Fascist, from "fasces" (latin), an ancient legal symbol favoured by Mussolini: a bundle of twigs tied together with the axe used to cut them. Going back to the roots is instructive with this stuff. Also relevant is the other roman legal term, "suum cuique", loosely translated as "To Each His Own", meaning that justice should fit the circumstances of the accused. There is humility and mercy in that. It is instructive, because it was written on the gate to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where the meaning was twisted. Only inmates (Hitler's political opponents) could read the letters, from within the camp. From outside, it was a mirror world, with the letters backwards. The abuse was clear: if all those politicians wanted a democratic state, the post WWI Weimar Republic, they could have it, in this little doll house model of it, Buchenwald. They could look out to the beech forest (Buche=Beech; Wald=Wood, or Forest) and see the new German state, in part the people they had kept as criminals in their prisons, living freely, outside this doll house Weimar Republic, while the republic (the camp) was quite literally hell. One more detail: the camp was built around the oak tree under which the poet Goethe wrote his first draft of a scene from his play "Faust". Goethe's classical models (Greek and Roman, merged with humanism and revolutionary democracy) were picked by the Weimar Republic as a good foundation for a non-Imperial German State. The tree was used as a gallows. Effectively, it was the greatest prisoner of the camp. These two examples are very illustrative of the mid-20th century regimes you are referencing, in ways that allow many avenues for baring connections to present day versions of such distorted visions of justice. Adding to that one more, the child-molesting and sexually predatory anti-Santa Claus, the Krampus, who has a switch related to the fasces and has become a darling of the German and Austrian extreme right, makes a robust image of our time possible. US intellectual culture is adept at providing universal images, such as the solid and timely analysis given here about fascism. Respectfully, a dose of extra-US specificity would strengthen these arguments. Buchenwald was also the one camp with a strong, functioning resistance.
Fascist, from "fasces" (latin), an ancient legal symbol favoured by Mussolini: a bundle of twigs tied together with the axe used to cut them. Going back to the roots is instructive with this stuff. Also relevant is the other roman legal term, "suum cuique", loosely translated as "To Each His Own", meaning that justice should fit the circumstances of the accused. There is humility and mercy in that. It is instructive, because it was written on the gate to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where the meaning was twisted. Only inmates (Hitler's political opponents) could read the letters, from within the camp. From outside, it was a mirror world, with the letters backwards. The abuse was clear: if all those politicians wanted a democratic state, the post WWI Weimar Republic, they could have it, in this little doll house model of it, Buchenwald. They could look out to the beech forest (Buche=Beech; Wald=Wood, or Forest) and see the new German state, in part the people they had kept as criminals in their prisons, living freely, outside this doll house Weimar Republic, while the republic (the camp) was quite literally hell. One more detail: the camp was built around the oak tree under which the poet Goethe wrote his first draft of a scene from his play "Faust". Goethe's classical models (Greek and Roman, merged with humanism and revolutionary democracy) were picked by the Weimar Republic as a good foundation for a non-Imperial German State. The tree was used as a gallows. Effectively, it was the greatest prisoner of the camp. These two examples are very illustrative of the mid-20th century regimes you are referencing, in ways that allow many avenues for baring connections to present day versions of such distorted visions of justice. Adding to that one more, the child-molesting and sexually predatory anti-Santa Claus, the Krampus, who has a switch related to the fasces and has become a darling of the German and Austrian extreme right, makes a robust image of our time possible. US intellectual culture is adept at providing universal images, such as the solid and timely analysis given here about fascism. Respectfully, a dose of extra-US specificity would strengthen these arguments. Buchenwald was also the one camp with a strong, functioning resistance.
Chilling, and as Sarah Quinn says, terrifying. Thank you for setting it out so clearly
Powerful writing and terrifying. Thank you Shanley.
Thank you. Well said.