“To be insulted by these fascists is so degrading.”
-"It’s No Game, Part one," David Bowie
-by Nigel Best
The monster that is racism and fascism devours the populace slowly. Like a slow-dripping tap or like a Komodo dragon, it waits for its poison to weaken its prey before swallowing it.
Drip…drip…drip.
It’s how men and women went from being parents to donning an S.S. officer’s uniform or a stormtrooper’s blazer, goose stepping with thousands of other at fascist rallies, or raising an arm in a nazi salute.
It’s how a mass population became a killing machine.
It’s a slow process convincing a person to become a blind follower of any cult, let alone fascism.
Like the slow breaking down of a water faucet’s o-ring seal, evil arrives as a slow drip. If it isn’t fixed, it becomes a constant run of water that, unchecked, will eventually drown whatever/whoever is in its path.
Falling into the evil does not happen overnight. It doesn’t come to co-opt a person at the end of a gun, either. It does try to find the weakest of the human flock, separates them, isolates them, and with offers of foods, begins a conversation that is designed to test a person’s weaknesses.
Eventually, with enough of the weak in its grasp, the evil will organize larger gatherings to entice those a little-more discerning. The slow drip of fascism needles its way then into larger and larger groups. Original beliefs are worn down, replaced with ideals of the cult.
A question often asked is how did the German population fall into the arms of the fascists? It took time. It took effort. It took evil in sheep’s clothing to separate the weakest individuals. The evil rips away at a person’s core beliefs.
The evil then embarrasses an individual for being who he/she was. Then it coerces the individual to believe something new. It then co-opts the individual into the new group’s way of thinking. It is a long process. That’s why it took years to get German citizens from listening to mere words to the slaughtering of others. It was brainwashing. It was how a cult operates.
This is how an average citizen playing at the park with a son or daughter finds himself wearing a nazi symbol, ready to obey any command without thinking anymore.
None of this happened overnight. Over years, those with the twisted vision used fear, economics, religion, shame, words, and lies, amongst other identifiers, to instil hatred into what would otherwise have been decent, normal human beings.
That bent and abhorrent politics has been taking a lot of time to finally be glaring down upon us all again.
The evil took a turn at me this past week. In my case,it came disguised as a middle-aged man and two woman offering a luncheon of cheese, breads, and wine. It was a lunch to chat about an art project.
Or so I thought.
Drip….drip…….drip!
Before the first sip of wine, I was led to believe that certain friends of mine were friends of these people. It was a grooming method designed to get me to feel comfortable with what was about to come.
So, the conversation went immediately to politics where I was first asked to consider that my politics were wrong, that what I held to be true was hurting the country. I fought hard, but these people were hell-bent on trying to get their hooks in me.
I was made to feel dirty, that I was on the wrong team. Could I not see that there was a better way.
The fetid breath of the monster they were coddling was trying to burn away my sense of right and wrong, my core values, my sense of who I am. The monster they are harbouring wanted to know if I am weak enough to cast off my identity and subscribe to theirs.
Thus, I was then offered the low-cost items available from the fascist boutique.
Before I show you the shopping menu, though, a bit of history.
WOG GO HOME
I was eleven when I first encountered the territorial markings of the evil that is racism.
There, just past the short railway trestle bridge where the dirt path split, painted in giant white letters on the pure black of the bent and crumbling wall of the then-abandoned canal were those three words:
WOG GO HOME.
(Wog is a shortened form of the word golliwog, a black-skinned toy doll with curly black hair. The word was shortened, becoming the British version of the “N” word, and used as a derogatory way to describe immigrants to the U.K. from both the West and East Indies.)
I froze in my steps, the core of me instinctively knowing what I was seeing was wrong.
Where that sense of morality came from at such a young age, I can only attribute to my mother, a woman who had seen and heard and been upset by events in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s when our family lived there.
Later, after moving countries for different jobs, now living near Detroit n the 1960s, she saw the hatred raising its ugly head with the tensions of the turbulent times unfolding in the USA. We moved away to the United Kingdom and into the arms of the beast that heading into the 1970s, she stood firm in her beliefs as the monster reared its ugly head there.
To her, it must have seemed that the monster was following her around the world. It could try, but my mother was not going to let that evil get its hooks in her children. Ne’er a racist word, comment, nor disdainful glance at another’s culture ever fell from her person.
Whether my mother or some other factor, that moment triggered a revulsion to racism that still resonates within me.
There was also music. Britain now threw ska, bluebeat, soul, glam up the record charts. From the United States came rare soul records.Those sounds a welcome relief from the faux blues of the white 60s.
There was food. Asian curries and Jamaican patties offered a world miles removed from British fare such as greasy eggs, chips and beans.
