Some comments
I’ve received from my Nazi loved ones (you don’t have Nazi loved ones? Let me
tell you your life is so much less interesting for it) made me think my latest
post on what comes after Trump’s likely defeat in November require some
clarification, and being in some form of philosophical dry spell these days I
can’t find anything better to do with my blogging time these days than to
extend on the first unmistakable signs of our civilizations demise (as do not
fool yourselves, Trump’s rise, and the unabashed totalitarianisms likely to
follow in Europe are but the harbinger of the final collapse of our societies’
dominant mode until now).
Let’s start
then with the clarifications. Do I think the 40-50 million Trump voters are a
bunch of fascists, salivating to wear their brown shirt and parade through the
national mall in Washington wearing swastikas, their right arm held high &
straight while they sing “sieg heil”? Nope, I don’t think so… yet. Most of them
are your average run-of-the-mill conservative, America-loving, God-fearing, reasonably
libertarian in economics (ie, standing for “minimal government intervention in
the economy”, or “everyone for himself, your fellow citizens be damned,
especially if they are from a different race”, depending on the political persuasion
from which you observe them) and reasonably traditionalist regarding the organization
of the family (mildly sexist -a modest amount of gender segregation is OK, gays
should not marry-or even be visible at all , divorce is bad but should be
allowed, philandering by men is admissible as long as done discreetly, abortion
is bad but other forms of birth control are OK -especially abstinence… you know
the package). As far from identifying with the super-evil, freedom-hating, Captain-America-already-kicked-their-butt
Nazis as anybody from the left, they would think insulting to be equated with
such traditional baddies in countless Hollywood flicks.
Or would
they? I mentioned in my post that my own reading of the mood in the alt-right
was that they were mostly young trolls, in it for the LOL and to scandalize the
establishment, and not very conscientious about the political implications of
their positions. Something that I found echoed in this widely commented article
by Milo Yiannopulos and Allum Bokhari published recently in Breitbart: Another guide to the alt-right...
. You may notice the authors self-deprecatingly use their own
unacceptability for more traditional fascists (one is an openly homosexual half-jew,
the other from Pakistani origin) to minimize the allegedly racist nature of the
“movement” (of which they both consider themselves if not leaders at least spokesmen),
regardless of what Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had to say in her
recent speech denouncing the ties of such movement with Trump. So should we
leave it at that, and accept that, by their own admission, they are not “true
Nazis” but just a bunch of good-humored youngsters getting a laugh by adopting
some of the external signs of the most demonized, most vilified boogeyman of
the stale left they so much deride? That they adopt those external signs but do
not share the most troubling tenets of such bogeyman? What would those tenets
be?
Anti-Semitism
may be a good place to start, as for long it has been almost unanimously
considered the most poisonous and less morally defensible aspect of the Nazi
ideology (as if you take hatred of the Jews away all you are left with is
Nationalism -nothing any jingoistic American could criticize in others with a
straight face; and Socialism, a failed ideology that admits of infinitely many
gradations that go from the merely inefficient to the murderously psychopathic…
as long as you stay closer to the first there is not that much to denounce there).
According to Mr. Yiannopoulos and Mr. Bokhari the most vocal group within the
alt-right, what they call the “meme brigade”:
Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal
devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to
fluster their grandparents.
According to
the authors, the only “bigotry” within the movement is confined to a tiny
minority, the “1488ers” (the true believers), who they see as not very
influential and more or less disregarded by all the rest.
Although Mr.
Yiannopoulos is somewhat of a Twitter celebrity (banned and afterwards
readmitted by the social network, where he obviously enjoys a numerous following,
after some ugly comments towards the actress Leslie Jones that could be interpreted
as being racist, which he undoubtedly hurled just to épater les burgeois and without actually meaning them…) with an
audience in the order of a few hundred thousands, it may be more revealing to
go to one of the alt-right leading web sites, the Daily Stormer, edited by Andrew Anglin and boasting a few millions
of monthly visits, who recently published his own guide to the Alt-right: A normie's guide to the alt-right
(one can not but think it is very much a response to Yiannopoulos &
Bokhari, who he explicitly quotes in very disparaging terms). So much for the “accusation
of Anti-Semitism is unfounded” defense. Front and center, the core belief of
the alt-right, according to Mr. Anglin (which I think is many light years ahead
of Mr. Yiannopoulos and Mr. Bokhari regarding legitimacy within the ranks) is
that Jews dominate the world and are hell bent on exterminating the White race.
You don’t need to go much further then to find an easy solution for all the
ills and evils of modern society: get rid of the Jews and they will all
miraculously correct themselves. Once you are at it, kick all other races out
of the good ‘ol USofA for good measure. But not to worry, the Stormer assuages its potentially
concerned readership with the following disclaimer:
We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence.
