On Justice and Hatred

I had an online discussion at Dawg's Blawg about the primary theme of Tarantino's newest film, The Hateful Eight, and it got a bit too provocative to manage a sincere response in the window of a comment, so I brought it here. Unfortunately I can't discuss the ideas without spoiling the film, so do see it first before continuing to read. This is a movie you won't want spoiled.

The film traps ten characters in a cabin in the middle of a blizzard: two bounty hunters, a prisoner, a Sheriff, a General, four disguised gang members out to free the prisoner (one in hiding), and the coach driver. The coach driver, O.B., clearly doesn't count in the hateful eight, but it's debatable which miscreant is excluded from the tally. The movie poster above suggests the hidden outlaw doesn't rate regardless his acts of violence, but John Ruth is the only one that doesn't actually shoot anyone.

First of all, a few things stood out to me as I watched. The film celebrates ruggedness and tenacity. Daisy, the prisoner, garners our respect for being able to take a punch with a wicked little smile. She is one tough cookie. The bounty hunters argue over the merits of John Ruth's insistence on taking prisoners in alive for the hangman as opposed to Major Warren's refusal to work harder than necessary for the same pay. I'm not convinced Ruth is more moral, but that he better enjoys the game of bringing his work to its final conclusion, perhaps of toying with his prey. But this lengthy discussion serves to open the question of the right way to complete a despicable act such as watching a woman die, which, I'd argue, primes the audience to consider the type of morality necessary within a sphere of the kind of harsh reality expected of this setting. This is key.

O.B. is the only soft character in the bunch. He can barely tolerate the cold much less any violence. He's the designated "bitch" of the group, sent on errands he barely manages. One outlaw kindly offers him food, but a little later another poisons him. His softness warrants him no favours.

The film also celebrates cunning. The Sheriff is on to Warren and outs his Lincoln-letter ruse to the cabin, but later he commends the little touches included in the piece of writing. There are all sorts of cleverness and sneaky goings-on here.

Also notable to me was the spotlight cast on the many documents of import: the Lincoln-letter, the bounty hunters' respective warrants, and the faux hangman's order of execution. These acted as proof of the acceptable boundaries of their brutal behaviours and the respect duly afforded to them.

There were curious little loyalties among the group, spoken or unspoken contracts. The outlaws were tight and purposeful. The General was keeping their secret on a promise of being released at the end. The two bounty hunters made a deal to watch over either other's bounty. And Ruth and Daisy, although the most brutal relationship, show a camaraderie from time to time, like when he genially offered her a shot of whiskey and drinks with her.

One of the gang members, Oswaldo, playing the part of a licensed hangman, gave a speech about the necessity of cool heads in the pursuit of justice. He argues that the hangman's impartiality is what makes a hanging moral: "The good part about frontier justice is it’s very thirst-quenching. The bad part is, it’s apt to be wrong as right." It's the dispassionate act of killing that makes it more likely to be a moral act. But the courthouse is just another venue where a good story can win the case, and many characters here might be spinning a convincing tale. The fun in the film is figuring what's actually true, and not everything is clarified by the end.

And at the end, against Warren's first impulse to put a quick bullet into her, the Sheriff insist on stringing up Daisy under the guise of right action because it follows the letter of the law, yet clearly there was some joy garnered in watching her dance. That was a mere show of morality hiding an ulterior motive.


So, here's how I understand it all: We can't know what really is right or wrong in many cases. We can't deliver justice accurately, with any certainty, even in a court of law. Justice is a slippery notion and relative to each perspective. It's not to say it can't be found, but that it can't be done easily or with certainty, and I'm not convinced the justice metered out by a society is necessarily more fair than that determined by individuals within the claustrophobic confines of a cabin.

With respect to the debate at Dawg's Blawg, Dawg argues that the theme of the film is hatred, but I see the slipperiness of justice dominating scenes far more prevalently. By way of comparison, The Revenant was a movie about hatred. One character is driven by hate from the pivotal act of injustice to the very end. I think it can be argued that the deaths in The Hateful Eight are from a sense of survival of the self or a kinship affiliation; sometimes the murders were awash in hatred, but that hatred wasn't the primary motive of most of the acts. The film is a symposium of sorts with each key player bringing his or her own philosophy of justice to the fore leaving the audience to sort out the coherence of each claim, and a variety claims to justice do exist. Keep in mind Plato argued in favour of slavery: "Justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior" (Gorgias section 483). It's an argument we abhor now, but there it is, on the table with the rest of the ideas.

