“Every time has their own fascism.”
Primo Levi, (1919-1987), Italian Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust.
Ninth May 1945. We could describe as a symbolically as the day when the Nazi flags were passed before allied boots in the District Berlin. That day is carved in the collective memory of Europe as a moment of the final victory of civilization over the barbarism, reason over the myth of blood and soil (Blut und Boden).
This Friday European officials will take wreaths and express regret because of “past wars”, probably mentioned Ukraine, and forget Gaza. However, maybe we should look around and ask if Fascism has really been defeated or just commented, learned new languages, describing myself with the new terminology, and infiltrated the institutions that should prevent him.
Celebrates rites
The paradox of our time is that 9. May is increasingly becoming a ceremony. We mark the end of one fascism, while we are not watching how others, under different names, but with identical nature, infiltrates into the cracks of our democracies. The difference is only in aesthetics. No more raised hands, but there are raised walls and fences with barbed wire.
No more crystalline night, but there are nights in which migrants are choked in trucks or Dave on the banks of Europe, and children and other innocent civilians kill and starve in Gaza and Ukraine. At the same time, national televisions across Europe and the world broadcast reality programs on culinary skills.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, memory of 9. May acts as a historic irony.
For example, in the entity that proclaimed 9. January, the day, and the implementation of genocide that will culminate in Srebrenica, as its own birthday, is grotesque to be the 9th. May treats as a holiday. The ruling structure there is no marking victory over fascism – it denies genocide. The President of the Entity is celebrating war criminals as “founders of the nation”, and schools teach children that in Srebrenica is not committed genocide, but a “political construct”. It is an institutionalized denial, real systemic cynicism.
We cannot say that Milorad Dodik or someone from the RS leadership Hitler. But Neither Hitler started as a Hitler we know. He began with the words, symbols, legal derogations, emotional mobilization of the majority against a minority. The same works in the Republika Srpska – constructs Bosniaks as an existential threat, makes fun of their faith, invites them to return to Christianity, sabotages their linguistic and political equality. And all this under the auspices of a system that is formally democratic.
Fascism, as warns Madeleine Albright, which was just denoting Dodik as a “fresh breeze” on BiH. The political scene does not come on tanks more. He now comes in the elections, under the auspices of the parties that verbally deny a relationship with that ideology, but is implemented in practice.
Political leaders of such parties have learned how to reverse the moral architecture of the liberal order. They do not say that fascists are, but claim to defend the people. They do not deny the right of others to exist, but only claim that they are “threats”. They learned that, in the time of social platforms, the most efficient propaganda is not the one that expands one truth, but the one who kills faith in the possibility of truth.
Our silence as support
Gaza is today one of the places where a lie is also revealed about “never more,” sentenced after victory over fascism. Where a collective penalty is applied, where people are denied electricity, water, movement, education, where schools are bombed, hospitals and refugee camps, there is not too much philosophy to recognize the form.
Dehumanization, insulation, destruction, the same matrix is applied, only on another geographical width.
In Russia, 9. May was turned into a political liturgy of the national victim and victory, from which the war cult that destroys Ukraine today. The Russian president uses an anti-fascist narrative to justify his own imperialism. “Denacification” becomes euphemism for crimes against humanity and international law.
In Central Europe, fascism comes under the auspices of “non-indignant democracy”. Proponents of iliberal democracies supported by Putin, while challenging the universality of human rights, represent a new type of “fascism”, one that does not recognize that fascism has ever existed. Instead, it offers “Christian Europe”, cleaned from liberalism, migrants and multiculturalism. Europe, under the leadership of “Iliberal Democrats”, would not win Hitler, but would, perhaps, invited him to a conference.
Today, the fight is no longer running only against the tyrant with brčići. Today, it is conducted against algorithms that serve us hatred in the name of engagement. Against schools equal to the truth and opinion. Against politicians who relativize the Holocaust because “history is not black and white.” Against journalists who are silent when monuments of war criminals are raised because they do not want “polarization.”
And the polarization is what fascism desires. Fascism does not feed on conflicts, but produce them. He does not only stronger on hatred than the indifference of us, citizens. And that’s why enemies 9. May today are not just new führeri but also tired citizens who are convinced that politics is no longer their job. Fascism does not need our support. Our silence is enough for him.
Therefore, 9. May is not a day for wreaths and slogans. It’s a day to ask unpleasant questions: How is it possible that those who won fascism today help or observe its new versions indifferently? How does the EU assign a candidate status to the state whose president leads the policy inspired by the “Russian world”? How do Bosniak returnees in the RS today live under the same rhetoric that led to the war?
Maybe it’s time for 9. May stop celebrating and start taking him seriously. Because, if the history of us learned us, then that is that fascism does not die. He is just transformed and waiting for us, behind the law, behind the screen, behind social networks.
In a time in which memory becomes selectively, and the truth is relative, perhaps the greatest act of resistance to remember – right. And we speak – clearly. Because fascism does not tolerate either.
(Vijesti.ba)
