It’s all in the optics

Most of the headlines are American in origin and some of the imagery that accompanies them both sound and visual, is painful in the extreme. The sound of pleading children being played at a White House press conference and a president and his staffers and supporters tin-eared to calls for a change to a policy that sees ‘illegals’ separated from their children. Tales of mounting concern as to what happens to the separated children are leaking into the public domain. Pictures of children in cages — effectively holding tanks — raise the hackles of many and none of this is new.

America has a long and dishonourable history of intolerance and an embedded fear of ‘The Other’ that might ‘infest’ (a Trumpian word) the country. It goes back centuries and starts with the indigenous people, the Red Indians, who to this day are corralled on the reservations created for them when the West was being won by those pioneering immigrants. Wall? What wall? Only today there is a bit of a susurrus about a sign erected by Rick Tyler from Tennessee which says ‘Make America White Again.’ In South Texas there are ‘tender age’ shelters for the youngest separated children, a fact that reduced an MSNBC anchor to tears live on air.

Not all Americans are latent or actual fascists, but enough are to sustain a presidency that will run to a second term and take decades to undo in terms of the harm it has done and will do. They may make a difference at the mid-terms but it is doubtful — but I am not here to re-run the American nightmare but to remind you that America is not alone. Try Italy.

Italy…pizza and pasta, grand architecture and high culture. And Fascism. Try this for size. As Weber notes, “In charismatic relations people no longer obey customs or laws, instead, the followers submit to the imperious demands of a heroic figure, whose orders are legitimated not by logic, nor by the hero’s place in ascribed hierarchy, but solely by the personal power to command of the charismatic individual.” Now lay that across the America and Italy of today. The fires of European fascism were dampened by the end of the Second World War, but the spark was still there and is enjoying a revival in the persona of the new Italian interior minister, Matteo Salvini. He it is that has proposed a census of the itinerant Roma people, long a persecuted minority in Italy, and the expulsion of those that do not prove to be Italian citizens. Those that are not are to leave — to where who knows as the Roma have no ‘nation’ — and the rest to remain much to the chagrin of Salvini.

Then consider the refusal of the Italian government to allow a ship-full of rescued migrants to dock in any of its ports, with Spain coming to the rescue eventually. It can be argued that Italy has already pulled its weight in terms of absorbing the surge of migrants from the wars in the Maghreb and the Levant, but the issue is wider than that. Salvini is young, charismatic, nationalist and happy to identify himself as on the far right of Italian politics. Trump he is not but the qualities read across both men. The gap between the far right and fascism is paper thin, and paper is highly combustible.

Look wider in continental Europe, Germany for instance, and it is not difficult to see old embers flickering again. And it is not confined to the northern hemisphere, as Australia’s far right has been coalesced and energised by the election of Trump who has become a lodestar of extremism and iconoclasm globally, an effect that even he might not have predicted.

Pakistan? There is little need for me to spell it out for readers of this column. There has long been a latency for the country to drift towards the right and that has accelerated in recent years in the face of the state deciding to do nothing to effectively countervail it. The die is cast and intolerance has supremacy, now moving to the mainstream via democratic process. And do we have a charismatic? Yes we do.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2018.

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