Introduction
We have seen this pattern of the Manufactured Enemy before, in history and in the stories we tell to brace ourselves against it. Orwell imagined a world where the enemy could be summoned at will. Atwood showed how ordinary life can narrow, inch by inch, until the unthinkable becomes routine. Their warnings endure because they understood something essential: once a society accepts the naming of enemies, the boundary never stays still.
Part II in this series, The Manufactured Enemy, will look closely at how that first boundary is drawn and how quickly it begins to shift.
The Factory Worker – The List on the Wall - Leipzig, 1933
The yard was already half full when he arrived, men standing in loose clusters with their hands in their pockets, breath rising in the cold. Someone had posted another notice on the factory bulletin board during the night. No one said who. No one ever did.
He joined the edge of the crowd and read the heading: Workers Under Review for Non-German Origin. It was not the first list. The first one had caused a stir, a few raised voices, a few men insisting it was only temporary. This one drew no such reaction. People read it the way they read the weather report, something to be endured rather than questioned.
He scanned the names. Most he did not know. One he did. Janek, the Polish-born fitter who had shared his lunch last week and had helped him lift a gearbox into place when his back was acting up. Janek’s name sat halfway down the page, typed neatly, as if it had always belonged there.
Below the list was a blank space, wide enough for more names. Someone had drawn a faint pencil line across it, as if preparing for the next addition.
The foreman stood a few steps away, arms folded, watching the men who lingered too long and the ones who walked past too quickly. No one spoke to him. No one asked questions. The rules were changing, but no one could say how.
The bell rang. The crowd broke apart. He followed the others inside.
Janek was already at his station, tightening a bolt with the same steady rhythm as always. A few men nodded to him, but from a distance, as if the space around him had shifted overnight. He started to raise a hand in greeting, then let it fall. The foreman was nearby, and the room felt too small for risks.
He took his place at the bench and tried to focus on the work, but the blank space on the notice stayed with him. It felt heavier than the names already written.
The Enemies List
The lists that appeared in early 1933 were not yet instruments of removal. They were instruments of unease. Their power came from suggestion, not decree. A name on a list didn’t have to lead anywhere; it only had to make people wonder what might come next.
In the factory, that wondering did the work. Men who had shared lunches and jokes now kept a careful distance. The foreman didn’t need to say a word. The list had already rearranged the room. Janek hadn’t changed, but the meaning of standing near him had.
The list changed more than Janek’s standing. It changed the room itself. Men who once worked shoulder to shoulder now watched one another with a new caution, as if proximity carried risk. The foreman didn’t need to issue warnings; his silence did the work. Even the rhythm of the machines felt different, as though the factory had absorbed the tension and was echoing it back. The list had introduced a new gravity, and everyone adjusted their steps without being told.
At Home that Night
He sat at the kitchen table, still in his work shirt.
“Janek was on the list,” he said.
His wife set the dish towel down.
“I saw his wife at the market. The children were practicing their letters.”
He nodded. “He was at his station. No one spoke to him.”
She took a slow breath. “People are afraid.”
He looked at his hands. “They left a blank space at the bottom.”
She reached for him, her fingers resting lightly on his.
“There is always a blank space,” she said.
The house felt smaller, the quiet stretching between them.
The question of who might be next settled into the room like a weight neither of them wanted to name. They held each other’s gaze, searching past the surface worry to the deeper fear that had begun to move through their days like a slow current, difficult to see directly yet impossible to ignore. The silence felt charged, as if the air itself understood what they could not bring themselves to say.
Then the tea kettle began to whistle, thin at first, then rising with a sharp insistence that cut through the room. It sounded like something pushed past its limit, something that had been heating quietly for too long. The moment broke, but the pressure beneath it did not.
At Home - Absorption
Fear didn’t enter that kitchen all at once. It slipped in quietly, carried by glances, pauses, and the small edits people were already making to their routines. What happened at that table was happening everywhere: a shared understanding that certain things were no longer safe to say aloud.
Once fear takes root, it spreads through the unspoken rules people begin to follow. Voices lower. Questions shrink. People learn to read the room before they speak. No one has to enforce these rules; ordinary people do it themselves, trying to stay on the safe side of a line that keeps moving.
In the United States, a similar instinct has taken hold as people began choosing silence over friction. Some grew quieter out of worry; others grew louder out of certainty. The emotional distance widened, and people adjusted their behavior to avoid crossing whatever boundary they sensed beneath the surface.
The Wives at the Market – Escalation
She reached the market later than usual, hoping the morning rush had passed. The air was sharp, and the stalls were crowded with people who seemed to speak more quietly than they once had. Near the potatoes, she saw Marta and Elise again, standing closer than she expected, their faces tight.
Marta greeted her with a small nod. Elise did not.
“I heard Janek hasn’t been back to the factory,” Marta said, her voice low.
