Tag Archives: Rob Riemen

Words Create Worlds.6 Doctors Against Fascism

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“Words create worlds,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world.  He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda.  Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child.  They must be used very carefully.  Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn.  The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[2]

I have been writing this series, Words Create Worlds, based on the words and writing of Rebecca Solnit, Rob Riemen, Timothy Snyder, Madeleine Albright, Jason Stanley, and physicians: Bandy Lee, Robert Jay Lifton, and Judith Herman. I was inspired by these authors and particularly by Riemen’s To Fight Against this Age: On Fascism and Humanism and Rebecca Solnit’s Call Them by Their True Names and their discourse about how words shape our reality. The title for this series of essays comes from Rabbi Heschel who cautions us to be careful with the words we use. I fear that these last four years we have been over-cautious in coming to call the words of the current president of the United States of America fascist. Dr. Bandy Lee’s Twitter profile states, “Uninvolved in politics until politics invaded my area of expertise. I take my professional responsibility to protect society seriously.” Similarly to Dr. Lee, I feel compelled to speak up politically because fascism is a public health crisis. As Foucault wrote, the “first task of the doctor is therefore political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.”[3]

The Responsibility of Spiritual Democracy

As I was working on Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality with Joseph Rael, I began to see that while the spiritual path may lead away from society at first, it eventually leads back – one returns after initiation with a new found sense of responsibility for the land and all the creatures that live on it: four-leggeds, two-leggeds, fin-ed and wing-ed. The spiritual path leads to a sense of Oneness, of non-duality. When you start to feel One with creation, you realize that you are responsible for creation. Words create worlds. The etymology of the word “responsible” goes back to a similar word, “answerable.” To be on a spiritual path, which Joseph would say is the same as the path of being a True Human Being, is to be answerable to the Earth. This led me to feel that we had to write a section of the book on the responsibility of the spiritual seeker.

Joseph Campbell taught that the hero’s or heroine’s journey had three stages: separation from the known world, initiation into the new world, and then return to the old world, but now transformed and carrying a responsibility for healing and transforming the world. For our book, this meant writing about our interrelationship with the land; about moving from “other” to “brother and sister;” about Oneness and non-difference; and about the concept of spiritual democracy – the spiritual responsibility we have for all beings. This responsibility led to us losing our publisher as the book turned out to be 500 pages long.

Joseph Rael, in the early 1980s had a vision of men and women sitting in a circular structure, half above ground, half below, singing and chanting for world peace. He followed this vision across the globe, helping to create over 60 Sound Peace Chambers on four different continents. He was recognized by the United Nations for this work on world peace. It is this spirit of peace that leads to my now needing to speak words of peace to counter the 20,005[4] divisive words of fascism.

Circle of Light Sound Chamber

Being Present with Suffering

Words Create Worlds. To be silent or neutral is to take the side of the bully. There are times that one can lose one’s humanity through inaction. Yes, it is true that one can act without humanity as well, that is a definition of fascism: actions without humanity and against humanity. When I was going through medical school in the early 1990s, struggling with the dehumanizing aspects (Perri Klass described medical school as, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure), I was also reading the Chicago Tribune regularly, trying to understand what was happening in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. I had read about World War II extensively when I was younger, I knew about fascism and genocide – but I struggled to make sense of what it meant to be a human being in the late 20th Century as I was immersed in learning the language of pathology and despair as I learned to diagnose and treat illness. I was overwhelmed by with the feeling that I was not being taught how to be human and present with either my suffering, my patients’ suffering, of the suffering of the world.

In The Shadow of the Slaughterhouse, D. Kopacz

In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity

I brought my friends together to write and to bear witness to the age. I was reading the Beats in those days, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and I loved how they created their own interpretive community and supported each other. The Beats didn’t shy away from suffering or madness, but bore witness to it, as Ginsberg wrote in Howl, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…” Or as William S. Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg, “Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.”[5] My friends and I put together an unpublishable manuscript that included cut-up art, multiple perspectives, and no coherent theme, other than a bunch of twenty-somethings let loose in the big city and reading a lot of books and trying to find their way in the world. I titled this collection, In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity. It included essays I wrote on the Native American genocide (from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) and an essay on witnessing and the survivor (from reading Terrence des Pres’ The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps). In a way, these essays on Words Create Worlds are a continuation of In the Shadow of the Slaughterhouse: Silence is the Only Real Crime Against Humanity. I cannot remain silent as the shadow of fascism falls across the country.

