ON THE VALUE OF MIRRORS
Since 2016 there's been much said about Nazis. Yet, somehow, despite all the talk and tweeting and counter protesting I feel we've managed to avoid saying and doing what is most essential. (Surprise!) Is there any doubt that the only way you prevent Nazis from emerging again (or anyone of the like; please insert your preferred flavour of genocidal stupidity: Indonesian, Rwandan, Bosnian, etc...) is for you to know that the Nazis (Soviets, Maoists, Khmer Rouge...) were you.
Yes, the only real antidote available is for you to know this, to believe it, to feel it. But, this is the very thing that virtually everyone refuses to do. And that's understandable. It's very difficult for psychologically healthy people to look inside themselves and understand that they are the kind of person who wouldn't merely kill another. And it's harder still to not run from this realization, particularly when the gravity of the thing becomes greater with every step closer to it; and even more so given that upon approach it becomes clear the thing you're after, once found, will change you – and not only for the better. But like any vaccine, it's only this jab, this violation, and the accompanying invasion of your person by this ugly though diminished thing, that can make you immune. (If immunity is even possible, which I don't think there's any reason to believe is so.)
So what exactly does such a realization entail? Well, it doesn't merely involve taking on the belief that you are capable of killing someone, or even being a cog in the machine that exterminates scores. (As in a Nazi at Auschwitz, say; or a participant in the Gestapu movement, that the New Order “anti-communist” purge responsible for the mass summary execution of maybe as many as three million across Indonesia, anyone decided to be an opponent of the military or political Islam; or any of the members of the Hutu Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi in Rwanda – hacking to death maybe 20,000 of their neighbours daily for months on end...) No. It's worse than that. You have to know that you could this day in and day out and not just feel justified but that you're the very kind of soul who could actually derive some personal satisfaction, even enjoyment, from doing so. It's the understanding that in these places at these times normal people (no different than you and your mom, your fifth-grade teacher and the lifeguard at the local pool) were not drugged en masse and didn't fall into a mysterious collective psychosis. These were ordinary folks (often the best educated in their lineage or anywhere on the planet) compelled by a simple story – typically one causing them to become absorbed by a sense of victimization and thus of the deep undeniable cosmic justification for using any means necessary to take, or take back, what's rightfully theirs. (What? You think you're immune to that do you?)
To look back, the message pressed out in newspaper and on radio in 1930s pre-war Germany was not about a desire to conquer the world and exterminate “lesser races” along the way but of Germany's continual and unprecedented offers of peace and understanding, their aim of creating and maintaining freedom and a lasting peace in Europe and around the world, and about wishing, like any nation, to preserve their autonomy and avoid becoming slaves to an expansionist Britain. And who wouldn't sign up for that? Everyone had heard or could remember a time when Germany was unified, strong, and proud but they heard and could see they were being treated unfairly by the international community. Anyone alive in Germany in the years preceding the rise of the National Socialist party would have had their own examples of hardship and unjust treatment and their government's constant diplomatic prostrations before the world community. And – though the Nazi party was very much a group of radical revolutionary thugs focused on building an empire that would put Germans forever above “inferior” Slavs and Jews – most Germans were conscripted into war and few, if any, volunteers signed up for any of the things we now all associate with WWII and with Nazism. Even putting the Nazi party in power was, in hindsight, a rational choice between the Social Democrats (who'd proven impotent, having already failed miserably in their aim to rejuvenate the nation), the Communist party (who sought to radically overturn society), and the National Socialists (aka Nazis, who appeared to many to be the rebirth of all that made Germany once great.) These folks were you and your neighbours and they were acting, really, as anyone would and not out of hysteria or psychosis. They weren't brainwashed by clever propagandists or hypnotized by a charismatic leader but instead deliberated hard among one another over wrong and right, weighing personal vs national interests, and most wanted more than anything to do what was best. These people were thinking about history and about the future and were critical of their government and their neighbours and their own families. Few endorsed killing civilians or mass murder, nevermind the “final solution.” And it was simply never necessary to convince millions of people of all of the most vile things Nazi leadership could dream up. We know all this because we can read the newspapers and correspondences and journal entries of Germans before, during, and after the war. Men sent into Poland at the start of the war wrote home of finding ethnic Germans by the dozens in town after town tied to trees with their eyes gouged out, left there to die. They wrote of the deplorable living conditions they found there and across eastern Europe. They wrote of being liberators and of being welcomed on by locals... And of course the response from home was moral support and packages of butter, coffee, and chocolate.
(If you doubt this you can read their words yourself. Find a translated collection of family correspondences called Between Two Homelands: Letters across the Borders of Nazi Germany. And go read Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland – about how normal, healthy, family men, folks conscripted and with little to no party loyalty, minimal training and ideological indoctrination, devolved into being the kind of person capable of dragging a mother and child from their home and summarily execute them in the street. These reads are as eyeopening as they are terrible, and in a sense have to be the most ugly and depressing books ever written. That being said they should be required reading, especially if you feel like you have some understanding but have only heard accounts from the victims or know only of history book or Hollywood film depictions of the times.)