From the outlaw perspective, saving one of their own is an act of bravery. They murdered many innocents before the beginning of the story, then continued as necessary toward their final end of freeing Daisy. Dawg suggests "Their casual killing highlights the underlying theme of hatred," and, in the comments refers to hatred as "the binary opposite of love." None of these murders was an act of hatred, but of indifference, which I'd argue is the antithesis of love. The moral fortitude of the outlaws was such that two of the gang members, Gage and Jody, gave themselves up to Warren as soon as Daisy's life was threatened.

When O.B. and Ruth are mysteriously poisoned, Warren doesn't open fire on the unarmed suspects or threaten them with torturous acts, but lines them up for questioning. He has a different set of rules than us civilized folk, but he's still operating within a system. One notion of justice is that we respect other's free actions without interference unless they violate other's rights. In that respect, he acted justly.

Warren kills the General, but it's not an impassioned acting out, but a patient game of preventing the General's hot revenge against him for a provocative tale. He manipulated the situation so he wasn't directly punishing the General for the inequities of years past but for taking aim to shoot at him. Now this was an act awash in hatred. Hatred demands pain and suffering - the kind Warren imposed on the General by implanting a horrific final memory, and the kind Warren and the Sheriff put Daisy through when an expedient death was a far easier and more merciful option. But the rest of the killings were basically collateral damage in the quest for life.

If they all acted from hatred, we might expect more torturous scenes. However, for the sake of argument, if we accept hatred as the opposite of love, then consider how a cast acting from loving kindness might behave in each situation. Warren might forgive the General his transgressions and the many derogatory comments he was asked to endure. The gang members might trap the household in the stable with adequate provisions and enable them to be found long after they escape with Daisy. And if they were caught, Warren and Ruth might have brought the outlaws to be held in a prison where they could be rehabilitated without risking harm to anyone. It might look something like O Brother Where Art Thou, a lovely film, but then we wouldn't get to see their heads blow off!

The discussion that precipitated this post ended with Dawg's very provocative point:

"Justice, to me, is based upon a social contract, and this was the most anti-social bunch of miscreants imaginable! I am wondering if we unconsciously expect hatred to be enacted in anger, given how bound up in destructive violence it is. Yet Eichmann did not strike me as an angry man. He was, however, enacting hatred at Auschwitz."

I'm not sure the analogy rings true unless we look at it from the point of view that Eichmann was working to rid his society of a perceived "Jewish Problem," and the bounty hunters were working to rid their society of the outlaw problem. Clearly these differ in that outlaws, by definition, have done some damage to society than requires punishing consequences. But they're similar in so far as the murderers are, within the perception of each time and place, acting for the greater good of their society (of their people). The law, acting from the power given it by the people, put those names on paper, not the bounty hunters. They merely acted as agents of the law - so long as they had those warrants in their pockets.

This brings it all back to the slipperiness of justice. Is the social contract the objectively true determinant of Justice, or is it just the best we've got so far? And the more I think of it, the more it occurs to me the film really is a mirror of Plato's Symposium with arguments of justice in place of love and certain death replacing party crashers ending the final scene! Cool.

ETA - Check out this review too!

What Does Compassion in Education Look LIke?

Since the pandemic started, educators have been asked to use a "trauma-informed" approach to their teaching, i.e. pay attention to the psychological safety of their students. Some of the literature on this looks pretty good: build connections through empathy, be consistent and predictable in the classroom, be flexible to accommodate different needs, delight in students by finding the best in them, and co-regulate by sharing your calmness with others. But, in practice, it fell apart a bit.

In my own experience, I was made to be flexible at the expense of consistency and predictability in a way that overrode our guiding documents. And, I'd argue, in a way that wasn't compassionate. 

I practiced a trauma-informed approach long before it was called that, providing clear expectations but with many alternatives for people to choose. Before my classes start, I'd email a survey of questions to students asking if they'd have any concerns with general rules and deadlines, and where they'd prefer to sit in the room, what would make them most comfortable, what they like to be called, etc., so that when they walked into the room on the first day, they knew exactly what to expect and they had already had some say in what the room looked like. These are grade 12s, many over 18. With Covid, I added more questions about what would make them feel safe, and I asked if having windows open 1/2" would be okay to add some ventilation to the room. 

