NAZIS FROM SPACE!

As if things weren’t bad enough in our embattled world. What with people in the USA fighting for civil rights [still!] and enduring daily altercations with militarized police forces and others in a country that houses a prison-industrial complex that, amongst other things, cages children and engages in forced hysterectomies in ICE detention centres, Chinese victimization of the Uighur people which reportedly includes “re-education camps”, the ongoing apartheid in Palestine where one of the most militarized states in the world continues to wage war against the Palestinian people, and an ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic which is being dealt with, worldwide, with disparate and unequal concern and effectiveness with hope ultimately being placed in vaccines sold to the highest bidder by rapacious pharmaceutical companies, it would, perhaps, be very 2020 to conclude the year with the news that our planet has been invaded by Nazis from space. [Although, of course, it seems that we already have far too many of our own in any case.]

Yet the Nazis from space that my title refers to are not real ones but fictional ones, fictional ones, in fact, from the 1983 TV miniseries V [V: The Original Miniseries for the purposes of distinguishing it from its 1984 follow up miniseries, V: The Final Battle, the 1984-85 TV series and the 2009 reboot]. This original miniseries should be set apart from its later follow ups for while they become increasingly based in science fiction and action [and become increasingly stupid as a result] the original two part miniseries is based on an allegory and ideas. It was in fact inspired by a 1935 book by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Sinclair Lewis, called It Can’t Happen Here, the story of a demagogue elected US President in 1936 who is described as “fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and ‘traditional’ values.” Once elected, this president “takes complete control of the government and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force”. Readers should not be surprised to learn that the president depicted in this book has drawn comparison with President Trump and the point of the book, of course, and in contravention of its title, is that the fascism it describes can always happen here because it doesn’t take much to tip over into a fascist situation.

But back to our Nazis from space for there is, I believe, several things we can learn from this fiction and that we need to pay attention to in our current lives in the contemporary world. The original, two-part miniseries V is the story of benevolent, humanoid aliens who come to Earth in stereotypical, “flying saucer” spaceships in search of various chemicals and minerals their civilisation has run out of. In return for the humans of Earth helping them out, these aliens are more than willing to share helpful technology with us as one would expect people capable of interstellar travel to possess. Initiating a first meeting with the head of the United Nations in New York, the aliens soon ingratiate themselves with the political leaders of the world but it is precisely then that more disturbing things start to happen. For example, scientists, those who naturally might have an enthusiastic interest in aliens from outer space, become an increasing target for public and media hate, both an enemy for the aliens to be wary of but also a scapegoat for the watching humans to blame. Various propaganda materials, which regard the aliens as “friends” and depict them in amicable poses with human beings, begin appearing. The aliens, termed “Visitors” in the show, deploy vast numbers of military forces in the various human communities depicted to facilitate their needs unmolested. A human spokeswoman is appointed by the Visitors so that the people of Earth may be addressed by one of their own and also, one suspects, so that the aliens can avoid interrogation by human beings directly. 

Soon enough, of course, we learn that the aliens are not all they appear to be. An investigative TV journalist, Mike Donovan, manages to sneak aboard one of the aliens’ 50 motherships hovering above various cities and discovers that the aliens have a terrible secret. They are not humanoid at all but carnivorous reptilians that eat live food such as mice or small birds - or even human beings. Their eventual plan is to steal all our water and harvest most of humanity as food. Being an investigative reporter, Donovan has a camera with him and films the alien commander eating a live guinea pig. Returning to ground, he goes to a TV studio and is about to broadcast the tape live when the broadcast is taken over by the Visitors who have now taken control of all media. In the meantime, the Visitors have instituted a “Visitor Youth” movement for young people aged 12-20 and we see one of the characters, Daniel Bernstein, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, enthusiastically joining up to this movement the members of which are actively encouraged to inform on the people of their neighbourhoods. Daniel is given a military type uniform and a laser weapon to help him perform his duties. Increasingly, we see Visitors, or their new human allies, on street corners or in public generally and those who speak against the aliens are vilified, persecuted or “disappeared” as a result. In addition, scientists begin coming forward and admitting to conspiring against the Visitors although it is noticed that, in some cases, they seem now to be right-handed where once they were left-handed and there are other dissonant things about such people as well. It transpires that the aliens have a “conversion process” by which the aliens can make processed human beings become utterly compliant to their wishes and make them say what they want. Soon enough, however, as the increased alien presence becomes more and more authoritarian, a resistance movement is begun even whilst others, including Mike Donovan’s own mother, become willing collaborators with the new alien overlords, overlords that the former civilian authorities willingly cooperate with as just someone else to take orders from. [At this point it strikes me that all the Visitors seem to have been depicted as white - although I don’t know if this was deliberate or not.]

