Integrity and "the last inch of us" in the fight against fascism

Lessons in politics from our last global flirtation with fascism, courtesy of Alan Moore.

This article is part of a series on the ideas and philosophy of Alan Moore. To read the other articles, click here.

Let me tell you a story, and you tell me if it sounds familiar:

After several years of gains for the progressive and labor movements, there was a conservative backlash, and the country elected a far-right leader who had links to rejuvenated fascist movements. Naturally, with the leader’s support, the fascists began targeting minorities as the country saw an uptick in hate crimes. The leader put an enormous amount of energy into damaging organized labor, and handed out massive paychecks to the already-rich through lowering taxes and deregulating industry, and distracted lower class whites by stoking culture wars. LGBTQ+ people were increasingly demonized in the press, which led to a spate of laws targeting them for persecution. The press looked the other way when it came to the leader’s chumminess with known pedophiles and brutal dictators. Military funding soared, social services were slashed, mass surveillance and crackdowns on dissent spiked, millions slipped into poverty, and the cultural tenor of the country shifted from one of hope and possibility to one of doom and despair.

This was, of course, Margaret Thatcher’s England in the 1980s, but you might know someone now in a similar situation. Alan Moore, who in the early 80s was a lesser-known but up-and-coming comics writer, hated Margaret Thatcher. For part of the decade, he lived in a polyamorous throuple with his wife and another woman, making him part of the targeted LGBTQ+ community. Even worse, he began to feel that a nuclear apocalypse had become increasingly likely, and found that he had to explain the horrors of the bomb to his two young daughters, whom he feared might not make it to adulthood.

This was the political backdrop for Moore’s breakout work V for Vendetta. It’s unfortunate that it is still politically relevant, but it is fortunate for us that we can learn from it, 40 years on.

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Anarchism vs. Fascism

V for Vendetta was Moore’s first real stab at a longform comic, and its reception is what put him on the radar of many comics fans in the 80s. In it, an anarchist terrorist who goes by “V” and wears a Guy Fawkes mask attempts to topple the fascist police state that arose in the wake of the chaos that followed a nuclear war¹. It was Moore’s attempt to grapple with — and warn against — the potential trajectory of the Thatcher era’s creeping fascism.

The famous Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta

It is not, it needs to be said, a work that is steeped in a lot of coherent political theory. Moore is a lifelong anarchist, but he does not appear to be the type of guy who reads The Conquest of Bread and quibbles over theoretical details with other radicals. This means the story’s got a lot of things that most anarchists wouldn’t really love (such as a single hero that takes down the government instead of a mass movement). But because he doesn’t dwell on theory, it allows him to get at what he sees as the deeper underlying issues. As he explained in one video:

“Anarchy is and always has been a romance. It is clearly the best way and the only morally sensible way to run the world: that everybody should be the master of their own destiny, everybody should be their own leader.”

V for Vendetta was in part a response to the polarization of the Cold War, with the capitalist West fighting the communist East. But to Moore, they both employed similarly repressive tactics when it came to dissent, and both meddled in the private lives of their citizens. He explained it a 2009 interview with the American anarchist Margaret Killjoy:

“It struck me that simple capitalism and communism were not the two poles around which the whole of political thinking revolved. It struck me that two much more representative extremes were to be found in fascism and anarchy.”

Interestingly, he frames the two poles in the usually-conservative language of personal responsibility:

Fascism is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. You are surrendering all responsibility for your own actions to the state on the belief that in unity there is strength, which was the definition of fascism represented by the original Roman symbol of the bundle of bound twigs. Yes, it is a very persuasive argument: “In unity there is strength.” But inevitably people tend to come to a conclusion that the bundle of bound twigs will be much stronger if all the twigs are of a uniform size and shape, that there aren’t any oddly shaped or bent twigs that are disturbing the bundle. So it goes from “in unity there is strength” to “in uniformity there is strength” and from there it proceeds to the excesses of fascism as we’ve seen them exercised throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world.

…if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.

V for Vendetta is framed around this understanding, that people acquiesce to being ruled because they simply do not want the responsibility of taking control of their own lives.

