The Beauty of Anti-Fascists Recognizing Fascists in the Mirror
Some people fail to see their own irony.
A few of them attended the premiere of Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists in Bochum, Germany, last Saturday.
The play’s theme centers around a Portuguese family’s ritualistic annual murder of a fascist. If the spectre of fascism really hung over the West, then certainly one would expect the audience disruption — in Germany, no less — to come from neo-Brown Shirts. These creatures, however, more densely populate the imaginations of those behind Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists than they do our actual world.
Instead, audience members suffering from the ideological hallucination that fascism threatens a global takeover saw the actor who played the character of the sacrificial fascist as an actual fascist and attacked him as he delivered a monologue.
It started with attempts to shout down the actor, then somebody threw an orange at him, and, finally, a few people rushed the stage to attack.
“I was astonished by the stupidity, really,” Mateja Koležnik, the show’s director, reacted. “I never, ever thought — nobody did — that somebody from the audience would jump on stage and try to hit the actor. I would expect this from the people we are voting against, but not from the people who should be on our side.”
The event generally evoked Lawrence Levine’s wonderful book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Therein, Levine explores audience passivity as a marker of highbrow performances and audience participation as a marker of lowbrow performances. Singing along, dancing, and, in extreme cases, heckling, pelting with foodstuffs, and fighting on-stage villains — all vehicles of audience catharsis — characterized the entertainment for the everyman.
In a more specific sense, the event evoked Levine’s discussion of Richard III, the most popular William Shakespeare play in 19th-century America. At a performance in 1856, The Sacramento Daily Union reported that, following Richard’s murder of Henry, “Cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wreath of vegetables, a sack of flour and one of soot, and a dead goose, with other articles, simultaneously fell upon the stage.”
Ultimately, both dead Henry and alive Richard, “his head enveloped in a halo of vegetable glory,” hastily exited the stage. This and other examples shared in Highbrow/Lowbrow illustrate that audiences in primitive times sometimes could not distinguish between fantasy and reality.
Do we live in primitive times?
We certainly live in delusional ones. Like Richard III, which depicts the last English king to die in battle falsely as a murderer of small children, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists comes across as a work of propaganda, even though its plot contains a few more subtleties than the brutes who rushed one of its players.
Neither Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar nor his followers were fascists. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, Leon Trotsky, and others who opposed Stalinism, they received this designation by Soviet Communists and their agents.
Fascism is a taunt disguised as a stable political classification. It basically means: I hate you.
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, the original fascist, owed his four names to men of the left. Mussolini served as the editor of the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party. The term “fascist” is similarly derived not from anything to do with individualism but from a Latin word for “bundle” that in its verb form meant “to bind.” In power, the fascists implemented a new deal for Italy, later imitated in America. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch put it in Three New Deals: Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939, a “synchronicity” existed between the vast public works projects of the Nazis, New Dealers, and fascists.
Fascism is a taunt disguised as a stable political classification. It basically means: I hate you. In this sense, it has become one of those unique words that tell us much about the person who says it and very little about the person to whom the label affixes. (RELATED: ‘Fascist’ Is the Dumbest Political Insult in the World Today)
“Fascist,” similar to “abracadabra” and “alakazam,” acts as a magic word. It disappears the humanity of those in political disagreement and the stain from anyone who decides to harm them. It allows its user to deploy it without reference to what it really means. Indeed, so many who charge others as fascists better fit the label. The word is a permission slip to murder, as the assassination of Charlie Kirk last September gruesomely proved. (RELATED: Fascism for Dummies)
Predicating a play on the idea that Salazar was a fascist is about as stupid as basing a play on the idea that Michael Dukakis was a communist. Yes, Salazar was not a civil libertarian, and Dukakis boasted of an ACLU membership. But the former does not make one a fascist and the latter does not make one a communist. Grasping historical fact from the rhetorical fictions that so often muck them up allows anyone with a brain to understand the play’s idiotic premise.
Theatregoers mistaking what politically flatters for profundity predictably exhibit a greater predilection for mistaking onstage fantasy for reality. This happened in Germany a week ago. Some people were surprised.
“What an embarrassment!” critic Martin Krumbholz wrote after witnessing the spectacle. “Parts of the Bochum audience, which one would almost have thought to be one of the most theatre-savvy in the republic, are apparently too stupid, one has to put it bluntly, to distinguish between fiction and reality; in doing so, they reveal the stupendous self-righteousness of a milieu that considers its own opinion to be beyond reproach from the outset.”
Before the audience confused fiction and reality, the play’s creators did. Stupid and self-righteous ideas attract stupid and self-righteous people. The history of the left, from Robespierre at the guillotine through that ice ax in Trotsky’s skull, is a history of Dr. Frankensteins staring at the monsters they had created. In microcosm, this history repeated itself in Bochum.
Will the real fascists please stand up? They did in a theatre in Germany — and rushed the stage, too.
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