The Slaughterhouse of Ideas

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This was supposed to be a different post.

I noticed recently that the last couple of posts I’ve made have been in the vein of “angry rants”, a popular form of internet content that I think will remain evergreen so long as there are things to get angry at. Much as I might seem it in the kind of books I write and the kind of stories I tell, I’m not an angry person. Far from it. I like books and movies and fun technology and walking my old dog. I like music and people and parties and good beer and a coffee in the morning with my girlfriend. I had decided that my next post was going to be more positive. Life-affirming, even.

I had a really good experience a couple of weekends ago. I went to a Pro-Palestine protest, I saw a great documentary film about love and dying (Come See Me in the Good Light), and I had a great dinner with a pair of complete strangers. I got a fair way into a decent length post about the importance of keeping joy in your life, even as you protest and remain active in your support of causes that will allow us to create a better and more humane world. The importance of keeping the faith, and how your own happiness and pursuit of good things can make you more effective as an activist, and help you retain a sense of the good of humanity.

This weekend though, around Australia, a series of “anti-immigration” rallies occurred, and Thomas Sewell, prominent neo-nazi shitheel, was allowed to speak on the steps of parliament in Melbourne.

So instead, here’s an angry rant about why you shouldn’t argue with fascists. Because fuck every one of the people who let that guy get behind a microphone.

When I say fascism, I mean fascism.

Let’s get this out of the way. When I’m talking about fascism, I’m not talking about the Fascist party of Italy (headed up by Mussolini) in the 1920s, nor am I using the term colloquially in the same way you might refer to a particularly strict boss or pedantic housemate. There’s a certain way in which centrists and centre-right people react when the word fascist is used. The tendency is for people to say “Well, you just call anyone you don’t agree with a fascist.” This isn’t the case for me, and it certainly isn’t the case in this article. I disagree with a lot of people about a lot of things, and most of those things aren’t signifiers of fascism1.

There are specific things that make a person or group of people fascist. I am talking about people exhibiting the confluence of traits espoused by Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay Ur-Fascism. I am talking about the impulse for Palengenetic Ultranationalism as described by Roger Griffin. I am talking about the bad actors exhibiting socially destructive tendencies as discussed by Lydia Khalil in her book Rise of the Extreme Right. I am talking about people who exhibit very real, very specific actions and desires that are espoused in ways that are well understood and well documented. I am not using the term fascist only perjoratively (though I certainly am using it that way), I am also using it descriptively. To quote the Youtuber ThoughtSlime: “I don’t think they’re fascists because I disagree with them; I disagree with them because they’re fascists.”

The State of Play

Fascism is extremely visible on the global stage again. Georgia Meloni, Italy’s current Prime Minister, is part of the Brothers of Italy party, whose members keep getting in trouble for giving Roman salutes and saying words like “Come back Benito Mussolini” and “Sieg Heil!” which are just hilarious things to have associated with the party that’s running your god damned country. Get thy house in order, Georgia. Or better yet, just fuck off.

Meanwhile in the US of A, one of the most boorish human beings on earth is ushering a very 1920s Italy style of authoritarianism and good lord, that’s going well. Incidentally, if you want to be chilled to the bone I really recommend Ordinary Things’ video about Mussolini. The number of eerily specific parallels between Benito and Donny, oh boy. Almost like Trumperino was taking notes2. I hope his exeunt from politics likewise takes notes from IL DUCE; I’d love to see him spending time hanging around partisans.

But things Dehn Undah aren’t exactly rosy either. Australia, despite bolstering its support for a moderate left-leaning government last year, likely in response to the rising tide of christo-fascism in the States, has had not-infrequent parades of literal nazis standing outside shopping centres or government buildings, even before the demonstrations this past weekend. I was speaking to an anti-fascist activist the day before the protests who was extremely worried, because two years ago the extreme right could only rally a dozen people on a good day. On Sunday there were thousands.

These are not things indicative of a healthy society.

