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Say the word “fascism” and most people envision an all-powerful government complete with goose-stepping soldiers, iron fists and hordes of loyal, obedient followers. It brings to mind a movement/regime that exudes a cruel arrogance, a smug assurance of never-ending triumph, and the presumption that all things attempting to stand in its inexorable way will be promptly and unceremoniously crushed.

While that may be a reasonable depiction of a fascist movement upon its taking power – its beginnings can appear much less promising, with a cause embraced not by a race of ubermensch but by the hurt and walking wounded.

Fascism announces itself with pained inflections. Proclaims its purpose in a voice drenched with fear. Speaks in the language of those who feel they have been coldly betrayed. Arrives not as a rampaging ogre flexing its over-sized muscles as it towers above its puny subjects, but as a desolate and occasionally unbalanced victim, stripped of power, left barren and bereft, with apparently little choice left but to take the most extreme measures, actions that go beyond the pale of human decency yet seem eminently reasonable to those who share in their mutual desperation.

It is not simply unchecked hate but generous helpings of delusionary persecution complexes that give birth to mass slaughter and genocide. Cold-blooded murder becomes recast as pre-emptive self-defense. Killers are re-defined as long-suffering victims who simply struck first. Didn’t the SS consider ghettos and death camps vital to protect the German people from domination by the so-called Jewish-Bolshevik menace? Didn’t the Klan believe that burning crosses and lynch mobs were necessary steps to safeguard the honor of Southern white women from what they saw as the growing threat of communist-connected Black integrationists. Didn’t those Interahamwe who wielded the bloody machetes during the slaughter of those men, women and children who bore the label “Tutsi” firmly believe that their very survival was at stake?

Though fascism is ultimately the exercise of a more nakedly brutal rule by some faction or grouping among those who already hold the reigns of power, it acquires its currency as a revolt by those who perceive themselves cast aside by the nation they always considered their own, marketed as a “moral” response to discarded values and broken dreams, and spread as a political narcotic that allows the user the elated feeling of complete righteousness while absolving them of all guilt for the buckets of blood that will soon be on their hands.

The author Upton Sinclair once reportedly said that when fascism comes, it will arrive waving the flag and bearing a cross. But before it declares its triumph, it begins with a shrill and bitter whine. And a small cup of tea.

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Another picture of death from Haiti.

A young woman lies still on the ground.

Unlike most casualties of the earthquake, she wears no covering of dust and debris and appears relatively unscathed – but for the small rivulets of blood running down the side of her face onto the ground beneath her prone form. There is no glimpse of a news crew nearby offering empathetic commentary. No rescue team standing off to the side, exhausted after a determined but futile effort to save her life.

She just lies there. Inert. Alone. And dead.

Though no less a victim than the countless thousands who fill makeshift morgues, tombs of rubble and hastily dug mass graves, it’s doubtful this young woman will be included in the official tally of the dead. The agent of her demise was not the pancaked floors of a collapsing building or a fatal post-injury infection, but a few small pellets of lead drilled into her skull from a police officer’s weapon.

Her alleged offense was stealing some plastic chairs and paintings from earthquake damaged stores. A picture lays sandwiched between her face and the blood-stained ground. Another painting – two pink flowers in a vase – is pinned underneath her torso. There are no chairs in the photo.

The image reveals no information about her life or the events leading to her death. That she was a wiz at math, did well in science and dreamed of being a nurse. That she lived in a one room shack with her parents and five siblings. That she had gone out that day to buy items for her family’s resale stand. That she wound up in the midst of a throng of people taking food, furniture and whatever else they needed from stores destroyed in the earthquake.

When police arrived, the young woman was making her way back home over a collapsed roof. They drew their weapons. They fired shots to scatter the crowds. At least one bullet hit its mark. Not by accident says her father, but by intent.

As distinguished officials stand before attentive cameras offering somber assessments and lofty promises of a new, improved and more business-friendly Haiti. As calculations and computations are made in anticipation of the lucrative opportunities for profitable investment born of disaster. As the grand and respectable international array of corporate and global leaders speak in terms of development as they plan to carve even more slices from Haiti’s depleted flesh.

A broken lifeless body is gently lifted from the ground by a grieving father and taken home. She will be buried in a small plot, unheralded and unknown but to a few.

She owned no sweatshops
Commanded neither military nor national police
Did not dominate the affairs of her small island nation,
nor gained wealth and power at the expense of those who were lacking in both.

She was not a looter.

She was just a young girl who might have grabbed a few pictures and chairs without paying, and for that was judged, convicted, and executed.

Her name was Fabienne.

She was only 15 years old.