Then, once in the room, I again asked if people were comfortable where they were sitting and if it wasn't too cold. Everyone was fine. Except somebody wasn't, but they likely didn't want to be the odd one out in the class, so texted dad, who called admin, who marched down to my class immediately to tell me, "Kids can't learn if they're cold!" And the students learned a valuable lesson that day: Get dad to call admin, and you can make anything happen right before your eyes! 

We talked about what to do if you have a conflict with a person, that it's always best to start with to the offending person directly, and then go higher up if you feel like you're not being heard or not being treated fairly. "Resolving" a conflict doesn't always mean getting what you want, though. We have to measure out what we want, what others want, and if anyone needs something to happen differently to figure out what's fair. I asked them, What will you do in a few months, if you have a concern about a class in university? 

Get my dad to call the university. 

I shocked them by letting them know that university profs and administrators won't talk to their parents. 

Idiocracy

Lorne's post on Harrelson's naive solution to world problems (from Ethos, but he said it in Go Further years earlier too), in which he suggests we should just stop buying bad stuff and companies will change, works in tandem with this quote making the rounds:

We do need to change our buying habits and show the corporations that citizens have power, but we're too lazy and stupid to actually do that. We need a shift in our culture to be able to even begin.

And then I read an article by David Hopkins that suggests that the show Friends and the constant belittling of Ross, the only intellectual in the show, was a turning point in the dumbing down of society. I'm not sure if that show started the trend since Cheer's regular dismissal of Diane's intelligence started a decade earlier, but it seems clear that the trend has spread to many similar shows that make fun of anyone with more than a couple brain cells to rub together. Hopkins says,

"We’re at a low point — where social media interaction has replaced genuine debate and political discourse, where politicians are judged by whether we’d want to have a beer with them, where scientific consensus is rejected, where scientific research is underfunded, where journalism is drowning in celebrity gossip."

Then these posts provoked me to re-watch a bit of How I Met Your Mother, and it was striking how often Ted is laughed at for being intelligent. There's a whole episode about it in which his friends make farting noises whenever he adds a cultural reference to the conversation. Now, I happen to find Ted particularly annoying because he's always whining about some girl. That's gets old fast, and it's a wonder the gang doesn't roll their eyes or otherwise cut him off when he goes on a whinge-fest, but they're quick to stop any intellectual discourse. This creates the illusion (or perhaps it creates the reality) that intelligent ideas are to be dismissed for being boring or, as Ted finally decides, "douchey." And then he just stops saying anything intelligent, and his dialogue is reduced to self-obsession and quips.

Hopkins also notes that Ross got annoying, which just further illustrates that some of the best comedic writers either don't know how to make intellectual discourse entertaining or they're being pressured to make the best and brightest into people we can't stand. Is it that if we can be made to accept mediocracy then we'll buy more stuff? Is that the game we're playing?

But who cares, right? Why analyze goofy TV shows when there are serious real events that need attention? I actually think sit-coms are important. I agree with Hopkins that they are quietly teaching us how to behave and what to care about. There's a growing concern over the rise in anti-intellectualism in our culture: it's being blamed for unwavering creationists, mass murders, and the rise of Trump. I believe it will be the death of us. Some think the cult of ignorance is entirely the fault of a weakened school system, but no method of education can flourish in a culture that ridicules intelligence, and our culture is influenced dramatically by TV shows that we get sucked into watching on a regular basis.

But that's not always a bad thing.

I remember the first time I saw condom use mentioned in a casual way in a TV show as if of course we all take a moment to discuss contraception before having sex. I was at the perfect age to be positively influenced by Bruce Willis's charming character asking Maddie Hayes about protection in the heat of a moment that had been building up for years. All the health class videos in the world can't teach how to have that conversation in a suave and sexy manner as well as a sit-com can.

A decade later, when Ellen's character came out on a sit-com, it was a game changer. After that, other shows scrambled to get some same-sex kissing on their show in whatever contrived way they could, and, after an awkward period of tokenism, now we have many characters throughout shows and films who happen to be LBGTQ. Sit-coms normalized something once demonized - well, for most of us.

