This diary is composed partly of comments from other discussions (revised and expanded), as well as excerpts from previous diaries.
The title is from this quote:
QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded
Gregory Stanton/ Just Security
September 9, 2020
A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.
Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.
I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.
The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.
There is no shortage of quibbling with terminology when we decide to use the ‘f word’, including the farcical claim that fascism is a distinctly European political pathology:
The F-Word: No Other Way to Describe Trump’s Fascism 2.0
If Trump’s lengthy rap sheet of lies, threats, obstruction, and incitement doesn’t add up to fascism, then what would?
Connect all these dots. What do you see? “They all have one purpose,” said Sally Yates, past acting attorney general, “to remove any check on his abuse of power.” The emerging picture is not transactional conservatism but rather a deviant fascism American-style. (For those still offended by the F-word, there’s more: For the first time in 58 elections, a president is refusing to agree beforehand to abide by the results.) That’s not mainstream but extreme. (emphasis added)
…there’s a binary choice: fascism for the few or democracy for all.
And we all know what came after the election.
We need to view fascism as a pathological worldview that emerged from colonialism, and has cross-pollinated between Europe and the US:
What the Nazis Learned from Jim Crow: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the U.S. Racial Caste System
In her extensively researched new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues the United States’ racial hierarchy should be thought of as a caste system, similar to that in India. In a wide-ranging interview, she describes how she also looks at the ways Nazi Germany borrowed from U.S. Jim Crow laws. “The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate,” Wilkerson says. “But what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States, to study and to research how the United States had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African American population.”
The Europeans learned how to be better fascists from the Jim Crow south, and then the Confederates took inspiration from European fascists, who actually decided to roll out tanks and gun people down in the streets.
What we saw on 1.6.21 was the US strain finally getting their chance to emulate their hall of fame heroes.
We need to talk about fascism, and the members of the fascist crowd:
None were duped: the psychology of crowds— fascists are not led, they congregate. (Jan. 20, 2021)
For all the derangement on display, for all the rabid violent intent (make no mistake, Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have been brutally murdered by the criminal thugs who entered the Capitol, just as they beat a police officer to death), it is a convenient and comforting fiction to refer to the insurrectionists as unusual, somehow separate from the larger fascist crowd that makes up the GOP.
But who entered the Capitol with firearms and incendiary devices, waving Nazi and Confederate flags?
A real estate agent who flew in her private jet to participate.
Off duty police officers from around the country.
Current and former GOP state representatives.
School teachers.
Lawyers.
Ordinary individuals from every profession, most financially in no distress:
"They were business owners, CEOs… [w]hile "any crowd that size is bound to include people who are struggling financially," Serwer said, the bulk "weren't 'low class.' They were respectable," rioting because "they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule."...
The criminal thugs who assaulted police, intent on murder and the destruction of our democracy, are indistinguishable from the GOP rank and file as a whole.
They live in non-descript communities, and are your neighbors, co-workers, former classmates, perhaps erstwhile friends. Some might be part of your family.
They are the literal embodiment of what Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil...
Too many on the left slept while fascism encroached, because ‘decent white Americans shouldn’t lumped together with the obvious fascists’.
The problem, of course, is viewing anyone who has aligned with the GOP/fascist cabal over the past half century as anything other than nakedly white supremacist:
GOP voters not all the same? My reply: That matters? Don’t make excuses for those choosing fascism. (Jan. 23, 2021)
It’s not uncommon for me to hear from people who do not share my views that the GOP is a fascist regime, that GOP voters by definition have made the choice to align with that regime, and that they do so because that is their preference, their conscious, deliberate decision.
In other words, my view is that rank and file GOP voters are fascists, and the regime would not exist without them, if not for their votes, and their ongoing support.
When a person does not share my view, it’s also not uncommon for them to state something to the effect ‘They’re not all the same’, or ‘74 million voters didn’t enter the Capitol intent on murder’, as if such statements convey some sort of acute observation, or constitute some sort of substantive rebuttal.
Such statements generally accompany the contentions: a) it is wrong to render such judgements about so many people I’ve never met, and b) there are decent people who vote GOP who need our understanding, and we must make efforts to invite them to join with us in some common purpose (presumably because such efforts on our part will solve the problems caused by the presence of fascist regime across our nation- actively committing crimes against humanity and murder, and attempting to overthrow our democracy).
Such statements are not just, to quote someone I heard somewhere, malarkey, they are in fact dangerous. If we adopt propositions (a) and (b) above, more people will die, and next time, the fascists will be more adept at burning our democracy to the ground.
Here’s why the observation that ‘they are all different’ is simply a vapid description, akin to saying ‘they all have feet of varying size’. Undoubtedly true, but demonstrating nothing about the person’s political priorities or worldview. I’d suggest that political priorities and worldview matter more than any other characteristics when someone has facilitated a gang of criminal thugs whose purpose was to destroy the Capital, dismantle our democratic institutions, and murder Democratic members of Congress.
Individual differences don’t always reflect meaningful distinctions in understanding who belongs to what cohort.
