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Back when I was in high school in Sarajevo, my
best friend was Zoka. We listened to the same bands, went to the
same rock shows, found the same stupid things hilarious, played
soccer together, skied on the same mountain, supported the same
soccer club, confided in each other re: girls, got drunk in the park
after school from the same bottle of toxically cheap liquor. We
argued about many things, very often about movies—back in the early
1980s (and thereafter) I fancied myself knowledgeable about cinema,
which entitled me to deplore the movies he appreciated.
We spent less time together after high school but
still remained close, playing soccer regularly and arguing pretty
often. But then, bit by bit, in ways so incremental as to be
imperceptible to me, he became a passionate Serbian nationalist.
Posters of rock bands were replaced with pictures of Serbian saints
and stately World War I generals. He no longer quoted lines from
movies but from Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath), the
19th-century epic poem about the Serbs’ righteous extermination of
Muslims. I detested his turn to nationalist tradition, entirely
alien to the urban spirit of Sarajevo, where we both grew up, and I
frequently told him so. It got to the point where we were likely to
spiral into an argument whenever we saw each other. I’d often
insist, before getting wound up myself, that we avoid “politics” and
stick instead to soccer and movies, but by the time the war started
in Croatia, with news of atrocities committed by the Serb Army, it
was hard to stay away from it.
The last time we were together was in the fall of
1991, the war was raging in Croatia. We argued for hours, in the
course of which he insisted that Radovan Karadzic—presently serving
a 40-year sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against
humanity—represented the interests of the Serbian people, including
Zoka. I remember most clearly my considered response to him,
conveyed by way of a tonsil-burn scream: “Well then fuck you and
fuck the people Karadzic represents!”
In the spring of 1992, Zoka had left Sarajevo and
his girlfriend to join the Serb Army as a doctor (he was in medical
school). She was of Muslim background and was, shall we say,
disinclined to follow him and stayed in the city. Later, he’d say to
one of our common friends that “she chose her people.” I don’t know
what happened to her, but her people remained under siege for more
than a thousand days, in the course of which more than 11,000 of her
people, including more than 1,000 children, were killed.
Nevertheless, even after I landed in Chicago in
1992, we exchanged a few letters heavy with “politics.” Sometime in
the summer of 1992, which was incredibly bloody in Sarajevo, I
wrote, in what would be my final letter to Zoka, that Slobodan
Milosevic, the nationalist president of Serbia and its Socialist
Party, who would die in The Hague awaiting trial for genocide and
war crimes, was a national socialist—in other words, a Nazi. In his
response, Zoka fully supported Milosevic, who for him also
represented the interests of the Serbian people, and wrote that
“Hitler did many good things for Germans.”
In a kind of epiphany, I understood that the
letter was written in a language I no longer recognized, not least
because he was using a dialect and diction far closer to Gorski
vijenac than to our past movie arguments. We were now so far apart
that whatever I might say could never reach him, let alone convert
him back into what I’d thought was the true and original version of
my friend. I never responded to his letter, nor would I ever see him
again, but he wrote a letter to my parents (who had been friends
with his). There, he drew a little map representing the siege of
Gorazde, a town 60 miles from Sarajevo where he was deployed,
proudly explaining to them that the Serbs did not care about the
town as much as they wanted to capture the nearby ammo factory. My
mother, who’d implored me not to end my friendship with Zoka for
“politics,” wept over the letter, because the Zoka she knew was
absent from it. I read it too. It was written not only by a
stranger, but by an enemy.
My relationship with the war has always been
marked by an intense sense that I failed to see what was coming,
even though everything I needed to know was there, before my very
eyes. While Zoka took active part in enacting the ideas I’d argued
against, my agency did not go beyond putting light pressure on his
fascist views by way of screaming. I have felt guilty, in other
words, for doing little, for extending my dialogue with him (and a
few other Serb nationalist friends) for far too long, even while his
positions—all of them easy to trace back to base Serbian
propaganda—were being actualized in a criminal and bloody operation.
I was blinded, I suppose, by our friendship which had ended, I know
now, well before our dialogue did. For all that, I still feel guilty
and ashamed of my cowardice and naïve belief that if we only kept
talking something might bring him back. I retroactively recognized
that his hate and racism were always present and that there was no
purpose or benefit to our continued conversation. I had long been
screaming into a human void.*
I recalled my memories of Zoka earlier this fall,
when it was announced that Steve Bannon would headline The New
Yorker Festival and engage in an on-stage conversation with the
editor-in-chief David Remnick. I was so upset that I rushed to a
conclusion that Bannon’s fascism was, for The New Yorker, merely a
difference of opinion that could be publicly debated for the
intellectual enjoyment of its paying audience. Angrily, I envisioned
an intense but polite exchange, a staged confrontation that makes
for a good high-brow spectacle, with cheese, wine and further
exchange of ideas in the foyer afterwards. In my tweets, I imagined
an afterparty where Bannon would be mingling with edgy hedge fund
managers, high-end literati and risqué fashion photographers, where
all the differences in opinion would be temporarily subsumed in
celebrity solidarity and washed away with champagne.