“He hasn’t,” she replied. “His wife said he’s waiting for someone to tell him what happens next.”
Elise let out a short breath. “People are saying he brought this on himself. That he wasn’t loyal. That he complained too much.”
Marta turned sharply. “He worked harder than most. You know that.”
Elise lifted her chin. “Hard work doesn’t matter if someone isn’t committed. These are dangerous times. The country needs people it can trust.”
The words hung in the cold air. A few women nearby glanced over, then quickly looked away.
She felt a small tremor in her chest. “Committed to what?” she asked, but Elise only tightened her grip on her basket.
Marta stepped closer to her. “This is how it starts,” she whispered. “People deciding who deserves to belong.”
Elise heard her. “Or who deserves to be protected,” she said sharply. “Some of us are tired of being taken advantage of.”
For a moment, none of them moved. The market noise swelled around them, the clatter of crates, the calls of vendors, the scrape of boots on hardened ground, yet the space between the three women felt suddenly brittle, as if one more word might cause it to crack.
Marta finally turned away. “There will be more lists,” she said quietly. “And more people willing to justify them.”
Elise didn’t answer. She was already walking toward the next stall, her shoulders stiff, her steps quick and certain.
The Escalation
Moments like the one in the marketplace didn’t stay isolated. They marked a shift in which ordinary disagreements hardened into judgments. People who once traded recipes now listened for what the other was willing to defend. The space for uncertainty narrowed. The cost of hesitation rose.
Public life changed in subtle ways. Conversations became signals. Choices that once meant nothing, such as a stall visited or a comment left unchallenged, began to carry weight. Communities that had relied on familiarity found themselves sorting into camps defined less by circumstance than by sentiment. The boundaries were still deniable, but already shaping how people moved through their days.
Naming the Pattern of Boundary – Shifting
A narrow boundary never stays narrow. Once a society accepts the idea that some people belong on the outside, the definition of “outside” becomes easier to stretch. What begins with one group soon extends to those connected to them, then to those who ask questions, then to anyone who complicates the story.
Each shift feels small enough to ignore, but together they redraw the moral landscape. People adapt to the new line, and that adaptation becomes permission for the next one. What was once unthinkable becomes routine. This is how a manufactured enemy grows, not through sudden leaps, but through quiet recalibrations that people learn to live with.
Re‑Humanizing the Neighbor
What happened in the factory, in the kitchen, and in the marketplace began with a quiet shift in how people saw one another. Once a person is treated as an idea instead of a neighbor, almost anything can be justified in the name of safety or strength. That is the move authoritarian systems depend on: the reduction of a life into a category.
The work of resisting that reduction is quiet. It shows up in small acts of recognition such as greeting someone who has been pushed aside, asking a real question, or refusing to repeat a slur even when silence would be easier. These gestures are not sentimental. They are civic.
Re‑humanization is a daily discipline, a way of insisting that no one is reducible to the story the state tells about them. Democracies weaken when people stop imagining the inner lives of others. The health of a society is measured not by how it treats its heroes, but by how it treats those it is tempted to fear or ignore.
This work rarely looks dramatic. But it is the ground on which democratic life stands.
Summary
In every era, the temptation to divide the world into “us” and “them” has offered a false sense of safety. It promises order, simplicity, and control. But history shows that once a society accepts the idea of an “enemy within,” it begins to lose the very qualities that made it strong in the first place. Fear narrows imagination. Suspicion replaces trust. Neighbors become symbols rather than people.
The quiet work of citizenship begins by refusing that narrowing. It asks us to see one another not as categories but as human beings with stories, burdens, and hopes of their own. This is not naïve optimism; it is the discipline that keeps a democracy from turning against itself.
When a society learns to fear its own people, the next steps become easier to justify. Boundaries harden. Force becomes a language. And the space for dissent begins to shrink.
The face of the enemy had taken shape.
Author’s Note:
Recognizing the Patterns — Quiet Lessons from the History of Fascism is a multi‑part essay series that examines the recurring patterns of fascist movements across world history and offers readers a steadier, more discerning way to understand the present. Beginning with Italy after the First World War and expanding to Germany, Spain, Latin America, and other regions where authoritarian movements took root, the series traces how societies drift toward extremes long before those extremes are named. Each essay pairs a concise historical vignette with a reflective exploration of the emotional and structural shifts that make populations vulnerable to simplified narratives, manufactured enemies, and the gradual erosion of shared reality.
The goal is not to provoke alarm, but to provide clarity. By illuminating recognizable patterns — the reshaping of public mood, the normalization of force, the cult of the leader, and the quiet weakening of institutions — the series helps readers rise above the noise of contemporary discourse. It offers a vantage point where reactions can be tempered, perspective can be regained, and responses can become proactive rather than reactive. In a moment saturated with outrage and confusion, these essays invite readers to slow down, look closely, and cultivate the steadiness that has always been the antidote to authoritarian drift.