Listening to Nick Fuentes and Kanye West makes me sad. Not because they are Nazis, mind you. Nazis make me angry. Or at least I thought they made me angry. It's just hard to get angry watching Kanye's delusions broadcasted for the world to see. This is a man who needs help, but literally you can't help him because he thinks medicine is part of a Jewish cabal. It's sad, and the fact that his mental health issues are public knowledge only makes it that much sadder. Surely, a mentally ill man who praises Hitler cannot be taken seriously?
And then there's Fuentes, an avowed racist who openly espouses dictatorship and wants to impose a Catholic theocracy on society to "force people to believe what we believe." For as much as he seems to advocate for dictatorship, he has absolutely none of the qualities of a dictator. He's boring, lethargic, and monotone. When the dictatorship comes, he'll be lucky to be a pawn. Of course, he's OK with this, because he fundamentally believes God designed pawns to be pawns. Still, I can't help but feel sorry for his inevitable self-induced subjugation.
But let's also not be fooled. Kanye and Fuentes are racists and anti-Semites. Period. Full stop. Call it what it is. They espouse dangerous ideologies and hate. Their sad state notwithstanding, every ideology needs pawns, kiss-ups, and bootlickers. That's how ideology works. Ideologies don't merely consist of charismatic leaders alone. They depend on willing followers who will be the first submissives to subjugate themselves. Ideology needs its useful idiots.
"The banality of evil" is a term coined by Hannah Arendt to document exactly this sort of behavior. Everyone has this image of evil as something cold and calculating, nefarious and sinister. But what if evil is actually boring? What if sending Jews to die in concentration camps required dry and monotonous work? What if the way that you feel when your boss asks you to schedule a business trip is exactly how Eichmann felt when he was scheduling trains to Belzec?
According to Arendt, the image of Eichmann as an evil mastermind, thoroughly corrupted in heart and mind, is an image that was created and cultivated out of our necessity to make it feel like the man corresponded to the acts he committed. The reality, according to Arendt, was that "everybody could see this man was not a 'monster,' but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise [of prosecuting him], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported."(pg. 54, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Penguin, 1994) In short, Arendt believed that Eichmann was exactly the sort of pathetic creature that Kanye is, and it is this sad, pathetic man who slaughtered millions of Jews.
The problem we face today is a corollary to Arendt's observations. If we do not accept that clowns and stooges are capable of causing vast degrees of harm and suffering, then we run the very real risk of dismissing the threat posed by clowns and stooges. The idea that Kanye or Fuentes are not dangerous because they are sad specimens of ideology is tempting. It is also wrong and misleading. They are dangerous, even if sad and pathetic.
I have yet to
read in full Hannah Arendt’s book "Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality
of Evil." I think I shall have to now that we are seeing
the banal displays of fascism rear their head again. This, it seems to me, is
precisely the sort of thing she was warning us of, and we should take that
warning seriously, lest history repeat itself.
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