We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is
available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable.
Wow! I feel
better already. When these nice people finally take power (more on that later)
and start rounding up blacks and kikes to send them back to other countries
where they will undoubtedly be happier between their natural brethren I’m sure
they will instruct the police (and the army, both will need to be fused) to be
polite and exquisitely civilized. No more Kristallnacht
for you, that’s just barbarous and undignified. Nothing like a bit of education
of the masses to have everybody understand what their place is and accept their
fate without undue resistance. By the way, it is an interesting phenomenon that
Anglin also talks about the 1488 as a separate group from himself, albeit much
less disparagingly than Yiannopoulos & Bokhari. You have to go even more to
the right (well into Stormfront
territory) to find someone actually willing to identify as one…
What I’m
driving at is that for a sizeable proportion of what calls itself “alt-right”
(which overlaps substantially with the neo-reaction) any semblance of what we
used to think as universally acceptable political discourse has been utterly
rejected and abandoned. The way the see themselves is as a bunch of (so far)
leaderless, distinctly intelligent people that have, independently, come to the
same conclusion: the way the mainstream media reports about reality is not only
highly biased, but craftily and willingly so, to hide the true reality of a socio-racial
“war” already taking place, in which the superior class/race (well-off white
heterosexual men) is being taken down by an alliance of feminists, blacks, the poor,
Muslims and progressives (communists), with the witless acquiescence of the
liberal left and the backstage organizing prowess of Jews (some
NeoReactionaries, of Jewish origin themselves, substitute a vague cabal they
call the “Cathedral” for the almost omnipotent Jews). As such conclusion flies
in the face of what every scholar studying how society works today and has
worked for the last twenty centuries knows and taches, the only “logical” and “reasonable”
conclusion is that all such scholars are in cahoots with the MSM and the cabal
that orchestrates such vast conspiracy, when not active participants in the
same. And so the whole ideological construct escapes any possibility of
empirical verification, as befits any paranoid schema for explaining the world
(where lack of evidence, instead of militating against the plausibility of the
whole thing just exacerbates its certainty, by reinforcing the hallucinatory
perception of the deviousness and cunning of its instigators). The other thing
all those intelligent guys have converged upon, and I think the two articles I’ve
linked provide enough evidence, is that Donald Trump is a wonderful candidate,
the best of all potential alternatives, and sure to receive their vote on November
no matter what he does or say between today and then.
So I think it
is pretty safe to state that some of Trump followers perfectly fit the
traditional definition of Nazi (hell, they not only blame the Jews for all of
society’s evils, but openly recognize Adolf Hitler as one of their heroes, and
present nineteen thirties’ Germany as a paragon of virtuous society!) How many
of them? I don’t know, and for reasons I’ll expound shortly thereafter, do not much
care. The number that do not recoil from such label, the unrepentant Hitler
fans is probably pretty small (a few hundred thousands tops). It is the number
of those that are not troubled enough by such lack of recoiling to reconsider
their vote, those that think that voting alongside a Jew-hating,
Swastika-bearing brownshirt is preferable to stay home or (God forbid!) vote
alongside the Democrats (many of whom are of a different race, oh hum!), which
worries me. Because again, I know how many of those there are: Fifty five
million. To put things in perspective, in the last election in Weimar Republic
the Nazis (the true ones, no discussion of proper labeling here) ended up in
power with a bit more than seventeen million votes, almost 44% (but that was
after Hitler had already been appointed chancellor, after the Parliament’s
arson was falsely attributed to the communists and a highly charged campaign in
which the NSDAP had already most of the means of state coercion at its
disposal, so may be a better figure is the amount of votes they received in the
previous election, arguably the last “normal” one: a little bit less than
twelve million, just a 33% of the electorate). We said the current American
electorate is made up of 225 million citizens, of which only 55%, or 124
million, actually vote. So the 55 million willing to vote for Trump, regardless
of who they associate with, constitute a “healthy” 44%. The Nazis didn’t need
more back in the day.
