Fascism Rising: Invisiblising the Other

‘In the Middle Ages they would have burned me.  Now, they are content with burning my books.  The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.  Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.’

Sigmund Freud (1930)

The beauty of these words, uttered some 100 years ago more or less, is that they are as prescient now, as they were back then.  The Aryan ideal, that only one race had the right to rule, that all other races, be they white or otherwise, were inferior.  They were not as attractive, not as physically powerful, and their ideas were not worth as much.  That so many people, not just in Germany, but across Europe and even here in the United Kingdom, believed so much, is something which has lasted over generations, and still formed so much of my childhood when interacting with Skinheads and the National Front in the 1970s and 80s. 

The grand movement to a form of modern day fascism which would have in the past hidden away from those on the political left who sought to marginalise such a supremacist ideology, has now in its populist form, been replaced by a form of Neo-Fascism within which the perpetrators wear suits and ties and run social media companies (yes plural), but whose ideas and ideology still maintains that sense of paranoia against being replaced by anyone and anything which might be seen as other.

The drive to frighten into hiding the trans community, the return and rise of pro-natalistic policies which are designed to drive women back into the compliant arms of the familial  (or societal) patriarch, the erasure of process designed to promote Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI), and the coming attempt at reformatting out of existence any form of neurodiversity, are just some of the ways fascism has come for us all over the past few years. 

Even though I live in the United Kingdom though, it would be naïve to believe that British politics does not have at its core the same supremacist ideals (Turner, 2023).  We have a Prime Minister who chose to say that the United Kingdom was not a racist country, even when race riots had ravaged the country during the summer of 2024, and even after he himself had advocated for the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds or right-wing rioters.  This failure is, to me, also a failure of the political left to recognise that in its complicity that it is in itself part of the fascist machine.  In its silence, as Malcolm X and many others have called out over the generations, the Left has once again revealed itself to be as riddled in the isms and obias as the right (Hayley, 1965). 

When Kendrick Lamar sang ‘Not Like Us,’ as part of the Half Time show at the recent American Super Bowl, the clarion call of consternation around the lack of white representation on the stage that night was astounding and amusing to witness.  From a people so fearful that for some 15 minutes one black man could stand up and perform such a rich, deepseated, creative and culturally deeply resonant piece, this was power to behold.  That he should have had to do so at all, also says a lot about just how important a moment this is.  A moment not just for America, not just for the United Kingdom, but worldwide.  When Floyd was murdered, whilst corporate companies performed solidarity with our struggles, Maori groups sang in solidarity.  When Pride month rolls round, whilst corporate systems performed solidarity with the LGBTQ populations, those who recognise the embedded revolutionary roots of Pride would build this into their celebration of those who have fallen.  When it is perceived that these and other movements have had their times though, note the speed with which so many of them have reverted back to their non-performative, capitalistically compliant roles in the marginalisation of the other. 

This is the importance of this blog this month.  We need to see and be shocked by fascism in its modern form.  We need to sit, to watch, to endure its ravages as it winds its way around the world.  We need to endure what is coming because we are it.  We are what gives it fuel.  Gone is the time when fascists could wipe Black Wall Street from the planet, in order to re-advocate for the superiority of that Wall Street in New York and its  coloniser ideas.  Gone is the time when such an incident could be denied, erased from the history books, hidden from view.

In this social media age, we film everything.  And we should film everything.  Not so much for us, but for the future generations, who will see just what it was like to be a black man walking the streets of a western town; to be a French woman dealing with the horrors of the abuses meted out on her by her own husband, to be a trans person harassed, assaulted and abused by homophobes.  Hate has always been here.  Now it is being filmed, and the world needs to not just see it, it needs to remember it as well.    

There is one more point I want to make though.  Whilst we watch out for movements of the political right, I watch a good number of allies, those people who claim to be advocates on the side of righteousness, who claim to be on the opposite side of fascism, then do exactly the same things as those who seek to invisibilise us, the other.  They have already begun to silence the voices of the other when they speak up, or to use their power and positioning to coopt and colonise the ideas, the words, and the spirit of the other, thereby playing their gatekeeper roles as the unconscious marginalisers of difference.

So, to all the allies, a message to you.  Do the work.  Seek within that part of you which has (consciously or unconsciously) erased voices those of difference.  Be they women’s books, texts by persons of colour, the stories of our trans colleagues, or the experiences of the neurodivergent, be incredibly careful.  Fascism exists because it exists within us.  We are it.  We are the system.  And only by facing the fascist within ourselves first of all will we have any hope of disrupting that behemoth which threatens to engulf us all. 

Find it. Face it. Feel the shame of its presence within. Then, defeat and contain it. 

I was listening to Dark Water, by Pearl Jam last week.  Seated on my stairs.  On my own.  It was 6pm at night.  I was listening to this very heavy track, and weeping.  Weeping for a colleague now deceased.  Sad to be left behind in a world so seemingly dark.  I wept tears, that is so true.  But I also felt a certain power.  A power which returns from remembering that, nay, from recovering from the depths that part of me which refuses to be silent.  That resist being invisible.  Freud’s books; those ideas outlived the burning piles.  May my words, may all of ours, do the same.    

References

Freud, S. (1930). Civilisation and its discontents. Penguin Limited.

Hayley, A. (1965). The Autobiography of Malcolm X (q). Golden Press.

Turner, D. D. L. (2023). The Psychology of Supremacy. Routledge.