A clarification for my haters

In the comments for my last post, someone asked, “If your country is so fascist, why aren’t you in a concentration camp?”

Well...our country has a problem with state capacity. We have a problem of chronic absenteeism in our schools—teachers draw a paycheck and don’t show up to school for months on end. Everything in our country is slow and creaky and inefficient, even our fascism. We are not rich like the U.S.: we do not have the ability to put millions of people in jail.

Instead, control is exerted in an ad-hoc fashion. Basically, if an individual fascist decides to kill you, then they can. They can do it either solo, by coming to your house and beating or stabbing you to death—or they can incite some kind of mob to come and do it for them. And they will almost never be punished for this crime, if they do it in the name of the cause.

But they select their targets judiciously. I am from a highly-educated upper-middle-class family, and I belong to the Trinitarian faith, so it’s unlikely that a fascist would decide to kill me. People like me often get doxxed, deluged with hate mail, etc, but we usually don’t get murdered. There are various reasons for this, but mostly it’s because of class-deference. Both demagogues and stormtroopers have some vestigial respect for the former ruling class. This is why, in the United States, you have Ben Shapiro and Peter Thiel going on New York Times podcasts—they want the approval of the old liberal elite.

Not that people like me can’t get punished in various ways. We can definitely lose our jobs, lose our housing, get socially ostracized. But people generally expect folks like me to hate the regime, and if we talk shit on this regime that’s somewhat acceptable. After all, there still exists an opposition party that continues to contest these elections that are, to a large extent, conducted democratically. Fascism has decisively beaten mainstream liberalism, and as a result the fascists aren’t particularly afraid of people like me.

In fact, because this regime is fueled by dissatisfaction with the old ruling class, the regime needs people like me—liberals—to stick around, as a pinata they can beat upon rhetorically.

And that’s the real reason why most people of my class don’t critique this regime. We are demoralized. We are unpopular. We had our chance to run this country, and generally speaking most people (including myself) think we did a bad job!

Another commenter asked: “Okay, so you guys are losers who have no plan. Why don’t you join the new regime then and work to make it better?”

This is something that my fascist stormtrooper friend Declan sometimes asks too. I am in college, at a large public university that’s somewhat famous in our country for being a hotbed of political organizing. Declan belongs to a fascist campus organization. Men in this organization wear uniforms, they carry big sticks, they periodically go to a training camp in the forest where they learn to shoot guns. They’re like a street gang: they have taken over a few blocks of this city, and now they have their own fascist bars, bookstores, restaurants, and cafes.

By the way, this is not Ireland. In my last post, I used a naming convention where I gave upper-class Trinitarians (like me) Welsh names, as opposed to the oppressed Unitarians, who have English names. But with people like Declan, there’s a very subtle class difference that distinguishes them from me. We both belong to the majority faith, which I’ve called Trinitarianism, but he’s from a lower echelon in our class system.

To explain the exact nature of the difference between him and me—a difference that anyone in my culture would understand just from glancing at his appearance or his name—would reveal exactly where I’m writing from, which is something I’d like to avoid, so I’m giving him an Irish name instead. I know this doesn’t actually correspond to the differences between Irish and English people in the UK, but that’s why I’m spending a paragraph explaining it here.

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Anyway, I have to say, these lower-middle-class fascists, they are very energetic and lively. I knew a lot of fascists in high school, but they were all from my same upper-class background, and they always seemed a bit smarmy and supercilious, fake somehow. It felt like an act, just to gain power.

But these lower-middle-class fascist stormtroopers on the other hand are pure libido. They just want to take over this country and smash things. Declan talks openly about genocide. This guy loves Hitler!

I am dead serious. He has read Mein Kampf, he has read everything about Hitler, and he’s like, Hitler succeeded in his aim. He made Europe Judenfrei. He won.

Similarly, Declan regards our minority religious group, the Unitarians, as inherently evil, bloodthirsty, genocidal. He believes the Unitarian aim is to extinguish our ethnic and religious identity, and he thinks they should be eliminated.

