21 Lessons for the 21st Century(94)
This worship of the nation is extremely attractive, not only because it simplifies many difficult dilemmas, but also because it causes people to think that they belong to the most important and most beautiful thing in the world – their nation. The horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust indicate the terrible consequences of this line of thinking. Unfortunately, when people talk of the ills of fascism they often do a poor job, because they tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster while failing to explain what is so seductive about it. This is why today people sometimes adopt fascist ideas without realising it. People think, ‘I was taught that fascism is ugly, and when I look in the mirror I see something very beautiful, so I cannot be a fascist.’
It is a bit like the mistake Hollywood movies make when they depict the bad guys – Voldemort, Lord Sauron, Darth Vader – as ugly and mean. They are usually cruel and nasty even towards their most loyal supporters. What I never understand when watching such movies is why anyone would be tempted to follow a disgusting creep like Voldemort.
The problem with evil is that in real life, it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful. Christianity knew this better than Hollywood, which is why traditional Christian art tended to depict Satan as a gorgeous hunk. That is why it is so difficult to resist Satan’s temptations. That is also why it is difficult to deal with fascism. When you look in the fascist mirror, what you see there isn’t ugly at all. When Germans looked in the fascist mirror in the 1930s, they saw Germany as the most beautiful thing in the world. If today Russians look in the fascist mirror, they will see Russia as the most beautiful thing in the world. And if Israelis look in the fascist mirror, they will see Israel as the most beautiful thing in the world. They will then want to lose themselves inside that beautiful collective.
The word ‘fascism’ comes from the Latin ‘fascis’, meaning ‘a bundle of rods’. That sounds like a rather unglamorous symbol for one of the most ferocious and deadly ideologies in world history. But it has a deep and sinister meaning. A single rod is very weak, and you can easily snap it in two. However, once you bundle many rods together into a fascis, it becomes almost impossible to break them. This implies that the individual is a thing of no consequence, but as long as the collective sticks together, it is very powerful.16 Fascists therefore believe in privileging the interests of the collective over those of any individual, and demand that no single rod ever dare break the unity of the bundle.
Of course, it is never clear where one human ‘bundle of rods’ ends and another begins. Why should I view Italy as the bundle of rods to which I belong? Why not my family, or the city of Florence, or the province of Tuscany, or the continent of Europe, or the entire human species? The milder forms of nationalism will tell me that I can indeed have obligations towards my family, Florence, Europe and the whole of humankind, as well as having special obligations to Italy. In contrast, Italian fascists will demand absolute loyalty to Italy alone.
Despite the best efforts of Mussolini and his fascist party, most Italians remained rather lukewarm about putting Italy before their famiglia. In Germany the Nazi propaganda machine did a much more thorough job, but not even Hitler managed to make people forget all the alternative stories. Even in the darkest days of the Nazi era, people always kept some back-up stories in addition to the official one. This became patently clear in 1945. You would have thought that after twelve years of Nazi brainwashing many Germans would be utterly incapable of making sense of their post-war lives. Having put all their faith in one great story, what to do when that story exploded? Yet most Germans recovered with amazing speed. Somewhere in their minds they maintained some other stories about the world, and no sooner had Hitler fired a bullet through his brain, than people in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich adopted new identities and found new meanings to their lives.
True, about 20 per cent of the Nazi gauleiters – the regional party leaders – committed suicide, as did about 10 per cent of generals.17 But that means that 80 per cent of gauleiters and 90 per cent of generals were quite happy to live on. The vast majority of card-holding Nazis and even of the SS rank and file neither went insane nor killed themselves. They went on to be productive farmers, teachers, doctors and insurance agents.
Indeed, even suicide doesn’t prove an absolute commitment to a single story. On 13 November 2015, the Islamic State orchestrated several suicide attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. The extremist group explained that it did so in revenge for the bombing of Islamic State activists in Syria and Iraq by the French air force, and in the hope that France would be deterred from carrying out such bombardments in the future.18 In the same breath, the Islamic State also declared that all the Muslims killed by the French air force were martyrs, who now enjoy eternal bliss in heaven.
Something here doesn’t make sense. If indeed the martyrs killed by the French air force are now in heaven, why should anyone seek revenge for it? Revenge for what, exactly? For sending people to heaven? If you just heard that your beloved brother won a million dollars in the lottery, would you start blowing up lottery stalls in revenge? So why go rampaging in Paris just because the French air force gave a few of your brothers a one-way ticket to paradise? It would be even worse if you indeed managed to deter the French from carrying out further bombings in Syria. For in that case, fewer Muslims would get to heaven.
We might be tempted to conclude that Islamic State activists don’t really believe that martyrs go to heaven. That’s why they are angry when they are bombed and killed. But if so, why do some of them strap on explosive belts and willingly blow themselves to smithereens? In all likelihood, the answer is that they hold on to two contradictory stories, without thinking too much about the inconsistencies. As noted earlier, some neurons are just not on speaking terms with one another.