I half-remember a story I heard when I was a kid. The details are a muddled mess with the rest of my fading memories, but the gist was this:
What was it like in Nazi Germany?
It was just like Germany the day before.
People went to work and bought homes. People argued over produce prices. Politicians lied and some people cheered them while others feared them.
Fascism doesn’t appear on the face of a nation overnight, like a pre-prom zit that does a genocide if you threaten to squeeze it. Fascism is sewed. It’s tended. It’s cultivated in a culture by those who seek to control and subjugate that culture. It’s powered by hard times, usually also caused by those same conspirators who want to be the boot on the neck of a personal utopia.
But a utopia, as “they” say, is always a dystopia to those for whom it was not built.
The fascist engine requires track to be laid. A problem is invented. Then amplified. Then touted to be the most important matter facing the nation! Then comes austerity. A fancy name for taking the money of the people and pocketing it while pretending to tighten belts and feigning hunger pangs. The problem of industrialists profiteering from war will then be ascribed to a marginalized class and the solution (final as it may be) will be proposed - remove the class of people we blamed for taking all of this money we took and hand over all of your power, your agency, your thought, and your bodies to our cause so that we can deal with them. You can’t question us. We are not the cause of your embarrassment, because we had a war and that money was all burned up! None was stolen by vultures seeing opportunity and picking corpses!
For post-WWI Germany the Jewish people were an easy ‘other’ to build a fantasy about from existing prejudices on top of a nationalist, isolationist ideology. “They” glorified genetic heritage, giving a disenfranchised people a no-effort way to feel ‘better than,’ and therefor ‘more entitled to.’ Did you waste your school days fraternizing instead of learning? Not your fault, Aryan Son. You see, you could not study because your professor was a Jew and withheld knowledge from you. Did you lose your job? The Jew, again, is to blame! The Jewish people infiltrated the German fatherland and took all of the high paying positions, those lazy Semites!
Sounds really familiar, doesn’t it? Trans-mania (an arguably awesome fictional country for an eastern European Victorian horror game) is brainwashing your kids! That’s why they don’t want to talk to you! The Mexicans, who are all drug runners and also so lazy they do nothing are taking all of our jobs! The Blacks are making us capitalize their race now! No matter what the problem is, “they” will find a way to blame marginalized, hurting populations. Usually, that way is as easy as saying, “hey white men…these people who are worse than you are living better than you and that should make you so mad!” “They” will refuse to teach real history, instead pushing nationalist propaganda, upholding an ideal of white purity and supremacy through blood right. Ignoring the fact that half of their ilk look like God’s first pancake. But Hitler was a one-balled fart machine with greasy hair and bad posture. So, you know… on brand. “They” will say you’re oppressing THEM because you’re not letting them openly oppress others. That’s reverse anti backwards wittershins racism! That’s identity politics! “They” will say all of these things while doing them in open air, because fascists project like an IMAX Pepper’s Ghost on the Hoover dam. Whether it’s bad economic decisions, election interference, or raping children, every accusation is a confession with fascists. “They” cannot fathom that people don’t think of and long for the same depravity “they” do.
Drawing lines from Nazi Germany to modern fascism is taboo because “they” do not want you drawing those lines. But “they” are boldly tracing! “They” are making a map using the same coordinates. The legend has a few minor symbol changes, but swastika or hood and cross or badge or failed steak brand logo all still point to oppression.
And who are “they?” Apart from being a tropey shorthand, it’s pretty obvious who they are. They are the powerful, wealthy, criminals who feel that government is just a code name for the wall separating their necks from our guillotines. They are generational wealth, mixing uneasily with nouveau riche, making a sour vine-regret.
Their play has been a long one, starting almost as soon as the war with those OTHER fascists - you know, the BAD ones, not our brave American heroes - was over. Well, the actual move to seize power unopposed, that is. The rot they used was older than that, of course. The whole nation of the USA was built on blood of people whose only slight to white might was existing where the white people weren’t. The Dutch delivered an imminent nation the double-whammy of trade markets and stolen humanity as labor. Slave owners got enough concessions in the drafting of our laws as to always keep the door cracked for a big enough windbag to blow open. Post WWII, that wind started blowing hard. The anti-communist witch hunts? The march of fascism. Nixon’s runway for Reagan to fly? The march of fascism. Stopping a legal, constitutionally mandated vote count? Whoo yeah, that was fascism and it was marching big time. The electoral college, a seed planted two and a half centuries ago, grew into a stinging nettle in full bloom under the thirsty corpo-elites who puppet the two-party system in America.
Psst. White folks. C’mere. This is your favorite thing. A little aside just for you. It’s important to take a moment or two here to really internalize how utterly undeserving white settlers were, but also how inept they were. Slavery was as clumsy as it was brutal, relying on the bounty stripped from a new world - unique in new worlds in that it was already well lived in - to essentially work people to death, taking every ounce of what their toil produced for their own. The native population was devastated by plague, making frontier ‘heroes’ out of European monsters simply capitalizing on the timing of it all. The Great Conquering Wave of European bone-scavengers was bought not by strength of character and good ancestry. It was, as with most white people who end up in positions they are laughably unqualified for, mostly luck and advantage they inherited. Your race is meaningless and there is no pride in surviving in a society on ‘easy’ mode, so quit asking for your own month and parade.
That’s a brief, off the hip, probably factually shaky history lesson and a scolding for some of you that will feel racist. For those folks, 1) you can’t be racist to white people, 2) any of my EuroMutt siblings with half a brain know what that paragraph means - it’s not scolding, it’s an acknowledgement of privilege and that we have work to do, and 3) you CAN’T BE RACIST TO WHITE PEOPLE. Fun blog, right? To what end, though?
No end. There is no ending to the fight against fascism. This space is, ultimately, just going to be a spot for me to casually lob out a few ideas here and there about how the easy answer of ‘it’s them differnt races and genders and whatnot!’ isn’t an answer at all. About how fighting a fascist takeover can be aided by some stuff that doesn’t cause you to break a sweat. Lazy resistance.
Mostly this is a place for me to get longform ideas out of my head in a world of 300 character limits and services that eat our screams and shit out ads. Enjoy my screams. Shit-free.