You might ask, “How do you even know such a person?”

Well, two weeks into college, during my first year, my ex-girlfriend’s dad, Bleddyn, gave a speech at this university. He texted me a few times, asking if we could have dinner. I didn’t really want to be associated with him, because by then I was already getting involved in campus activism and Bleddyn happens to be a big-deal fascist. But he hunted me down in his big black car. And when Bleddyn emerged, he had Declan in tow.

Bleddyn pointed to me, and he said to Declan, “Now see here, this is the one.” Later I learned from my ex-girlfriend that her dad was trying to protect me, to make sure I didn’t get on any hit-lists.

“Got it,” Declan said.

Of course, the whole school knew about this incident within days, and the left-wing activists started saying I was a police operative.

Declan kept hunting me down, often with the rest of his squadron in tow. He tended to walk around in a clique of four uniformed boys, and a trailing party of a few girls—all of them slender, glossy-haired, wearing make-up, western clothes. Just these crisp, polished fascist girls. It was visually quite impressive.

Meanwhile, I was eating most of my meals alone. I don’t know...it was lonely. I’d come here expressly to resist fascism. I figured there’d be something happening here if nowhere else. But it’s the same here as everywhere: just the same left-wing infighting.

Many leftists thought that violence was the solution to our problem. The fascist movement used violence—that’s all it was, organized violence and the threat of violence, wielded to bend various institutions, whether corporate or governmental or nonprofit, to the will of Leader. So why didn’t we left-wingers use violence as well?

I disagreed, mostly because...violence seemed impractical. The fascists were more populous and more popular, so in any violent conflict they would obviously win. To me, the correct answer was that we use moral authority, like Gandhi, like MLK. But my left-wing friends said moral authority doesn’t work! Look at South Africa—they gave up on non-violence and turned to violence, and that’s what brought down apartheid.

But that led to all these arguments about what exactly happened in the South Africa, and these tactical debates were just so endless. It felt so impossible to get on the same page.

I also think...violence is wrong. What is bad about fascism is that it endorses violence. If you lose that, then you’re just as bad as the fascists. But obviously this is a very washed liberal thing to say and is exactly the reason everyone hates people like me.

Everyone except Declan, who engaged in a charm offensive—It was a lot like being seduced.

One day I was wandering around town, and he grabbed me by the shoulder, and he said, “Stop moping. Come on.”

And we went to his fascist cafe. It looked just like a regular middle-class coffee ship, with sweets and espresso drinks. “Let me get you something,” Declan said.

I ordered a latte, and he ordered nothing. I said, “Don’t they pay you?” (I knew that fascist stormtroopers got paid essentially nothing).

Declan grimaced. Then I looked at the guy behind the counter. Declan was the big man on campus. All eyes were on Declan.

“No,” Declan said. “It’s not for the money. I have no money. None of us are here for the money. Right? Take your coffee.”

That day, when we sat down to coffee, that’s when he asked if I’d ever read Mein Kampf.

This is not as crazy to say in our country as it would be in America. Here a lot of people have read Mein Kampf. They sell the book on the streets—a lot of people respond to the rhetoric and the passion in this book. But because I went to an American-style school I’d been educated into the usual revulsion at Hitler, so I said, “N—no.”

“You should,” he said. “Look into it. This is a leader with a great program. Unfairly maligned.”

“But he lost.”

“Did he?” he said. “Are there any Jews today in Germany?”

“What?”

“He cleansed his country. And now it is one of the great countries of the world. He cleansed it, made them free, united them as one race. He went down in history as a villain, but he won.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“He made his own law, took the burden of villainy on himself for all time, so others would be free. That is what a hero does—they do what must be done.”

The other fascists in the cafe were titillated, clearly wondering what I would do, what I would say. This was a humiliation ritual: I was a prominent liberal, and they wanted to see if I would get ‘triggered’.