The reason so many antifascist activists right now are sounding the alarm is because this is how it always starts. This is how it started in Italy in the 1920s. This is how it started with the Nazis in the 1930s. It’s how it started with Trump in 2015.

It starts with a small crowd and people ignore it, because a dozen people can be written off as a group full of idiots. It builds to hundreds and people say “oh thank god it’s no t that many”. Then theres the rising wave of national paranoia and before you know it politicians start talking about border walls and muslim bans and then ICE is knocking doors down and deporting people or putting them in camps.

It’s the same playbook and it’s so stupid and it’s so transparent and we seem to fall for it every fucking time. When Trump started with his bullshit in 2015 CNN couldn’t keep the cameras off him because “wow what a wacky guy, he’s saying the most cuh-razy stuff that brings in the ratings” not realising the degree to which they were playing the game for him.

Fascism is an Impulse, not an Ideology

One of the things that’s frustrating about fascism is that it’s not an ideology in the same way that, say, Socialism or Democracy or Liberalism is. It’s not some reasoned and thought-out set of ideals that describe the way a world ought to work. That takes thought and hard work and rigour to arrive at, and Fascism isn’t rigorous. It’s rooted in ideological contradiction, typified by part 8 of Umberto Eco’s 14 rules of fascism:

“The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” - Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism

It’s not something that people think about particularly hard to arrive at. It’s more about whether a thing seems true, or feels true, or anecdotal evidence can point to being true, rather than something that actually is true. No, Fascism pulls at something that’s fairly fundamental to us, a perversion of the survival instincts that served us well as tribes in the savannah but do us no favours in a globalised society.

I’m going to give my attempt at describing a couple of the things that fascism pulls at, but I’m not an expert at it, this is just supposed to provide the vibe.

Objectification and Categorisation

We usually hear about objectification in a negative context. Sexual objectification of women, for example. Objectification doesn’t necessarily connotate something negative though; it’s actually a very useful thing to help us understand the world around us, that is, to percieve things as objects.

In the wild thousands of years ago, it was pretty helpful if, when looking at a collection of teeth, fur, tongues, tails and claws, we were able to identify it immediately as a “Lion” instead of having to register each of those individual items specifically. Similarly, being able to look at different instances of those collections of teeth and fur and to recognise them as “Lion” is handy. You can objectify (the “Lion” is an object) and then you can categorise (“Lions” are things that I know are dangerous).

The benefits of this are extremely useful. As a squishy human with nothing but a loincloth and a fairly fragile spear, being able to tell when the rolling mass toward them can be categorised as a lion (fast, dangerous, enjoys human flesh) vs, say, an antelope (fast, less dangerous, doesn’t fancy human hamburger) is a great skill to have.

Anyway, we apply broad objectification and categorisations to stuff in our mind, and that’s really handy for identifying food, prey and threats. Unfortunately, it also means we apply it to fellow humans. Again, in a world where the next tribe of humans you meet might genuinely want to kill you and take your stuff (because you’ve got a nice cave and the dandelions look really swish in the sunlight, you lucky duck) categorising other groups of unknown people as a threat is probably not the worst thing as a survival instinct.

Impulse Doesn’t Make Good Governance

In modern Australia though, we don’t live in that world. We don’t live in a place where we’re at risk of being killed as a matter of course, and the things we do have difficulty accessing are due to systemic problems, not demographic ones.

The housing crisis? Huge systemic problem. Housing supply, as well as reform of rental rights, ownership rights, land banking laws and other systems need urgently addressing. Otherwise, we’re going to have generations of people who live entire lives of housing insecurity.

Income inequality? Huge systemic problem. We need to fundamentally rework the tax structure and incentives so that there is a minimum standard of living retained for everyone even when they’re unemployed. A minimum wage should be enough to live comfortably, and welfare should allow people to get back on their feet rather than subsisting on crumbs.

