I remember when I learned the death of a fascist does not mean the end of fascism. About nineteen years ago, my sibling and I were at my Nona’s for our regular Friday lunch, which included viewings of Touched by an Angel and The People’s Court. As Nona and I gazed at the TV screen and I started to fall asleep to the catharsis-inducing sounds of earthbound angels helping out sad, suffering, and dying people, my brother was reading the book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. When my Nona noticed the cover of the book in my brother’s hands—a black and white photo of what appears to be a fascist rally with a sea of people raising their right hands—she said softly in her Barese accented English, “I remember when Mussolini died… I saw photos of his body hanging from the rafters… it was in news… I was sad.” Hearing these words, my brother dropped his book into his lap, I was torn out of my half-slumber, and we waited to hear her say more.
Nona had never shared anything as direct and personal about what it was like living in southeast Italy during the war years until that point. The ‘authorized’ stories told by my father’s family about these experiences are limited, and when they are shared, they obscure as much as they reveal details. This, as I have come to understand, is how many families carry and process intergenerational trauma. The people who hold the memories, the people who are wounded at the subterranean somatic level by what those memories represent, often avoid speaking about the trauma—and when they do speak about it, they speak in vague, dissociated terms.[2] But on that day, Nona was speaking in vivid terms about her past traumas, and we were shocked by what she said.
She used the word sad to describe the death of Mussolini! What in God’s name, I thought, could possibly be sad about the death of such an awful person—the end of such an awful regime?
I was born and raised in western Canadian suburbs. I am white, middle class, and male. So I grew up with common clarity on these and other moral matters; the kind of morality that operates according to the following logic: people like Mussolini are bad, fascism is bad, so ‘clearly’ it is good when bad people like Mussolini (fascists) die. However, what my Nona said complicated this ‘logic’ and ‘clarity’ in critical and constructive ways. Of course she was glad to receive news about the end of Mussolini’s reign of terror. But she was disgusted and grieved by images of Mussolini, his mistress Claretta Petacci, and other fascist corpses hanging upside-down from a beam in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto for crowds to observe, curse, and desecrate.
Likewise, I imagine my Nona knew the toppling of one dictator and his political party did not necessarily mean the end of fascism. She probably sensed, with acute terror, that Mussolini’s death might make room for another authoritarian leader and party.[3]
Now, I do not present this story and these reflections as ‘field research.’ I do not share them to make definitive claims about fascism, anti-fascism, and violence. I share them to generate the critical and constructive complication I described earlier—one in which the seemingly clear logic and morality of anti-fascist violence (i.e., reactionary violence thatresists fascist violence) starts to become opaque when the centrifugal and centripetal powers of both forms of violence are brought into view.[4] That is why I propose in this essay that the binding power of fascist and anti-fascist violence inclines towards the unleashing of violence and fracture that too easily reifies anti-fascism into fascism. I will substantiate this proposal through engagement with Natasha Lennard’s Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life and John 19:26-27 and Acts 1:18-19, and then, in response, I offer an ethic for non-violent, disruptive anti-fascism.
The Alchemy of (Mediated) Violence
The hyper-mediation of fascist and anti-fascist displays of violence in our soundbite and reel crammed moment of history produces much analysis, but it is difficult if not impossible to see with accuracy what will happen when these events are recorded and put ‘out there’ for the world to engage. In Being Numerous, Natasha Lennard laments this unpredictability when she considers a specific instance of fascist/anti-fascist violence. She writes, “I thought, with fear of fascism in the air and a clamour for some unified resistance” when Donald Trump became President in 2016, “[People] could agree that it was okay, if not good, to punch a neo-Nazi. How wrong I was.”[5] The event Lennard is referring to here is the viral spectacle of alt-right, white supremacist Richard Spencer being sucker punched by an anonymous figure clad entirely in black in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during celebrations of Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration. What confounds Lennard about the response to this viral clip is the initially “gleeful social media circulation of the Spencer punch video was met with censure from the same liberal media microcosms that had spent the previous weeks nail-biting about fascism. Even the most simply Antifa act—a silencing, anti-Nazi punch—would not find broad support in the so-called resistance.”[6] Why, she asks, would not they support the forceful, and humiliating silencing of Spencer? Lennard answers this question with a precise critique of “liberal aversion to violence, but [an aversion] that fails to locate violence in the right places.”[7] On the one hand, I agree with Lennard. Privileged liberals do typically abhor violence and locate it in the wrong places because coming to terms with the violence that secures their privilege often is ‘too much’ for their fragile consciences too handle. On the other hand, I worry about Lennard’s treatment of fascism, anti-fascism, and violence when it involves not only a defence of, but in some cases celebration of it in and beyond her analysis of the hyper-mediated sucker punch of Richard Spencer.[8]
My worry stems from a gut feeling, informed by ample historical evidence, that violence, once ‘out there’ in the word, simply cannot be controlled. Lennard proposes that “anti-fascist violence is [a] counterviolence, not an instigation of violence onto a terrain of preexisting peace…. The problem we face, then, is not so much that of necessary violence as it is one of impossible nonviolence.”[9] I think her proposal underestimates the degree to which violence, whatever form it takes, initially binds in centripetal ways, but loosens and fragments in centrifugal ways as time passes—especially when the violence is mediated, as in the Spencer case, and in the case of Mussolini, his mistress, and his supporters being hung from rafters and brutalized in public squares.
