ARE WE THERE YET?
Every iteration of that Nazi state will not come with a man and his toothbrush mustache, it will be a different unrecognizable beast. If you will only accept it when people are being taken to gas chambers and trains running to Auschwitz, then it’s a fool’s errand. You have to be deductive enough to see the signs, and the signs are here.
Some of us feel the impulse of outrage, some days it stays longer than others but more often than not it is murdered in order to carry on with the daily labors of life. Things keep happening around you, and even before you realize one thing piles on another and another and another while you keep thinking about what to get for dinner or sending your PowerPoint before that deadline. Sometimes in a raw moment usually during the weekends you feel the slow throbbing anger in your veins but in a week filled with 50 hours-worth of productivity, it feels more rational to drown that anger, self-care is important after all. You still need to pick what to eat for dinner. If you think totalitarianism would only be real when we can see it outside your windows, when a cop wearing an arm band with a weird sign stops you at check posts, when you have to report your daily activities to the local police stations, when the TV tells you it is here, we will never be able to identify it. For most of us, the English speakers of the state, our daily lives revolve around sedentary labor and material consumption and both these can largely go uninhibited under a totalitarian system.
Remember outrage only comes to those who have the time to ponder. Outrage more often than not is an emotion experienced by the helpless bystander for to those in the line of fire, outrage is a luxury, they’re busy with not dying, with court hearings designed to humiliate and prison nights for worse. Most of us if we are lucky will only get to outrage and be angry at things. To sit in an enclosed office space while our boss jokes about the identity of that other who may or may not be in the same space just living through that daily process of surrender. We will gulp and try and change the topic, perhaps make eye contact to tell that other that we understand but there is too much at stake even for us. Perhaps, things are not that bad, I mean if we stop reading news or social media and just focus solely on the nine to five and then on films and food and that new iPhone we can allow ourselves the privilege of ignorance, didn’t someone say it was bliss? Your siblings, and parents, uncles, and cousins will tell you that you are just being an alarmist. Nothing really has changed in your life or theirs and you still need to pick what to for dinner.
You feel like asking what is the threshold of being alarmed? Was there someone on the TV to tell people in Nazi Germany that things are officially bad now? Is there a moment, a specific type of event that signals that would tell us to finally be angry? You have felt fear before and in moments you still do but now it has also been normalized. You do not order that food item in public or you have found your guy who you sort of trust to deliver it to your doorstep so that no one knows, it is your personal life any way no one needs to know. You tell your friend who is in love with that other to not pursue it any further as it isn’t practical, you are just being a friend and we should all be cautious. And caution is just so ordinary, you were told through books, cinema, and history that when fascism arrives things will look bad not ordinary. No one told you that reading a certain book in a public place could cause ire you just do not want to risk it; you are just being practical. See, it is not yet fascism just the ordinary banality of life.
You and I are average people living an average existence but even we are not comfortable enough to voice all our political opinions in public, not open about eating certain things in public, proclaiming to loving someone (Hindu-Muslim for ex) openly, even to watch film or read certain books, to consume art or recite poetry in public, people unaccounted . Most of this is not because the regime has outright banned it, but it has ensured that neighbors can’t trust their neighbors and co-workers cannot trust each other. Nobody, no government has announced any bans, but it has created situations for it to exist on its own. The ultimate beneficiary of this lack of trust in each other is the supreme leader.
The public opinion was crystalized to a binary of for or against the nation, then it became for or against the religion and now it is for or against the party. The choice, broken down into a binary of us and them always ensures that people pick whatever the ‘us’ is.
What we have is the choice to pick a different brand of ketchup or car, the most privileged of us can consume to our hearts content but is that what it means to be democratic?
They do not need to kill you if they can make your existence worthless.
