My Inner Nazi

Editor’s Note: Hi everyone. It is my great honor to share more word work from my friend and neighbor, Lynne McFarland. First, there was “Let’s Break Free,” then there was “Interaction.” And then“The Other Side Of Rage.” And then, just the other day, “Fugitivity and Nonviolence.” I now place before you a piece called “My Inner Nazi.” When I mull that title, a couple of items come to mind. One is a line from our beloved Bruce Cockburn: “Fascist Architecture of my own design.” You can hear his amazing song here. I believe it accompanies the reading well. I also think of this from Parker Palmer: "If the end of tension is what you want, fascism is the thing for you." I hope all of this alongside Lynne’s words will comfort and challenge you as it comforts and challenges me.

I just spent a week with some friends in a workshop that examined authoritarianism and democracy, especially as it appears here in America. An excellent part of this workshop was a lecture series on the structure of fascism presented by Yale philosopher Dr. Jason Stanley, in which he named the beliefs that underlie fascism, the methods used to introduce a fascist structure into a society, and the terrible world that results from a fascist success story.

The workshop was attended mostly by young Black students and scholars, for whom this story was familiar. The first night of the workshop we were privileged to hear in person Dr. Bernard Lafayette, the nonviolent leader who took on Dr. King’s charge to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolent work.

Dr. Lafayette told the story of intervening in a Nigerian tribal conflict through introducing nonviolent principles back in the day (he has worked around the world, and he celebrated his 84th birthday at our conference last week). Because some of the attendees of his nonviolent classes in Nigeria did not know how to read, they learned the principles from other members of the group who sang the lessons to them!

“Music!” Dr. Lafayette said. I loved that.

And right on the heels of this intense week of study, I dug back in to reading the nonviolence literature, My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence by Dr. King, and re-reading his arguments for why he was against authoritarianism (which are in a book of sermons called Strength to Love).

There is no doubt in my poor, overwhelmed mind that we are in a struggle now between authoritarianism and democracy in our country and that we can say the two end points of that struggle are fascism or Beloved Community.

There are different versions of fascism, but we probably know best about the racist, supremacist, colonial versions of which there have been many examples in our modern world.

One group gets to be in charge. One group sees themselves as better than the other groups, which are only good for labor or not any good at all. The Dear Leader myth, the Great Man myth, the rigidification of gender roles, the glorification of a past that never existed, the trashing of scholarly work, the misuse of law to trample the powerless, the demonization of the Other. Ah yes, we’ve seen it all.

There is lots of projection in fascism. The Other carries all the negatives and the Chosen Group (Aryan in Nazi Germany for example) gets all the positives. You are ignorant, simple, evil, devious, unworthy. I am noble, smart, good, pure, and worthy.

We have visions of the Beloved Community on the other hand, based on the inherent worth and dignity of all persons, the power of Love in the universe, and the ability to see that each individual has an inner life that can enrich the world we share together. All of us have potential for being both good and bad. (In the words of Will Campbell, “We are bastards but God loves us anyway.”)

It’s like fascism and Beloved Community are opposites, right?

I want to be on that Beloved Community end of the spectrum.

But oh no, I have an Inner Nazi. In my own self.

Every once in a while, I get a glimpse of it. But I usually don’t see it directly. Usually I only see it when I have a surge of hateful judgy superiority toward somebody (it could be almost anyone) just out of the blue. That Other person is, say, unreliable, or taking advantage of others, or Something. I feel that surge of judgment strongly. I am way better than that person.

And then, lo and behold, I see that the other person is a Mirror. A Mirror. That’s the Me that I don’t want to acknowledge. The Inner Nazi collapses like a deflated balloon and I’m back to being –well, myself—good enough, just like you are. And in need of continuing the work.

This is a basic principle of Dr. King’s nonviolence: “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

An authoritarian system divides and excludes; democracy unites and includes. Democracy is a deeper recognition of the structure of reality. Describing his own path of spiritual growth, Dr. King said he could not fathom how to bring together the good and evil aspects of us humans until he realized the power of love. That’s what it takes, and that is at the core of nonviolence. More than that, love is the deepest truth of reality, according to King (and according to Gandhi as well).

I am still trying to pull together all the threads I gathered this past week. But I expect to have a sturdy fabric when it’s done.