructively eventually gets boring, so I like to switch things up and read things written by morons. I could, of course, go on piling up truths — but is this as fun as watching somebody mangle them? I insist that it isn't; so I load myself up with books that I'll hate, with titles like Why Women Should Rule the World or Eloquent Rage: a Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower; something so obviously and deliciously stupid that I couldn't dare to miss it. These artworks of idiocy are a treasure to me and serve to get my blood boiling and my mind churning; a garbage pile of ideas so rotten I have to take it down with a flamethrower — bullseyes to set my mind to, meth-houses to bulldoze; at the very least a sassing teen-age girl to bitch-slap. In other words something satisfying in the whole, and an on-tap sense of superiority. I go to Macaulay and I feel edified, but small. He's so far above me I have no choice but to worship him. I go to Timothy Snyder and Michael Eric Dyson when I want to feel like a giant.

***In one of the stranger passages about fake news, Snyder describes big media, the people who control much of the thought of the nation, as the minority. In one sense he's absolutely right: we do outnumber them. But do we have to believe or honor them because of it?

We always outnumber our masters; and a professional journalist or media mogul is no less prone to personal interest than our oil tycoons, big pharma, and state universities. Each of them is a minority — and it is precisely because they're the minority, and they hold so much power, that we ought to hold them in suspicion. Nay, in many cases, in derision.

This being said, I'm not one of those people who avoids mainstream news. I recommend reading papers from a diversity of viewpoints; and if you're following Breitbart you ought to be reading The New York Times. If you're listening to Ben Shapiro you ought to be hearing from Bill Maher. I'm not saying these are equally honest, or equally righteous, or equally smart, or equally interesting. But they all have their guns on one another, and if one of them is pulling a fast one the others are likely to rat them out.