However, the beast of hatred was doing its job corrupting the youth, so that by the time punk rock was, in a few ways, fighting back against racism, hatred and violence spilled over into the streets of the U.K. Melting razor blades into the rubber soles of their Doctor Marten boots so as to slice open in fights those who fought back against them, was one tactic of those misinformed of the far right. It wasn’t the only method of intimidation used to try to kick in the skulls of those in the political centre or on the left. Nor was it the only method of grotesque intimidation used against those whose skin colour gave them away as, well what? Immigrants? British nationals? Third, fourth, fifth generation descendants of immigrants?
Skin colour meant attacks like fire bombs through windows, or worse. There were police that stood by and watched as non-whites had to suffer the demeaning of who they were as human beings. Policies that allowed the police to arrest and detain those of colour without any real cause.
It wasn’t just ignorant youth that fell into the jaws of that yellow-bellied beast. With nazi flags, boot boys and girls, right wing skinheads (there are skinheads who fought against the right wing factions as well) marching in the streets, the quietly spoken fascist commentaries burst our very publicly from politicians, artists, religious zealots, tv personalities.
“All over people changing their votes, along with their overcoats. If Adolph Hitler flew in today, they’d send a limousine anyway.” Thus sang The Clash, making the point that what had been hiding was now in plain sight and allowable to speak openly about even in polite society.
In North America, the sickness of fascism had begun to rewrap its insidious tentacles into society as far back as the end of the second world war. The same methods of indoctrination were employed; the economy, immigrants, religion, welfare mothers, and liberal elites are some of the other roads leading to the fascists of today.
So, the three that brought me to the door of the fascist boutique? Far from being stupid as some would like to label these adults, its not that simple. On the door into their world hangs a sign that says, Welcome Misinformed.
Once through that door, the first item for sale is nostalgia. A yearning for something akin to Leave It To Beaver, a world that only existed in the TV’s eye. It’s world that believes, in North America, that the continent belongs to them, the whites.
It’s a story that the white skinned has come to believe. It’s a story that conveniently forgets the existence of cultures and peoples that lived on the land long before ships of the Europeans ran aground on the shores of what was to become the Americas.
So, these right-wing zealots believe on the top shelf should be a return to some sort of bedrock values, which, in layman’s terms is white Christian morality.
Guns and god.
In that distasteful luncheon, the boutique offered the following items for sale to me:
The removal of rights for women, or as one of the women present laughed scornfully at me, “Feminism was to blame for women being in the workforce. Women need to return to raising children;
The authority of parents to raise their children (so long as a parent doesn’t want to opt for helping a child work through its sexuality);
Classic education (the type of education that loves god, but negates history);
Religious freedom that establishes the value of every individual life (but negates the value of a pregnant women who wants an abortion. You know, all those women that go out to get pregnant just so they can get an abortion);
Good government founded upon the Supremacy of God (That god that says don’t kill but has, for thousands of years demanded people kill in its name);
Rule of Law as set out in the Bill of Rights (except the rights they don’t want to allow like gay marriage, abortion to name but two);
Restore the Freedom of Speech (the freedom of speech that only they will allow);
Stop the flow of “certain” immigrants (one can only believe that if the tables turned and white folk needed to flee to a safe sanctuary, those so-called “shithole” nations, as viewed by the fascists, would hopefully be welcoming with wide open arms.)
There were other issues the three tried to coerce me with. White children cannot get good paying jobs because of immigrants; White kids will never be able to afford housing; The government is responsible for the high price of food and gasoline; Taking away of guns by the government; Electric cars take four days to charge up; Fifteen mile cities is how those in charge will confine us from travelling in the future; What were my thoughts that the World Economic Forum will lead to a one-world government. In essence, all the tropes that the far-right has come to believe are the ills of their world.
What can these people not confront about themselves, I was thinking? Later, in retrospect, I believe it’s the inability to turn and confront the terror that is hundreds of years of colonialism and neoliberalism disguised as capitalism that has now turned to feast on them.
I left that luncheon feeling so dirty. In fact, on the country road leading away from that meeting, I had become so enraged that I had pushed my car’s accelerator so much, I was almost 60 mph over the speed limit.
So angry because I couldn’t understand what it was these people had potentially seen in me to make them believe I would embrace their sickness.
It took me days to realize this was the thin edge of a wedge used over time to manipulate. The boutique is operated with nods and smiles, enticing to, at first, the weak, then those who should know better but are afraid of not going along with the crowd.
These are dangerous times, A sickening wind is this way blowing.
Speaking out against this shopping list of malfeasance has the potential to bring down severe punishment. One stands being put against a metaphorical or, potentially, a real wall where reputations can be destroyed, or worse.
Beware, entering the fascist boutique.