I kept my cool, tried not to get worked up, and just asked questions, where I elucidated everything I told you he believed: about the extermination of the Unitarians. And then I walked out of there feeling humiliated and ashamed. And I thought for many weeks about what exactly I was doing with my life. It was easy enough to say “Fight” or “Resist”, but the truth was that people like me were considered so inoffensive to this regime that nobody even bothered to attack us.

One of the interesting things (to me) about this school was that it mostly drew from the lower-middle-classes. Our country is very poor, so the lower-middle-class covers a lot of ground. If you have any kind of government job or do any form of formal-sector labor, you’re lower-middle-class. It doesn’t matter if you’re a janitor or if you scrub toilets, if you have a paycheck, you’re lower middle class.

And all of these people, the janitors and toilet scrubbers, they all tell their kids the same thing, “Grow up and do something better than this. Get a desk job.”

These parents were illiterate or semi-literate, but their kids studied hard, got decent grades, and gained admission to this college. Now they continue to study! They continue to go to school! Why? There’s no jobs. They’d have been better off if they’d gotten a position somewhere scrubbing toilets. That’s at least a paycheck.

In our school, there’s a few people who understand that there’s no point to excelling in school. But they’re in a minority. Most people are still going to class, hoping to get somewhere. Most of them avoid politics, because it would be a distraction from the work of getting ahead. Very few people at this school are bitter, nihilistic, or revolutionary.

There’s a lot of hope at this school, is what I am saying. A lot of idealism. A lot of people who are out from under their parents for the first time, and who are able to explore their intellectual interests genuinely, for the first time. I’m told that in America, younger people no longer feel hopeful about the future—in my country that’s true for upper-class youth like me, but these lower-middle-class strivers haven’t gotten the message yet.

A lot of these people are girls. There are a lot of girls falling in love with Foucault at this school! Oftentimes in the same classes where I am finding him to be...somewhat difficult, somewhat uninteresting.

And these girls love me! When they look at me, they see something like from a book. They see someone cultured, who’s been exposed to the better things in life.

It is so comical. I was not that popular with girls in high school. People were so confused about my relationship with my high-school girlfriend. I am serious, it was a major topic of gossip for years—“What does she see in that overweight loser? Does he have a big dick? What is going on with those two?”

Here it’s not like that at all! These girls are so forward. I don’t know where they could’ve learned this. They’re always sitting next to me in class, brushing up against me, giving me their number.

And it’s a commuter college. Some people live in dorms, but a lot of people are taking the bus or train every day from their family homes. I’m living in a room near campus, but I don’t have my own bathroom—I use one down the hall. It’s above a tea-shop. I sleep on a little futon, and I drink and smoke cigarettes and read pirated books on my phone (I am an inveterate book pirate, which is a terrible habit I know).

But I’ve started investing in some physical books out of pure self-defense for when I bring these girls home, so we have something to talk about. I won’t give you the names of the books, because it would be tedious—although I have indeed read these books, they’re purely a decoration to impress girls.

And these girls are like, “I have never met anyone like you...you’re so sensitive...you’re so thoughtful...”

It is comical! These girls are also usually virgins, and I have some more experience in that department, which they’re grateful for.

But I don’t know. It’s hard not to compare them to Anwen, my ex-girlfriend. She was very sophisticated, fashionable, rich. And she also chose me. It was so forceful. She could’ve had anyone, and she picked me, because there was something in my particular outlook that she responded to. She got me.

These other girls, they don’t really get me. I don’t feel they know me at all. They have some illusion about me. Many of them, for instance, seem to think that I am a writer! Or an intellectual!

It’s so funny. It makes me laugh. For a few months in my freshman year, I was seeing one particular girl, Saoirse, who loved literature, loved ideas of all sorts. She would call me up in a passion about Tolstoy. “Have you ever read Tolstoy? You must read Tolstoy!”

I said, “N—no.”

She was trying to connect with me. She kept wanting to know what I was reading. I’d tell her, and then she would read the book herself, and she’d want to discuss it! Like we were in a book club! She’d want to talk about ideas. But whenever I talked to her about the main idea that interested me, which is the idea that something terrible is coming in this country—ethnic cleansing!—she was not that interested. She would prefer to talk about Tolstoy or something. I don’t know.

