Before they send out death squads
Before pageants in the square
Before the leader speaks law from the balcony
Before the women shudder and the men howl with victory,
Before the bad elements disappear, the cowards are shot fleeing
Before the show trials
When they're still in brownshirts and bloody on the street
Or no, before that,
When they're still good burgers in the beerhall,
Suited and groomed dandies at the club
Angered by what this nation has become
Spitting about parasites and degenerates,
Saying, there ought to be a law,
I'd like to wring their necks,
One day a rain will come,
Look at all these sluts,
Are they fascists?
When they conciliate
When they call jubilees and elections
When they raise the workers wage and
Build a hospital for the poor
When they give an amnesty or name a civilian successor
Are they fascist now?
When the doctors who'd tormented the starving,
when the spymasters traded on their secrets
for a sinecure in Virginia or high office in their own, new, liberal nation
Were they still fascist?
When the arms and advisers sail to your key ally in the region,
When they are regrettably bastards, but your bastards,
Killers and sadists, but graduates of your school,
Planners of hunger and rape, but graduates of your school
Profiteers of blood and slavery, but always with other graduates of your school,
When you're only in it for the profit, and better you than the competition,
When anyway the Communists forced you into this fiendship with the devil,
When the only burning you do is from 30,000 feet or nine thousand miles distance
Does that make you a fascist?
barracuda:
Among other things, fascism is a kind of political reaction and degeneration that visits modern and modernizing societies when they enter severe economic crisis. It is usually a disease of capitalism. To define it as a particular kind of goosestep or style of monumentalism is to deny that it can come to any nation, and that it will have very different forms, and that it will call itself things like popular and socialist, and that it must be recognized and fought long before it reaches the full manifestations that you wish to rigidly define as the sole phenomena worthy of the name. Fascism has always been, curiously, an international phenomenon. One fascist revolution inspires another, they intervene to help each other at least until power is assured. No country lacks its fascists, even when they are not organized and in power. Few people are entirely immune to the fascist drive. I do not exclude the American sponsors of the classical foreign fascist movements and regimes from their guilt, just because they didn't manage to impose the full version here. Some of them tried, we all know the story of the 1934 plot.
And while I don't want to deny the truth of this:
to describe this country as being so does a criminal disservice to the suffering of the millions for whom the general quality of life here - not specific instances of severe repression of which indeed there are many, but the general quality - surely would be a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom.
to put this country under permanent protection from being described by the term in those cases when it
does fit is a criminal disservice to the millions who live here in pockets outside that "general quality" to which you and I are privileged and lucky enough to belong, for example, in the world's largest prison system (in part thanks to a demented, delusional, public health policy with some of its roots in eugenic thinking, one that is called a war and pursued with jackboots and seizures of whole housing projects and evictions and yes, shootings of the people who usually lack the "general quality" of paler skin); and it is also a disservice to the hundreds of millions for whom "the general quality of life here" would have indeed been "a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom," only that they had the misfortune to be living, not in one of our designated totalitarian enemies, from whence they could at least expect the doors here to be open for them were they successfully to flee, but in one of our merely authoritarian allies, where our taxes were paying for the bullets and bombs murdering them.
Rosen auf den Weg gestreut
Ihr müßt sie lieb und nett behandeln,
erschreckt sie nicht – sie sind so zart!
Ihr müßt mit Palmen sie umwandeln,
getreulich ihrer Eigenart!
Pfeift euerm Hunde, wenn er kläfft –:
Küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft!
Wenn sie in ihren Sälen hetzen,
sagt: »Ja und Amen – aber gern!
Hier habt ihr mich – schlagt mich in Fetzen!«
Und prügeln sie, so lobt den Herrn.
Denn Prügeln ist doch ihr Geschäft!
Küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft.
Und schießen sie –: du lieber Himmel,
schätzt ihr das Leben so hoch ein?
Das ist ein Pazifisten-Fimmel!
Wer möchte nicht gern Opfer sein?
Nennt sie: die süßen Schnuckerchen,
gebt ihnen Bonbons und Zuckerchen ...
Und verspürt ihr auch
in euerm Bauch
den Hitler-Dolch, tief, bis zum Heft –:
Küßt die Faschisten, küßt die Faschisten,
küßt die Faschisten, wo ihr sie trefft –!
Theobald Tiger
Die Weltbühne, 31.03.1931, Nr. 13, S. 452.
