[ Written two years ago, over the controversy created by inviting
Steven Bannon to "discuss fascism" at a public forum, the conclusions
of this article are relevant for today, with the coup of January 6 and
the pardon of Bannon by Donald Trump.] [[link removed]]

FASCISM IS NOT AN IDEA TO BE DEBATED, IT’S A SET OF ACTIONS TO
FIGHT  
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Aleksandar Hemon
November 1, 2018
Literary Hub
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_ Written two years ago, over the controversy created by inviting
Steven Bannon to "discuss fascism" at a public forum, the conclusions
of this article are relevant for today, with the coup of January 6 and
the pardon of Bannon by Donald Trump. _

Steve Bannon,

 

Back when I was in high school in Sarajevo, my best friend was Zoka.
We listened to the same bands, went to the same rock shows, found the
same stupid things hilarious, played soccer together, skied on the
same mountain, supported the same soccer club, confided in each other
re: girls, got drunk in the park after school from the same bottle of
toxically cheap liquor. We argued about many things, very often about
movies—back in the early 1980s (and thereafter) I fancied myself
knowledgeable about cinema, which entitled me to deplore the movies he
appreciated.

We spent less time together after high school but still remained
close, playing soccer regularly and arguing pretty often. But then,
bit by bit, in ways so incremental as to be imperceptible to me, he
became a passionate Serbian nationalist. Posters of rock bands were
replaced with pictures of Serbian saints and stately World War I
generals. He no longer quoted lines from movies but from _Gorski
vijenac_ (_The Mountain Wreath_), the 19th-century epic poem about
the Serbs’ righteous extermination of Muslims. I detested his turn
to nationalist tradition, entirely alien to the urban spirit of
Sarajevo, where we both grew up, and I frequently told him so. It got
to the point where we were likely to spiral into an argument whenever
we saw each other. I’d often insist, before getting wound up myself,
that we avoid “politics” and stick instead to soccer and movies,
but by the time the war started in Croatia, with news of atrocities
committed by the Serb Army, it was hard to stay away from it.

The last time we were together was in the fall of 1991, the war was
raging in Croatia. We argued for hours, in the course of which he
insisted that Radovan Karadzic—presently serving a 40-year sentence
for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—represented
the interests of the Serbian people, including Zoka. I remember most
clearly my considered response to him, conveyed by way of a
tonsil-burn scream: “Well then fuck you and fuck the people Karadzic
represents!”

In the spring of 1992, Zoka had left Sarajevo and his girlfriend to
join the Serb Army as a doctor (he was in medical school). She was of
Muslim background and was, shall we say, disinclined to follow him and
stayed in the city. Later, he’d say to one of our common friends
that “she chose her people.” I don’t know what happened to her,
but _her people_ remained under siege for more than a thousand days,
in the course of which more than 11,000 of _her people_, including
more than 1,000 children, were killed.

.

Nevertheless, even after I landed in Chicago in 1992, we exchanged a
few letters heavy with “politics.” Sometime in the summer of 1992,
which was incredibly bloody in Sarajevo, I wrote, in what would be my
final letter to Zoka, that Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist
president of Serbia and its Socialist Party, who would die in The
Hague awaiting trial for genocide and war crimes, was a _national
socialist_—in other words, a Nazi. In his response, Zoka fully
supported Milosevic, who for him also represented the interests of the
Serbian people, and wrote that “Hitler did many good things for
Germans.”

“I still feel guilty and ashamed of my cowardice and naïve belief
that if we only kept talking something might bring him back.”

In a kind of epiphany, I understood that the letter was written in a
language I no longer recognized, not least because he was using a
dialect and diction far closer to _Gorski vijenac_ than to our past
movie arguments. We were now so far apart that whatever I might say
could never reach him, let alone convert him back into what I’d
thought was the true and original version of my friend. I never
responded to his letter, nor would I ever see him again, but he wrote
a letter to my parents (who had been friends with his). There, he drew
a little map representing the siege of Gorazde, a town 60 miles from
Sarajevo where he was deployed, proudly explaining to them that the
Serbs did not care about the town as much as they wanted to capture
the nearby ammo factory. My mother, who’d implored me not to end my
friendship with Zoka for “politics,” wept over the letter, because
the Zoka she knew was absent from it. I read it too. It was written
not only by a stranger, but by an enemy.

My relationship with the war has always been marked by an intense
sense that I failed to see what was coming, even though everything I
needed to know was there, before my very eyes. While Zoka took active
part in enacting the ideas I’d argued against, my agency did not go
beyond putting light pressure on his fascist views by way of
screaming. I have felt guilty, in other words, for doing little, for
extending my dialogue with him (and a few other Serb nationalist
friends) for far too long, even while his positions—all of them easy
to trace back to base Serbian propaganda—were being actualized in a
criminal and bloody operation. I was blinded, I suppose, by our
friendship which had ended, I know now, well before our dialogue did.
For all that, I still feel guilty and ashamed of my cowardice and
naïve belief that if we only kept talking something might bring him
back. I retroactively recognized that his hate and racism were always
present and that there was no purpose or benefit to our continued
conversation. I had long been screaming into a human void.

*

I recalled my memories of Zoka earlier this fall, when it was
announced that Steve Bannon would headline _The_ _New
Yorker_ Festival and engage in an on-stage conversation with the
editor-in-chief David Remnick. I was so upset that I rushed to a
conclusion that Bannon’s fascism was, for _The New Yorker_, merely
a difference of opinion that could be publicly debated for the
intellectual enjoyment of its paying audience. Angrily, I envisioned
an intense but polite exchange, a staged confrontation that makes for
a good high-brow spectacle, with cheese, wine and further exchange of
ideas in the foyer afterwards. In my tweets, I imagined an afterparty
where Bannon would be mingling with edgy hedge fund managers, high-end
literati and risqué fashion photographers, where all the differences
in opinion would be temporarily subsumed in celebrity solidarity and
washed away with champagne.

