I spend a lot of time thinking about cancer. I ought to, since it's my job. Working on cancer vaccine research is mostly reading, trying something a bit new, and hoping it all works out. Cancer is an ailment as old as life itself, so getting rid of it is no easy task.
Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time living in America too. This means I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about a different ailment: fascism. As I've spent more time learning about both, there are stark similarities between the two: in treatment and in their origin. In this piece, I wanted to tease out the connections between the two. There are interesting answers to confronting fascism, with similarities in how we confront cancer. Finally, I think that both of these ailments speak to something greater about mankind. They are evils that will never completely leave the human race.
Earlier, I said it's difficult to destroy cancer. That's not completely true. Cancer cells are the same cells we're made out of, they can die just as easily. It's the eradication of only cancer cells that demands nuance. Our current standard of care, chemotherapy, is like a bomb to the cells. We hope it kills the correct ones and our immune system can cover the difference. Today's treatments attempt to be a bit more refined. In the science world, you'll find investigation into immunotherapy: using the body's own natural defenses to confront cancer. By training our immune cells, the little white blood cells in our bodies become warriors in the fight against cancer.
It's the training that's the hard part though. Cancer is very, very tricky. When it starts out, cancer cells shed off special markers that tell other cells: "destroy me!". When these are lost, cancer becomes invisible to our body's natural surveillance mechanisms. But, here comes science! If we can re-train those white blood cells to see a whole new tag, then it's possible to show them the previously hidden disease.
Like I said, however, cancer is tricky. Scientists spend a lot of time looking for a tag that could work. Finding a marker that only exists on a cancer cell, and not on our healthy ones, is the modern search for a cure. One issue is that each cancer is unique. Each tumor can have completely different cells, as life unregulated grows wildly. Cells can differentiate into specialized tissue or can stay as a stem cell. Or, pieces of cells can become unattached and metastasize elsewhere, creating a whole new and unique tumor environment. This means that one cancer patient can have different expressing tumors, though this is incredibly rare. Usually the most dominant mutant prevails, ravaging the body with its growth.
I'm going to change the subject here a little bit, bear with me.
Imagine a person you've met in public. They seem innocuous enough, maybe even kind to you. You would most likely treat them with respect. But maybe they say something off to you, something that sounds wrong. Maybe they mention the numbers "1488" off-handedly, or you notice it's their phone passcode. Are they referencing the dog whistle? Or did they just accidentally choose a supremacist dog whistle? Is it worth confronting this random stranger about it? Do they even know about the dog whistle?
These questions arise because confusion is a primary defense tactic of fascists. Like cancer cells, fascists cannot exist in the public space. Individuals who loudly proclaim their love for white supremacy and Nazi politics won't create much change. People naturally don't want to associate with a goose-stepping Nazi. Instead, fascists seek to lose the tags that define them. They speak in code or in gesture, with the primary point of being confusing, to defend themselves from ostracization. See also the "just joking" claims, where fascists will use comedy as a smokescreen to espouse horrible beliefs.
Don't take it from me, take it from famous Nazi Andrew Anglin, who founded Nazi website Daily Stormer, and mentions this in website’s style guide:
"While racial slurs are allowed/recommended, not every reference to non-white should [. . .] be a slur and their use should be based on the tone of the article. Generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking – like a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it’s true. This follows the generally light tone of the site. It should not come across as genuine raging vitriol. That is a turnoff to the overwhelming majority of people."
What a charmer.
Modern day fascists use modern society's tolerance to hide themselves as "one of us". By making every day talking points become inundated with hidden and racist code words, it becomes harder and harder to define who has fascistic beliefs. Like cancer, it demands a special kind of retraining from those who seek to fight it. Anti-fascists today have to look closely into the different ways that racist and intolerant actors sneak into our society.
Modern day treatments of cancer demand an environment that can allow immune cells to fight metastatic tumors. This extends to modern day anti-fascist sentiments. By creating communities that are visibly diverse and anti-racist, the "environment" of a community can become inhospitable to far right agitators. Some may be able to infiltrate, but with a strong presence of community focused individuals, there would be little change they could affect. Furthermore, by training community leaders to become sensitive to fascist ideology and policy, we can create human immune cells that can specially target hateful ideas.
Fascists know this too (admittedly, this is where the analogy begins to crumble a bit). Groups like "Gays Against Groomers" or "LGB drop the T" explicitly seek to damage these open and tolerant communities. By fracturing the diverse environment into smaller subsets, individuals can have more influence and change over the goals of a community. It's the job of allies and community leaders to maintain solidarity, regardless of race, religion, class, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Such a powerful community of tolerance is inhospitable to those who seek to destroy equality.
All in all, this was a long diatribe that over-explained the Paradox of Tolerance. In the past, I've had issues defining exactly the line of tolerability - but I've found cancer to be a good metric. No one expects us to be tolerant of cancer in our body, or any disease for that matter. We should, and definitely could, extend this to our communities as well. By identifying fascism for what it is, a malignant growth on human society, we can recognize and excise it from our collective being.