If we were to take out all the leaders tomorrow, and put them up against a wall and shoot them — and it’s a lovely thought, so let me just dwell on that for a moment before I dismiss it — but if we were to do that, society would probably collapse, because the majority of people have had thousands of years of being conditioned to depend upon leadership from a source outside themselves. That has become a crutch to an awful lot of people, and if you were to simply kick it away, then those people would simply fall over and take society with them. In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people — and educate them massively — towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider group: that they must allow other people within that group to take responsibility for their own actions.

Moore had originally planned for V for Vendetta to end on a more utopian note, in which the fascist government was overthrown and anarchy took its place. But by the time he finished V for Vendetta — nearly 8 years after he started it — he grew uncertain that such a dramatic change was possible. Living under autocracy stifles us and deforms us, but it is less terrifying than being in charge of our own lives.

Spiritual fascism and “The Last Inch”

Interestingly, Moore equates the fascist tendency of submitting our own thoughts and desires to the powerful with the religious impulse:

Now if you move that into the spiritual domain, then in religion, I find very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. The word “religion” comes from the root word ligare, which is the same root word as ligature, and ligament, and basically means “bound together in one belief.” It’s basically the same as the idea behind fascism; there’s not even necessarily a spiritual component it. Everything from the Republican Party to the Girl Guides could be seen as a religion, in that they are bound together in one belief.

This is something I only very recently came to realize myself. I grew up Catholic and left the church when I was in my teens, declaring myself an atheist. A few months ago, after taking a particularly strong edible, I rediscovered an old feeling that, as a kid, I identified as the presence of “god.” It’s an incredibly pleasant, serene feeling, but I was surprised that it was still there. I had, after all, rejected the concept of God along with the Catholic Church in my teens.

I realized, almost instantly, that the experience itself was real, but that the religious leaders in my life had attempted to tell me what it was, what it meant, and how I should behave towards it. Because the stuff they were telling me was batshit insane and sometimes openly evil (you should be ashamed of your body, you are a broken sinner, your only way back towards this feeling is obedience to our rules), I rejected the feeling itself along with the church, and it lay dormant in me for over 20 years.

It is a delightful feeling to have back in my life, but I am taking it slow and am exploring it without any labels. The feeling is mine, and I get to explore my relationship with the feeling in private. I don’t want to even call it “god” or “spirituality,” because I have the sense, to steal from the first line of the Tao Te Ching, that the god that can be named is not the true god.

Along with the feeling of intense relief that comes with finding this feeling still buried inside me after all these years, I have found myself incredibly angry that the feeling was co-opted and taken from me by the religious leaders in my life.

This sense, that there’s something inside us that cannot and should not be touched by others, that should remain our own, makes up the most famous moment in V for Vendetta and its film adaptation, the “Last Inch” scene. In the scene, Evey Hammond, a character allied with V, has been arrested and thrown into a prison cell. While there, she discovers a roll of toilet paper on which one of her fellow inmates, a woman named Valerie, wrote her autobiography, which I reproduce in part here:

In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later, I moved to London, enrolling at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart.

But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free.

…I imagine I’ll die quite soon. It is strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologised to nobody. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish… except one.

An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Protecting our “last inch” is not easy. The capitalist society we live in treats humans like expendable machines that exist only for generating profits for the rich. It tells us that we are garbage, that humans are a disease, a stain on the face of the earth, and that we should rent our bodies and our souls out to the rich and powerful so that they can make better use of them. They are happy to take everything from us until there’s nothing left.

You do not have to be an anarchist to accept the alternative: that you matter, and there are some parts of you that are just yours, and that you’re allowed to live with dignity and integrity. This sounds simple, but the implications of doing this, of taking responsibility for your life, are immense. There are consequences to being your own person, and those consequences could end up costing you everything.

But wouldn’t all that responsibility be worth it? If you could be your own person and hold yourself in high enough esteem to not sell every last bit of yourself to others, no matter how high the price?

Isn’t responsibility a small price to play for liberation?

1. Strangely, Moore’s vision seemed to seep off of the page and into reality: the Guy Fawkes mask was adopted by the Anonymous hacktivist group in the 2000s, and later became associated with the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring protests. Moore, an anarchist himself, was pleased at this development. He was less pleased that his futuristic vision of London, full of CCTV cameras and riot police, also came to fruition. This seepage of ideas from his imagination into the real world — where they spun out of his control — greatly influenced Moore’s theory of the imagination, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

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