This is not the succinct entry into the topic of Doctors Against Fascism that I envisioned – but then, the fight against fascism is not through bullets or bullet points, but through re-humanization. What is more re-humanizing than stories about human beings trying to make sense of suffering and bear witness? It is our humanity, our shared humanity, that protects us against the dehumanization of fascism. All of us, as human beings, are responsible for humanity because we are part of humanity. Similarly, as creatures of the Earth we are all responsible for the Earth, as we are part of Her.

What it Means to be a Professional

I have been thinking about the idea of medical activism and what it means to be a professional.[6] In my work on re-humanizing medicine through the compassion revolution,[7] I have argued that much of what we are taught in contemporary medicine is how to be a technician rather than on how to be a healer. A technician is not a professional, necessarily, but someone who performs a set of route protocols and techniques. A healer, on the other hand, is someone who learns techniques, but who also learns humanity – for it is our human presence that we must bring to suffering. While a technique or protocol might treat a disease, suffering needs humanity and compassion. To this end I have continued to argue that as physicians we should be good technicians, but that we must also be good human beings. To be a good medical technician, we are required to engage in Continuing Medical Education. To be a good human being we have to seek out our own Continuing Human Education – this is what I call the counter-curriculum of re-humanization.[8]

To be a professional means that we answer to a higher calling than just simply doing our jobs or staying in our lanes,[9],[10] it means that we are responsible to humanity. This means that our job does not end at the walls of our exam room – our job as healers is to attend to the public health of humanity.

Witnessing Professionals

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Robert Jay Lifton describes the concept of health care providers as “witnessing professionals” who have a responsibility to confront malignant normality (such as when lies and cruelty become normality). Lifton ends the interview with the following statement:

“I always feel we have to work both outside and inside of our existing institutions, so we have to…examine carefully our institutions and what they’re meant to do and how they’re being violated. I also think we need movements from below that oppose what this administration and administrations like it are doing to ordinary people. And for those of us who contributed to this book [The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump] — well, as I said earlier, we have to be “witnessing professionals” and fulfill our duty to warn.”[11]

As Psychiatrists We Feel Obliged to Express Our Alarm

Robert Jay Lifton is psychiatrist and psychohistorian I greatly admire, he is a living example of a witnessing professional who has worked at both the individual and the societal level for healing. He and Judith Herman (another psychiatrist I respect) wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times March 8, 2017.[12]

“To the Editor:

“Soon after the election, one of us raised concerns about Donald Trump’s fitness for office, based on the alarming symptoms of mental instability he had shown during his campaign. Since then, this concern has grown. Even within the space of a few weeks, the demands of the presidency have magnified his erratic patterns of behavior.

“In particular, we are struck by his repeated failure to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and his outbursts of rage when his fantasies are contradicted. Without any demonstrable evidence, he repeatedly resorts to paranoid claims of conspiracy.

“Most recently, in response to suggestions of contact between his campaign and agents of the Russian government, he has issued tirades against the press as an “enemy of the people” and accusations without proof that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, engaged in partisan surveillance against him.

“We are in no way offering a psychiatric diagnosis, which would be unwise to attempt from a distance. Nevertheless, as psychiatrists we feel obliged to express our alarm. We fear that when faced with a crisis, President Trump will lack the judgment to respond rationally.

“The military powers entrusted to him endanger us all. We urge our elected representatives to take the necessary steps to protect us from this dangerous president.” (Robert Jay Lifton & Judith Herman)

A Duty to Warn

Dr. Bandy Lee organized an April 20, 2017 conference at Yale, entitled, “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” From this conference grew the first edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, and then the second edition with 37 experts, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Dr. Lee and colleagues then formed the World Mental Health Coalition and published The World Mental Health Coalition Documents, which collects conference transcripts, media transcripts, letters and statements, a report on the Mueller Report, and a Prescription for Survival. Dr. Lee writes:

“Since society is one of psychiatry’s primary responsibilities, next to that of patients, there is unquestionably a duty not only to warn but to protect and to promote its wellbeing. We are bound by law in most states, as now replicated in multiple countries and even in fields outside of mental health, that we must warn even those who are not our clients in the case of danger. We also have an obligation not only to warn but to take steps to protect potential victims if security personnel will not act; safety is always first priority.”[13]

