The great lie of fascism

by Will Walker, Hamilton

A few months ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Bitterroot Star about the dangers of white supremacist ideology, and the importance of confronting it when it emerges in a rural community such as our own. I talked about how I had seen people endorsing it in the same public spaces that I occupied – and how worried it made me. While some people agreed with what I had to say, others were dismissive of it. A few questioned why I was so hostile to white “special interest protection groups,” while at the same time not addressing what they perceived to be similar organizations for other races. Others concluded that I was just extremely gun-shy.

A week ago before I began to write this, a Hispanic man walked into a Texas mall and killed 8 people with an Armalite rifle. While our nation yet again goes through the process of grieving the victims and asking questions, I wanted to examine why it happened, and how it could have been stopped. The answers led me back to my letter, and the follow-up that you are reading now.

This shooting in particular reveals a great deal about the mechanisms of white supremacy that are normally hidden from view, because the man with the gun was a Hispanic Nazi. The concept sounds so absurd that many people dismiss it entirely, but it is true. More than true, it is one of the most important qualities of Nazism – that being, you do not have to be a shining example of the Ubermensch to benefit from it. You do not even have to be white. All that is required is to not be at the bottom of their hierarchy. 

Something that people will often forget about the Nazis and other fascist movements is that, in the end, they are all hierarchies. There is not a line where the elite lie above and the dregs below, but rather a gradient; in Nazi society, being an Aryan was better than being an Englishman, an Englishman was better than a Slav, and so on. 

If every Nazi was required to have blonde hair, blue eyes, and pure German heritage, their efforts would have died before they even started. Instead, the ideology was made to allow those who were not at the very top of the racial hierarchy to still exist within it. Not everyone can be an Aryan, but if you’re not as low as a Jew or a Slav, they may tolerate you – for a time.

This is why a man named Mauricio Garcia, with SS runes and swastikas tattooed on his body, killed 8 people in Texas. By no means was he the pinnacle of the white race. He did not have to be. He was satisfied with not being at the bottom.

The cruel trick of fascism is that if, somehow, Garcia purged all the races below his own in the hierarchy, his head would have been next. It is an ideology that requires an existential enemy to fight against. The standard of what his allies would consider to be acceptable would rise, until he fell below the threshold and was exterminated; it would continue until they too failed. Fascism is a snake that eats its own tail.

So what can we do to protect ourselves from men like him? It begins at education. We must teach ourselves, as well as our children, how this cycle of violence works and how we can break it. We have to be honest with past failures to do so, and be ready to condemn it where it may appear again. And if all of that fails, and a man with a gun comes to purge the unclean, we need to shoot the bastard.