From the editorial page of the Irish Times comes an assessment of where we are worldwide right now: the trial run for Fascism where themes and strategies are test marketed. And after finding the right buttons to push to manipulate their target audience, Fascists begin pushing boundaries of what is accepted and palatable and begin whetting people’s appetite for savagery, cruelty and blood.
In an editorial from early July, O’Toole wrote how the logic of fascism is escalating violence. As you take away more of a peoples’ rights and benefits you have to give them something in return like visuals showing the state torturing children:
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
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www.irishtimes.com/...
Fintan O’Toole: The logic of Trump and fascism is escalating violence:
What can the far right offer in return for people surrendering democratic power?
Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely. The lure of fascism is the glint of collective supremacy through the fog of individual inferiority.
In Gilead, the dystopian country version of the United States in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the handmaids are enslaved as reproductive vessels for the elite Commanders. But now and then they are unleashed for a “Particicution” in which they tear a political prisoner limb from limb. “As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system . . . you must offer some benefits and freedoms . . . in return for those you remove . . . When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.”
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