I took it extremely personally, in other words, because I’d
published in _The New Yorker_ and participated in the Festival many
times. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of betrayal, since it appeared
to me that Bannon, the Great Thinker of White Nationalism who has
dedicated his life to destroying and subjugating people like my wife
(an African-American) and me (an immigrant) as well as our children,
families and friends, was welcome to a large tumbler of high-end
bourbon, after a stimulating debate on an America he deems endangered
by unruly people of color and immigrants. _The New York
Times_ reported that in his invitation to Bannon, Remnick wrote:
“We would be honored to have you.”

“Only those safe from fascism and its practices are likely to think
that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists.”

But within hours of the announcement, just as I was intensifying my
furious search for things to break, _The New Yorker_ disinvited
Bannon. Remnick issued a memo to the staff in which he explained his
reasons for wanting an interview with Bannon and acknowledged that a
public conversation was the wrong format for it. I found Remnick’s
reasoning to be comforting in its sincerity and belief in the truth of
journalism, even if I continued to think that an on-stage interview
would’ve inescapably and obviously had the shape of an exchange of
ideas. Indeed, a number of opinions were publicly expressed before
long, on Twitter and in the pages of the _NYT_, that banning Bannon
was stifling a necessary dialogue, that “we” have to engage with
the “other” side, whoever _we_ and _they_ might be. And
suddenly, Bannon was sparkling in the bright lights of the marketplace
of ideas (wherever that may be), and I was again grasping for things
to break.

The public discussion prompted by the (dis)invitation confirmed to me
that only those safe from fascism and its practices are  likely to
think that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists.
What for such a privileged group is a matter of a potentially
productive difference in opinion is, for many of us, a matter of basic
survival. The essential quality of fascism (and its attendant racism)
is that it kills people and destroys their lives—and it does so
because it openly aims so.

Witness Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance for
illegal immigration” policy. Fascism’s central idea, appearing in
a small repertoire of familiar guises, is that there are classes of
human beings who deserve diminishment and destruction because
they’re for some reason (genetic, cultural, whatever) inherently
inferior to “us.” Every fucking fascist, Bannon included, strives
to enact that idea, even if he (and it is usually a _he_—fascism is
a masculine ideology, and therefore inherently misogynist) bittercoats
it in a discourse of victimization and national self-defense. You
know: _they_ are contaminating our nation/race; _they_ are
destroying our culture; _we_ must do something about _them_ or
perish. At the end of such an ideological trajectory is always
genocide, as it was the case in Bosnia.

The effects and consequences of fascism, however, are not equally
distributed along that trajectory. Its ideas are enacted first and
foremost upon the bodies and lives of the people whose presence within
“our” national domain is prohibitive. In Bannon/Trump’s case,
that domain is nativist and white. Presently, their ideas are
inflicted upon people of color and immigrants, who do not experience
them as ideas but as violence. The practice of fascism supersedes its
ideas, which is why people affected and diminished by it are not all
that interested in a marketplace of ideas in which fascists have prime
purchasing power.

The error in Bannon’s headlining _The New Yorker_ Festival would
not have been in giving him a platform to spew his hateful rhetoric,
for he was as likely to convert anyone as he himself was to be shown
the light in conversation with Remnick. The catastrophic error
would’ve been in allowing him to divorce his ideas from the fascist
practices in which they’re actualized with brutality. If he is at
all relevant, it is not as a thinker, but as a (former) executive who
has worked to build the Trumpist edifice of power that cages children
and is dismantling mechanisms of democracy.

We must never forget, of course, that _The New Yorker_ has steadily
and relentlessly probed Trumpist malfeasance, publishing substantial,
unimpeachable stories about the administration’s unmaking of
America. In his memo, in fact, Remnick insisted that his intention was
to question unflinchingly these Bannonite practices. Nonetheless,
sharing the marquee with Zadie Smith or Haruki Murakami, Bannon the
Fascist would’ve been allowed to appear in the guise of an Idea Man.

To engage properly with Bannon and his ilk, the white nationalists and
supremacists presently populating and energizing the American
government, they must be identified as what they are: fascists. Much
of American media and press on this side of the Fox News darkness does
not dare to call out a fascist. That is partly out of knee-jerk
complicity with the culture of leadership and celebrity worship. But I
believe that it is also a matter of unbearable fear that the shape of
American society, and the practices it has long depended on to
maintain some semblance of democracy, are being destroyed, and no one
quite knows what to do about it, save hoping to be saved by Mueller
and/or impeachment.

If Bannon were to be called as he is, a fascist, the marketplace of
ideas would have to confront the fact that the American government is
being rapidly radicalized, that things unimaginable might be around
the corner, and that there are many tempting paths to full
collaboration. The idea that we’re all in this together and that we
must keep talking is dangerous, just as my commitment to friendship
was, because we might find ourselves wasting time and anger on a
fundamentally unbalanced dialogue, where one side is armed with ideas,
and the other is armed with weapons.

It is frightening to think we could be entering the civil war mode,
wherein none of the differences and disagreements can be hashed out in
discussion. It is quite possible that there is no resolution to the
present situation until one side is thoroughly destroyed as an
ideological power and political entity. If that is the case, the
inescapable struggle requires that anti-fascist forces clearly
identify the enemy and commit to defeating them, whoever they are,
whatever it takes. The time of conversations with fascists is over,
even if they might be your best friend from high school.

_[Aleksandar Hemon is the author of five books including The Book of
My Lives and The Lazarus Project. He is the recipient of a
Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the PEN/W.G. Sebald
Award.]_

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