My ex-girlfriend, Anwen, was also a straight A student. She hardly read books, aside from the ones assigned for class, but she understood what was important. She lived in the same reality as me, and she had the only rational response to that reality, which was revulsion. She wasn’t going to resist this reality, but she understood that there was no goodness possible in this regime—the regime her father had made. I don’t know, maybe that’s nihilistic, but Anwen and I were in sympathy. We had the same principles.

In contrast, Saoirse’s principle was that the intellect was sacred, but she upheld the concept of ‘the intellect’ without actually using hers. She wanted a world where she could just read Tolstoy all day. Maybe that world would be good, maybe it wouldn’t, I don’t know...we just didn’t connect. That’s all I’m saying.

But she thought that she knew me. She thought I was like her. One day she said, “Oh maybe we can try to do our PhDs in the same place...”

I said, “What?”

She was always saying things like that. Like, she was always encouraging me to write essays or write for the school paper. I said the school paper is controlled by the fascist government! Do you want to get me killed?

But, whatever, Saoirse’s parents ran a magazine kiosk at a railway station. She was their only child. They literally lived in a slum—improvised housing, made of corrugated tin and plywood, built on unused land that was technically owned by the defense ministry. The government had been trying to clear them out for years, but this slum was organized, controlled by bosses who controlled this bloc of votes and used it to cut deals with politicians. She still lived in that place, went back there every night, to parents who I am sure were in awe of her. She was an exceptional person—nobody expects a girl like that to love Tolstoy. Probably someday she will turn to politics, but for right now she wants to live in the dream created by these books. And that’s fine.

But then she would spend her time agonizing about me. She asked once why I never said that I loved her. What could I say? I told her some line about how I’d never said it before.

“Not even to your ex?”

“If I was sure that I was going to marry someone, that’s when I’d say it.”

Just a line. Of course I said it to Anwen! I had actually loved her. I had felt that chemical reaction—that overpowering sense of gratitude for her presence in my life—that corresponds to love, and I had wanted her to understand how deeply grateful I was for her existence. You know, I loved her. I just didn’t love Saoirse.

But I didn’t see any reason to stop hanging out with Saoirse. I didn’t feel like I was leading her on, but I’m sure she would’ve had a different view.

Anyway, what ultimately repaired my reputation with the leftists was the fact that I was good with girls. Like, these leftists, they kept talking about speaking to the people, organizing the people—but they couldn’t even connect with the vast majority of this student body, which generally wanted nothing to do with them. Meanwhile, I obviously had something that these women (the campus was sixty percent women) really responded to.

As a result, when I went to these leftist meetings I stopped worrying somebody would jump me or denounce me as a police agent. And that meant I was also free to hang out with Declan, because, like most fascists, he was pathologically shy around women and under-fucked.

Update

Many people have taken exception with my characterization of Declan’s beliefs. I guess they just don’t believe that a major country’s ruling party would enable a campus operative who idealizes Hitler and openly espouses genocide.

Believe me, you are not alone in lacking a belief in Declan. When I told my own father about Declan, he said, “You are exaggerating. This Hitler stuff is too much. He is pulling your leg—this friend of yours.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s the logical end-point of the Leader’s rhetoric.”

“No, stop this,” he said. “Even calling them fascist, it is too much. They have a certain religious program, but they are a regular political party. You have certain policy disagreements with them—I do as well. But they are not evil.”

“No dad, come on,” I said. “It’s not about policies. What’s happening has nothing to do with policy. They have aroused anger at a certain set of enemies. And their aim is to keep that anger burning. Eventually it’ll turn into genocide, because they’ve convinced themselves that this is a Trinitarian country, and that if you’re Unitarian you can never be fully of this country. And...it’ll be genocide. With someone like Declan it’s a relief because he says the quiet part out loud. Obviously nobody would vote explicitly for genocide, but you don’t have to. That’s how it works. You vote because there’s a problem, and one party says they’ll solve the problem. And it’ll happen. Extermination.”

