How to spot a Fascist

 

Carlo Levi was the author of a wonderful little book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, based on his exile as an anti-Fascist Jew in Mussolini’s Italy to a hill town called Grassano. Levi’s book examines how people become Fascists, without merely condemning them, but rather by understanding how good people can do bad things. His book is not a work of denunciation, but of understanding.

 

I was reminded of reading his book many years ago by correspondence in my newspaper concerning a work by Umberto Eco, which I have not read, but in which apparently Eco provides a handy 14-point guide to spotting a Fascist. Wikipedia provides an accessible summary of Eco’s guide:

1. "The cult of tradition", characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
2. "The rejection of modernism", which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
3. "The cult of action for action's sake", which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
4. "Disagreement is treason" – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
5. "Fear of difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
6. "Appeal to a frustrated middle class", fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
7. "Obsession with a plot" and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson's book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
9. "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy" because "life is permanent warfare" – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
10. "Contempt for the weak", which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
11. "Everybody is educated to become a hero", which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, "[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
12. "Machismo", which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality".
13. "Selective populism" – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of "no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people".
14. "Newspeak" – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

 

Have any of you spotted a Fascist lately?

Poor America

 

As we watch from afar the Trump administration threatening its neighbours, and in due course our European neighbours, and perhaps the UK, we also find in our newspaper reports of the freezing of all aid funding and the like. In sohort things that affect those of us who live outside the USA. But Jan just came into my “office” to bring to my attention one indication of the vandalism of the new administration that will surely harm America’s own citizens.

 

Trained as a librarian to help researchers in the days of analogue information, I rely on Jan to research family medical information. Many of her preferred sources are American, such as the Mayo Clinic or the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). This morning she wanted to check on the CDC whether or not one should fast before taking a blood glucose blood test. She was shocked to find that enormous amounts of information of great importance to health professionals and members of the public have been removed. She mentioned information about vaccines, information for young people, for LGBT people, about HIV and the like.

 

In 40 years working and travelling in the USA, I learned to admire the expertise and rational expertise of the professions and of government agencies. What explanation can there for what has been done to the CDC website other than wanton vandalism that directly harms the people who elected this administration?

Building a dam in Tlaxcalilla

 

 

The recent item about Tamazunchale, San Luis Potosí, prompted several responses, one of which came from my friend Toby Bainton, who in 1970 was in another small town in Mexico, Tlaxcalilla, in the state of Hidalgo, about 250 kilometres southwest of Tamazunchale, and some 160 northwest of Mexico City. I have not been able to find out much about Tlaxcalilla except that in 2000 its population was 2,932. By 2020 the numbers had increased to 3,479: 1,690 males, 1,789 females. 2,424 of the village’s inhabitants in 2020 were literate. 3,158 locals were Roman Catholic, 69 Protestant, one lonely soul was of another religion, and 248 professed no faith.

 

The image above, probably the only work in the history of art to take Tlaxcalilla as its subject, is Toby’s watercolour and ink painting of daily activity in the town in 1970, which he captions thus:

 

The picture on this card shows a street layout slightly modified through artistic licence, but the houses, the village bar, the stable-yard, the stone walls, and the shepherd boys and their sheep are all faithfully copied from photographs I took in 1970.

 

Toby’s experiences in Tlaxcalilla are reminiscent in various ways of Tamazunchale in the 1920s and 1930s:

 

“When I was on my American Friends Service Committee workcamp in 1970, my village, Tlaxcalilla, Hidalgo, had no running water or sewage system. Your picture of Elfriede in her orchard looks exactly like a backyard in Tlaxcalilla in 1970 – I have photographs to prove it – where people were subsistence small-holders.  We volunteers lived in an old school building and the workcamp organisers made sure we had regular supplies of drinking water, bought from the doctor in the nearby town, Huichapan. The villagers of Tlaxcalilla couldn’t afford regular purchases of water, and no one in the village had any kind of motor vehicle to go and buy it. For them, water was brought to each home from something that looked like a neglected swimming bath, namely the village's one concrete tank of rainwater (containing various pathogens). Fetching water was the occupation of boys about eight years old.  Many families seemed to have such a boy. People went to the toilet in any convenient place, and were surprised at the workcampers' insistence of returning, perhaps some distance, for that purpose to the new school building, which had two enormous long-drop lavatories, one for boys and one for girls. 

 

The purported purpose of the workcamp was to provide running water from a new reservoir formed by damming a stream. The dam was half-built when we arrived. The government (state or federal, I don't know which) provided a full-time 'masón' and two full-time lorry-drivers and two trucks. One of these vehicles had a tipper body and made regular trips to a hillside where sand could be dug out for making cement. The other truck, used for collecting boulders from the surrounding hills, was by then not much more than a cab, chassis and wheels. The villagers provided the labour.  The boys on the workcamp helped load rocks from the hillside onto the remains of the truck so that they could be transported cross-country down to the dam. The rocks derived from government-supplied dynamite. Prickly-pear cactus was used as a lubricating cushion under each boulder to slide it up a wooden beam to the truck. The girls were not allowed to do any work connected with the dam (social norms would have been transgressed), and planted trees instead. 

 

I say that the purported purpose of the workcamp was to help with the dam. I realised afterwards that its real purpose was to show bourgeois students from the USA – and indeed me, the only European there – what life was like in a 'developing country', as Mexico was then classed. The 15 or so of us on the workcamp were 50% WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and the others from Puerto Rico (several), Peru, Colombia, and from other parts of Mexico. I don't know how the hispanohablantes (native Spanish speakers) were chosen.

I'm still in touch with someone from the camp, my friend Katy who now lives in Alaska. She went back to Tlaxcalilla in c. 1980 and the dam was finished, the reservoir full, and the water supply in place.  I wonder what they do about toilets now. 

 

Tlaxcalilla was the quietest village I’ve ever set foot in. The only sounds were human voices or the noises made by domestic animals. Quite a contrast to Mexico City, not so far away, with its hubbub and (one of my clearest memories) innumerable street vendors selling food and drinks of various lively colours. I expect they’re still a big presence there.”

 

I met Toby in 1973. I had just begun my research for my PhD and Toby was the librarian responsible for Spanish-language books in Cambridge University Library. Every morning a small group of Spanish graduates met for coffee (an in my case a cheese scone) in the library’s tea room. Toby was a regular member of the coffee group. He is a man of talents. In2018 Handhel Press published his translation from Danish of Eddie Thomas Petersen’s novel Ønskebarnet, with the English title After the Death of Ellen Keldberg.