Now, now! I
can hear my readership uncomfortably rumbling in their seats while the
implications of all this sink in. Am I saying the USA is heading towards a true
National Socialist dictatorship with some genocide thrown in for good measure? Absolutely
not, remember I think Hillary will win (which, by the way, does not mean that I
want Hil to win, more on that later
on). But just for the sake of historical perspective, of the 17 million Nazi
voters in 1933 I bet my own (brown) shirt that only a very small minority would
have heartily endorsed building concentration camps to send all the Jewish
population there for extermination, burning books, giving extraordinary (and
almost unlimited) powers to a secret police under direct control of the party (with
no judicial review) and prohibiting free speech and any form of association not
sanctioned by the state. Probably no more than a few hundred thousands were for
all that since the beginning. Most just very strongly disliked the communists
and socialists, and were willing to ignore the most unsavory elements of the “movement”
they were voting with (rather than for). Like many Americans today just equally
strongly dislike Democrats (many of which happen to be black, or to show more
understanding to Latinos) and are willing to ignore the most unsavory elements
of the alt-right that happen to be willing to vote for the same candidate as
them. Both the original Nazis and the followers of the Daily Stormer have made their preferences and intentions abundantly
clear, so nobody should be surprised if in the future the later act as the
former did once in power…
But of course
power is what the American right seems far, far from ever achieving, as the
coalition they have been able to put together so for is still much smaller that
the left’s. Unless they succeed, that is, prying a good chunk of the white
working class from the Democrats (something they are already doing) and manage
to make more significant inroads into the college educated and urban whites (the
missing piece in the puzzle of their potential electoral majority). Something
that may never happen. But let’s delve for a moment in the dynamic that this
recognition of the racial animus behind a substantial part of the electorate is
wont to have. The republican voters are going to get out of this election cycle
not just bruised (with their candidate soundly defeated, especially when
measured in terms of electoral college votes), and despondent of their ability
to ever retake the white house (for the right wing media Hillary Clinton is the
weakest candidate imaginable… if they have not been able to defeat her, with all the purported flaws that
their opinion makers have been insisting on and exaggerating beyond all
proportion, who will they ever be
able to beat?), but with serious doubts about the legitimacy of the whole process.
What "their" media will have told them (and the fact that there are entirely different media for different parts of the public is itself a big part of the problem), once and again, is that they are the real victims of
a system stacked against them, run by socialists that want to redistribute
their hard earned wealth to undeserving “others” (mostly black and latino).
That there are many just like them that do not buy in the previous consensus of
“political correctness” that is just a thinly veiled justification for
preserving such patently unfair status quo. That it is OK to rebel against that
status quo, a rebellion that can take many forms, from rejecting affirmative
action to seizing federal property á la
Clive Bundy to murdering the attendants to a Black church á la Dylan Roof… if we are in the midst of a racial war, more glory
to the warriors! The guys that were outside the fringe two electoral cycles ago
now are fellow republican voters. They are not some loonies and wackos, but
suddenly some people they have something in common with, which simply happen to
espouse some more extreme version of ideas that are already out in the open,
being discussed by perfectly acceptable people in the press and in TV. Because,
and THIS is the seismic chance this election has brought, those are not any
more the ideas that EVERYBODY is against. From now on they are the ideas that
only the “liberals”, the “progressives” (or less respectful epithets: the “lefties”,
the “commies”, the “libtards”, the “kikes”) are against. And the more ardently
they denounce them, the more acceptable they will look like to those
instinctively, pre-rationally opposed to the progressive worldview. What the
embrace of Trump’s candidacy by the alt-right (what in any other place is
called the extreme right, and for a long time has been the extra-parliamentary
right due to its inability to attract enough electoral support) has achieved is
the obliteration of the consensus against certain positions, like racism,
Anti-Semitism or the acceptability of a police state unbound by constitution or
law (in certain exceptional circumstances, but we know how such “extraordinary”
situations tend to perpetuate themselves and end up being too much ordinary).
Not only has such consensus been obliterated, but my prediction is that some of
those positions will be openly embraced by bigger and bigger parts of the
electorate, and some may even become part of a winning party’s platform in an
advanced economy.
Big enough to
eventually succeed? Even in the face of a concerted opposition from significant
parts of the society? It all depends on how the whole of the economy goes. You
rob the mob of much of its rightful indignation when you can buy it with the
promise of increasing wealth for its members, and it is exactly the betrayal of
that promise which has caused much of the discredit of the social compact of
Western democracies. As long as the middle classes see that any improvement in
the ability of their nation to produce riches is entirely hijacked by the
wealthiest 1% (leveraging the competition from workers in low-pay, low-social-protection
countries far away) I can see an inexhaustible well of animus and resentment
easy to exploit by any demagogue. Our collective hope then rests in the ability
of our leaders to reignite the growth engine of our free-market, rule-of-law
based economies AND to ensure the fruits of such growth are equitable shared
between all classes. Something especially challenging in the face of an
exhausted dominant reason that seems unable to extract the necessary additional
efforts from any substantial group (see Erik Hurst’s interview The Young These Days...
about how more kids just choose to play videogames instead of pursuing an
education that would land them in a shitty McJob anyway), doesn’t provide
enough incentive for technological innovation, heck, doesn’t provide enough
incentive for just reproducing… That is, we are essentially screwed
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