Twentieth Blog

In an earlier blog, covering liberal Fascism and white guilt, I particularly focused at one point on indie game developer Meg Jayanth’s statements on ethnic representation in video games. Her critique was that video games should be more representative of minorities and acknowledging of racial politics in the United States, arguing that all creative work is political. In turn, my critique was that such a notion – that all private life should be politicized – is Fascist. My standpoint on creativity, on which in retrospect I feel I did not elaborate sufficiently, is that a creative work, while widely subject to interpretation, only states what the creator chooses for it to state; furthermore, creativity should be appreciated for enjoyment and mental stimulation – subjugating it to a dogma only stifles it. I still stand behind this critique, but I will admit, I was too harsh.

I said that Jayanth’s critique would be more fitting in an editorial about ethnic issues in entertainment. The issue of representation, ultimately, should be addressed, particularly considering the issue of ethnic stereotypes being promoted in entertainment. (I still feel though that her criticism of Tom Clancy’s The Division was misdirected.) Ultimately, however, even this is beside the point: my diagnosis of Fascism could easily be construed – and wrongly so – to characterize her as malicious and with trivial concerns. After all, “fascist” is today no more than a meaningless political insult. We might fear Fascism* more than we really should – it has occurred frequently throughout human history, and considering human nature, it may be inevitable.

(*Or perhaps to be more accurate, totalitarianism. One can think of totalitarianism as a scalar and of Fascism as a vector quality – totalitarianism is when all segments of society, by cooperation or coercion, are controlled by and aligned with a single entity, the state; Fascism is that combined with Sorelianism, and Futurism in its application, typically expressed as populism and/or nationalism, seeking to unite and mobilize the people on common ideology and/or myth against a common enemy and/or scapegoat.)

History textbooks often make the mistake of teaching Fascism to be an anomaly. The mass murders under the Nazis and Communists, of course, always will require special attention – not only are they nearly unrivaled in terms of quantity, but also in nature: the ten million people who died in the concentration camps were not in the line of fire – Hitler killed them simply because they existed; Stalin and Mao killed their millions because they were inconvenient. Looking past this, however, we were not that different. We bombed massive numbers of civilians in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. We jailed countless political dissidents under the Espionage, Sedition, Hatch, and Smith acts – don’t forget the Palmer raids! We sent our own citizens of German, Italian, and Japanese descent into internment camps. Akin to Mussolini’s corporatist doctrine, our government took control over industry and labor during the World Wars. We watched during those (and arguably in recent and current) wars as the government integrated and mobilized society on every level over common goals against common enemies.

As we discussed in our last class, our technology seems to be advancing beyond our control to the point where we may live in a Fascist dystopia a la The Lametrix Matrix. The only way to prevent this might be to choose between the lesser of two evils and adopt a more benign form of Fascism. An all-encompassing social revolution may be our only option in replacing our ruling class and values. A rigid system of authority and discipline may thus be necessary for upholding the new values and preventing the people from otherwise becoming enslaved to a more sinister master. Our population is growing out of control – unless we carry out extraterrestrial colonization overnight, the results will be catastrophic. In order to prevent the human race from starving into misery or out of existence, our only course of action may be to take drastic measures to reduce population growth – or even more drastic measures to reduce the population itself. As a certain Professor once said, all wars are primarily economic. Our commonly held liberal, humanist values – that we all entitled to life, liberty, and prosperity – are relatively new and may not last in the long run when there are too few resources to satiate all humans.