Many of us want to envision the positive outcomes of a fascist dictator dead with photographs to prove it. Many of us want to see the whole world cheering about viral video footage of a white supremacist getting a hook to the jaw and have that unifying phenomena lead to more people banding together to end fascism. But despite the desire, are we certain the unpredictable binding and loosing power of violence in general, and mediated violence in particular does not risk generating out of our control phenomena like more, not less, people feeling sorry for fascists and consequently being lulled into states of inactivity, if not support for fascists? However one answers this question, I would submit the following point for consideration: whenever we ponder impossible nonviolence, so too should we think about impossible violence. That is, we should take seriously the impossibility of controlling the centripetal and centrifugal outcomes of violence, including anti-fascist violence. As Susan Sontag puts it in Regarding the Pain of Others, “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality.”[10] In other words, it is the alchemy of violence in general, and mediated violence in particular, that troubles me. I hope it troubles other people too as many of us see people around us flirting, if not in a committed relationship with, fascism.
The Binding and Loosing power of The Cross
Still, if the only thing that troubles us about alchemic violence is its unpredictability and degree of efficaciousness, is that enough to warrant worrying about fascist and anti-fascist violence? Perhaps. But not enough for those who claim to be Christian. For, I think what should really concern a Christian about violence is the violence of The Cross. There, we encounter unpredictable, efficacious, centripetal, centrifugal, divine and fleshly violence. But the violence of The Cross is a kind of violence that permanently and unwaveringly binds people into friendship and family that transcends biology and unleashes a shalom soaked love in the world that binds more people into this kind of friendship and family. Or, putting it differently as Jacques Ellul does, “What would be the use of the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, if Christians were meant to be and to act just like the others?”[11] As far as violence is considered, Ellul answers—and I with him—that the only form of violence that ought to be acceptable to Christians is the “violence of love.”[12] He defines this cruciform, binding and unleashing, kind of love as follows: “The whole meaning of the violence of love is contained in Paul’s word that evil is to be overcome with good (Romans 12:17-21). This is a generalization of the Sermon on the Mount. And it is important for us to understand that this sermon shows what the violence of love is.”[13] It is a kind of love that will get you violently killed—even flogged, nailed to a cross, mocked, and stabbed with a spear—but a kind of violence that overcomes vicious evil with good love.[14]
But what about this family and friendship bond created at The Cross? We read in John 19:26-27, “When Jesus,” who was dying on the cross, “Saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” Deploying a non-violent, disruptive anti-fascist hermeneutic here, one could say the family and friendship created at the cross and its violence definitively ends all violence, and it is only a matter of time until that end is realized totally. The trouble is waiting and persevering individually and collectively in faith, hope, love, and peace for the full end to come. But to those who struggle with the waiting and perseverance, I will say the following. What is a better witness to Jesus Christ and his strength: someone who beats the tar out of someone else, or someone who takes a devastating beating, gets back on their feet, and does not back down even if it means they will get hit again-and-again; someone who is willing to kill someone else for what they believe in (a zealot), or someone who is willing to die for what they believe in (a martyr)? My hope is this rhetorical question will inspire committed, concrete praxis.
To conclude, Acts 1:18-19 describes the fate of Judas in the post-crucifixion, -resurrection, and -ascension days. The narration of his fate is, I think, instructive for the discussion at hand. It says: “Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their language Hakeldama, that is, Field of Blood.” It appears a fascist like Judas Iscariot—someone who unleashes violence and binds people for personal gain—is taken care of in the end. Judas hung himself, so to speak. He did not need someone else to help him slip, fall headlong, and explode his bowels in a field of blood. The same could be said for Mussolini, his mistress, and his fascist supporters. They hung themselves the second they became fascists. It was only a matter of time until that truth was revealed. God revealed that truth in time.[15] And when the Triune God revealed to us in the crucified and resurrected Son of God, Jesus Christ, reveals such truths, I hope all of us, myself included, react with compassion—just like my Nona did when she saw Mussolini, his mistress, and other dead fascists hanging and swinging from beams in a public square as people cursed and brutalized their corpses. For, Lennard is right: “We act against fascists in the knowledge we act against ourselves, too. The strategy is always to create consequences for living a fascist life and seeking anti-fascist departures.”[16] Anti-fascist departures, for Christians at least, start with our repeated encounters with The Cross of Jesus Christ; The Cross that refuses to let us forget that what is inside of fascists is also inside of anti-fascists, and the only way to resist that part of ourselves is by being bound and unleashed by the family and friendship created by the crucified and risen Prince of Peace.