Anyway, you get the idea, I hope, from this brief overview. V is a particularly blunt allegory of the Nazism of 1933-1945 but one in which such Nazism has come to especially the USA [the programme was American-made, after all, and was set in Los Angeles] in ways more unbelievable in the 1980s than it would be in a Trumpian context of protestors being snatched from the streets, Proud Boys’ militia roaming armed around city centres with implicit police approval and presidents using their social media presence and public appearances to vilify the press, political opponents and critics alike as traitors, potential targets for harassment and worse. And that’s before we get into the targeted disinformation campaigns and voter suppression efforts that modern technology and social interaction enables but which 1980s TV producers could not have dreamed of. Nevertheless, many of the obvious factors in a popular fascism are scarily present even in a saccharin TV miniseries presented to appeal to a family audience in the spring of 1983. We see how the fascists ingratiate themselves with the leaders before taking power themselves, how they seek to control all media, so controlling what people are told, how they vilify and arrest their perceived enemies and remove those most likely to expose them, how they perpetrate atrocities against their enemies and dehumanise them, how they encourage collaboration and propagandise their presence and intent. Does this sound very much like YOUR government in YOUR country, I wonder? 

Yet why would a slightly hokey US miniseries almost 40 years old interest me so? It is because I am an anarchist and, being an anarchist, I am, of course, extremely anti-authoritarian - and fascism is essentially a kind of popular authoritarianism. But it is not necessarily a consistent, well thought out, intelligent authoritarianism as the Italian philosopher and novelist, Umberto Eco, reminded us in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” [“Eternal Fascism”]. There, amongst 14 typical features of fascism, Eco records we find:

*A cult of tradition

*Rejection of modern thinking and the experts of the day

*Acting without thinking, thinking being regarded as suspect

*Any disagreement being regarded as treason

*A fear of any difference - making fascism racist by definition

*Concentration on social frustrations [which might need someone to blame for them]

*Obsession with plots and being under threat from enemies

*Inconsistency on whether the chosen enemies are strong or weak

*Refusal to take sides is seen as siding with the enemy

*An utter contempt for the weak in an elitism of the strong

*A cult of the hero where heroic death is also eulogised

*Obsession with machismo and weaponry which devalues both women and diverse genders and sexualities

*A fixation with the fiction of “the will of the People” or “the people’s Voice” which the fascists claim to be the authoritative interpreters of

*Fascists developing their own simplified form of language, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four where Orwell calls such a thing “Newspeak”. 

As I regard my readers as intelligent people in their own right I am sure you are able to see some, or even several, of these features active in various governments around the world today. In many cases these are governments which deign to allow their populations to vote once every four or five years in elections which these same political actors also can’t quite stop trying to rig, affect or otherwise gerrymander. At the same time, traditional and social media are being utilised to blast political messaging into the consciousnesses of people far and wide. As an anarchist, I don’t know what this is but it isn’t democracy for it is never democracy if you are being told what to think, if people are being cheated out of their vote or if your media are 24/7 propaganda messaging conduits so far divorced from truth or reality that they are essentially free-form fiction being marketed as the truth. I had cause to remark earlier in this essay that the people of 1983 would have found it hard to imagine fascism in the USA. They would find it much easier today - and not only in the USA.

For today we find ourselves living in an increasingly authoritarian, fascist world and it doesn’t matter whether you talk about the USA, Russia, China, the UK, Brazil, Israel, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia or any number of other disparate countries with quite different political histories and traditions. Politicians worldwide seem to have decided that what they love is having authority and keeping the people generally under control in order to service their own political wills which they denominate the will of the people. Those of us on the political left are sometimes prey to this political temptation as well, mistakenly thinking that control, even a benevolent control, is the answer. But it isn’t and servicing a political agenda, one, today, often coerced by capitalist actors who worship exploitation of resources as the result of wealth and power, is always an authoritarian move which curtails freedom and denies liberty equally to all. Indeed, in much the same way as various collaborators in V put their companies at the service of the Visitors so that they might profit from their authoritarianism, we see exactly the same thing happening in our own, much more real and consequential world. What these various capitalists and people with authoritarian ideologies have in common is a desire to exploit and control and what destroys them is always genuine democracy - which is why fighting for real democracy is something the opponents of authoritarianism and fascism must always do. 

