Fascism Amnesia: A Failure of Witnessing

Conversations like the following were happening more frequently: “Where could we go? Where will they let us in and let us work? Is it safer to try someplace nearby or best to go farther away?” Or this: “Three generations of my family have lived in the same house in the same town. All of a sudden we are told to leave and walk out with a single suitcase.” (Story by Irene Fogel Weiss, (The Guardian 2015) as told to Kate Connolly)

Listen to this excerpt from The Atlantic, December 2022, by Gail Beckerman titled, “What It Feels Like When Fascism Starts.” She writes, “Among the many Holocaust anecdotes I heard again and again as a child […] none was more common than the tale of the brother who stayed and the brother who left. […] One brother couldn’t bear to abandon his small shop, parents or homeland, while another brother packed a suitcase at the first inkling of danger and set off […]. The more impetuous one lives. The takeaway: when the social and political barometric pressure begins to drop, when you can feel that tingling: Leave.”

Can you tell what year these are from? Is it the 1930s in Germany? Or is it 1970s in Argentina? Or 2017/2018s in the United States? I raise this because in many ways, in many places in the world, “we” have been here before, and we certainly know how things can turn out. Though I was born in the United States post-WWII, many historical residues flood me. I am aware of how endangered many are feeling, and there is a foreboding in me, barely contained, just beneath the surface.

Since 2020, early in the COVID pandemic, we have seen imploding racism, increased anti-Semitism, anti-Asian attacks, increasing weekly incidences of gun violence and mass killings (in the United States we have more guns owned than the number of people), the banning of books, the overturning of the legal right of women to choose to end a pregnancy, and hatred of immigrants. These are all examples of reemerging deeply oppressive forces and the ways that regimes of power exert control over minorities, their most vulnerable citizens.

Consider all of this with the push to restrict what can be taught to children; in Florida there are the anti-WOKE, Don’t Say Gay laws; in many states there are extreme abortion bans and violence toward transgender people, and in Texas, there is a move to remove any books in schools or libraries that make parents feel uncomfortable, such as books about slavery, critical race theory, or gender and sexual diversities. When you ban teaching history and attack the news, memory is foreclosed. Amnesia becomes instilled.

A New York Times article states that ex-President Trump plans, if restored to the presidency in 2024, to “centralize more power in the Oval Office” by “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government.” He and his cohort of advisers envision a “president” who cannot be checked by Congress or the courts. I don’t know which is more terrifying, the blatant plan to seize and centralize power or the public attestation Trump made that he would be a dictator on day one. Who are the many who would and do support this? And further, with the ongoing refusal to address the growing climate emergency, with instead a focus on power, not safety of our life on planet Earth, well, my terror is building.

Judith Herman (1997) coined the term “episodic amnesia” to describe how the field of psychology (and I would add psychoanalysis) briefly considers trauma and then looks away, episodically remembering and then forgetting completely. The events of the world over the past few years suggest a broader understanding of this amnesic process. I view it as a kind of refusal to allow memory that is filled with terror, with pain and great loss, into awareness. It is a negation of the anguished process that is necessary for true transformative healing to take hold. Empathy exhaustion ensues, and too often we all look away.

These moves toward fascism suggest a further disavowal of how far from a humane world we have moved, a kind of amnesia surrounding the trauma history in the United States and the world. The currents I am pointing to of hatred and violence with suppression of diverse points of view or historical facts are, I believe, the reawakening of a fascism that never went away. The dissemination of what was once considered fascistic propaganda has now found the light of day in the term “alternative facts,” or real news being called fake news, with conspiracy theories having enormous currency. How do we awaken ourselves from the amnesic response to the traumatized burden of history? How do we live with a sense of terror and yet mobilize?

Disappeared memory and history erased remain fascism’s best weapon. In the world as it exists, the protofascist leader purports omnipotence, forcing helplessness and weakness into the minority group to be victimized. Which part of the split would any of us need to inhabit to stay sane in this kind of world? This simultaneous diffusing of victim/perpetrator processes into the collective rests upon a failure of witnessing, an aborted mourning process of the atrocities of prior generations. Now, you may respond that this is categorically wrong; look at the Holocaust testimony projects that Dori Laub and others created, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, or the Genocide Studies graduate program at Yale, which takes testimonies from Rwanda, Cambodia, and elsewhere in the world, or the vast data from the legacies of the World Wars. And now the war in Ukraine, where they are fighting on some of the same battlefields as WWII with Putin’s propaganda saying they are purging more Nazis while the Ukrainians are relentlessly fighting for their lives and freedom. And the fighting in Israel and Gaza, where misinformation and propaganda abound. We must ask, how did the cry of “never again” become “yet again”?

Fascistic leaders opportunistically capitalize on our internal unsettledness, our unexpressed grievances, losses, and longings. While the witnessing we have accomplished has been very important, have we gone far enough? Or have we failed to witness fully the evil and destruction and meet it with profound grief and with what Watkins (2018) coined “deserved shame”? Can we respond to our shame and be more moved toward reparative social justice? Has it remained too much on the surface? Where are our communal obligation to each other and the recognition of how inexorably linked our lives are now and to prior and future generations?

I want to offer an example of what a deeper and fuller witnessing has been. During the Argentinian state terror unleashed during the dictatorship years, in 1977 a group of grieving women were trying to find the whereabouts of their arrested daughters and their babies, some of whom gave birth in captivity. In writing about the effects of Argentinian social and political life on psychoanalysis, Volnovich (2017) writes: “Just as Argentines were scarred forever by state terror, so were we all shaken by the presence of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo). They opened a space, a gap, a crevice through which the ability to think could flow. They put a desire, a boundary opposite to overwhelming totalitarian power.”

This is taken from the Abuelas’ website: “These children are the children of our children, who have also disappeared… We, the babies’ grandmothers, tried desperately to locate them. Thus, in 1977, the NGO called Abuelas [Grandmothers] de Plaza de Mayo was established, dedicated specifically to fighting for the return of our grandchildren. [We] push for investigating our children’s and grandchildren’s disappearances, in hopes of finding them.”

Their relentless search embodies an impossible feat: mourning a loss that is not confirmed but felt in the silence. The Abuelas insisted a crime—kidnapping and possible death—had occurred, and they held on to memory despite loss. In 2017 I had the opportunity to go to the Plaza de Mayo on a Thursday when the Abuelas and others who joined them demonstrated. They march with pictures of their children and loved ones. In their continuing insistence they chant and sing, “We will not forget you.”

Their persistence over these many years has been remarkable. Not just because it started during the military takeover and threatened their own lives, not just because they sought out every legal avenue they could and when thwarted went to the international level, not just because with the technology of science and gene mapping, they could now find matches from their DNA to their grandchildren, and not just because they have reunited over 120 grandchildren with their biological families. In their insistence on the longevity of memory and mourning, they were standing up to the autocratic military regime that refused accountability for its crimes.

Witnessing needs to be in the service of defying and refusing fascistic amnesia. Every episode of mass violence is enabled by willful obliviousness and collective denial. Actions can derive from love or from hate, from reparative wishes or destructive ones. The urgency of restoring attachment and repairing damaging ruptures is crucial. In the aftermath of atrocity, cultures rarely offer survivors a reflective, recognizing container for their Big History trauma. Without working through processes for the social, political, racialized, or sexualized traumas that entail fully remembering with recognition, we cannot expect fascism to remain in the past.