Agent 488 (aka Dr. Carl Gustav Jung)

There are precedents of psychiatrists using their skills for public health and safety. Robert Jay Lifton’s career as a psychohistorian is an example – understanding dangerous movements such as: Nazi Germany, Chinese thought reform, Aum Shinrikyō, climate deniers, and the current president of the USA. Swiss psychiatrist, Carl G Jung (aka Agent 488)[14] was recruited by the United States during World War II to provide psychological profiles of Hitler. Jung’s descriptions of Hitler’s psychology and behavior are eerily similar to the current president of the United States:

“All these pathological features— complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow men (how contemptuously Hitler spoke of his own people!), projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing — all these were united in the man who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years.”[15]

Jung cautioned about Hitler’s systematic lying which he described as pseudologia phantastica. Is our current president’s 20,055 falsehoods (as of 7/9/20) another example of pseudologia phantastica?[16]

“A more accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition would be pseudologia phantastica, that form of hysteria which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies. For a short spell, such people usually meet with astounding success, and for that reason are socially dangerous.”[17]

After World War II, many professionals wondered, “Why would so many apparently rational, even educated people, follow a fascist?”[18] Jung would say that those who do not deal honestly with their own shadow project it on to “others” who are then seen as bad, dangerous, untrustworthy. Jung saw Hitler as an inferior personality who was over-taken by his own shadow, projecting his own darkness on to the world and then trying to destroy his own darkness by destroying others. From that perspective, a fascist movement is a giant psychological experiment and a fight between those who have little self-awareness and do not take responsibility for their own darkness and those who are committed to truth and reality and are willing to introspect. Jung describes the formation of mass psychosis and mob psychology:

“Its leader will soon be found in the individual who has the least resistance, the least sense of responsibility and, because of his inferiority, the greatest will to power. He will let loose everything that is ready to burst forth, and the mob will follow with the irresistible force of an avalanche…[H]e symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”[19]

Untitled, D. Kopacz

The Plague of Fascism

As I have watched this regime unfold over the past four years, my early uneasiness has gradually turned to alarm. I think it is time for the Doctor to make the diagnosis: fascism, prognosis: serious.

In 1947, Albert Camus wrote his allegory on fascism, The Plague. Camus cautioned us, through his indefatigable Dr. Rieux,

“I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they’ll think things over; and so shall I. But what’s wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can, that’s all.”[20]

Dr. Rieux’s commitment to defend sick people as best he can reminds us of the professional commitment of Drs. Lee, Lifton, and Herman, as well as Dr. Fauci and all the frontline health care workers doing the best they can during this pandemic. Just as Lifton encourages us to be witnessing professionals, Rieux’s writing bears witness to the peoples’ suffering:

“It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”[21]

Camus’ choice of a plague as an allegory of fascism resonates with our current situation. We are currently in an actual viral pandemic of Covid-19 and this viral plague has further illuminated the plague of fascism. The president’s deplorable and counter-scientific handling of the pandemic has led to the United States of America, the country with the most expensive health care system in the world, and with 4% of the world population, to account for roughly 25% of the cases of Covid-19 worldwide. The president has contradicted and undermined scientists and physicians, he has encouraged the opposite of public health measures (ridiculing masks and those who wear them), he has preached economy over public health, and has spread over one-third of the global misinformation on the virus.[22] And, as of 10/2/20, the president himself is now infected with Covid-19, a carrier of the plague of the pandemic and the plague of fascism. However, we knew all along that we were electing a sick individual who is a plague – a plague of lies, a plague of bullying, a plague of divisiveness, a plague of crookedness, a plague of Covid-19 and, ultimately, a plague of fascism.

Doctors Against Fascism

The way you learn how to diagnose something in medical school is to see case after case after case – until it becomes automatic. At the first signs or symptoms, you see the incipient signs of a more serious illness. This is why we need Doctors Against Fascism – to diagnose and warn us that the fascist bacillus is starting to dehumanize our population and make it vulnerable to fulminant fascism.

The Doctor is in and has bad news for you – the prognosis of our nation’s health is serious. We are infected with fascism – it has taken hold in the brains of many of our citizens and it is spreading through our institutions. Words Create Worlds and we are surrounded by 20,055 and counting words of fascism. Every lie is an assault on reality and every bit of reality that is eroded weakens the immune system of democracy, making us vulnerable to infection with the unreality of fascism.