I took it extremely personally, in other words,
because I’d published in The New Yorker and participated in the
Festival many times. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of betrayal,
since it appeared to me that Bannon, the Great Thinker of White
Nationalism who has dedicated his life to destroying and subjugating
people like my wife (an African-American) and me (an immigrant) as
well as our children, families and friends, was welcome to a large
tumbler of high-end bourbon, after a stimulating debate on an
America he deems endangered by unruly people of color and
immigrants. The New York Times reported that in his invitation to
Bannon, Remnick wrote: “We would be honored to have you.”
But within hours of the announcement, just as I
was intensifying my furious search for things to break, The New
Yorker disinvited Bannon. Remnick issued a memo to the staff in
which he explained his reasons for wanting an interview with Bannon
and acknowledged that a public conversation was the wrong format for
it. I found Remnick’s reasoning to be comforting in its sincerity
and belief in the truth of journalism, even if I continued to think
that an on-stage interview would’ve inescapably and obviously had
the shape of an exchange of ideas. Indeed, a number of opinions were
publicly expressed before long, on Twitter and in the pages of the
NYT, that banning Bannon was stifling a necessary dialogue, that
“we” have to engage with the “other” side, whoever we and they might
be. And suddenly, Bannon was sparkling in the bright lights of the
marketplace of ideas (wherever that may be), and I was again
grasping for things to break.
The public discussion prompted by the
(dis)invitation confirmed to me that only those safe from fascism
and its practices are likely to think that there might be a benefit
in exchanging ideas with fascists. What for such a privileged group
is a matter of a potentially productive difference in opinion is,
for many of us, a matter of basic survival. The essential quality of
fascism (and its attendant racism) is that it kills people and
destroys their lives—and it does so because it openly aims so.
Witness Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s “zero
tolerance for illegal immigration” policy. Fascism’s central idea,
appearing in a small repertoire of familiar guises, is that there
are classes of human beings who deserve diminishment and destruction
because they’re for some reason (genetic, cultural, whatever)
inherently inferior to “us.” Every fucking fascist, Bannon included,
strives to enact that idea, even if he (and it is usually a
he—fascism is a masculine ideology, and therefore inherently
misogynist) bittercoats it in a discourse of victimization and
national self-defense. You know: they are contaminating our
nation/race; they are destroying our culture; we must do something
about them or perish. At the end of such an ideological trajectory
is always genocide, as it was the case in Bosnia.
The effects and consequences of fascism, however,
are not equally distributed along that trajectory. Its ideas are
enacted first and foremost upon the bodies and lives of the people
whose presence within “our” national domain is prohibitive. In
Bannon/Trump’s case, that domain is nativist and white. Presently,
their ideas are inflicted upon people of color and immigrants, who
do not experience them as ideas but as violence. The practice of
fascism supersedes its ideas, which is why people affected and
diminished by it are not all that interested in a marketplace of
ideas in which fascists have prime purchasing power.
The error in Bannon’s headlining The New Yorker
Festival would not have been in giving him a platform to spew his
hateful rhetoric, for he was as likely to convert anyone as he
himself was to be shown the light in conversation with Remnick. The
catastrophic error would’ve been in allowing him to divorce his
ideas from the fascist practices in which they’re actualized with
brutality. If he is at all relevant, it is not as a thinker, but as
a (former) executive who has worked to build the Trumpist edifice of
power that cages children and is dismantling mechanisms of
democracy.
We must never forget, of course, that The New
Yorker has steadily and relentlessly probed Trumpist malfeasance,
publishing substantial, unimpeachable stories about the
administration’s unmaking of America. In his memo, in fact, Remnick
insisted that his intention was to question unflinchingly these
Bannonite practices. Nonetheless, sharing the marquee with Zadie
Smith or Haruki Murakami, Bannon the Fascist would’ve been allowed
to appear in the guise of an Idea Man.
To engage properly with Bannon and his ilk, the
white nationalists and supremacists presently populating and
energizing the American government, they must be identified as what
they are: fascists. Much of American media and press on this side of
the Fox News darkness does not dare to call out a fascist. That is
partly out of knee-jerk complicity with the culture of leadership
and celebrity worship. But I believe that it is also a matter of
unbearable fear that the shape of American society, and the
practices it has long depended on to maintain some semblance of
democracy, are being destroyed, and no one quite knows what to do
about it, save hoping to be saved by Mueller and/or impeachment.
If Bannon were to be called as he is, a fascist,
the marketplace of ideas would have to confront the fact that the
American government is being rapidly radicalized, that things
unimaginable might be around the corner, and that there are many
tempting paths to full collaboration. The idea that we’re all in
this together and that we must keep talking is dangerous, just as my
commitment to friendship was, because we might find ourselves
wasting time and anger on a fundamentally unbalanced dialogue, where
one side is armed with ideas, and the other is armed with weapons.
It is frightening to think we could be entering
the civil war mode, wherein none of the differences and
disagreements can be hashed out in discussion. It is quite possible
that there is no resolution to the present situation until one side
is thoroughly destroyed as an ideological power and political
entity. If that is the case, the inescapable struggle requires that
anti-fascist forces clearly identify the enemy and commit to
defeating them, whoever they are, whatever it takes. The time of
conversations with fascists is over, even if they might be your best
friend from high school.
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