“This is just a hysteria,” my dad said. “And you are ruining your life. This Bleddyn, he said to me that he talked to you about getting a spot in the civil service, and you said no.”

“Because I would’ve been part of it, this regime.”

“We are all part of it,” he said. “Everyone who works and does anything in this country. Your mother is a professor at a government university. She is a part of it too no?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You all are. But not me.”

“This mania for purity—it is so typical of leftists,” my dad said. “You castigate everyone who is not 100 percent pure.”

“I hang out with the Hitler guy. I don’t castigate him. But I am not going to devote my life force to helping genocide.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I will stop it,” I said.

“This is nonsense. How will you stop it? Through violence. Through terrorism.”

“No,” I said. “By finding the arguments that convince people it is wrong.”

“Well you have not even convinced me it is happening, much less that it’s wrong.”

“You are scared,” I said. “You don’t need convincing. You know I’m right. You’re the one who taught me the things I believe. But now you’re scared and demoralized. But the time will come when what you represent and what I represent—when that will be important.”

“I just think telling people about this boy, this Declan, it is the wrong tack. It is unconvincing.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

You might wonder how Declan and I became friends in the first place. Well, Declan got my number and pestered me for months to hang out. He kept saying he was willing to talk about anything, anywhere, in any setting. I told him to come to my rooms, but he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to be alone with me.

Finally we met at the teashop under my apartment, which is not really a student hang-out at all, because the students are mostly girls and this place is full of unemployed middle-aged men who sit around scratching themselves and playing chess.

Declan came in puffed-up in his uniform, and these men raised an eyebrow. He originally said he wasn’t going to order anything, but then he looked at the menu and frowned.

“It’s not too expensive.”

“This menu is like my home village,” he said.

Our country is very long-settled and full of regional differences that matter intensely to the people in question, and I guess this teashop-owner and Declan were from the same region. Declan waved at the man behind the counter and then he went up to him. They talked for a very long time.

However long you think Declan’s conversation with this man must’ve been—it was so much longer than that. It lasted for two hours! Which seems insane, even for me to type it. Declan got this man’s whole life story out of him—and now he was inviting us to dinner with his family. It was too much!

“Declan!” I said. “I don’t want to have dinner with him.”

“See this is the problem,” Declan said. “With your kind of people.”

“I just don’t want to,” I said. “You had something you wanted to say to me. And now we’ve been here two hours, and you haven’t said it. Please! Take pity.”

The tea-shop owner shook his head, and he told Declan that we obviously had important business to attend to privately. I knew this man. I knew his name. I came to this tea shop every day. The teashop-owner was suspicious of me, as he obviously should be, because he was witness to my comings and goings with various college girls. I had a whole history with this man, the owner of this tea shop, and it was a bit offensive for Declan to come in and pretend like I somehow wasn’t friendly enough to this guy.

Anyway, when Declan finally sat down, I was treated to a stream of nervous joking.

“You were so bored...you could’ve just left...but here’s the thing with you guys...you’ve gotta connect with people...you treat people like dirt, that’s why, that’s why...they hate the smugness...this feeling like you’re better than them. That’s what people respond to.”

“Declan, I fucked your sister.”

“What?” he said.

“I fucked ten girls last semester, hotter than your sister, who’s an ugly bitch.”

He laughed. Then he smiled with just his upper teeth. “She is fucking ugly. That’s true.”

“Now your mom...” I said.

The men in this cafe were scandalized. This wasn’t really how people talked here. This wasn’t how anybody talked. This was talk imported from the movies, or from our weird vague understanding of how ‘real’ guys in America might talk.

“Oh my mom is even uglier,” Declan said. “But if you fucked her I’d have to beat you to death.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’d do it. Just come here, come up to your rooms, kick you in the gut, smash your face until you stopped breathing.”

