There is the argument that we shouldn’t talk about right wing politics, but scum always rises and there are always awful things hidden under rocks. The danger with forcing fascism out is the danger of forcing it underground onto another layer of the web, hidden deep, running malevolent, waiting to rise. We saw that in New Zealand a few weeks ago, how ignorance, how anger and hatred can fuel barbaric acts that chip away at our humanity. I am not here to understand why that person did what he did to those people who went to pray. I just know that it was wrong with every fibre of my being and that it worried me, made me cry for the waste of life, of children and adults whose humour, love and own demons have been wiped from the world. There is no excuse. There is only evil at the heart of such acts. There is only ignorance in the people that do it. There is only flint where there should be a soul or heart. We forget as history pulls away from us that we fought at every step in the twentieth century to keep fascism in its box, to shoot it, to stamp on it, to lampoon it, to go to war against it. Millions died because of the ego of a few. It defined my childhood, only two generations away from Hitler, only a hand hold away from the men and women who lived in fear of Nazis and Black Shirts. It wasn’t talked about. We’d won. We didn’t have to revisit the horrors but I was drawn like a moth to a flame, tried to make sense of it, of the iconography, of the ideas, of the machine. Fascism is born of the machine age, defined and given power by it. It is a product of the Industrial Revolution. It is the ultimate human eating machine. We are just fodder for it. There is no love in the machine. My fear as I look at the world today, look at how things move and circle, repeat from times long gone, that we are circling the maw of the machine again. Looking at Capitalism, looking at Fascism, I see replications, imagery, metaphors that reveal their similarities. It is not such a great leap from the death throes of Capitalism to the insular view of a Fascist. Great businesses. Great country. Great people. Through power. Through strength. Through work. It will set you free. Chilling to think in those terms when CEOs of multi-nationals state that no water is free, and echo a phrase found above the gates of Auschwitz. The simple truth is that there are too many of us swirling around the mouth of the machine. Too many, so few resources. Such a hunger for black or white rather than shades of humanity. It is not surprising that as I write my water men, a fascist group in a growing fascist England, that I think of Mosley and his black shirts. Mosley once said, ‘The Press will not be free to tell lies’ and in those words we hear another, someone else who turns to the press and calls it ‘Fake news’. History repeats and whilst we live in a binary world, where we only see male and female, where one gender diminishes another, then we will fail to break the cycle, fail to embrace our humanity and become the playthings of those that seek to destroy and build the world in their own image. That is why when writing my climate change work, I cannot peel away the growing fear that right wing groups will use it to their own ends.
You can follow me here each Wednesday through the #clifimadness project which chronicles my research into climate change and how addressing it in fiction, the novel form, may be the answer to reaching a wider audience. I will chronicle my everyday ramblings on twitter and Facebook, please sign up for info there.
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 