What you have to know is that who you are, at bottom, is someone capable of being so blind to your own motives and actions in one moment that in the next you could find yourself in court for crimes against humanity – not for doing something obviously evil but for acting in a manner you knew to be right, and your government and your colleagues, your church and your family all supported; something you were confident of and you and your colleagues delighted, as a matter of fact, in carrying out.
But, of course, this is the very thing most people never do. And there's no evidence whatsoever that even those marching against Nazis in the Southern US, for one example, have done this work. To the contrary, the appear wholly animated by the certainty of their moral, cultural, racial, and/or political superiority – or, worse, just the social points they win by posting a selfie from the right side of the march. People won't even look reality in the face. Instead, without even attempting to do so, people tell you they're nothing like a Nazi, that they wouldn't be, and further, could never be. Worse still, they tell you that, given the chance, they'd be everything like Oskar Schindler or mount a non-violent opposition as a modern Gandhi or Martin Luther King. That's bullshit! (Even just statistically, there's virtually no chance that you would. Schindler, Gandhi, and King aren't one in a million figures but closer to one in a billion. And so even if you want to give yourself the label, of fearless moral outlier, doing so means that no one else in your counter-protest or in your entire global ideological movement can be. So improbable is it, that you are who you say you are, that we can confidently disagree.) Actually, this isn't just bullshit, this claim of moral superiority. No. The kind of person who would look back at the history of violence, in just the twentieth century alone, and imagine themself in each murderous instance, in every decade and across a broad swathe of our species, as a victim and not one of the perpetrators is the very lack of self-awareness you need if you want an entire society capable of sliding into genocidal stupidity.
Is there really any doubt that it's our blindness to this, and our active encouragement of one anothers' blindness, that gives us all the evidence we need to know that, without a doubt, we are just the kind of people who'd commit believable acts of horror? (...Not “unbelievable” as is said, over and over, every time it happens.) We would do so wholly unconsciously while at the same time publishing editorials and carrying banners containing slogans of peace, freedom, equality, and justice. I have no doubt.
Just do the thought experiment for yourself. Let's say you're Catholic, born into it, and you and four generations of your family and much of the community you live in and rely upon attend church regularly. If you would find it difficult to stand up, walk to the front of your church, and declare your homosexuality and your desire for you and your lover to get married at your family church next Spring, there is no chance you have what it takes to not become a Nazi yourself – for the act and its consequences pale in comparison. Or better, if you couldn't post a video to Twitter or Facebook of yourself participating in a Nazi march then there's virtually no chance you have what it takes to avoid becoming a Nazi yourself – for, as above, the act and its consequences pale in comparison.
Remarkably, my most leftist and anti-fascist acquaintances regularly behave like, and even cite the theories and beliefs of, decorated Nazis. Yeah, you read that right. Read it again. My favourite example is the postmodernist Paul Feyerabend. Born in Austria, he graduated high school in the early 1940s and was drafted into the ranks of the German Arbeitsdienst – a kind of make-work labour corps established in response to mass unemployment and for the purpose of militarizing the population while schooling them in Nazi ideology. From there he joined the army and volunteered for officer training, and further absorbed the fullness of formal Nazi indoctrination. But that was on the start of his journey. After officer training, Feyerabend spent his time on the Eastern Front, as a lieutenant, where his efforts would see him decorated with the Iron Cross for his display of bravery. When the war ended Feyerabend entered academia. He moved from institution to institution throughout the West, eventually landing in America, at UC Berkeley. In his thirty years there he published books with titles such as Against Method and Farewell to Reason, in which he attacked virtually all of Western thought, particularly science. He held that science was no more justified than witchcraft, denounced the "tyranny" of "abstract concepts such as 'truth', 'reality', or 'objectivity", and did all this while defending astrology, alternative medicine, and creationism. These ideas form the philosophy not of a mere citizen living under the regime nor a card carrying party member but a decorated Nazi lieutenant. As far as I can tell, this is the considered synthesis of Nazism, not its antithesis.
If you think the above is odd it's because you do not know anything about Nazi philosophy. From elites like Heinrich Himmler down to lowly SS captains, Nazis pushed eastern philosophy – such as that found in yoga and Hinduism's Bhagavad Gita (which Himmler carried on his person and used as a guide for racial purification) – as tools for steeling German resolve and preparing individual soldiers mentally for the unscrupulous violence required to attain Germany's “higher purpose”, as modelled by the Kshatriya caste of ancient India. (Go read Mathias Tietke's Yoga in National Socialism.)
