Fascism Never Left Us
Just look at how we've treated the natural world
It seems that every few generations, white Europeans and their descendants decide that perhaps they just didn’t do it right last time, and return to what appears to be their default: fascism. There are many excellent analyses by scholars as to how and why fascism rears its head, and it is often linked to economic downturn. That fascism must still, on some level, linger within the culture in order to be revived is obvious. Often, we look to cultural markers of that lingering horror: the perpetuation of gender and race hierarchies. Fascist ideology is an aesthetic of purity and incorruptibility, to paraphrase Susan Sontag. But I’ve been wondering recently whether our surprise at its resurgence masks an anthropocentrism which fails to see where fascist policy has been materially present all along: our consumption, destruction and transformation of the natural world.
I’ve written before about the link between Judeo-Christian theologies marking the natural world as “profane” and human ascendance as the ultimate goal. This week, however, I read Sontag’s Fascinating Fascism, an essay about fascist aesthetics which hammers home very similar ideologies: the binaries between pure and impure, weak and strong, perfect and imperfect. There seems to me a striking link between this belief set which Nazi Germany propagandised through art, and that same Judeo-Christian disavowal of the material world. When we think of fascism, we tend to think of the 20th century, but its roots are anchored in thousands of years of domination, control and violent transformation. We consider fascism to have lain dormant for 70 years, but perhaps those same ideals were running rampant over the earth, terraforming and extracting from the natural world in order to achieve the vision of a small group with regards to how society should look. Fascism has run roughshod over the earth in the name of progress during a period of resource abundance. Now that those earthly resources are running dry, it is turning its attention back to its human resources.
The early settlers in Turtle Island, what is now known as the USA, wrote often of the need to “tame” and “master” the land, referring to its wilderness as ugly and beastly, a canvas of sin which needed to be contained and put to work. Another fascist aesthetic is striving for greatness, and the erotic fetishisation of arduous work, as Sontag explains through her acerbic analysis of the Nazi propagandist films, Leni Reifensthal. The rhetoric pushed by and pushing Donald Trump, of his being the saviour of the United States, the only person capable of putting the country back together in a way that is acceptable (non-plural), and the positioning of his as a demi-god figure strikes a chord with that same aesthetic. While the land of the United States has been conquered, its people have not, and must be subject to a regime which can whip them into shape. But this is more than just a culture war. Donald Trump has been instrumental in the imprisonment and enclosure of women’s bodies, demarcating them as breeding stock for an economy on the brink of collapse. It is no wonder, in a resource-scarce world, that women’s bodies have been isolated as a reproductive resource with the state wielding its right to access that resource when it needs to, for that is exactly how Western politics has treated the reproductive carrying capacity of the earth, pushing it to breaking point in pursuit of greatness.
The willingness to exterminate, subdue and imprison has not just been a violent impulse underpinning our global economy. It has been a fascistic impulse, exerting dominion over creatures considered lesser, or not worthy of life, in order to build a master power. With thousands of years of teachings that separate us from nature, it is no wonder we did not consider this to be fascistic when enacted against “the natural world”, presuming, then, that the human world exists somewhere else, is something else (much like heaven). However, when considering the material reality that we are all part of the earth’s body, it should be no surprise that fascism comes back again and again and again to enact violence against its human subjects when it runs out of everything else.
The only way to claim that fascism was temporarily defeated is to maintain that false binary between humankind and everything else. In truth, fascism never left us. Its aesthetics and ideals lived on in our ugly appropriation of more-than-human bodies to build an ugly world. To truly defeat it, we must abandon its goal: strength, at any cost.
Thank you Rachel for this crisp and cutting hand mirror, as always. I feel compelled to add that the world as ‘resource scarce’ is but one imaginary that feeds our status quo. It is a rhetoric of fear and competition that forecloses the possibility of other ways of living where the earth, even as she is now - damaged, abused - can be seen as abundant, resilient and ceaselessly life giving. Should some of us (and especially the mega extractors and abusers) give up some of our comforts and desires we’ve confused for needs. If we trade an energy of fear and ‘problem solving’ or ‘innovating’ with a lens of connection and possibility.
Then i’ll give fascism an eviction notice. If it plans on squatting, i’ll give it the boot!