The fascist heart is unsettled and isolated, uncertain and yearning for certainties. It longs for a tribe to which it can pledge its allegiance. It does not wish to think. It revels in slogans. It only wishes to feel. Emotion is right, especially among others who feel the same way. It wants to submerge itself in a tribe.
The fascist heart is nostalgically utopian and mourns the loss of a mythological golden age. It believes itself under assault by conspiracies, by forces Satanic or Jewish or female; by heretics or by any color or ethnic group other than its own. It needs enemies. The world only makes sense through enemies who are the answer to all that has gone wrong in their lives and in the nation. It inevitably moves step-by-step towards brutality — for enemies are those who will never agree and therefore “ one needs … to circle the right Satan, then kill that Satan (along with his neighbors and anyone who happens to be in the area), thereby opening the gates of heaven once and for all (1).”
The fascist heart is an exterminating heart. It just may not know it yet.
The fascist heart learns to choose cruelty. If someone more powerful expects cruelty, there will always be those who will rush to prove themselves worthy of his or her expectations:
“How much pain, sir? How long should it last? Is there anything more I need do to afflict this person, sir?”
So with the schoolyard, so with a gang, so with the most powerful offices in this land or any other. Cruelty becomes a duty for the sycophant, and for some, a pleasure. Those who are reluctant to inflict it either personally or by an order could say No, but ambition or agreement stays their conscience. Of course, there will always be those who like it. Sadists exist under every flag. To exercise power over another’s well-being or fate provides them with both purpose and a high.
The fascist heart cannot abide democracy for democracy by its definition means a sharing of power and a competition of ideas. Democracy means voters independent of the tribe and therefore it is a threat to safety and to a purity of feeling. It is a threat to the one and only leader or party who can protect them. The fascist heart is a totalitarian heart. There is no difference.
Power is the adrenaline that makes the fascist heart most dangerous. In 1942, my father was part of a State Police Team that broke up a secret birthday party for Adolf Hitler at a remote barn in Berks County. They found an enormous Nazi flag, a birthday cake, portraits of the Fuhrer and dozens of men and women in their Sunday best, but they had no power. They were dreamers only. But if a leader had given them the power to search out and punish his enemies, some of them would have risen to the occasion. The fascist heart thirsts for the opportunity to strike its enemies.
Individuals choose to accept a fascist heart. It evolves over time. The common human failings of self-pity and gloating mesh into a rancid creation. Add fear and propaganda, and they will fear what they are told to fear. They will believe unquestioningly. They will enter the realm of politics as faith. They will give up their desire to imagine the enemy as human, as a person with experiences and relationships like themselves. The enemy will become the eternal “other”, the not-quite- human, the threat, the animal, the thing in the darkness.
No people are immune to fascism’s temptations. Not a one. There were good Germans and good Italians who loved their children and worked hard and obeyed the law and proudly hung portraits of Hitler and the Duce in their homes and shut their eyes at the roundups of their Jewish neighbors and the beatings and humiliations on the street and the concentration camps sprinkled all over Germany. It was only Jews they said … or we did not know … or what could we do … or good, they deserved it. Jean Renoir said, “The truly terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”
Each person chooses to become a fascist or to be cruel or to willingly support cruelty as exercised by the state. Each … person. There is no escape from this choice, and no lie men or women can tell themselves that will obliterate what they choose.
Everyone is watching.
