The Terror

The Terror is already here with us and it is in plain sight, and it is ugly, yet there’s an absence of any regard to it. Perhaps, because the current targets are by characteristics, not ‘one of us’, but minorities, and Other. This brings to mind, the Vicar’s Daughter’s “Hostile Environment”, and its language of hatred. The Terror is specifically aimed at so called illegal migrants, mostly Hispanics, but often natives of a different shade who are picked up, essentially abducted, and then rapidly deported without due process.

The abductions are large scale and public, not secret, not dignified, but intentionally disquieting and conducted as mass phenomena, on streets, schools, churches, shops, and brazenly violent. This is, of course, the hallmark of authoritarianism, of despotism, indeed, of fascism. The pretext is that the victims are underserving of our concern, and that insofar as they are less than human they can be treated inhumanely. The truth is that one of the aims is to render the wider public immune to observed callousness, to corrupt and infect what is pure and sacred, affiliation and innocence, with the darkness and putrefaction of the Great Leader’s inner world. To spread terror as a means of control.

Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism is still worth reading or re-reading. He identifies fascism with the irrational, the rejection of reflection, the suspicion of the place and role of knowledge, of universities, the denigration of intellectual life. The attack on Harvard, the pointed and unashamed rejection of books, of history, and the use of the term “liberal” or “progressives” as terms of abuse- these are all formal characteristics of fascism.

And, what about dissent? The extraordinary fear of difference which dissenting voices expose. So, the Great Leader’s cabinet is a uniformity of ignorance, and obeisance is the rule. No independent thought is welcome. Only abject prostration and inexhaustible loyalty or should I say fealty, is acceptable. Homogeneity is the polar opposite of difference, so by definition, Fascism and the Great Leader’s ideology (if an asinine and amorphous splutter can be caricatured as ideology) is racist.

The disciples must feel, and be humiliated. In Eco’s discussion, the feeling of humiliation is determined by the manufactured contrast with the supposed enemy, Jews, globalists, and others. But, in reality the humiliation is also given life and thrust by the Great Leader’s disdain for and hatred of his disciples. The Great Leader treats his cabinet with contempt and like battered wives, they grovel even more, seeking his love and approval, something which will never be forthcoming. The Great Leader knows no love, has no capacity for mutuality, is wholly empty of reciprocity, so his disciples, fearing that they will be rejected and eviscerated, redouble their efforts at pleasing. The cabinet meetings are malign scenes of the utmost degradation of his disciples and they are conducted for the public and show the Great Leader’s cabinet to be shameless. Better the Great Leader’s mistreatment than be rejected and then killed. That is yet to come. The script is well rehearsed. We have seen the movie and have the T-shirt to prove it.

I want to end with the place of the individual in fascism. In democracy, the individual has rights, the individual is highly valued. In fascism, the indistinguishable mass, that monolithic mass, whose common will is tractable only by the Great Leader, and who is always called to act, as they were called to insurrection on January 6th, that amorphous and amoeba-like mass, that has no thought and no reflection is much preferred. Better still if the mass is ill-educated, if even the Great Leader treats the mass with contempt but at least the mass is better than some poor Others, Latinos, Black people, foreigners, and women.

The Terror is already here. Don’t miss or mistake the signs. It is ugly, very ugly, indeed.