The New York Times published a subtly frightening article over the weekend. The piece is a profile of a 29 year old Ohio man who is perhaps most notable for his very banality. He dines at Panera and Applebee’s. He plays video games and likes Seinfeld. Just married, his wedding registry was at Target.
He’s also, it turns out, a self-proclaimed fascist, a malevolent fool who advocates racial separation and who claims that the Holocaust’s exhaustively documented death toll is in fact “overblown.” In an unwitting bit of self discrediting, he cites the moronic action movie Pacific Rim as somehow being illustrative of the correctness of his ideology.
The Times profile, penned by the journalist Richard Fausset, has come under heavy criticism. To my mind, much of it is unfair. A heavily circulated tweet by a physician named Eugene Gu, for example, says the Times is guilty of “normalizing white supremacy,” a charge echoed by many others. This seems unfair, as it mistakes cause for effect: It is precisely because Nazism is (perhaps) being normalized that this article could be written. The Times is merely a mirror here. And indeed, it is the banality of the article’s subject that makes it so troubling.
Another criticism of the piece—one, bizarrely, that the Fausset himself seems to agree with—is that it fails to adequately explain why a seemingly normal (if dimwitted) Midwestern man would turn fascist. The subject of the profile grew up on racially integrated military bases; he’s financially secure; he was never the victim of a crime. The piece lacks for what Fausset calls a “Rosebud.”
But the truth is, there’s rarely a pat explanation for why people turn on their neighbors. Did each of the millions of Europeans who gleefully participated in the slaughter of their Jewish compatriots have single, identifiable cause for their hatred? What about the tens of thousands of Hutus who murdered Tutsis in Rwanda? Or the dozens of ISIS terrorists who just murdered more than 300 Sufi Muslims in Egypt? Do they each have a personal Rosebud?
The search for that one explanation of a person’s malevolent ideology extends to Hitler himself, as detailed in Ron Rosenbaum’s brilliant Explaining Hitler. Armchair psychologists have been puzzling over Hitler’s turn to evil for more than half a century. Discredited theories abound. “He had a Jewish stepfather he hated!” “He had one testicle!” But the failure to locate that one an precise explanation for a turn to Nazism is not some deficiency on Rosenbaum or Fausset’s part. It speaks more to the complexity of human psychology, not to mention the apparently boundless capacity of human cruelty. It’s not a coincidence that Rosebud is actually from a work of fiction.
Lastly, it seems that many critics of the article have forgotten what we all learned as two year olds: object permanence. They appear to think that if we don’t look at them, then the Nazis won’t exist. Perhaps needless to say, that approach did not work well, historically.
