Introduction

Consider this in many ways a notebook, or various notebooks of mediations on fascism. We are all familiar, sometimes overly familiar, with a certain view of Fascism in its historical application, as ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘totalitarian politics,’ marked by mass murder and extermination, cults and rituals of state worship, as well as fear and unprecedented oversight by the governmental bodies of the people, who, in a moment of fallen weakness, shamelessly comply out of both apparent monstrosity and fear. The three most (in)famous figures are, of course, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, along with the dictators that mark the past century with campaigns of terror, fear and violence.

Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, in many ways, are the limits we set as the extremes of human behavior and possibility of brutality, they are in many ways other than us we say, they are situations gone too far astray, they are politics when taken away from the people, they are the ultimate compromising of our inherent democratic freedoms. Much time and energy has been spent working through these questions, not without some fruit. But the hard, difficult question is never asked, namely the question that ponders the mechanics of Fascism and where they are derived. The question sitting the corner of the room begs: yes, all that happened is horrible, but how do we resemble those monsters? Is there in fact a little monster in all of us, in our minds, in our thoughts, in our behaviors? Is this monster rather created by us in an effort to distance ourselves from a project all too reflective of what is deemed ‘rational’ or ‘right,’ where there is no real monster at all, but rather expressions in full form of what we believe to be true, good and progressive?

Asking these questions is by no means to demean the suffering of those who lived under Fascist regimes, but rather quite the opposite. I write these notes in Jerusalem, where the act of mourning those murdered by the Nazis, in all of the Nazi holocaust’s awful brutality and willingness, weighs heavily on the public conscious. The Nazi holocaust is continually on the mind of many here and subject to consistent interpretation, evaluation and remembrance. The purpose of these notes is to do a different act of mourning and remembrance for the victims of such atrocities, to ask the hard questions about our thoughts, questions about how such atrocities could ever occur. But instead of doing so in an attempt to report the horrors again or document how ‘freakish’ or ‘monstrous’ such crimes are, away from us and all rationality, instead the aim will be to wonder as to how such killers are, in many ways, more like us than we want to believe, and if they are executing what we believe to its fullest extent, if they are our project par excellence. Killing became part of everyday life under the Nazis. In these notes, everyday life is on trial.

These notes are dedicated to Hallie, for the bomb, and Chino Moreno, for the way home.