Communism and Fascism — A Short Walk Through a Berlin Neighborhood

Besides the rise in antisemitism, the strange fear of a revival of communism seems one of the most backwards and misplaced political currents in contemporary democratic society. In a 30-minute walk from my apartment, I am able to walk through what was once the death strip (now a grassy area lined with trees) and by small memorials, so-called “stumbling blocks”, to German-Jewish Berliners who were deported and murdered in concentration camps (all with the same dates and destination, Auschwitz, meaning that the whole neighborhood was deported and murdered in the same transport. The one pictured below is a family with their 12- and 4-year-old daughters). Though people like to draw comparisons between now and 1930’s Europe, and especially Germany, the geopolitical and socio-cultural situation is more akin to a combination of the antique world after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe after the invention of the printing press and the Protestant revolution, and the world right before the outbreak of WWI. All tumultuous times when known structures dissolved. The world today is the last aftershock of the old world blown apart by WWI.

Communism and Fascism won’t appear as they did 100 years ago. Contemporary communism is China – an authoritarian surveillance state run by a party oligarchy that has no real investment in Marxist ideologies, but very much invested in global geopolitical power – and one that offers wealth and the superficial comforts of early 21st-century life and society to all those who conform to state doctrine and punishes any who diverge. Democracy is on its way to becoming the cousin to this format. Equally tied to surveillance, though not as authoritarian and blatant (yet, maybe), its future may well be a numbing culture of relentless individuality and marketing of peak experiences completely untethered from actual political beliefs and societal aims though they will and are marketed as such. Politics divulging into a competition of whose truth is the more holy and righteous, the dominating party projecting their reality onto others (similar to late Antiquity). All the while, the planet will turn and change, and we will have to learn to come to terms with our increasing insignificance on it. Don’t fear repeats of the past, fascism and communism are failed religions that will always have their supporters and their eschatological dreams of end-time utopias. Be wary of futures not yet imaginable, that will simultaneously be tolerable, insufferable, mind-numbing, oppressive and inviting. The warnings of our past worlds are all around us, but no one ever listened to them before.