In an era that celebrates cruelty, embrace subversive kindness

In 1925, 25,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Never before had so many men in white sheets descended on the nation’s capital, their “invisible empire” becoming visible. The Klan’s far-flung ranks are estimated to have numbered 4 million.

Fourteen years later, a pro-Nazi rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden drew 20,000. The hosting organization, the German American Bund, actively supported Hitler and his “leader principle,” or Führerprinzip, by which a single leader has absolute power. Though not explicitly pro-Hitler, the isolationist America First Committee was also surging. In 1941, America First found a spokesperson in the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who accused Jews of conspiring to lead the U.S. into World War II.

Fascism almost “happened here,” to riff on the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” about the anti-democratic forces threatening America in the lead-up to the Second World War. Why didn’t it? Well, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Germany declared war on the United States. These events spurred the public to support the war effort.

Then, when American troops went overseas, they witnessed firsthand what fascist regimes were doing to civilians on the streets and in concentration camps, and Americans wrote home about the atrocities. The press and film industry also exposed the brutality. Americans generally didn’t like what they saw, and protofascist movements in the U.S. were forced underground.

Now murmurs from the sewer can be heard again. Not just on social media but in public discourse. It looks as if the decades of relatively stable democracy following the war were not a change in our history but a temporary interlude. And I fear that a critical guardrail is gone. If Americans were once revolted by the aesthetics of fascism, in today’s era of mass content consumption, many now appear to be entertained.

How else to explain the 94,000 likes of a video, posted by the White House’s official X account, of migrants being chained without due process and put on an airplane? The post included a caption bearing the hashtag “#ASMR,” referring to the pleasurable response to auditory or visual stimuli — implying that some in the audience would be soothed by seeing such cruelty. It would be more apt to caption the video “#TorturePorn.”

And how to explain the 32,000 likes of a posed photo of Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) in which the congressman is giving thumbs up outside a cell at the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where individuals are being held indefinitely after being detained in the U.S. without due process?

If I had any doubts about my compatriots’ appetite for human suffering, these were put to rest with the news that the Department of Homeland Security is considering a reality show in which immigrants compete for U.S. citizenship. While Secretary Kristi Noem has not yet approved the program, the fact that a producer would even float such a dehumanizing premise speaks to the public’s appetite for exploitation. The American people apparently do not merely rely on migrants to pick our crops and build our homes; we also expect to be entertained by their struggles.

What is there to do when swaths of the public are no longer horrified, but rather titillated, by the imagery of the far right? What hope is there when the prospect of ICE agents storming workplaces and neighborhoods makes so many people giddy?

I believe the answer is to promote images of hospitality — that is, images of people embracing prisoners and welcoming those who hail from foreign lands. The antidote to an aesthetics of exploitation is an aesthetics of encounter.

The late Pope Francis emblematized the latter. Only two days after the congressman went viral for his thumbs up against a cell block, the pontiff marked Holy Thursday by visiting the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. There he spoke with inmates, prayed with them and blew kisses. If not for his ailing health, he said, he’d have washed inmates’ feet, as he’s done in the past in accordance with tradition.

An American priest, Father James Martin, noted the stark contrast between the West Virginia lawmaker and the pontiff, two Catholics making very different uses of photo opportunities with prisoners. Martin asked in a post on X: “Which way would Jesus, who was imprisoned, prefer?”

Of course, many of us outside the church have our own images and memories of fraternity bridging divides. Having long served in the United State Foreign Service, I was privileged to meet countless people from around the world. Even when we did not share a language, we shared meals. Even when we had no common past, we were able to find common goals.

I find myself returning to these experiences and musing about their quiet radicality. There is something powerful about people of different tribes coming together to share a laugh, break bread or simply recognize their shared humanity. Understanding this, I’ve tried, as a novelist, to write scenes of communion to combat those of violence.

As a thriller about infiltrating a white supremacist militia, my next book does not shy away from exposing neo-Nazis’ dark libido. But nor does it skimp on expressing hope for peace, celebrating characters who cross racial and cultural lines to become friends and even lovers.

At a time when simply by bearing witness to the news each day, Americans mass-consume what amounts to torture porn, we all have a duty to capture and recreate small moments of encounter. Because encounters transform us from the inside out. Francis put it poetically when he wrote that we must resist “the temptation to build a culture of walls,” whether in our hearts or on our lands. For those “who raise walls will end up as slaves within the very walls they have built,” he said, and will be “left without horizons.”

Otho Eskin, a playwright and retired diplomat, is the author of the forthcoming novel “Black Sun Rising.”