7 Top Faces of Fascism
“An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.” — Valerie, V for Vendetta toilet paper letter excerpt
Those who know me, know that I say it very often: that we have known since 1933 that sexual repression is one of the leading contributors to fascism. A long time ago in community college, I wrote a paper entitled “The Second Red Scare” where I systematically proved how George Bush Jr’s Iraqi War on Islam was very much in line with the McCarthy war on communism in the 1930s and 1950s. Now, almost two decades later and being the communist-abolitionist that I am, I try to constantly push pop culture needles towards liberation and away from authoritarianism and abuse. But again, here we are… and current events have me constantly thinking about the following characteristics once again.
So like I have done so many times before in little snippets, I have tried to put it the best way I can to writing. Here is a list of my own making with the 7 Top Faces of Fascism. On this Fifth of November let us remember we are all Guy Fawkes – we need to take a good hard look at governing bodies and ask ourselves some very obvious hard questions. Because something really is terribly wrong with this world. Here is my question: Do you see these characteristics in your own neighborhood, town/city, and country? Today and every day we must stand up against fascism, against apartheid, against genocide. We must embrace abolitionist ideals and rally against the machine of fascism everywhere we see it. 🌹🌹🌹
#FreeIreland #RosesAndBread #VForVendetta #GuyFawkes #FreePalestine #FreeTurtleIsland #FreePuertoRico #FreeHawaii #FreeCongo #FreeSudan
7 Top Faces of Fascism
1.) Imperialist Patriotism & Religious Nationalism –
We see this characteristic in places where there is constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, songs, and flags to lure residents into a community of pride with common symbols, dog-whistle language, and rituals in order to create an us vs. them mentality and create a supremacy based ideology and identity. This is done most effectively by governments that intertwine with a culturally specific dominant religion and spirituality as a tool to manipulate the population, and often shows up in regime controlled authoritative spaces like schools, work, police and military.
As such, any other cultures/religions are demonised and stigmatised and in many ways rendered illogical & illegal.
Examples: The usage in art or rhetoric of “bad hombres”, Pepe the frog, “law and order”, “inner cities”, “America First”, The Red Scare, anticommunist rhetoric, Pledges of allegiance in schools, “In God We Trust” on currency, American flags, Thin Blue line stickers, Blue Lives Matter flags, Punisher flags, Confederate flags, Christonormativity and Christian extremism, illegalising traditional African religions, Muslim bans, pagans stereotyped as devil worshipers, Jews stereotyped as baby eaters, Indigenous peoples stereotyped as “barbaric” or cannibals, etc.
2.) Abusive Cult of Surveillance, Security and Punishment/Policing –
The disregard for human rights in the name of false senses of “safety” and “security” is often used to create a cult and culture of abuse. This is where cultures and their people prioritise property over people, like when people get upset about protestors breaking bank windows or flipping cop cars in protest of police brutality and ecocidal fossil fuel driven profits. It is in this type of cult of surveillance, security and punishment where people are more inclined to approve of death penalties, executions, assassination, torture and excessive force. This is then manifested as an obsession with controlling peoples autonomy, expressions, and movement; and an obsession with oppressive laws, and physical representations of such laws of segregation, like gated communities, walls, and fences.
Examples include: abuse of all kinds, domestic violence, and abuse of power, “see something say something” signs, overfunding police departments, underfunding communities, militarisation of the police, border walls, ICE, Guantanimo Bay, the US putting kids in changes, Indigenous kids in residential schools.
3.) Supremacy Cult of the Military –
This is where number two is manifested in a similiar way, but more towards a military that is a similar cult of surveillance, homeland security, and policing the country and world. The United States has a public relations and marketing team designed to make us the policers of the world, and with over 750 military bases worldwide; you can see how easily this is achieved. Within this supremacy of global might and control, soldiers and the rest of the military are glamourised and are given disproportional luxuries and governmental funding, while in service. It is in this way that military are classed as heroes and saviours… but we must ask ourselves heroes and saviours of what and what interests?
Other examples include: memorials everywhere for police, wars, and soldiers rather than peace makers and human rights activists, separate military court systems; and food, healthcare, and housing accommodations are free of charge and is provided while in service.
4.) Racist Cisheterosexism & Sexual Weaponisation & Repression —
Widespread sexism permeates the racist/colorist culture where cisheterosexual light-skinned men are in dominant positions, western colonial binary gender roles are more rigid, and sex education, divorce, and abortion is taboo or otherwise unavailable. This is what leads to 2SLGBTQIA+ people being generalised down to simple “homosexuals” who need to be criminalised, pathologised, kept away from children & suppressed.
