[Fascism is a Roman word. It comes from the Latin fasces, a neatly bundled package of rods tied round a double-headed ax. When heads of the Roman state appeared in public, functionaries known as lictors carried the bundle conspicuously in the vanguard of the security retinue. In a society that couldn’t be molested by the technologies of modern mass media, it served as a vivid reminder to all citizens of the right of state to execute and flog (i.e. torture). If Washington were as honest about the underpinnings of its own ill-gotten power, men carrying portable models of needle-crossed gurneys, torture equipment, warplanes and bombs would be part of the president’s retinue whenever he left the White House.

The right of the state to execute is the seed corn of fascism, if you will, the very first building block, the sine qua non, upon which any of its more extreme manifestations must rest. A society of free-thinking people would never give this “right” to anyone. Even under repressed and manipulated conditions, people don’t really give it. Rulers take it, and then try to make it appear normal by enshrinement in law, and necessary by pursuing policies with the side effects, if not direct effects, of spreading fear and insecurity throughout the population. From here, it’s an easy step to exploit false notions of justice, deterrence, revenge.

The death penalty is a fetishized reenactment of the earlier violence that created the state in the first place, and procured its fortunes; a funnel of blood stretching backward in time, linking rulers of the devolved state to ancestors of the proto-state who scrupled not to use murder as a tool for their own advancement and power-building. The craven impulse gives those who act upon it a distinct advantage over those who refrain from murder as an organizing tool for the achievement of political ends. Death penalty is the “blood bond” that keeps the “blood” of present-day rulers in touch with the “blood” of the state’s founding ancestors. Notable exceptions notwithstanding – Tibet under the Lamas, India under Asoka post-conversion – the organized state, at the highest levels, is essentially a government of killers. Historically, human beings seem to have no idea how to create an interdependent world of sovereign nations whose governments are not subject to domination by killers. Certainly this is one of the greatest failures of the species, a hideous bequeathal to ourselves of eternal return that may one day overshadow all human accomplishments – if it doesn’t lead to events causing our own extinction.

Death penalty and war – if ever there were two sides of the same counterfeit coin circulated by the state to prop up a false economy, this is it. Death penalty is war turned inward against citizens singly; war is death penalty turned outward against non-citizens en masse. In both cases, the state arrogates the right to kill any and all human beings who challenge what it absolutely has no right to do: base any portion of its economy on executing the human within, while waging war against the human without.

The short poem below is a rewrite of the foundation myth of Rome – the version in which Remus in jest jumps over the wall that his brother Romulus starts to build. For this, Romulus kills Remus, and then founds the city of Rome, fratricide its first unofficial act.]

Rome, so they say, was not built in a day.
But if on the first day the masons had
stopped, when playful Remus bounded over
Rome’s wee little walls and brother (instead
of killing brother that day, then the threat:
“So perish whoso else shall leap these walls!”)
had laughed that day with his twin brother, all
murder cast from the boundary of thought,
and they charged, as one, heralds to announce:
“So shall be our kin whoso else shall round
these walls!” – and decreed all the wall stays
waist-high to commemorate that blest day’s
mirth and new beginning, Rome and Latin
brethren might have learned a diff’rent lesson.

little big pine
los angeles county
andromeda overhead
october 2006

Little Big Pine: citizen, patriot, poet; may be reached at littlebigpine@gmail.com.