When I was seven, I saw my first photos of concentration camp inmates; when I was 14, my high school was the first in the nation to do a full-semester course on the Holocaust. I was reading Hannah Arendt and watching Night and Fog as a sophomore.
At seventeen, I had a German girlfriend and watched her cry as we stood together at a place called Dachau. In the years since, I’ve studied the psychology of fascism, seen its many faces, from the Argentinian Junta to Franco’s Spain and watched in 2016 as the homegrown species circled America like a shark and last week, attacked.
Thus, I have zero fellow feeling for any supporter of any fascist. None.
I’ve seen too much of how they operate and what horrors they bring. They get no consideration from me, only all the contempt and opprobrium I can lay on them.
For those of us who value diverse and free democracies, please understand that fascists and their sympathizers are a cancer that hijacks the free expression and association that makes our societies vital and welcoming places in order to weaken and destroy the host organism.
Don’t be fooled by their appeals to ‘civility’ and ‘fair play.’ They don’t really believe in those things. Freedom of thought, expression and association cannot exist once they take power. They will destroy all ideas but their own, and those ideas and the actions they inspire are sick beyond belief. So paradoxically, they must be suppressed for free societies to live.
