Re: On Fascists And Nazis
Ran across a very... weird post on the Most Recent feed today. It starts out with a bit of burying the lede:
Everyone seems to be preoccupied with two words, lately. Which words are those? Fascist, and Nazi.
Firstly, I find it interesting that SO MANY people are suddenly interested in Nazis. I think that’s great, but I also feel that perhaps people need to be reminded that a lot of things the Nazis did still have not truly faced justice. I assume that now so many people feel passionately about being anti-Nazi, they will feel similarly predisposed toward righting these original wrongs.
Notice how little context this paragraph gives you -- in my opinion, very deliberately. People are talking about the words "Fascist" and "Nazi" a lot, recently. Why? Oh, who knows. It's a total mystery, that couldn't possibly have an explanation, like, say, a right-wing populist strongman leader assuming office and consolidating power, or the richest man in the world doing the sieg heil salute. People are just suddenly talking about Fascists and Nazis for no reason.
And notice the vague reference to "wrongs" that haven't been "righted". It's not immediately clear what the writer is referring to here. The Nuremberg Trials are some of the most famous war crime trials in history, and many of the highest-ranking Nazi officials were either executed for their role in the Holocaust or committed suicide before they could stand trial.
That's not to say I don't agree with the writer that many of those complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich evaded justice, or that the victims and families of the victims didn't receive the reparations they were due. De-Nazification was an incomplete process on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Operation Paperclip, infamously, involved the US importing Nazi scientists to work on the Apollo project, including Wernher von Braun, who used Jewish slave labor on his projects in Germany. And, of course, many of the Jewish refugees of the concentration camps were shafted in the same way we shaft modern refugees, due to antisemitism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment among the Allied nations, the so-called "good guys" of WWII.
But the writer doesn't provide you with those specifics. Instead, he leaves you with a vague idea, that there were wrongs that should be righted, and lets you fill in the blanks with your own preconceived notions.
The second term I hear a lot lately is the word “Fascist”. Originally, this term concerned Roman magistrates and their relative power and how the “bundle was held together as one” to show a kind of unity. Later, of course, Mussolini adopted it and used it in a different way. Most people are using the term in reference to what Mussolini did. Of course, that’s also great, because Italy was on Hitler’s side! Again, there are many, many crimes that were perpetrated during these years that have not been adequately addressed, so I assume all these people who are anti-fascist are going to start taking their financial resources and making what was done wrong put correctly back in order.
This paragraph pulls a similar trick to the previous first one. Notice how he's willing to provide you the context for the definition of the word, "fascism", but leaves out most of the other context. There are a few writing choices that I think are more down to sloppiness than disingenuousness (Fascism is an ideology, it's not "what Mussolini did". Also, the sentence, "Of course, that’s also great, because Italy was on Hitler’s side!" is just kind of awkward in a way I don't quite know how to put my finger on), but it has all the same rhetorical back-handedness of the first two paragraphs. It's clearly leading with a bunch of non-specific, generally agreeable sentiments (Nazis and Fascists are bad! The bad things they did haven't been made right! You want to make the bad things right, don't you?), but what exactly those sentiments are supposed to be leading you to agree with has not, as of yet, been stated explici--
This means they must support Israel. Let me tell you why.
Ah.
A Nazi, in a Biblical sense, is an Edomite.
What?
An Edomite is a descendant of Essau.
What the fuck?
The amount of rhetorical whiplash that happens between the last paragraph and this one is staggering. You go straight from, "Nazis and Fascists are generally bad" to analyzing the Biblical archetypical makeup of Nazism in order to support the modern state of Israel.
Essau, you might remember, picked the money and the soup instead of the land and the birthright then got mad after he did these things that he lost that blessing. Therefore, a Nazi, and this is the important part, is someone who attempts to assert a false birthright. Another way of putting it is they are trying to steal the inheritance of Jacob. Jacob, of course, inherited the land of Israel.
It should be said, I don't hate the idea of Nazis as metaphorically connected to Essau. It's interesting to think of them as asserting a false claim to some imagined Aryan birthright, but it's hardly the layup pro-Israel argument that the writer seems to think it is, and it doesn't engage whatsoever with the actual criticisms of Israel that the left puts forth. It's a neat metaphor, but not much else.
Since all these anti-fascists have shown up, and anti-Nazis are out in force, it must then mean they are supporting the people of Jacob who, it must be, are in the land of Israel! Else, they are not anti-Nazi. They would be guilty of stealing an essential part of a Jewish narrative, (and that of Israel) unfortunately, to advance a false claim to try to present themselves as though they are the “actual inheritors” of whatever it is they are griping about. Of course, you cannot be anti Israel and have Nazis and Fascists since World War II was, unquestionably, largely about races and especially so about Jewish people and the question of Israel and the land.
Man, what a crap paragraph. Get an editor, or if you have one, fire them and get a better one. The last sentence is absolutely terrible. "Of course, you cannot be anti Israel and have Nazis and Fascists" what in God's name are you on about? Not only is your argument flimsy, but you're doing a terrible job presenting it.
As best as I can reconstruct it from your incomprehensible chickenscratch, your argument goes something like this: A Nazi/Fascist is one who attempts to assert a false birthright. This is synonymous with trying to steal the birthright of Jacob, which is the land of Israel. Therefore, anyone who is anti-fascist/anti-nazi must neccessarily support the claim of the decendants of Jacob, who are the current inhabitants of Israel, thereby reafirmming the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
This argument has so many logical leaps that it would make Super Mario blush. First, it relies on your characterization of Nazis as being, primarily, challengers of the Jewish birthright to Palestine. Is that why people don't like Nazis? Is that the main reason people object to the wholesale slaughter of millions of civilians, the abstract concept of a birthright? Do you think it would be morally different if, say, Nazis had a "legitimate" claim to the land that they asserted themselves the rightful inheretors of? What, exactly, would make a claim on a birthright legitimate, vs illegitimate?
All these, and more, are assumptions the original post leans on like a drunkard leans on a streetlight. If you already agree with the post's main thrust -- that the enemies of the modern state of Israel are all neo-Nazis -- then the post flows like butter. But if you try to challenge it, or think critically about it at all, it's like trying to swim in molasses.
So, the solution is simple. If you want to oppose Nazis and Fascists, pony up your resources and support Israel and its people. Otherwise, you are trying to usurp on the basis of a false birth right which makes YOU the Nazi AND the Fascist.
A presumptive closer to an even more presumptive post.
There's been a bit of discourse about the far-right in indie web spaces. Frankly, I think it's a little overblown. If this unconvincing tripe is the best the right can do in the absence of outright dehumanization and hatred, I'm not concerned.