But it takes a careful touch to manipulate the populous well. Ostrov and Gentile's experiment on the correlation between educational TV and relational aggression in children is telling. Children's television developed morals and removed all traces of the violence of anvils and steamrollers. This would be great except the study found that children missed the overall moral of the plotline of shows like Franklin, Arthur, and Magic School Bus, but they picked up on individual behaviours of the characters:

“The most common relationally aggressive behaviors were children saying, ‘I won’t be your friend anymore unless you do what I say,’ or ‘You can’t come to my birthday party’ as well as socially excluding a peer from play,” Ostrov said. “From our viewing, this type of relational aggression is much more common in young children’s programming than physically aggressive behavior.”

We were hoping to have a new generation of kinder and more knowledgable kids, but we ended up with passive aggressive banter on the playground instead. What we teach isn't always related to what they learn.

Pro-social TV can backfire horribly, like when Fonzie got a pair of glasses and a new "school is cool" mantra. It didn't make school look cool, it made Fonzie look like a nerd who literally jumped a shark for attention.  In classical conditioning lingo, the neutral stimulus (school) is supposed to take on the response generated by an unconditioned stimulus (Fonzie) by association, so, after several pairings of the two, we develop a conditioned response and react to school like we would to Fonzie (love it - maybe even swoon a bit). The problem comes when a neutral stimulus (school) actually provokes a response already (aversion because it's so uncool). Then the neutral stimulus can act as the unconditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus acts as the neutral stimulus creating a conditioned response to Fonzie (hate him the way we hate school).

But while it may be difficult for media to get us to change our behaviours around things we already love or hate, it can be easy to change a behaviour that's just a mindless habit, particularly if a well-loved character reacts negatively to it. But it has to be clearly disliked not just from the story-line, but from all the behaviours and attitudes by the protagonists.

There are many tiny behaviours that could be shifted by this medium, but all too often shows reinforce the status quo. It was disappointing in HIMYM when it was revealed that all the characters smoked. I guess they ran out of story-lines, so they brought in a new problem to be fixed. The story-line presented it as a problem, but the behaviours we saw showed close social engagement facility by cigarettes.Thus when Lily quit smoking, but her husband Marshall didn't, she got grossed out and offended as soon as he walked in the door after a cigarette. That might have influenced people to develop a distaste for smoking except she behaved in a policing manner, which made her the authority catching her husband's misbehaviour. Few people want to align themselves with the authority figure, especially if we're participating in the misbehaviour. We want to have fun with Marshall not tell him off. For a real anti-smoking campaign to work, they'd need a new character that everyone hates to do the bad thing. Then they could all disparage the redshirt uniformly.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin's protagonist was viewed as undeveloped, and part of that came from watching him cycling through the city. He was put on a fast-track to adulthood that included selling his stuff and learning how to drive. Virgins ride bikes, and sexually-active dudes drive cars. Would it have been possible for his character to develop enough charm in the process of his first relationships to convince everyone to start biking to work? He does get his girlfriend to go for a ride, but a car is still presented as a necessary marker of adulthood. Under a careful hand it might have worked, but audiences sniff out manipulations. It has to be done well or not at all.

But it can be done. All it would take is a few well-loved characters to insist on tap water over bottled water, to decide to walk or subway instead of jumping in a car without making it seem a hardship, to have a drink over a variety of platefuls of vegan dishes instead of hamburgers or wings, and to make the smart one the clever, lovable hero again. Barney Miller, Bob Newhart, Andy Travis were the voice of maturity and reason in a cast of goofy characters. We laughed at the inane antics of the ensemble, but the shows' trajectory had us relieved there was some wisdom in the midst.

If it's possible for sit-coms to affect our culture significantly, and if we know where the culture needs to be heading in terms of people embracing science and taking personal responsibility for actions that affect the well-being of the world including our consumerist habits, then shouldn't entertainment make some movement in that direction? I don't think many of us struggle to be moral, to have character and integrity, so I'm sure it's far too much to ask of a production company. There are a few that have characters who do the right thing: Rectify and even Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a heart, but if only Andy Sandberg could insist on fair trade coffee at work! That would be a start.  At least it's a cop show where nobody gets shot.

Lunatic Fringe?

