From: KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008) 79-94
by Saladdin Said Ahmed
EXCERPT:
The intelligentsia, too idle to be concerned about anything that is not boldly uttered, has provided a perfect environment over the last few decades for fascism to creep into and fester within the sectors of mass culture, unnoticed. Unlike fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, today’s fascism derives its power from its invisibility, which makes it less detectable, especially in the climate of political correctness.
Meanwhile, Deleuze and Guattari state, “what makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.”15 Pseudo-intellectuals oversimplify everything. As a result, they always choose an easy target such as a certain political administration, and major media corporations. That way it is easy for the educated middle-class person to take a “political” stance without thinking critically about the state of affairs. The evil and the good are made too obvious to leave any need for real critical thinking. The worst thing in this political stupidization is that fascism grows in almost everyone unnoticed. Recognizing fascism requires individual skills of criticism, which is the last thing to be present in a mass-production society in which even political leftism is produced for mass usage.
The proliferation and internalization of fascism take place through the propagation and internalization of ideologies that capitalize a locally- constructed collective identity (culture) according to which the mere existence of “the other” represents a normative threat to the fragile situation of “our purity.” The germs of fascism are transformed from the fascist communitarian foci into the “individual” mentality of the subjects by the prejudices that are built into the structures of the dominant ideology which is reflected in the main stream media. The potential fascists are the people whose lack of critical individual identity pushes them to search for an alternative passionate collective identity that can invite them into the festive spirit of one extended brotherhood and sisterhood. In this sense the phenomenon of fascism is an existential crisis of individualism. For fascists, culture is exactly what “[gives] meaning to a world which makes them meaningless.”16 For the person whose identity is determined almost entirely by his or her collective background, every other individual is also nothing but a representative of another collective body. This mentality is sickly reductionist: it reduces all humans into a few types, whether races, faiths, nationalities, regions, or cultures. Eventually, in the fascist mentality, the world would be reduced to “they” and “us.” For the fascist the very classification process of him/herself under a certain collective identity is one and the same process with the classification of the others under an antipode category.
Full text here:
http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_3/ahmed_june2008.pdf
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