Thus, it is no surprise that even in countries that do have so-called democratic elections, in places that disingenuously bleat on about their love of democracy, we find scandals emerging from behind the scenes about ways the same people who have claimed to love democracy have tried to cheat it. It is equally unsurprising that shadowy figures have been revealed to be operating out of the limelight, putting their fortunes at the disposal of both political parties and political campaigns determined to dupe the gullible and control both trade and politics by putting them into the hands of the blessed few. Recently, in both the USA and the UK, apparent threats to such an agenda arose in the forms of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn but both were swiftly attacked on all sides - not least by members of their own parties more beholden to the agendas of authoritarianism and capital - and were despatched, once more, to the bubbles from which they had emerged. Such people the authoritarian-controlled and influenced cast as cranks, people out to take away what’s rightfully yours, and, funnily enough, authoritarians who want to impose “socialism” on you. It is, of course, propaganda. But when you control the vast majority of the media its very hard to hear someone tell you anything else and, even if by osmosis, you can be sure that certain numbers of people will come to believe it.

This is just one reason why democracy should be the chosen weapon used to defeat both authoritarianism, our political enemy of the day, and capitalism, its economic counterpart. By “democracy” I don’t necessarily mean voting for democracy is simply the factually expressed will of the people and that can be expressed at any time - for example, by protesting, by organising strikes, or by organising boycotts. All of these are democratic actions for we should not allow the very idea of democracy to be controlled by the few who, paradoxically, even want to define what “democratic” is - to their own benefit, of course. Democracy is the voice and action of real people being heard and not simply this as it is expressed through processes denominated as such. Democracy is the constant ability to “speak truth to power” and to act in pursuance of freedom for yourself and others. In this sense, fighting for such democracy and freedom is always a matter of resistance against those who would wish to exploit and control you whether these be commercial or political actors. It is a fascist impulse to want to control and to claim to speak for some fictional mass of the people. It is a democratic impulse that is expressed when people take action or speak out from the authentic experience of their own lives and ask to be heard.

As an anarchist, of course, I do not believe in any leaders or authorities and insist on my own democratic responsibility for my own life at all times. I believe in the purest democracy there is which is the uncoerced agreement of equally free people who are then at liberty to speak for themselves, make their own choices and, in mutual cooperation with others, make their own community arrangements for how they shall live. I do a lot of thinking about this for it is not, and can never be, just some utopian idea. Anarchism expresses itself as a genuine, workable, practical means of living for human beings in the real world and so anarchists everywhere must at least try to think of ways in which it can actually be lived at the same time as they employ strategies to frustrate and destroy the authoritarian capitalism we see all around us in the contemporary world which chains up and controls others. The answers, for anyone on the political left and not just anarchists, are always going to be practical. It is about doing and not just talking for it is only actions that change circumstances. So, with that said, let me close this short essay with a few suggestions in regard to things we can do right here, right now to change an authoritarian situation into a democratic one:

*Talk to friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances about your political situation

*Identify people who share social values of human solidarity and mutual aid

*Build networks with others that offer support to the vulnerable and needy

*Find ways to subvert the ongoing forms of power in your community or workplace

*Think, with others, about ways you can form your own, self-sufficient communities 

*Detach yourselves from corporate systems of provision and media so you are not reliant upon them

*Remember that together we are stronger but alone we can be picked off one by one

*Educate others about the importance of real democracy and how both capitalism and authoritarianism try to destroy it

*Train yourself to be aware of what is going on in your society and become more ready and wiling to respond to it

Taken together, these things might not stop Nazis from space but they are at least a start in working for freedom against the interests of those who would just see us as people to exploit or things to control and consume. In the end, resisting fascism, authoritarianism and capitalism is up to those who would work to oppose them and who are prepared to speak out and act for themselves and others. Without such democratic and socially libertarian voices its a free home run for those who want to exploit and control. So it is always a matter of active resistance and of those with a will to resist.