I'm a bit of a social media addict, but I quietly wandered away from Facebook last summer when too many people I know in real life were making fun of people wearing masks. A quick peek back finds far too much support for this inane convoy making a mess of Ottawa. It's bad enough having to deal with that unnerving feeling in person, my blood running cold as it's explained to me that N95s are too uncomfortable to bother with, and that we have to make peace with death and the death of others. We have to live our lives!! The lack of concern for how overwhelmed hospitals are and childhood hospitalizations increasing has me reeling. 

And we can live our lives for so much longer, and with much greater pleasure from good health, if we get vaccinated, wear better masks, and keep buildings well ventilated. It's baffling to me the level of denial and the weird rationalizations people are making around the pandemic. I hear that, like me, people are terrified for their lives and the lives of our children, but denial just makes it so much worse. It IS possible to mitigate the risks and avoid the costs with just so little effort! 

Questionable numbers here, but estimates still show N95 give better protection.

The "truckers convoy" is a perfect symbol of misdirected discontent. I put it in quotation marks because most of this gang aren't truckers, and most truckers have denounce the whole shenanigans, with over 90% vaccinated. It's really a white nationalist grift and a distraction from worse events allowed to continue.  

Gertz's Nihilism and Technology

I really love this book. First of all, the chapter headings and sub-headings are all clever little in jokes, like "Beyond Google and Evil," that make anyone with a cursory knowledge of Nietzsche feel like part of the gang. But it's not just looking at tech through the lens of Nietzsche in a cut-and-paste way. This is an analysis of our relationship with technology that, while immersed in Nietzsche, and will allow a novice to solidify their understanding of some major works, is really an analysis of human nature that would benefit the a-philosophical as well. This is a brief summary as a memory aid for myself, but the book deserves a close read in full.

He uses Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals to explain how technology is used "to soothe rather than cure" our nihilistic attitudes by applying five tactics the ascetic priest uses "to make nihilism palatable" (21): self-hypnosis, mechanical activity, petty pleasures, herd instinct, and orgies of feeling.

Breathe, Grieve, Love, Repeat

We have very little direct influence over one another but we do affect one another in myriad ways that we often don't even notice.

I had a student once, about 15 years ago who I thought was a delight, as I did almost all my students. He was bright and funny and curious about history. He was also known to have significant gang involvement and may have killed someone by now or have been killed. Who knows. I can't barely remember anybody's name of the over 5,000 students I taught, so there's no looking him up. I likely had little impact on the general trajectory of his life, but I taught him a bit about the last century and solidified some writing skills. And maybe the fact that I warmly welcomed him into class on the rare times he showed up had a bit of an effect on him. I hope he's doing okay. 

About seven years ago I got into a big online argument about the meaning of a film, and it's was beautiful. We each had points and tried to persuade the other, and neither of us budged, and it got absolutely nowhere, but it was a delight to debate what we each saw in a work of art. Neither of us even considered name calling or threatening one another's life or getting all our buddies to destroy the other online. 

Remember those days?? It wasn't that long ago.

Because we can't always see how our actions will affect others in future, we have to take care with what we say and how we say it and watch for the direct effect on others. We have to be more careful online where we can't see one another's facial expression to check if they got that we were just joking or to notice the first sign that we're upsetting them. That concern with caring is waning -- I think largely because we don't get immediate facial feedback. But it's vital we get it back for the coming years. 

Mad Max: Reality Road, an Even Darker Ride

It was so close.

First, the less important comparison:  It wasn't as gripping and shocking as the original Road Warrior, and my son called it before we went in:  more explosions and less rapey.  People don't accept casual rape scenes in movies like they did in the 80s.  This is a good thing, but it does take away from developing a sense of horror and brutality in this lawless world.  There were many of the same bits of humour in it, and really cool cars, but no sharpened boomerangs. But what it really lacked was character development.  Furiosa's backstory was delivered in an awkward scene of overt explanation rather than a more subtle development throughout.  We don't get to know the other characters enough to care about them.  There was no scrappy little kid surviving by his wits.  And when one of the wives died, I wasn't remotely upset.  I don't remember any of their names.  Somehow it lacked the same kind of tension that was such an important part of the first film, and this Max reminded me more of Indiana Jones than the original Road Warrior, but my kids thought I was nuts on that one. But there was one excellent scene that made me glad to have caught it in 3D.  Things blowed up real good!

