Back in my radical youth, I would always object when the term "fascist" was applied to Reagan, because if we call Reagan a fascist, what do we call actual fascists? And as the great-granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the daughter of a Jewish father, I take enormous offense at the casual use of "Hitler," "Storm Troopers," "SS," and other evocations of Nazism to describe political behavior of which the speaker disapproves. (Hell, I've heard people use it to describe PET CARE behavior of which they disapprove!) Even when the political behavior in question amounts to torture and murder, it still feels wrong to me.
So when I read a recent blog entry by Coturnix, a biologist in North Carolina who comes from Belgrade (or, as he describes himself, a "Red-State Serbian Jewish atheist liberal PhD student with Thesis-writing block and severe blogorrhea trying to understand US politics by making strange connections between science, religion, brain, language and sex"), over at Science and Politics, at first I just nodded my head along with him. He started out with a little bit of history:
Back in 1991, before I left Belgrade, we were demonstrating against Milosevic. Many plackards and graffiti at the time compared Milosevic to Saddam. They were mostly NOT comparing him to Hitler. Why? Not because we liked Milosevic and did not want to insult him. Not because we thought it was bad strategy. It was because we wanted to put him down, to show him how small he is, how transparent he is, how impotent he is.
He goes on to identify other reasons for not invoking Hitler in political dogfights - that it tends to be a debate-stopper because of the emotions it provokes, that it's a cheap metaphor, and of course, that Hitler's acts were evil beyond anything even remotely perpetrated by those to whom he's being compared; that Bush has killed thousands but Hitler killed millions.
But then he veers right off in another direction, and gets me questioning everything I thought I believed on this issue - enough so that I'll quote a bigger chunk than I normally do of someone else's writing:
Of course fascism will take different forms in different places and at different times. No state is going to resurrect the swastika today. The signs and emblems fascism do not make. It is the underlying ideology which can be coated in whatever symbols people are already used to - and proud of - including the American flag.
Perhaps due to my growing up in Europe, or being Jewish, or losing 42 family members in the Holocaust (including my maternal grandparents), I may be oversensitized. But, when I first heard GW Bush's campaign speeches in 1999, I got chills down my spine. I was able, due to my upbringing, to recognize something most Americans did not at the time, though many are waking up now. This was the rhetoric, the platform, the ideology, and the campaign strategy deeply soaked in fascistic way of thinking.
Neither Nazism nor Stalinism sprung up suddenly out of nowhere. Both built up gradually, over the years, slowly acclimating the populations to the ever-increasing levels of totalitarianism, and utilizing the fears and emotional insecurity of the few to rein in the many. The mass killings were just the last phase. It is like boiling a frog (or a lobster) alive: put it in cold water and warm up gradually. If you put a frog in hot water it will jump out, but if you warm it up gradually, it will just sit there until it is served well done.
I don't want to believe that we're facing a battle with fascism in this country, and I don't like abandoning my moral certainty on this issue. Dick Cheney is a buzzing gnat compared to Hitler, and no one can change my mind on that. But.... go read and see what you think.
Interesting post. I haven't read the original yet, but I will.
I saw the Holocaust Exhibit at the Imperial War Museum the other day, and one thing that they really emphasized is how this horrible thing didn't happen all at once, and was not committed by just a small group of people.
There was a room where the walls were covered with the beaurocratic chain that supported the killing. The gas in the trucks had to be manufactured, the gold fillings were disposed of, and so on and so on. Everybody knew what was going on.
One thing...there is a distinction between Nazisim and Fascism. I've never had a problem saying Bush and Co are like fascists...they are. But they still haven't come close to the type of fascism the Nazis practiced. Nor did the Spanish fascists, or any other pseudofascist government. Hitler and Co. were far far removed from that.
Posted by: KathyF | 28 June 2005 at 02:55 PM