The Growing Stack of Books I Keep on My Desk as a Reminder

…

This series, Words Create Worlds, grows out of my work with Joseph Rael on peace. In Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[23]

[1] Life Between the Trees blog, https://lifebetweenthetrees.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/words-create-worlds-monday-morning-parable/. I first came across a shorter instance of this quote in the Omid Safi reference below.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 38.

[4] “In 1,267 days, President Trump has made 20,055 false or misleading claims,” Updated July 9, 2020. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2

[5] William S. Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg The Letters of William S. Burroughs, Vol. 1: 1945-1959, p. 227.

[6] David Kopacz, “Medical Activism: A Draft Working Paper,” (8/11/20) in the Being Fully Human Blog, https://beingfullyhuman.com/2020/08/11/medical-activism-a-draft-of-a-working-paper/.

[7] David Kopacz, Re-humanizing Medicine: A Holistic Framework for Transforming Your Self, Your Practice, and the Culture of Medicine, Washington DC: Ayni Books, 2014.

[8] Ibid. Also see David Kopacz, “A Proposition for a Counter-Curriculum in Healthcare Education and Practice,” (9/10/16), Being Fully Human blog, https://beingfullyhuman.com/2016/09/10/a-proposition-for-a-counter-curriculum-in-healthcare-education-and-practice/

[9] “Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane’ on Gun Policy,” Matthew Haag, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018. The original criticism was in a Tweet from the NRA, “Someone should tell self-important  anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.” https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1060256567914909702.

[10] “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: At ‘woke’ medical schools, curricula are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness,” Stanley Goldfarb, Wall Street Journal, 9/12/19.

[11] http://billmoyers.com/story/dangerous-case-donald-trump-robert-jay-lifton-bill-moyers-duty-warn/

[12] Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Herman, “‘Protect Us From This Dangerous President,’ 2 Psychiatrists Say,” The New York Times, March 8, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/protect-us-from-this-dangerous-president-2-psychiatrists-say.html

[13] Bandy X Lee, “American Psychiatry’s Complicity with the State,” in Bandy Lee (ed) The World Mental Health Coalition Documents, 299.

[14] Jung was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the organization that eventually grew into the CIA and INR, to provide psychological profiles of political leaders, foremost among them Adolf Hitler. Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography. New York: Back Bay Books, 2003, pages 481-495.

[15] CG Jung, “After the Catastrophe” (1945) in CW 10 Civilization in Transition, page 203.

[16] The Washington Post Fact Checker, 7/9/20, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2

[17] Ibid., 203-204.

[18] For a recent analysis of this question, see John Dean and Bob Altemeyer’s Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.

[19] CG Jung, “The Fight With the Shadow” (1946) in CW 10 Civilization in Transition, 220-223.

[20] Albert Camus, The Plague, New York: Vintage International, 1991, p. 127.

[21] Ibid., 308.

[22] Sarah Evanega, Mark Lynas ,Jordan Adams, Karinne Smolenyak, “Corona virus misinformation: quantifying sources and themes in the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’”

Click to access full.pdf

[23] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.

Words Create Worlds.5 To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism & Humanism

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“Words create worlds,” said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

To Fight Against this Age: On Fascism and Humanism[2] by Rob Riemen

The Words Create Worlds series of essays was inspired by Rabbi Heschel’s warning of the way certain words led to the Holocaust, Riemen’s To Fight Against this Age, and Rebecca Solnit’s Call Them by Their True Names. I felt compelled as a health professional to speak up about fascism, based on the warning flags of the current US presidency and other world movements. In my youth, I was fascinated with World War II, later as a professional I became interested in trauma and the role of the trauma therapist as a moral agent – not just a neutral technician, but a human being who takes a moral stand against human rights abuses, what Robert Jay Lifton calls a “witnessing professional.”[3] As I have watched this regime unfold over the past four years, my early uneasiness has gradually turned to alarm. As physicians, we need to remember our higher calling to function as witnessing professionals for the health of society.

I think it is time for the Doctor to make the diagnosis: fascism, the prognosis: serious.

Fascism is a sickness, an illness, a disorder. It spreads through false-fixed beliefs (delusions), scapegoating (projection), and its continuous stream of lies creates unreality (impaired reality testing). Fascism infects the individual, but it spreads through the community. As a doctor, I am trained to diagnosis and treat sickness. As a doctor, I am trained to attend to individual health as well as public health. Some would say that doctors need to shut up and “stay in their lanes.”[4],[5] However, as someone who has read Nietzsche,[6] has read Robert Jay Lifton, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, Madeleine Albright, and Rob Riemen – I have learned from history and I have studied epidemiology – people staying in their lane and just following orders leads down a deadly road. 