[2] As Shelly Rambo writes in Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Aftermath of Trauma (Waco: Baylor University, 2017 ), 92, “In line with trauma theory, wounds returning in the present bear the marks of past suffering that was not integrated. This surfacing of past wounds holds both peril and promise. Memories return to haunt the present as a way of reckoning with the past. It is a ‘good haunting’ in that it calls forward a past that has been unacknowledged and unreconciled. The goodness lies in the promises that the past comes forward to be addressed. The surfacing of wounds opens up the possibilities for breaking the cycles of traumatic violence. But it is also vulnerable to misunderstanding since the appearances take place in the present, removed from that history. The ‘past’ must be met by a particular kind of witnessing that can account for the complex dynamics of after-living.” Rambo’s reference to haunting if from Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 64.
[3] In fact, Robert A. Vantresca notes in “Mussolini’s Ghost: Italy’s Duce in History and Memory,” History and Memory, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), 89-90 “Italy has never know a period since 1945 without some talk of Mussolini and fascism. In the 1950s there were ongoing concerns in certain circles about the electoral inroads of the Movimento Sociale Italiano that seemed to presage a return of fascism, to say nothing of the public attention garnered by the return of Mussolini’s mortal remains to his sometime, Predappio, in 1957. As late as the 1970s observers mused aloud of Italy’s lingering tase for a ‘strong man’ in politics, or of concerns of a fascist revival in a troubled democracy. Even today, thousands of people, ranging from curious tourists to militant neofascists and militant antifascists, travel to visit the site of Mussolini’s grace in Predappio, some leaving handwritten expressions of admiration.”
[4] The word fascism emerges from the Latin word fasces, which literally means bundle, and typically represented symbolically as a bundle of wood wrapped around a prominent axe. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “The Politics of Symbols: From Content to Form,” Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997) particularly pages 95-96 for further discussion.
[5] Natasha Lennard, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 10.
[6] Ibid., 10.
[7] Ibid., 11. This is why the Christian aversion to violence should be markedly different from the liberal aversion to violence. It also important to emphasize the following: the nominal Christian aversion to violence has, at its foundations, a lack of the character needed to (1) acknowledge the violence perpetrated in order to secure the ‘safe’ existence of privileged North Americans, and (2) resist that violence to the extent of experiencing discomfort and/or undergoing a brutal beating.
[8] For the record, I am focusing on Lennard’s work here because I think it represents common perspectives in fascism/anti-fascism discourse. So, I am not trying to do a book review or single Lennard out for targeted criticism in this essay. I am trying to take seriously her work, which I see as communicating clearly and creatively prominent themes in this area of discussion.
[9] Ibid., 16. It may sound trite to say that with people nothing is possible, but with God all things are (Luke 1:37)—but that is precisely the leap of faith I am asking others to take with me. Formulating my proposed leap as a question: what if commitment to (impossible) nonviolence brought us to the portico of martyrdom, and the miraculous ways God uses martyrs?
[10] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Picador, 2004) 32.
[11] Jacques Ellul, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective ( ), 162.
[12] Ibid., 172.
[13] Ibid., 172-173.
[14] I like how Frederick Bauerschmidt puts it in The Love that is God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 29: “In connecting the life of Jesus to his death, we need to look not simply at the fact of his human life but also at the kind of human life he lived. John Chrysostom wrote in the late fourth century, “All that Jesus did and suffered was for our instruction” (Matthew 13:1). This means that it is not the mere fact of Jesus’s life that shows forth the God who is love, but the particular shape of the life he lives. And this same life is what leads to his death, not simply in the sense that all human life eventually ends in death but in the sense that how he lives his life will lead people to want to take that life from him.” And of course, Jesus gives up his life willingly and nobody ultimately takes it from him (cf. John 10:7-18 and Philippians 2:5-8).
[15] This warrants another essay in itself, but it could also be argued that trying to hasten the revelation ourselves can get in the way of God’s intention to redeem what seems to be an irredeemable person and/or situation. I have in mind here the Apostle Paul who, before becoming a Christian, was persecuting Christians in ways that are zealous, if not fascistic. What would have happened if one Jesus’ disciples killed Paul (originally named Saul) before his conversion, or killed him after he converted because they did not believe it was genuine and/or they did not forgive him (cf. Acts 9)?
[16] Lennard, Being Numerous, 14.
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