Sex therefore is only culturally acceptable for procreation or as a punishment, pleasure is deemed hedonistic for everyone but a cishet man, and sexual violence becomes an unspoken topic while being a widespread practice. It is no wonder that human trafficking and sexual assault has always been a weapon of imperialism, slavery, war and dominance.
Examples: “dont-say-gay” bills, anti-trans bathroom bans, anti-abortion laws, conversion therapy, cops arrest Indigenous, Black, and Trans women for simply having condoms on their person, anti-sex worker rights, cops arrest Black & Indigenous children are demonised and treated and prosecuted as adults, strict hair and dress codes at work and school.
5.) Violent Capitalist Strike & Union Busting –
Fascism uses police as an arm of the capitalist elite, and the elite need obedient workers and slaves so that they can exploit labour in order to create profits. Fascists need to control body autonomy so that they can control our body’s productions: children are seen as commodities and future workers, people with fertile uteruses are seen as simple baby-factories, slavery is legalised in prisons… and prison labour is cheap for corporations but expensive for tax payers.
Examples abound everywhere: from Starbucks closing down entire branches rather than follow through on union promises, Hollywood cutting shady trees during heatwaves, companies launching astroturf campaigns, and creating feelings of futility in the workplace. Other historical examples include squashing enslaved people rebellions, The Palmer Raids, The 1916 Everett Massacre, and governors calling in the national guard to break up and arrest protestors. Here is a website that is a union-busting watchdog with a generally up-to-date list: Click here .
6 & 7.) Biased Anti-Creative Intellectualist Activism, Criminalised Dissent & Censored Mass Media –
These last two really go hand-in-hand. In fascistic cultures, activism is seen as taboo troublemaking and divorced by public opinion from its innate scholarship (most activists are scholars). Books are often either banned and burned, there is an open hostility towards truths contrary to the regime, higher education and the arts are shunned, artists and scholars are silenced/erased, and journalists are murdered/disappeared.
News companies are often run and funded by the same elites who also own and profit from the police/military industrial complexes.
Examples include: the Media-Military industrial complex, when in the words of Helen Johnson, “Corporate media manufactures pro-military opinion among the public, contributes to climates of mass hysteria in the periods leading up to military involvement, suppresses information relevant to military involvement, provides a sanitized coverage of war, fails to investigate, criticize or thoroughly debate issues of military involvement, too easily bends to pressure from government and military officials and even sometimes spreads outright lies and false information regarding matters of war”. This of course goes hand-in-hand with the military-media complex. A prime example of this one is Hollywood. “Many movie and television productions are, by choice, contractually supervised by the DoD Entertainment Media Unit within the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, and by the public affairs offices of the military services maintained solely for the American entertainment industry in Hollywood”.
We see other examples of this face when dissent is criminalised, protestors are beaten/killed by police, antifascists and activists are targeted by the state as domestic terrorists, social media companies shadow ban activists & artists, control-freak rules are implemented for artists and musicians, language is purposefully chosen differently in headlines, news articles & anchor language helps shape public opinion in favour of the regime, police, and war, and military.
Conclusion
All in all these are not the only faces of fascism. So many wonderful scholars have pointed out important other arms of the kyriarchy than what I have discussed here.
But my point in showcasing these seven faces is to pay tribute in a way to Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Cultural Characteristics”, and Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression”, which were both foundational and exemplary to my undergraduate education.
I hope in some small way these words open eyes to what is all around us, that then will inspire you to not only despair, but to dissent!
Good night, and good luck comrades!
Sources
- https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html
- https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781400839902-005/html?lang=en
- https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739136973/The-Global-Industrial-Complex-Systems-of-Domination
- https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-25-4-mussolini-and-the-rise-of-fascism.html
- https://www.bremertonschools.org/cms/lib/WA01001541/Centricity/Domain/222/Fourteen%20Defining%20Characteristics%20of%20Fascism%20slides.pdf
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/235001
- https://www.sigtheatre.org/signature-in-the-schools-the-spoken-word-educational-resources/fascism-101
- https://www.openculture.com/2021/10/yale-professor-jason-stanley-identifies-10-tactics-of-fascism.html
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00131857.2020.1727403#:~:text=Suppression%20of%20the%20natural%20sexuality,it%20produces%2C%20by%20inhibiting%20sexual
- https://brooklynrail.org/2020/12/books/Wilhelm-Reichs-The-Mass-Psychology-of-Fascism
