"The Price of Going to Class" and Fascism

Filkin's article about the hardships faced by modern day Afghan schoolgirls remind us that fascism is not just a distant memory of the past, but a fact of modern life. Maus reminds us of the past and the atrocities that a government with unchecked powers can do. But what both of these pieces do is give a personal, human spin by telling the story of a person, instead of giving percentages or statistics.
Both of these works give us the true human experience of what it is to live in the intolerant, fascists regimes of both modern day and of the past. The similarities between the modern day Taliban and past fascists regimes, such as Hitler's and Mussolini's, are abundant. Both the Taliban and past regimes used fear to subdue their enemies, and were willing to use brutal methods of torture to silence them if necessary. The Taliban, in their pursuit to put to an end to the schooling of girls, use the fear of the people in Swat Valley to achieve their goals. It is their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that leads them to terrorize the girls that wish to succeed in life, saying that a woman's place is at home. Hitler's Germany had a similar plan for separating those that were not of the "pure" Aryan race. The Nazi party's rise to power was during a time when the world was at a turning point: on one side, there was total economic collapse; on the other side, salvation and restoration of cherished times. The Nazi party, through it charisma and eventual rise to power, was able to sway the German citizens to rally against its own Jewish citizens. Those deemed unfit to be part of Germany, especially, but not only Jews, were slowly purged from their homes and sent to labor camps. As the party began to gain more and more power, they relied on more drastic measures to fulfill their end goal. The Nazi party saw their goal, a world ruled by the Aryan race, as an end that could justify the means. The horrid tactics they employed to get their plan through is shown through Maus. And these tactics of fear and torture are once again on the rise in Taliban ruled Afghanistan.