“I know.”

“That’s something I could do,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Should we call some girls?”

“What?”

“Let’s call some girls. Let’s do something. Let’s have a party.”

That’s how it was with Declan, I realized. You needed to toy with him, constantly switching tacks, always throwing him off. And at some point, you needed to get him drinking. Which I did. That night we ended up with four girls and the two of us in our rooms.

I knew if I had sex around him, he would never forgive me, so eventually I kicked out the girls, saying I’d sworn off intercourse.

But by now he was drunk, alone in my room. He was lying on my bed, a hand on his pants. And I started telling him about the girls I’d fucked in that bed.

I’d never told dirty stories before, so I had to improvise a little bit. But he seemed satisfied enough.

In our country, whenever two boys are alone and are drunk, they often hook up.

There’s never been a Kinsey report in our country, but if there was, I am sure it would find that at least thirty percent of the boys have hooked up with another boy.

I hadn’t participated much in this, because I had a girlfriend through most of high school. But in our country it’s difficult to find opportunities to be alone with members of the opposite sex, whereas it’s a lot easier to find time alone with other guys.

You can usually tell when a guy has hooked up with a lot of other guys, because they give off an air of expectation when you’re alone with them.

Although in principle I am not against this kind of behavior, I find that in practice it tends to become very messy. Some guys can be normal. Others not so much. Maybe the problem is that people are too educated now, they know about homosexuality. So they’re always trying to convince you they’re not gay. Surely there must’ve been a time, thirty or forty years ago, when you could just jerk off another guy and not agonize over what it meant, but that time was past.

So Declan was not at all unusual in giving me this down-low vibe. I was tempted to go there with him, because...really the only time you can know another guy is after you’ve been with them. For that night, at least, they’re usually less guarded. Not always, sometimes they roll over and fall asleep, or they get their nut off and leave. But sometimes you lie awake and look at the ceiling and you talk to them about their hopes and dreams, and it’s very nice.

But with Declan it felt a bit dangerous, so I didn’t go to him on the bed. I stayed in my chair by the window, watching the cars honking and jostling in the street, and I took a long drag on my cigarette. Then I turned to find him looking at the ceiling anyway, smiling to himself. He had a hand in his pants, idly.

“So how many girls, you think?” he said. “Give me a number...in this bed, I mean...”

So I told him a number, and he came. I think it wasn’t a fetish, just a power move. Who was I gonna tell about this? People on this campus were afraid of him. He was just starting to realize that he could probably pressure people into doing a lot of things they didn’t really want to.

“That was nice,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It was good,” he said.

“Declan,” I said. “Okay can I ask you something? What is the deal with this Hitler stuff. What do people say when you talk about this stuff?”

He smiled. “They all agree. They’re just surprised I’ll say it. The whole point is to be done with this problem. A lot of times, people did things like that. They just got rid of the problem. We’ve had hundreds of years of fighting over this, sapping our country’s strength—we’ve never been able to get a foothold in the world, because we’re not united. If a people are really united, they can do anything. Everyone working together, towards one goal. That’s how all the great empires started. Usually just one little city, or one little tribe. Like the Mongols, and they came together for a brief second, conquered the world. If they could’ve held together for thirty years longer, the whole world would’ve been Mongol. It’s so obvious.”

“And then what?” I said.

“Then you rule. You create justice for everyone. Fairness. People understand their place, and they accept it. And good people are able to rise and be rewarded. There is order. Control. This chaos, with everything overturned every three years—it doesn’t have to be this way.”

He talked and talked and talked like this until he finally passed out. And I filmed it all with my phone. In the morning I thought he might remember some of this, but he never talked to me about it. And yet whenever we met afterwards he’d have that same dreamy smile, the same one he’d evinced through his monologue.

Two Men In An Attic. Jean Forain. Source.

P.S. This post is the second in a series. If you’re interested in reading more about how our unnamed protagonist balances his hatred of fascism with his strong desire to sleep with pretty girls, you can learn about his high school adventures here.