Maintain, at all costs, silence
I’d planned to discuss a matter of literary interest for my next essay, but found that writing about such matters is challenging work when the lived world in which said interests exist is on fire.
"The forces interested in fascist solutions to nation problems are not to be found in one political party or the other,” begins Toni Morrison in her 1995 essay in The Nation “Racism and Fascism”, adapted from her charter day speech at Howard University earlier that same year. “We must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home."
This word, fascism, like many words in our stunted, saturated and polluted social discourse, sheds a bit of meaning with each new dose of overuse. The consequence of this is that the average person finds it more challenging to recognize when something fascistic knocks at their door, tugs at their sleeve, shakes their hand. We expect fascism to arrive wholesale, fully packaged, and not in small parts delivered over time, not as an incomplete package, capable of having a similar effect as a fully-formed one. We expect to recognize fascistic tendencies in large movements; we expect them to occur in extremes and at the highest possible levels. We expect fascism to be an external infiltrator, not a homegrown one, taking root in our very own gardens.
But if we’ve learned anything from the past few years of a global health pandemic, it is that such a sickness, as fascism is, does not care in what dosage it arrives, how it spreads, who it spreads to. Belief or disbelief in it is moot. It kills, and it continues killing, until it is made to stop.
Morrison’s essay, for me, has become one of various North Stars in a time such as this, when established institutions of power—from the nation-state to hyper-capitalist industries to institutions of militancy—loom so large as to become unquestionable. When the structures borne of their historical choice-making have, paraphrasing Ursula LeGuin, become as inescapable (and therefore, justified) as the divine right of kings. And so, even when these institutions invest in the explicit destruction and upending of our very existence—say, bombs dropped on innocent civilians in a faraway country; or reserving the human right to shelter for only those who meet fixed parameters—we embrace the opportunity to speak of these artificially created realities in the same language crafted by said institutions. We think of them in this language too, and in doing so, contribute to reinforcing these restrictions on our own living—on and on in a loop we go.
Morrison encourages us not to defer to this manner of existence, not to relent in seeking otherwise—because then we’d be truly fucked. "Fascism talks ideology,” she says, “but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge…It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight."
For this, Morrison offers some insight into how to recognize such environments.
“Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.”
I was seven when my parents first spoke about the Nigerian civil war (or the “Biafra war” or the “Biafran genocide”, depending on who you speak to—witness, here, how language shapes reality). For context: in the 1960s, the newly-formed Nigeria had just completed its journey from British-owned production company to independent nation-state, by way of British colonial rule. However, all the worst lessons about power and control had been learned by those in whose hands these countless lives had been placed, sparking a race of reckless abandon in pursuit of power.
Amidst military coups, counter-coups and a needless jostling for power, a specific group—the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria—was fingered as the sole culprit for Nigeria’s dwindling fate. So began an investment in expunging said group—pogroms on its people (specifically within northern Nigeria) to drive them “back home”. On the back of these pogroms arose an Igbo figurehead, in 1967, who opted to therefore lead the Eastern Region into a secession from Nigeria, and form a new nation-state called Biafra.
“Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.”
I grew up in 90s southern Nigeria, in the former midwestern Bendel State, amidst a people who’d initially believed they were not participants in this war, considering themselves neutrals, absolved of positionality. Reality, however, begged to differ. When advancing forces passed through this region, even the so-called Nigerian forces meant to protect them, the inhabitants of the midwest were not spared. Ask any boomer in today’s Delta state about the Asaba massacre, and watch them fold into themselves upon the memory of it. (For shorthand, the Nigerian army raided homes and murdered hundreds of innocent men, branding them “Biafra sympathizers”. Un-peopling them, in essence; the first step in ensuring their deaths cannot—should not, must not—be mourned as, first and foremost, human lives lost.)
“Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.”
If this all sounds familiar (especially right now, as destruction is visited upon innocent peoples—yet again—in West Asia and other parts of the globe), it is because the story is always the same, regardless of who is employing it, and how it is manifesting differently. But herein lies a trap—that because the tale is familiar, we assume we will recognize it when it reappears, and therefore avoid complicity in its new manifestation. We’d like to imagine that, when it comes down to it, we would do better against these powerful forces.
