The smallest people in the world
It can be difficult as a citizen to watch as society moves in grand sweeps like the swelling of the ocean in a storm. If I had the ability, I—and many others—would attempt to arrest its excesses and perhaps prevent some of its harms, but I at least am merely a man amidst the waves. The United States slips with a sickening inevitability into an authoritarian, nativist mode that has never been purged from this land but has perhaps never been so stupid.
As they are wont to do, the craven attempt to demonstrate the perversion they believe to be strength by targeting the weak. In our name people are kidnapped off the streets by masked thugs. They are taken from their families, imprisoned and sent to countries they have no real connection to for crimes as heinous as “minor paperwork error” or “showed up for their immigration hearing.” The Department of Homeland Security posts memes about enjoying the utopia we’ll have once 100 million people are deported.[1]
It is “racial purity” by euphemism, but pains have also been taken to make the process itself as cruel as they can get away with. We sent men convicted of no crime to a foreign torture prison where they were shaved and beaten and raped, without any mechanism to appeal that detention.[2] Parents have been grabbed out of their vehicles and their toddlers left abandoned. Legal immigrants have been snatched straight from their immigration hearings. Families have been torn apart and torn apart with violence. Only a few days ago, a mother by the name of Rachel Nicole Good was shot repeatedly, including in the head, at close range by an ICE officer and the administration, in trying to excuse him, says they put a man with active PTSD out on the street with a gun and had him confront people.
Of course, we wouldn’t do this unless the people we hurt were bad people, right? They must deserve it, right? Because we wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t, right?
It is amazing what you can excuse once you decide someone is “bad.” Once you decide that human beings aren’t.
This cruelty is necessary, because the cruelty proves we are “strong,” because this bastardisation of strength is defined by violence and indifference and not by empathy and compassion and kindness. It is exemplified by reaching out to our fellow man not with an open hand but with a fist.
And we act as if our cruelty is about our “enemies,” and not ourselves. Cruelty is never necessary, because cruelty is always a choice.
Look upon these empty souls who need to hurt others to feel powerful.
Guess who else does that? Wife beaters. Every time you look at the president or members of his cabinet or the thugs they send out onto the street, that’s the image you should have in your mind: a man so inadequate the only way he can feel powerful is to beat up someone he thinks can’t fight back.
The Nazis were a bunch of losers. No, really.
One of the things that appeals to mediocre men about fascism is that it might make them strong.[3] When they can deploy violence against you with the backing of the state, they love nothing more than to respond to any sort of antagonistic or even gruff words with that violence, knowing any action you take in self-defence will be used as justification for their unprovoked attack.
But one thing that fascists do not like at all is when you can demonstrate how pathetic they actually are. These people can’t take a joke at their own expense because they are insecure crybabies, lashing out at perceived slights because deep down they fear the jester is right. And the reason this works is that you’re telling other people, who might have a deep-seated respect for authority, “look at this dipshit who is abusing it.”[4]
The thing is, this has historical precedent. Do you know who else was a bunch of weird, mediocre losers? The Nazis.[5]
Joseph Goebbels frequently whined in his diaries about the big meanie Heinrich Himmler who was preventing him from having more time with Hitler.
Himmler was conned into believing that some runes and beliefs made up by völkisch grifter Guido List were real, and these informed the occult side of the SS. The primary SS insignia, the two “lightning bolts,” are meant to say “Victory! Victory!” but are in reality just a sign they got conned.
Fellow Thule Society member Rudolf Hess became increasingly sidelined as the war progressed, and the deputy Führer attempted to get back in Hitler’s good graces by beginning peace talks with the British on his own initiative. After parachuting alone from a plane over Scotland, he made contact with a British noble he was certain would be sympathetic… a man who immediately reported Hess to the authorities.
Hitler himself may be the best example. His father was an asshole even for the time, and his mother was his own second cousin. Hitler may also have impregnated his own niece, who he effectively kept prisoner in his Munich apartment until she “committed suicide,” though that is not clear—she may have not intended to die from the gunshot wound in her chest, and that wound may not have been self-inflicted.
Hitler had room-clearing flatulence, that he attempted to treat with quack medicine that contained both atropine and the rat-poison ingredient strychnine. He also tried to have sex with a sixteen year old girl called Maria Reiter, whom he asked to call him “Wolf,” a nickname he thought was so cool that he kept telling people to use it (like cool people do).[6] On one “date,” the then thirty-seven year old brought her to her recently deceased mother’s grave after saying that Reiter’s eyes reminded him of his own dead mother.
You can tell someone who looks up to Hitler that the man was a disgusting, violent thing responsible for the deaths of millions of people—and you’d be right, but that might be what they like about him. Saying instead that he fucked his own niece and kept telling people to call him “Wolf” may be more effective at dissuading the edgelords.
If you look up to fascists, you’re a moron
As alluded to above, there’s this gross admiration some people have for fascists, because they look at their violence and their horrors and think “what a guy!” They think fascists are strong, even though their beliefs inevitably work against their own constituency.[7] Some of these sick fucks are even in the executive branch!
Government departments keep putting out messages and advertisements and slogans that are almost (and sometimes *are)* the same as those Nazis or other white supremacists have released. Let’s look at a couple.
The Department of Labor put out a message exhorting Americans to “remember who you are,” under a slogan clearly inspired by Nazi bullshit. “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” is a mere breath away from the Nazi slogan “One People, One Nation, One Leader.” (you mighty be more familiar with the German: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”).