It is Time to Call it Fascism

Could it really be happening again? Right here in the USA? The erosion of democracy and the growth of fascism and totalitarianism. I think it is time we started calling it anti-democracy and fascism. Umair Haque thinks so, see his article “What Does it Take to Fight Authoritarianism? The One Thing Americans Still Won’t Do,” in which he writes:

“I don’t blame Americans for not getting why they have to say fascism. It’s a complex and subtle set of thoughts to understand, this responsibility.

And yet if I say ‘not calling racism or sexism racism or sexism is legitimising it,’ you get it instantly. Get exactly that logic for fascism and authoritarianism now. That moral, social, and personal responsibility.”[7]

The Leader spews a continuous stream of “false statements,” otherwise known as lies, propaganda – to confuse and disorient opposition and to mobilize a base of followers into a false-fixed state of loyalty and unreality. There are so many lies that the footnotes start to eclipse the text. During his presidency, the president of the United States had made more than 20,000 “false statements,”[8] which we should just start calling lies and propaganda because there is a method behind the madness – the method of the fascist playbook.

It sounds like a constant stream of gibberish, (just try to read this two hour speech), it makes no logical sense, but it appeals to biases and emotions. It is propaganda: “othering” and demonizing of groups of people: Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims, and women, “Antifa,” “radical leftists,” “anarchists.” Every event is amplified and weaponized to create divisiveness. He casts doubt on the institution of elections and hints that he will not honor the results or submit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

And This Also Has Been One of the Dark Places of the Earth, D. Kopacz

To Fight Against This Age

Let us turn to Rob Riemen’s To Fight Against the Age: On Fascism and Humanism (2018). Riemen is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Nexus Institute, “a leading international center for intellectual reflection to inspire the Western cultural and philosophical debate,” and is the editor of the journal Nexus.

I picked up Riemen’s book, by chance, when I was traveling for work and was in Charleston, West Virginia. I found it at a nice little bookstore, Taylor Books. I bought it on impulse and then was fascinated by it and finished it on the flight home. The book consists of two essays, “The Eternal Return of Fascism,” (originally published in 2010) and “The Return of Europa.” In keeping with the theme of Words Creating Worlds, Riemen writes that “to be able to understand something,” you have to “call it by its proper name,” specifically, “populism…will not provide any meaningful understanding,” (18).  Even more specifically:

“The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy,” (19).

Fascism Rests on Dehumanizing Others

I have personally been concerned with the objectification and dehumanization that happens in medical education and medical practice (see Kopacz, Re-humanizing Medicine – 2014). The antidote to dehumanization is quite simple in theory: re-humanization. The more difficult questions are: What is a human being? How is the soul of the human being lost? How is the soul of the human being regained? Riemen reaches a conclusion similar to mine about the limitations of numbers and the scientific method and the need for the humanities and a whole person philosophy.

“Science and technology will never be able to provide us with a complete understanding of the human being with his instincts and desires, virtues and values, mind and spirit…The humanities and the arts” provide “the only knowledge that could provide a true understanding of the human heart,” and that “the real requirements of a democratic civilization [are] the wisdom of poetry and literature, philosophy and theology, the arts and history,” (19-20).

How does fascism return to civilized democracies? Germany, itself was a democracy, Hitler was elected and then gradually did away with democratic institutions, consolidating power. Riemen puts it bluntly, “the main reason fascism can return so easily in mass democracies: ignorance,” (21). The ignorance of history. The ignorance of social psychology. The ignorance of power and fascism. If we don’t call it by its true name, as Riemen and Solnit both implore us, we will have no chance of confronting and stopping it.

Riemen takes his title of his book, To Fight Against this Age from Nietzsche, whom he paraphrases, “we should not accept the blind power of the actual and that instead of conforming to the whole noisy sham-culture of our age, we have to be fighters against this age…It is now upon us to fight against a zeitgeist that destroys the spirit of the democratic civilization,” (27).  