But that's not the important comparison.  With a quick read of a few scientific journals, it could have been an authentic depiction of what we will likely face far too soon if we don't change the path we're on, and the movie could have been just that much more brutal because of it.  That they're fighting over water and searching for arable land instead of for oil (sort of), gets us part way there.

***spoiler alert***

A question occurred to me as I watched them suffering in the heat, using slaves to run pulley systems, and using fire for heat and light all within a contained city that turned out to be the best possible place to live:  What did they need oil for?  They didn't use it to generate electricity in any way that I could see.  And they made it clear there was no place to go to, so all that gasoline and ripping up the desert was for nought.  Oil seems to be a dead commodity in a post-apocalyptic world.  Just as well.

But one bit of reality was that whomever controls the water, controls the world.  That will be very true very soon.  Canada has lots of fresh water, but could we win against an American invasion?  Or will Harper erode our rights so much (which has already started) that the U.S. will feel the need to stage a coup and install a better leader for us under the guise of helping us reform a democratic system, and then take control of all our water while they're at it?

In the film, once the good guys win and kill the bad guy who was rationing water too stringently (and keeping slaves and many wives), they seem to decide to open the water for all without any rationing as if that's the nice thing to do.  But it's not.  It's as equally bad leadership as rationing too tightly.  Rationing will have to be a reality in their world where, like in Snowpiercer and The 100, there are too many people for too few resources.  Population control must be a top priority or they'll have to start culling people in ritual sacrifices.  

Just imagine, when the good guys made it out east and talked about going back and taking over the place, imagine that they had had one brief conversation about how they would run the place differently.  And imagine if their ideas actually made sense!   They could have excitedly talked about a fair means of delivering food and water, a choice of jobs on a rotation, a means to slow population growth...  and then we'd see the realization on their faces that no matter what they did, they would have to control childbearing.  Men and women just couldn't be allowed to have every child they wanted.  Saving women from the clutches of an evil-doer who controls their reproduction would have to be replaced by a different system of control rather than done away with completely.  Figuring out how to do that without being hated by the masses is the exciting bit.

The gang tries to find some green space that used to be Furiosa's home, but it's all dead now.  The soil is full of salt so nothing can grow.  One effect of climate change will likely be "the extension of salt-affected territories."  But something else that could have been included, that was slipped into Interstellar and discussed in The Sixth Extinction (which has already started), is that many of us will likely suffocate before we starve.  Here's my summary on the 3rd major extinction from Kolbert's book:

Ending the Permian period - 252 million years ago. This was the most devastating - called "the great dying." It was caused by an increase in carbon which acidified the oceans and, with the oxygen level dropping, most organisms probably suffocated. Reefs collapsed. It lasted maybe 100,000 years from start to finish, and eliminated 90% of all species on earth (104). The best explanation for this increased carbon is a massive burst of vulcanism in Siberia. "But this spectacular event probably released, on an annual basis, less carbon than our cars and factories and power plants" (123). This one is most similar to what we're currently experiencing, but these days we like to do things much, much faster.

It's not just water that would be a scarce resource, but oxygen would be too.  The main bad guy had the right idea with an oxygen mask, but they could also have made oxygen their drug of choice.  As the ocean acidifies (which is already happening), hydrogen sulfide is released into the atmosphere.  It tends to sit low on the ground, so they might be fine in higher altitudes but need oxygen masks on in the lowlands.  Just think of all the creative ways they could each design their masks!

And check out the effects of exposure to low levels of hydrogen sulfide: eye damage and degenerative nerve damage.  They could have had people riding through lower areas, and unmask a bad guy who suddenly has his eyes eaten away and falls into a fit of spasms!  It would also make the air more flammable, and there's so much special effects guys could do with that!  It was such a missed opportunity.

The horrors of real life scientific predictions are rife with great ideas for apocalyptic films just waiting to be taken, and maybe a disclaimer at the end with sources would wake up a few more people to the reality we could be facing.  Except that it might ruin their happy ending.

Bearing Witness

 Brandon Friedman wrote an important thread about what we do now. Here it is in full:

"This is a German woman being marched past the bodies of Holocaust victims. After World War II, it was common refrain among German civilians: They just didn't know. For that reason, many were forced by Allied troops to bear witness. Like this. 

I bring this up because fascism is now here, in America. 

If you're thinking, "but it doesn't feel like fascism, nothing in my life seems amiss," then congratulations, you have discovered what fascism is like.