by Don Campbell

And we're so abused, and we're so confused
It's easy to believe that someone's gonna light the fuse
Can't happen here, can't happen here
All that you fear they're telling you, can't happen here

- Can’t Happen Here, Rainbow (1981)

In 1935 Doubleday published the novel It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. The plot may sound familiar to you. A populist politician, one whose ideas supposedly reflect those of the common man, rises to power. He himself is viewed as a somewhat average Joe, charismatic and easy to listen to. He makes promises that the ordinary citizen finds attractive and thus they elect him president. As he takes control, his tenure rapidly becomes dictatorial. Dissent is outlawed, political enemies are removed to camps, Congress is eliminated. Outrage is met with martial law and still many support him for his patriotism and ideals.

If it sounds like Nazi Germany, that’s because it was a novel written to parallel Hitler’s rise to power well before World War II kicked into high gear, but set in the United States. Many people were convinced such a thing could never happen on American soil, but Lewis understood the ease with which such things can be accepted by the unsuspecting. Before the truth is realized, it’s often too late. Hitler did not seize power, he was given power. The people supported him at the beginning and they went on supporting him, making excuses for his actions, well after it was obvious what he was really up to.

The novel has seen many incarnations over the years, stage and screen. The most pertinent to our discussion, however, is probably the most surprising and least recognized. In 1982 director-producer Kenneth Johnson was inspired by the story and wished to produce a film. His script, titled Storm Warnings, was presented to NBC who promptly turned it down. Network executives, who as we know always know what the public wants to see, thought it far too cerebral. Considering the political climate at the time, they were probably right.

Johnson, who clearly knows what network executives want to see, promptly rewrote the script and changed the fascists to aliens with a taste for human flesh (and mice) and thus the mini-series V was born. Chances are if you are reading this, you are familiar with at least the newer version of this story, if not the original that aired in 1983. Remove false-faced (figuratively) politicians, replace with false-faced (literally) reptile men from beyond the moon or, if you’re David Icke, you just say that all politicians actually are reptile men from beyond the moon and you got the recipe for a much beloved sci-fi story or a really great (read: crazy) conspiracy theory.

Orwell’s 1984 covers the subject matter thoroughly. He understood the dangers and in his own words the book "is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism... I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."

I recently read (and reviewed) a novel, The American Book of the Dead by author Henry Baum, that trod similar ground. It, like the aforementioned Orwell and Lewis, takes the “modern” path to its logical conclusion. Under the right circumstances and for the just the right kind of reasons, people as a group can be led in a dangerous direction. We are wired to accept authority, to accept that our “betters” know and will execute the right plan. Baum’s novel takes today’s world, full of disillusionment, crime, fundamentalism, and political strife, and nudges it ever so slightly into the future and then shoves it over the edge of the abyss into madness. The apocalypse war that occurs seems improbable at first, but the more one thinks about it, the more one has to wonder. Because you may find it surprising how social experiments dealing with this sort of thing have worked out.

In 1967 in Palo Alto, California a history teacher named Ron Jones was trying to explain to his students how the German people could have fallen under the sway of the Nazi ideology so readily. Finding it difficult, he decided to show them and created a student movement which he dubbed “The Third Wave”, based on the commonly held belief that the third wave of a series tends to be the biggest and most powerful. The movement pushed conformity, thought to be necessary for the greater good. Individualism was frowned upon. He began by insisting they follow strict routines of seating and posture and moved on to discipline and salutes. He became a figure of great authority to the students and the movement spread, unexpectedly, beyond the walls of his classroom. Suddenly there were hundreds of recruits, membership cards, and students snitching on each other to him when the rules of The Wave were broken by other members. All of this took three days.

By the fourth day Jones realized he was losing control. His solution was to announce that the Third Wave was, in fact, part of a nationwide movement and that the leader, a supposed presidential candidate, would appear on television and that they would watch this appearance at an assembly. Upon arriving at the assembly the students were greeted by an empty screen, at which point Jones essentially said “See? Told you so.” And then showed them a film about Nazi Germany.

If it sounds like the plot to a novel or a film, you’re right. Because it has been adapted a few times as a book, film and even an After School Special (a series which few of you probably remember). It is also an actual thing that happened. It rates right up there with the Stanford Experiment in showing how groupthink can easily lead people down paths they would never dream of going down on their own. To quote Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

In his novel The Long Walk, written under his nom de plume Richard Bachman, Stephen King once referred to it as The Great God Crowd (to quote: "They stared at each other uneasily and bunched closer together like small boys in a lightning storm or cows in a blizzard. There was a raw redness in that swelling sound of Crowd. A hunger that was numbing. Garraty had a vivid and scary image of the great god Crowd clawing its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs and devouring them all alive."), which is something that has stuck with me since I first read it as a kid. It’s a concept of the entity that takes over as more and more people fall into the line of a certain way of thinking, and there is no denying its power when we worship at its feet. It’s a deity whose domain is memetic virulence, an idea that spreads like a plague through a population, causing even good men to commit evil deeds.

And that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Serial killers notwithstanding, it’s highly unlikely anyone just wakes up one day and decides to do evil. The dictators, the zealots, the men and women we label as evil, they don’t see themselves that way. They believe not just that they are right, but that they are righteous in their causes. An ideology that outsiders may see as evil and destructive is seen by those that hold it as not just good, but completely necessary. Any time we brush arms with extremism, we dance with the Great God Crowd, be it left wing or right wing, conservative or liberal, Christian or Muslim, or any other. We are not evil, they are. Just always remember, whichever “side” you’re on, the other side thinks the same thing about you.

So there it is, I suppose. Not horror exactly, but certainly speculative fiction. Dark and dirty and sometimes seething, writhing, crawling on the floor, staring back up at us with eyes that we suddenly realize are our own. It’s the horror of truth, of how easy the wrong path can be to take. It’s starting at the beginning of the labyrinth and getting to the end with a knife in hand and blood in your eyes and not remembering why or how or even whose.

They say truth is stranger than fiction, but I’d like to see that amended. It may be stranger, but it’s also on occasion more horrifying. The best of fiction can come from that, from being rooted in the harsh realities of the world around us. Blind love can be just as destructive and awful as blind hatred.

Even this column has spiraled out of control, starting as simply something informative for you, the reader, to read and possibly take away a few seeds of storytelling possibilities and spiraling down into a bleak digression on my personal lack of trust in human nature.

Philip Zimbardo who conducted the original Stanford Experiment calls it The Lucifer Effect. It’s a name I can sort of get behind.

The road to Hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. 

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