You Let Your Magic Tortoise Go, D. Kopacz

The Plague of Fascism

Riemen writes about Camus’ allegory of fascism, The Plague,[9] commenting on the “fascist bacillus,” he tells us that if “we want to put up a good fight, we first have to admit that it has become active in our social body and call it by its name: fascism,” (34). We must diagnose the problem before we can treat it correctly.

Riemen’s book was published in 2018. Now we have the strange juxtaposition of an actual pandemic being used as a fascist tool for promoting divisiveness and effecting the first purge of this regime, 200,000+ dead in the United States as of late September – 25% of the global deaths for 4% of the global population, at least we are “great” at something. Even stranger, now we have a president who is actually infected with a virus he is hell-bent on spreading to others.

Riemen, following Nietzsche’s critique, sees a problem with European and Western culture – that we have lost spiritual values. “With the loss of spiritual values,” he writes, “not only did morals disappear but so did culture in the original meaning of the word: cultura animi, the ‘cultivation of the soul,’” (38). We have become the barbarians. Barbarian originally meant “unintelligible speech,”[10] again, just try reading through this transcript.

This “cultivation of the soul” and the recognition of our common humanity is what humanism is founded upon. Fascism is the opposite of humanism – it is about the degradation of the soul, it is about exaggerating the differences between human beings into a false and superficial sense of sameness rather than seeing “out of many, one,” e pluribus unum.

Writing in the mid-1930s, Menno ter Braak noted that fascist movements were focused on “stimulating aggression and anger.” Riemen summarizes that a fascist movement:

“was not actually interested in finding solutions, had no ideas of its own, and did not want to solve social problems, because injustice was necessary for maintaining an atmosphere of vilification and hatred,” (51).

Lousy at Democracy, Super-Good at Fascism

If we look at the current US presidency, we might be tempted to call it incompetent – and from a perspective of democracy it would be right to do so. However, if we view the current president through the lens of fascism – he is hypercompetent. He is lousy at democracy, but he is super-good at fascist.

Menno ter Braak focused on the use of “social resentment vented on a scapegoat who was blamed for everything: the Jew.” Riemen further summarizes ter Braak’s view:

“At the same time, this movement considered itself to be the eternal victim of the ‘left’ or the ‘elite’ and harbored a deep aversion to intellectuals, cosmopolitans, and anyone who was different…[with a] continuous use of slogans and empty rhetoric…it was reactionary,” (52).

Untitled, D. Kopacz

Fascism is Semi-civilization and Promotes the Cult of Resentment

Fascism is “semi-civilization” and promotes “the cult of resentment.” These are the rules that the current US president is very good at, he consults the fascist playbook at every turn and fascism is winning and democracy is losing.

How did fascism gain hold in European democracies? By using those democracies against themselves. Both Hitler and Mussolini were voted into power. Riemen writes that both the liberals and the conservatives caved in to fascism because they thought they could gain something from it. It is the classic devil’s bargain of “the end justifies the means.” This is based, or maybe we should say de-based, on the idea that getting power or money (the ultimate materialist focus) is more important than human values, civility, decency, or humanity.

“The liberals no longer defended the freedom principle of European humanism but became interested only in the freedom of the markets: that is to say, As long as we can earn money,” (56).

We see this today – somehow the stock market in the US seems to give permission for fascism, as long as we can earn money.

“The conservatives were unprepared to unscrupulously exchange the protection of spiritual values for the preservation of their own power, under the veils of ‘tradition’ and ‘social order,’” (56).

We see this today, the conservatives going along with the president, even when it seems to violate their own principles, as long as they can preserve power and social order. This is the definition of fascism: power and order become more important than principles, ideals, more important than human beings.

After World War II, after Mussolini and Hitler were defeated, some still worried that we had not learned the lessons of history. Riemen reminds of that both Albert Camus and Thomas Mann, both Nobel Prize winners, warned of the return of fascism.

“Camus and Mann…as early as 1947…stated that fascism was a political phenomenon that had not disappeared at the end of the war and that we could now describe as the politicization of the mentality of the rancorous mass-man. It is a form of politics used by demagogues whose only motive is to enforce and extend their own power, to which end they will exploit resentment, designate scapegoats, incite hatred, hide intellectual vacuity beneath raucous slogans and insults, and elevate political opportunism into an art form with their populism,” (60).

