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Allow fascists to run riot and you will find your timidity has invited a bedlam of bloodshed and gunplay

You can burn Dresden in a barrage of firebombs, smash their 1,000-year reich to smithereens, execute the surviving leadership after fair trials at Nuremberg and hang the corpses of Il Duce and his mistress upside down in a public square in Milan. But they will be back. No newspaper column is going to persuade them to put the gun down, nor entreaties to reason or appeals to our common humanity.

There are exceptions, of course. The stupidly deluded can be peeled away from time to time. But the rule is proved time and again, and it applies with equal force to the derivatives and mutations of classic European fascism, to the Baathism of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi variety and Bashar Ashad’s Syrian variety, and to the theocratic fascism of the Taliban type, the Arabic Al Qaida variety, and so on.

This is an unpleasant axiom, but it is objectively unimpeachable. It should not be taken as an impudence or a challenge to the breathtaking Christian charity and moral courage of Mark Heyer, the broken-hearted father of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who died in the bedlam of a terrorist outrage in Charlottesville last weekend. A car was rammed straight into a crowded Charlottesville intersection, injuring dozens, sending 19 protestors to hospital and killing Heather; a pathetic little Kentucky fascist, an admirer of Adolph Hitler and Bashar Assad in equal measure, was behind the wheel. Here is what Mark Heyer had to say: “People need to stop hating, and they need to forgive each other, you know? And I include myself in that, in forgiving the guy that did this, okay? He don’t know no better. You know, I just think of what the Lord said on the Cross. Forgive ‘em. They don’t know what they’re doing.”