Fear: a door into fascism

I was born in 1944 in Occupied Holland, during the last year of the war. My father, who had done his National Service in the Bureau of Statistics because of his Conscientious Objector status, was in hiding for a considerable part of that year because the German army wanted him. Happily, they were unsuccessful, and our little 3-person family was present for the subsequent Liberation by Canadian forces.  (Although my grandparents in Nijmegen were both killed before then by the Allied bombing that made that liberation possible.)

I don’t, of course, remember any of the war, but the familial memory of the time and the events leading up to it are the rock upon which much of my understanding of the world has been built. We haven’t discussed it, but I’d be surprised if that wasn’t also the case for my siblings.

My parents were not the sort of people who tell war stories. That would partly be true because their experiences had been mostly of banal deprivation and loss, punctuated by relatively brief periods of intense anxiety and fear. Mostly, I suspect, they had just muddled through, like most of their compatriots. But two stories from the war have accompanied me throughout most of my life: my dad hiding from the German army, when he knew they were hunting for him, in the pigsty of a neighbouring farm, and my mom recounting the horror she felt when, in the early stages of the war, citizens of Nijmegen, either fearful for their own safety or from personal conviction, turned fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish over to the invaders. A couple of those citizens who just happened to be Jewish had been their classmates.

At the time my parents were very liberal Christians, so much so, I discovered fairly late in my dad’s life, that before the war he had seriously considered studying to be a Minister. The war intervened, but when we moved to Canada and Terrace some years after the war, they sought out the United Church there and became staunch contributing members. That continued when we moved to Victoria, and ended abruptly when my father discovered the new Minister was an anti-Semite. I never learned the particulars, but the family never went back, and as far as I know none of us were ever Christians in that church-going sense again.

None of this is particularly interesting or relevant except that it accounts for my dismay when I read recent Facebook comments to the effect that some correspondents, particularly those already insulated by bodies of water, are so fearful of infection by Covid-19 that they believe their fellow citizens should be forcibly prevented from traveling. (At Easter! Talk about missing the message!)

I wasn’t traveling at Easter, and I won’t be traveling anytime soon but I just know that attitude, the one that says, “you’re not from here, and therefore you’re a danger” is very close to “you’re different, and therefore we should fear you”. It’s a wake-up call to considering where such attitudes potentially lead, and how they cater to that beast that lurks inside us all: the call to authoritarianism, the call to repressing the “other”, the call to our worst instincts, to fascism.

We have short memories, but most of us can remember when AIDS had us in a similar place, and the overt homophobia it engendered. We appear to have weathered that, but many of us can recall the calls to quarantine, to banish, to outlaw.  Indeed there are countries and states and politics that still indulge those fascist inclinations, usually in the guise of religious belief.

So what about people who go to the cottage at Easter? Why are we even worried about them? Why would we assume they are less responsible than we are? If you live in a downtown condo with your two children, have you suddenly lost the right to some down time at your cottage? Have your rights diminished because you don’t live there year round? 

Maybe some people should mind their own business unless they are actually threatened by something other than paranoid fantasy.

I’m not suggesting that Covid-19 isn’t scary. It is, particularly because we don’t know who can spread it. But our health authorities have very deliberately not panicked, and neither should we.
Obviously we should practice social distancing religiously, because we know we will not be infected by a carrier who is 6 feet or more from us. I note that in Campbell River, anecdotally, we’re already very good at this: I have a lung condition which is helped by walking daily. These days there are many other walkers, and they all so far, like me, have been scrupulous about keeping their distance. They even make a point of keeping their dogs away, although dogs really aren’t much of a concern.

We should wash our hands and avoid touching our faces when we have touched something potentially contaminated. I notice that the stores I shop in, nowadays infrequently, are excellent at disinfecting carts, surfaces, etc. They’ve gotten the message, and if they hadn’t I wouldn’t shop there.

Lastly, we should cover our mouths and noses if we think we have any potential of being a carrier. The mask won’t protect us, but it will potentially protect the ones we meet.

If all of us do all those things, we will not be a danger to others and they will not be a danger to us. We will beat this Covid-19, regardless of where we live and work most of the time.