And yet my Marxist, Socialist, anti-fascist, and self-styled SJW friends and acquaintances commonly argue that it was a commitment to the scientific method, to the elimination of bias, to truth-seeking, skeptical enquiry, evidence gathering, falsifiability and reproducibility, and to the need for peer review that gave us the “master race”, the “thousand year Reich”, and the whole rest of the German Fascist canon. And they don't like it at all when you suggest they can't possibly be serious or that they must have lost their collectivist mind... Most amazingly, in the very same breath these folks argue that narrow group identification is all that matters. They claim that humans, as individuals, don't actually exist and that by labelling folks by their skin colour, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and other gross identifiers tells us all we need to know about a person – particularly of their rank in the spectrum of social dominance. And they insist that this ideology is not what gave us the horrors of the 20th century: that privileging group membership is a superior mode of operation than one which embraces universal human rights and the sanctity of all individuals. It's astonishing. They read that Germany's National Socialists saw as a preliminary answer to Jewish economic and political success the measuring and labelling of a person's Jewishness (and then Jewish social participation limited to a proportional representation among the larger German population) and then turn around and themselves push for institutional, provincial, and federal policy that would weight, measure, and label everyone and establish across society – from the ranks of donut shop and department store to boardrooms and city council – a proportionate representation of so-labelled groups. They read that the Soviets and Maoists and Cambodian Left did the same – rooted out the successful and the literate, or just anyone with any sign of technical knowledge or vague personal interest (like stowing a potato for winter or feeding their starving child) and sent them to the gulags or, more mercifully, put a bullet in their head – and hope that we too might “level the playing field” just so. Brilliant. (And when doing so they don't even bother changing the fucking slogans or renaming these murderous policies!)
And it's from this framing – of supreme subjectivity and anti-reason, of mass social partitioning coupled with the erasure of the individual – that they engage in “direct action.” This thinking excuses any sort or volume of brutality due to the stated sincerity of their illogic and proclaimed good intentions. Here the mere application of "common sense" to reality is how truth-value is revealed. Pure/true knowledge is illuminated and arrived at when this applied common sense yields desired ends. (Which is also how tarot reading, horoscopes, homeopathy, bloodletting, and the gifting of children to volcano spirits all work.) As such, no time at all is squandered justifying setting fire to cars, the local Starbucks, or a bank – as though this shallow performance of public masturbation ever did anything more than hurt working class people while enriching insurance companies and winning sympathy for corporations. And it's from here where “punch a Nazi” turns quickly into “smash the skull of anyone at all because I'm more of an anti-oppression activist than thou, fighting for real justice – and such deliciously utopic frittatas ("is that harrisa paste?") most certainly necessitate the cracking of some number of eggs, intended or otherwise.” How is anyone confused about what this is? This is exactly the thinking and activity you need to normalize before moving your neighbours, the filthy vermin they are, into ghettos. This is how that's brought about. This is the very recipe.
To see this clearly you can get very specific. We can speak about the actions of a notable anti-fascist activist: a Berkeley ethics professor – teacher of philosophy and critical thinking who describes themself as a “gender-nonconforming sapiosexual” interested in “helping to precipitate the end of civil society.” This anti-Nazi felt the need to run around in a mask at a right-wing free speech rally and bludgeon not less than seven people, including three in the neck and skull, with a heavy bike lock. Video of the most notorious incident shows the ethics prof crushing the skull of a man kneeling on the ground with his hands in the air. (Perhaps he hasn't read about the birth of National Socialism in Germany?) Thanks only to such video evidence, and some online amateur sleuthing, this person was tracked down and subsequently charged with four counts of felony assault and causing grievous bodily harm to three; charges against which this teacher of critical thinking pleaded “no contest” and will forever wear as a badge of honour in the community, as evidence of their selfless, violent commitment to peace and justice.
This person, and those subscribed to the same thinking, tell us daily they don't feel that terrible ideas can be combated by good ones. As though Donald Trump or Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos or Richard Spencer are all super-humans peddling uniquely cogent wisdom that doesn't collapse under its own stupidity. Like true fascists, these anti-fascists tell us they stand opposed to the far-right, and are the only ones clear-thinking enough, ethical enough, or brave enough to do so (no doubt, seeking their own Iron Cross) – while labelling anyone not also throwing bricks or molotov cocktails at total strangers as “fascist sympathizers” deserving of a good skull crushing. They assert that freedom of speech – the very foundation of civil society, universal human rights, and the lynchpin to every other right you can name (as demonstrated by no less than three centuries of social progress in a positive direction) – is nothing more than cover for all evils, especially white supremacy and bloody genocide. They claim that eighty million Trump voters, regardless of ethnicity or motivation (even Orthodox Jewish Bernie supporters), are closeted neo-Nazis, or at best “Deplorables” (those fascist-lite tools of violent Nationalist extremists.) We might ask if these fools are completely blind to their own motivations or are just failing to mask them effectively? What could be more bizarre than the anti-truth crowd labelling themselves anti-fascist, all while using the tools of fascism to shut down those who parrot “fake news”? It's such pure, distilled comedy that it has now transmuted into tragedy.