Untitled, D. Kopacz

A Realm Where Words are Separated from their Meanings

Riemen warns us, as early as 2010, that “this is a new outbreak of the plague,” (60). But just as you cannot treat a disease you cannot name and diagnose, you cannot appropriately respond to a movement if you cannot call it by its true name – fascism. We, in the US, were sick, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were in the throes of a revival of an old illness – the pandemic of fascism. We entered into a realm where “words were separated from their meanings and reduced to slogans,” (61).

Again and again, throughout this essay, Riemen reminds us that the cure to fascism is the medicine of our human unity and spiritual/moral values. This is not about religion – many of the most vocal followers of the president are “religious” people who are more interested in power than in human goodness.

“Our true identity is determined not by nationality, origin, language, belief, income, race, or any way in which people differ from one another, but precisely by what unites us and makes the unity of [hu]mankind possible: universal spiritual values that shape human dignity and that every… [one]…can adopt,” (67).

“Anyone who really wants to be a humanist rejects every form of fanaticism and learns the courtesy of the heart and the art of conversation, dialogue,” (68).

What is needed is not a political solution, but a human solution. We need to remember our original instructions and the principles and tenets of spiritual democracy. While fascism is a political movement based in materialism (money and power), its cure is a spiritual movement based in humanism (soul and spirit).

Continuous Lies as Politics

Riemen describes the Party for Freedom (PVV, Partij voor de Vrijeheid) in his native Netherlands in words that sound like the current US president’s playbook. Fascism is not creative, it is not novel, it is really just the same damn thing, over and over again – the basest aspects of our material nature. It is the propagation of dehumanization through dehumanization. The PPV offers

“the shameless opposite of the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions: vulgar materialism, oppressive nationalism, xenophobia, ammunition for resentment, a deep aversion to the arts and the exercise of spiritual values, a suffocating spiritual bigotry, a fierce resistance to the European spirit, and continuous lies as politics,” (68-69).

Doctors Against Fascism, D. Kopacz (2020)

Doctors Against Fascism

The way you learn how to diagnose something in medical school is by seeing case after case after case – until it becomes automatic, at the first signs or symptoms, you see the incipient signs of a more serious illness. This is why we need Doctors Against Fascism – witnessing professionals to diagnose and warn us that the fascist bacillus is starting to dehumanize our population and make it vulnerable to fulminant fascism. In the USA, there has been a growing concern about the signs and symptoms of fascism since 2016. Riemen has been seeing it in Europe since at least 2010 and we see it spreading all over the globe – a pandemic of fascism in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Philippines, England, Brazil, India, and the United States of America.

The Doctor is in and has bad news for you – the prognosis of our nation’s health is serious. We are infected with fascism – it has taken hold in the minds of many of our citizens and it is spreading through our institutions. Words Create Worlds and we are surrounded by continuous lies as politics.

This essay seems to have found a natural ending-point here. I will pick up with the rest of the review of Rob Riemen’s book, To Fight Against This Age: Fascism and Humanism, in the next installment of Words Create Worlds. Perhaps I will develop this theme of Doctors Against Fascism more.

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This series, Words Create Worlds, grows out of my work with Joseph Rael on peace. In Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility that grows out of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which can ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[11]

[1] Life Between the Trees blog.

[2] Rob Riemen, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

[3] Robert Jay Lifton, “Foreword to the First Edition: Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” in Bandy Lee (ed) The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019.

[4] “Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane’ on Gun Policy,” Matthew Haag, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018. The original criticism was in a Tweet from the NRA, “Someone should tell self-important  anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.” https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1060256567914909702.

[5] “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: At ‘woke’ medical schools, curricula are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness,” Stanley Goldfarb, Wall Street Journal, 9/12/19.

[6] Richard Huelsenbeck, German-American psychiatrist and Dada-ist who was investigated by the Nazis and forbidden to write, once said, “We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to risk becoming one―that’s what we get paid for!” (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, p. 211). Marcus’ book traces the spirit of protest from punk rock back to earlier art movements that were cultural and political critiques of the times.

[7] Umair Haque, “What Does it Take to Fight Authoritarianism? The One Thing Americans Still Won’t Do.” Eudamoinia & Co, Sept 25, 2020, https://eand.co/what-does-it-take-to-fight-authoritarianism-the-one-thing-americans-still-wont-do-676dfb86794b

[8] Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims.” The Washington Post, July 13, 2020 at 12:00 a.m. PDT

[9] Albert Camus, The Plague, New York: Vintage International, 1991.

[10] https://www.etymonline.com/word/barbarian

[11] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.