Meanwhile, ICE posts recruitment ads quoting lyrics from a song by the Männerbund, a nationalist group associated with Germany’s Völkisch movement. That is not a modern movement, but instead one instrumental in the foundation of the Nazi party—not fascist, not Nazi-like, but the literal Nazi party. The song uses “blood and soil” imagery, describing somewhere “stolen” by people who have made the singers foreigners in their own land, and is popular among neo-Nazis and other movements that are explicitly white supremacist.[8]
The White House recently posted a weird “Which way, Greenland man?” image months after DHS posted an ICE recruitment ad saying “Which way, American man?” Seems like a peculiar form of phrasing, right? Well, [DHS already used a graphic from a guy whose Twitter bio read “Which way, white man?” (I do hope you are noticing the possibility of racism already) The phrase comes from a book titled Which Way, Western Man? and that book:
Claims there is a Jewish plot to destroy white Christians.
Calls for violence against Jewish people, calling them “Enemy No. 1.”
Calls for stripping Jewish people of citizenship and deporting them.
Tops off this list of gross shit by saying Adolf Hitler was right.
And they keep doing it.
It’s pretty clear that there’s a large contingent of Nazi fans (again, the literal Nazis) in the Trump administration, that they put out so much shit like this. But if you look up to Nazis, you don’t just look up to a bunch of weird losers; you’re also a moron.
Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t perfect, but one thing he’s been consistently good on, is talking about the Nazis. Emphasis mine:
I’ve talked a lot about my father and the broken men that I was surrounded by when I grew up in Austria after the Second World War. You know, they drank to numb the pain. Their bodies were riddled with injuries, and shrapnel from the evil war, and their hearts and their minds were equally riddled with guilt.
But besides the guilt, and the injuries, they felt like losers, not only because they lost the war, but also because they fell for a horrible, loser ideology. They were lied to, and misled into a path that ended in misery.
Some of them joined the Nazis because they were filled with hate. Some of them joined because they thought they deserved more in their lives, and they bought into the idea that the only way to make their lives better was to make other lives worse. Some of them joined because they were frustrated with the government, and some of them just joined because everyone else was doing it.
In the end, it didn’t really matter why they joined. They were all broken in the same way. That’s the bottom line here. I mean, if you find yourself at the crossroads wondering if that path of hate might make sense to you, for one reason or the other, or even wrapping yourself in the flag of hate, I want you to know where that path ends.
I want you to see it very clearly in front of you, in your mind. Because throughout history, hate has always been the easy path—the path of least resistance. I get it. And, I mean, it’s easier to find a scapegoat for a problem than to try to make things better ourselves, right?
But let me be clear: you will not find success on the end of that route. You will not find fulfilment or happiness, because hate burns fast and bright. It might make you feel empowered for a while, but it eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels. It breaks you. It’s the path of the weak.
And that’s why there has never been a successful movement based on hate. I mean, think about that. The Nazis? Losers. The Confederacy? Losers. The apartheid movement? Losers. And the list goes on and on.
The problem is that you could have government officials and agents literally put swastika armbands on, and a lot of the public would say they’re not Nazis, because they can’t be Nazis, right? Coming to terms with the descent of your own government into fascism is gruelling because it means that so many of the assumptions you’ve made are wrong, and the world you actually live in is far, far more frightening than you’d thought. And it would mean you’d have to do something about it.
But if people can’t be convinced their government is descending into authoritarianism, then what might they actually believe?
Pointing out that he keeps telling people to call him “Wolf.”
I leave you with a song these times reminded me of.
1: As this is roughly twice the number of foreign-born people living in the United States in total, this dream they have would by necessity involve the removal not just of legal foreign-born residents, not just foreign-born citizens (like myself), but natural born American citizens too.
Perhaps the administration will find citizens who just feel a bit foreign to them?
Of course, this is the logic of an underpants gnome—if the underpants gnomes were also Nazis.
Phase 1 - Deport millions of people.
Phase 2 - ???
Phase 3 - Utopia!
2: They have thankfully since been released, but their release does not in any way excuse what happened to them. Their release *was certainly not the original plan.*
3: Them, and their country—where “country” is defined as “not them,” whoever it is convenient for “they” to be.
4: This is why some of the best responses to ICE have been things like “please don’t shoot me.” Imagine hearing someone say “please don’t shoot me” and an officer responding with aggression? With such a lack of professionalism? It has already happened.
5: This is not to lessen the horrors of the regime in any way—in fact, it’s part of the explanation for why such horrors were committed. For example, Doctor Mengele’s experiments were not primarily motivated by cruelty (though he was certainly cruel). They were instead motivated by a desire to advance his medical career by providing twin studies to other doctors. It’s easier to think all atrocities are carried out by some moustache-twirling villain than face the truth: vile things are often done because someone wanted a better job.
6: Seriously, imagine anyone ever saying to you something as lame as “Hey, call me Wolf.” Hitler kept telling people to call him Wolf.
Wolf the fuck?
7: It’s not just immoral but also stupid to think that authoritarianism is okay, because you’re in the “us” group. That assumption may even be true, but there are no guarantees that it will remain so.
At least some of the Nazis killed during the Night of the Long Knives must have thought they were safe.
People talk about the efficiency of the Nazis, but this is a myth. They introduced a lot of corruption into the system. People had to pay bribes to officials just to access government services. The SS created its own armed forces, separate from the regular army. The Nazis also put a huge amount of government resources into purging and murdering Jewish people, resources not spent on the people they still classed as citizens… and that was before they got into a war they lost.
8: There has been a lot of talk about white supremacy in America, and often the ideas are dismissed out of hand by people who think infrastructure can’t be racist (it can be if it’s explicitly designed to keep black people out, i.e. by Robert Moses). But it’s much harder to deny that white supremacy is white supremacy when it’s racists saying “white people are better than other people.”