Not all of an individual’s characteristics, the purported contributing factors to their decisions, are equally relevant, especially when it comes to the decisions people make.
Two different species of tree can be present in the same forest, and are part of what comprises that forest.
Amplifying the importance of differences among individuals, when those differences do not produce substantially different effects, can create the illusion that these disparate characteristics represent ‘daylight between them’, perhaps even opportunities to find a path to reconciliation, when none exists in reality…
Even if a person interviewed all 74 million GOP voters personally, what powers of discernment allow them to peer into their souls and divine their ‘true heart of hearts’,
Credulous acceptance of pretexts, and post-hoc justifications, is not a virtue.
It creates the conditions where more crimes are committed, more people die.
I find that problematic as a starting point.
The problem is, some data, and some contentions (even when these are considered by well-intentioned people) are spurious.
This is especially true when it comes to assessing another person’s conduct, their choices, their expressed motives, their rationale.
That is, the person’s explicit claims of how they, and their motives, are different from some others whom they nevertheless find themselves aligned with, are not presumptively genuine. Additionally, whatever story a person may tell themselves as to why they make certain choices, act in a certain way, in order to feel justified in what they do, to maintain their self-image as reasonable, even righteous, is also not presumptively legitimate, or even coherent.
To place undue emphasis on apparent or claimed differences, without scrutinizing them, without evaluating their credibility and salience, without considering the potential for hidden motives, or the desire to camouflage actual intentions behind a favored public persona, is, to say the least, problematic.
If instead we approach the task of looking clearly at the opponents we’re focused on in this discussion (and so many discussions here at DKos), opponents who have contributed by their choices, and alignment with the party of mass death and crimes against humanity, have facilitated acts of violence with the purpose of overthrowing our democracy, we might need to be more cautious about how much we make of claimed ‘differences’, and what those ‘differences’ actually signify.
There are far too many people who call themselves progressive who will make every effort to do anything but have that uncomfortable conversation when it involves friends and family members.
Listen to Trump voters? Listen to Gessen, Eco and Canetti first: learning the lessons of history. (Nov. 14, 2016)
All the things we know about Trump were not veiled, none of his message was subtle. As I, and others here at DKos have pointed out— the people who voted for him voted knowing precisely what he is, and what he intends to be— a bigoted autocrat. Whatever they’re individual motives supposedly are, this fundamental fact was of no concern to them.
I believe no one who has read the history of the rise of fascism in Europe, or witnessed what conservatism, as embodied in the GOP for the past half century, has espoused, should be the least bit surprised. The people who voted for Trump voted for him because he is autocratic, not in spite of it. They voted for him because the support what he says, and what he has promised to do.
Umberto Eco, who lived through the ascendance of Mussolini, and the rise of fascism throughout Europe, gave us the clearest description of what fascism is, and why it appeals to those drawn to it, in his 1995 essay Ur-Fascism:
Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values…
Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one.
What part of the above description does not fit the worldview of conservatives, and what we’re being told is the reason masses of working class white people in Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio voted for Trump?
‘Friendly Fascism’: The Core of American Conservatism. (Sept. 3, 2017)
Since the election, I’ve written about the long association between conservatives, white supremacists and Nazis (Nazis in full daylight. No one should be surprised where conservatism and the GOP have brought us. — Aug. 13, 2017), the ominous parallels in the exploitation of white working class economic concerns by the GOP during Trump’s campaign, and origins of fascism in Europe (Looking at the birth of fascism in Italy, and seeing who Trump’s supporters really are. — Dec. 6, 2016), and the specific psychological characteristics of typical conservatives and rank and file GOP members that make them susceptible to the messages of a bigoted autocrat, making them, as I describe them, proto-fascists (The Authoritarian Personality and Trump Voters: conservatism’s true face is fascism. — Dec. 1, 2016)
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Ten years before the installation of Trump in the White House, this fundamental connection between contemporary American conservatism and fascism was described by sociologist Milan Zafirovski of the University of North Texas, Toward friendly fascism? American Conservatism in the 21st Century…
In the aftermath of the election, there have been endless analyses of how to understand the rise of Trump, many portraying him as an interloper in the GOP, and his voters as somehow a distinct and new species, derived from the economic anxieties of the White Working Class (an hypothesis that has been repeatedly debunked, but continues to surface as a zombie narrative); this, ultimately, constitutes an elaborate apologetics for the GOP and conservatives (‘don’t paint us all with that brush’, ‘we’re not all the deplorables’). This is not merely a self-serving rationalization for tolerating the presence of overt Nazis (like those that terrorized Charlottesville) within the ranks of the GOP, it is a effort to obscure and disavow the true motives and goals of conservatism:
… while the North won the“civil war”, the South may win--and apparently is winning as shown in the 2004 election—what US neo-conservatives call “culture wars” raging for long, thus exacting a sort of moral victory and revenge; such are the peculiar workings and effects of American conservatism heading toward friendly fascism at the start of the 21st century. At the minimum, American conservatism, including its “Establishment leaders” has greatly contributed to friendly fascism or a “repressive corporate society” in America. (pg. 22)