If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We’d see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn’t always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
~Bertolt Brecht, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”
Viktor Orbán. Jarosław Kaczyński. Matteo Salvini. Donald Trump. Jair Bolsonaro.
Mass murders of Muslims, Blacks and Jews, here in North America.
Fascism is winning. We can no longer deny the obvious, counsel politesse and non-violence in the face of savagery, and play semantic games. Resistance is mandatory. Our “democratic” institutions are not proving equal to the task. We must either replace them or abandon them and take the fight to the streets.
Seem extreme? Not to anyone with an awareness of history. Fascism didn’t just leap full-grown from its foul womb. It was conceived, birthed, nurtured and coddled until it grew spectacularly monstrous, at which point nervous grown-ups attempted to make deals and compromises, offering concessions that merely fed the beast-child. It didn’t work, of course. Only force worked, by the time we got around to it, and it was at an unprecedented cost.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, it often rhymes. We should stop the vain search for superficial differences and concentrate on the glaring similarities: violent racism and its associated hatreds (misogyny, homophobia), strongman government, conservative and liberal acquiescence (Conrad Black’s paean of praise for the fascist mayoral candidate Faith Goldy, for example, or the attempted platforming of that reprobate in the name of “free speech”), and a complaisant or even actively complicit media (eg, the “goats slaughtered in hotels” Toronto Sun, Canada’s very own Völkischer Beobachter).
Of course there is resistance, but it’s fragmented and generally ineffectual. The Left has other things on its mind. Faced with a full-frontal attack on the most vulnerable by a brutish government that clearly relishes its own cruelty, the leader of the labour movement in Ontario, Chris Buckley, deplores the breaking of a window in a Minister’s office. In this he is joined by the leader of the social-democratic “alternative,” Andrea Horwath. Calls for “civility” are the norm, in the teeth of the gale. (Civility, if I might point out the obvious, didn’t save a single Jew from the gas chambers.)
Fascism is armed, mobilized, and is heading our way. But we seem to be stuck at the Neville Chamberlain stage, appeasing rather than mobilizing ourselves. If we don’t want to hear it rhyme, we’d better do something about the history being made in front of our eyes. By any means necessary.
