Fascism's Theater of the Obscene

Babies ripped apart from their mothers. Grandmothers and grandfathers taken. Parents standing guard at schools. Masked men, attacking, gassing, beating, killing.

What we’re witnessing now in. America is obscene. It’s obscenity, a process of it, an unfolding, an unravelling. This is the only sane starting point to discuss what is happening now. 

Obscenity. Understand why I say this. And if we begin anywhere else—to reduce it to everyday politics, or some semblance of a “phase”, which is all to legitimate it—we are already lost. Even at this grim juncture, too many in America mince their words. Let us be courageous and wise enough not to.

We’re going to speak about this today. Fascism’s theatre of the obscene. What it means. How history tells us a different story about life and its meaning, society and its purpose, and you and I. Obscenity means: moral collapse. 

You see, what’s particular and telling about fascism is how it revels in obscenity. Makes a spectacle of it. 

Think again of the masked men. The masks aren’t just there to “hide their faces.” That’s secondary. They’re there to send a message. We are untouchable. We are above you and beyond you. Nothing you have restrains or compels or limits us. Not your democracy, not its pathetic rule of law. Nor does morality, truth, sanity, or decency.

The masks are there to create characters in the theatre of the obscene.

And in this theatre of the obscene, the old tales of humankind are perverted. Our tales, did you know, are all we have? They are what guide us home. Through the difficult days. Amidst the terrible grief. The endless hurt of this thing called life. These tales, as old as time, from Homer to Ovid to Orwell and beyond—they are all we really have. All the rest—money, power—is nothing at all by comparison.

In our tales, there is a protagonist, who is a hero. He or she fights a monster, at great suffering. Self-sacrifice teaches the protagonist the great moral lessons of life, which begin in the sacred miracle called love. The transcendence and renunciation of the self. And in this way, my friends, we come to know the highest truth of all. We learn to surrender. Not to the monster within us, but the monster within us. We cast him out. 

We learn from these tales the meaning and power of this terrible tragedy called life. In it, through the renunciation of the little self, only do we gain the ability to love. And that, as the tales always teach us, is the truest power of all. No monster can be slain without it. One only becomes the monsters one wishes to slay. Through love, all lower powers become ours, at last, and we find our ways home, to those we love, having gained, through this ordeal, wisdom, strength, courage. We have been fortified by our dark night of the soul. We have slain the monster, and the monster was us.

This is the story of all stories.

Now let’s come back to fascism’s theater of the obscene. It’s nothing like the above, is it? In it, there are monsters, and they win. Our only choice—and we are not allowed to have choices in this story, unlike in the old ones, the good ones—is to submit. Whether we do so begrudgingly, or in fear, or in desperation—it makes no difference.

All we are to do is submit. Or else. Or else what? We are to be degraded.

Think again of the men in the masks. They are there to degrade. They punish, with a kind of wanton abandonment. Their cruelty has shocked the world. What they are really doing is this: they are degrading the people they abuse. 

Degrade is a word I mean formally here. It means: to place another on a lower level. Of existence, of life itself. If I degrade you, I say: you are my slave. You are nothing to me. You are certainly not an equal. You are a level, a rung, many, beneath me. You exist on a different grade, in a hierarchy of being.

The men in masks are instruments of degradation. And in America, degradation has been institutionalized. It long has been, if we think back to segregation and slavery—remember the formal meaning of degradation too. Only now it has come for the “real” Americans, too. It makes no different if you are a middle class soccer mom—the masked men will degrade you now just the same.

For what? For a crime? For being on the side of the subhumans, for when we degrade people, that is what we are saying: why, you are not a human being at all. 

What kind of man rips a breastfeeding baby from his mother? Could any with one iota of strength, courage, or wisdom bear it? Wouldn’t they be haunted until their dying day, by the ultimate moral boundary they’d crossed, the violation of the truest innocence there is? 

A man who is ready to degrade another. For the sake of power. Because now it is the job of institutions to degrade a society. And this is what fascism really is. The degradation of a society. Its cleavage into human and nonhuman, subhuman, by way of the inhuman.

And this is the story fascism’s theatre of the absurd tells. It is the moral, purpose, and point of the story. The characters in the story are these: the god-like leader, the cult-like followers, the violent abusers, the terrible tribulations to be suffered by the unbelievers and the heretics, and the ultimate purification and cleansing of the impure. 

If this sounds religious to you, it is, but make no mistake: it is an inversion of religion. In religious systems of belief, there is a place called heaven, or nirvana, which compels us to behave morally in this life. In fascism’s theatre of the obscene, there is only hell on earth. Eternally. Forever. Which is why fascism dreams of thousand year Reichs and so on. 

There is no salvation. Not through divine grace, as in religion. Nor through imperfect love, the basis of humanism and existentialism. Nothing can save us at all, except to hurt, violate, and kill each other. To degrade one another.

And so in this story, the protagonist is the god-like leader. We all know who that is, don’t we? And his job is to teach us the opposite of the old tales. Love won’t save us. Morality doesn’t exist. All that is left, in the void, is hatred, violence, and suffering. The infliction of it. There is no redemption permissible. 

We are not to slay the dragon or the demon or the Medusa or the Hydra. We are to become them. 

And if we don’t, then we are the weak ones, who deserve the punishment that figures like men in masks will come to mete out.

I wonder if you think about these things like I do. If you feel the anguish and anger burning through you like it does in me. The world feels it. See how it responds to America now, with a kind of moral repulsion that is explosive. The world is now estranged by and from America. Because of this theater of the obscene. 

Now. Why are we talking about all this? 

Because, my friends, it is wrong. It is the most horrific moral violation of all. Remember the old stories. Think how they have guided us for millennia, back home, and home, for us humans, things with fragile arms, is what it has always been: one another. The old stories teach us. This story robs us. Worse. It blinds and deafens us. Worse. 

It degrades us.

And so you are living through something terrible, if you’re American. Only I wonder if we discuss it enough, or well. You are trapped in fascism’s theater of the obscene. The world is a witness, but you are in the cast. You are playing out a role, that has been written for you, whether you like it or not. That role’s name is degradation.

That role says: instead of learning to slay the monster, and thus accept the high gifts of self-renunciation, which are love, grace, and courage, become the monster, and hurt, wound, eat, feed, kill.

There has never been an uglier lie than that.

And in the end, a society can only respond in one way to this, or else it is lost. It must stop playing the role of silent participant, or hapless victim, and speak out. It must break the spell, stop reciting the lines, or the absence of them, and address the audience, unscripted, saying: this is wrong, this is horrific, this is nightmarish.

I know that many in America are trying. I don’t wish to downplay that. I applaud them. I am only observing from the point of view of the world, which asks: when will enough be enough?

Fascism’s theater of the obscene ends in one way. The curtain always falls on the same scenes. In Rome, in Germany, throughout history, we know what awaits, every time this play begins. Ruin. Self-destruction. Suicide. How did Hitler die?

I send you all the courage, strength, and joy left in me, my friends. It is yours. We hold each other close in times like these. I’m proud of you. I know: you will never accept the theatre of the obscene as anything but the lie it has always been.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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