My first brush with censorship surrounding this piece of Nigerian history was within a secondary school textbook. I’d grown up listening to my father—who’d lived in the midwest during the war—explain how he and his community members had to wade into swamps when forces advanced through their villages. He was barely seven himself; eating lizards by day, sleeping in trees by night. Imagine, then, arriving in school, and receiving a sanitized version of these events that glorified these soldiers as victors and saviours, and not the murderous wave of despair that they epitomized.
“Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification. Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.”
As I grew up and became more entrenched in the world, I would witness this dissonance more and more. People unwilling to speak about the atrocities committed, to even accept that they happened at all. Broadcasts cut short on radio because someone so much as uttered the word Biafra. Books from the Biafran point of view conspicuously missing from bookstores and libraries. Families going silent when a grand aunt from an old family photograph is asked about. And yet, every morning at school assembly, a national anthem sung, praising “our heroes past”; waving flags of green-and-white on independence day; and amidst all this, not a single mention of those three dark years.
What we often forget, when we think of ourselves as doing better, is that we are products of these institutions too, subject to its structures. Try renting a home without the social markers of responsibility (credit history, fixed employment, and in some places, a marital partner). Try walking through a neighbourhood deemed beyond your means. Try speaking back to an armed officer of the state, regardless of how right you are, and how wrong they are. Try existing in a world designed specifically to elicit silence from you.
“Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process. Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.”
You must have surmised, by now, that orienting this essay toward my own experience as a Nigerian-born person is a way of pointing to larger global concerns on this same subject. Why I have done that is because, if you asked the average Nigerian if Nigeria, as a nation-state, is a fascist institution, they’d likely respond with a firm, resounding No. If asked, citizens of other nations I’ve lived in—England, the US, Canada—would likely respond similarly. We may have done bad things in the past, they would argue, but now we are not that.
Perhaps we may be right that, to the letter of the term, these aren’t predominantly fascist institutions. Perhaps it is the language itself that fails us; it offers us a whole, where we seek to reference a part. And why should we think otherwise? Much of the work of such institutions is to ensure that we receive this false messaging over and over, so that it becomes truth. This is the land of freedom. We welcome all kinds of people. Our primary aim is safety for all.
I argue that while the exactitude of language matters, extended discord over if said language adequately represents an institution is moot. To decipher the purpose of an institution’s actions, here is something I, like you, can clearly and succinctly describe: I know when I am being asked to maintain, at all costs, silence.
“Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.”
If asked, today, whether a nation-state like Israel—an institution backed by major Western powers and continuously supported in its large-scale campaign of destruction of lives and property, oppression and displacement of peoples, under the guise of self-defense—is a fascist institution, I expect there to be a lack of consensus. That would be very much in keeping with other matters lacking consensus: for instance, whether we can term such bombardment and displacement an act of genocide. And again, perhaps the language is insufficient, and as a result, the lack of consensus is therefore understandable. Yet I maintain, again, that the continuous fixation on the distinction between pieces of nomenclature is not the end that it is presented to be.
What Morrison’s essay asks us to do is reject the idea of consensus as the singular marker of legitimacy. Rather, she wants us to look at the fruits these institutions bear, to judge them by their actions and legacies. Fascism does not need to arrive fully-formed; only a small infection is enough. For a sickness this potent, any sufficiently weakened entity can become a suitable home.
“Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press; a little pseudo-success; the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.”
Earlier in 1975, in her speech at Portland State University, Morrison offered some insight into the thinking that shaped this essay. “The very serious function of racism,” she said, “is distraction.” I say: the very serious function of institutional malfeasance, misrepresentation, misdirection—insert whatever term works here for your circumstance—is distraction. Arguments over nomenclature—Condemn it, but don’t call it a genocide—over motivation—They started it first; ask them to stop—over possibility—This is the only way; can you suggest another?—over the where and how of dissent—Protest, yes, but not like that—these are all distractions presenting as useful queries.
Look at the fruit. Look at the stem, the branch, the root. The institution has always been, and always will be, about maintaining power; and its charge, as always, is to invest in ensuring that its victims
“Maintain, at all costs, silence.”
Suggested reading: Morrison, Toni. “Racism and Fascism”: The Nation, May 29, 1995. Excerpt from Charter Day Speech, “The First Solution”: Howard University Washington, DC, March 3, 1995.
Suggested listening: Isabella Hammad: Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (Between the Covers podcast)