But we aren’t evolved to understand systemic issues. We’re evolved to recognise objects as agents, and to categorise them as threats. So instead of working to understand housing systems or economic systems, we instead see a category of person and label them and dump all of our woes onto them.

You start adding to this the rhetoric of bad actors who are deliberately trying to gain power from this kind of thing, and suddenly you have a fascist movement on your hands. And it is a nascent fascist, xenophobic movement we saw on Sunday. This is a group of people who are operating on the thoughtless survival instinct of the savannah. They have objectified a group of people as “Immigrants” and then they have categorised them as a threat.

It’s worth mentioning that the use of the word “Immigrants” is coded in and of itself. They aren’t talking about immigrants from England, or New Zealand, or Germany, or the USA. No, the immigrants of this categorisation fall into a very specific set of characteristics. And that, more than anything, should set the klaxons ringing whenever people talk in coded language like this.

All of this is a reaction. It’s reactionary thought, it’s reactionary ideas, and it’s deeply antithetical to the idea of a society that works hard to solve its problems rather than just identifying an outgroup to put them on (and then exterminate them).

And the kind of people who advocate for those ideas are dangerous.

The Slaughterhouse of Ideas

It is tempting to think that we should “open up a dialogue” with these fucking dorks. That we should come to a consensus in the “marketplace” of ideas. Let the douchebag who insists that the Hitler salute isn’t a hate symbol onto a news program to just explain why he feels this way. It’s not only a terrible idea to do this, but a dangerous one.

The problem with the marketplace of ideas is that for too many people it’s not an exhchange of ideas, it’s a discussion of their right to exist. Their right to participate in the world without fear of some kind of retribution being visited on them for a nonexistent crime.

We open up a discussion as to whether trans people pose some kind of societal threat, either to women or children or both, and suddenly every trans person in the room starts wondering if they’re going to be further ostracised. Or sterilised. Or killed.

We start talking about the “immigrant problem”3 and everyone who wasn’t born here starts wondering if they’ll have trouble renewing their Visa. If they’re going to have to start explaining where it is they came from (even more than they currently do). If in a few months they’re going to find their doors knocked in and their bodies dragged down the street for the crime of living in the country while brown.

Because again, it isn’t immigrants they care about. I have friends from England and New Zealand who are now Australian citizens, and they haven’t had any issues with people saying they shouldn’t have immigrated. I wonder white why?

So what do we do with the Thomas Sewells4 of the world? The people who argue that their ideas about “demography” and “returning to past glory” are ones that should be entertained, even as they assault homeless people in parks and call for the “protection” of white Australia.

Here’s what you do. First of all, read and consume stuff about history. Read about Mussolini. Read about the Nazis, read about Rwanda, read about all of the times when dehumanisation made the shift from rhetoric to violence, and how quickly it happened. Understand that this is where it starts, and when people like Thomas Sewell start flapping their idiot gums and making the noises they do, that they want to garner support for the same kind of violence.

After that, don’t talk to them. Don’t engage with them. Don’t let them waste your time trying to honey their words to make their rhetoric sound less cruel and dehumanising than it is. Don’t try to convince them out of their ideas, because while you’re doing that, they’re able to convince people into theirs. It’s easier for them, because we humans are stupid and our brains still think we live in tribes of twenty in a Savannah and not in a global society. And for all they wear suits and ties and use terms like “demographic shift” to try to make their ideas seem reasonable, they aren’t. They’re hateful and wrong, and they should be shut down.

You don’t want to head down that path. There are a great many things that are worth discussing and worth having an open debate about, but you should be very, very wary about any time someone names a characteristic of a group of people and starts questioning the validity of that characteristic. Whether it’s sexuality, immigration status, colour of skin, age, gender identity, lack of wealth, anything. Any time someone opens their mouth and starts voicing “concerns” about the way “these people” (who are not in positions of power) are changing society, you should leave the conversation and start stitching a red flag to raise over their head.

Because at the end of that conversation there is a field of dead bodies, and at least some of them will look like people you know.