I’m Part of Another Generation that Fights Nazis, Advocate, 20/02/2017

But this time, the war is on the home front.

I haven’t posted in a few days because I’ve been busy on our European vacation. Since Friday night, the GF and I have been in Berlin, and we’ve spent almost all our time in the old GDR section of the city. Staying in a hostel just across the street from Alexanderplatz.

This vacation isn’t just to relax and party, though there’s been plenty of that. Sunday afternoon, we toured the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, which walks you through the genocide with representative stories of families in the installations.

Graphic photos of women who had been forced to strip naked and die in ravines, shot in the head one by one. Families herded into vans and suffocated with carbon monoxide.

As we were on the train from Holland, I’d look out at the fields – bleak, flat, featureless, grey with the rain and clouds. Even the fields that had been converted into wind and solar farms appeared haunted. As if I could see shadows of hundreds of thousands of dead silently screaming between blades of grass.

Your eyes feel the chill when you know what happened in those empty fields decades ago. Grass rippling with spirits.

A photo of the Jewish cemetery in St Louis where hundreds of gravestones
have been vandalized.

It was violence motivated by rage. Hatred boiled in a nation’s soul until it combusts. An explosion of bubbling blood, splatters that leave burn scars on the flesh of a country.

Saturday morning, I read the news and saw that there was a rally against the existence of Islam in Canada. The protesters held signs and chanted slogans that Muslims were all terrorists, rapists, hated women, and held “anti-Canadian values.” Screaming these slogans, they blocked worshipers in their building during Friday prayers.

The protest was organized by such congenial organizations as Rebel Media and Rise Canada, the latter of which is a group that specifically promotes the notion that all Muslims believe in instituting Saudi-style Sharia law across Canada.

When I read this story, I posted a pretty angry note on Facebook. Because despite the explosion of counter-protestors the next day, this is something we should be angry about. I’m here in the country that planned, organized, and led the Holocaust.

After a year of following the rise of Donald Trump, and a year before that of following the rise of alt-right white nationalism, and investigating the ideological and philosophical roots of this new, terrifying movement, I’m prepared to call it what it is.

This is 21st century Nazism.

America's hikikomori are the nihilistic
vanguard of Trump's revolution, applauding
the mass murder-suicide of the human race. To
them, it's becoming a hero.

Islam and Muslims are this movement’s most up-front enemy, though there’s plenty of anti-Semitic filth spewing from the mouths of these wretched grannies. Hate crimes against Jews have exploded across America, and Jews have been harassed in my home of Toronto as well. If you defend these actions in the name of free speech or free expression, you're enabling Holocaust behaviour.

As of my writing this, the post is about 50 comments deep, and includes a surprising number of people defending their right to scream acid hate at people while they pray. And I’m not about to debate these people as if their views are reasonable positions.

I’m not about to treat people who call for the entire expulsion of an ethnic-religious group from my country as deserving of my respect. The next time one of these rallies happen and I can physically make it there, I will show up with a Canadian flag screaming “Nazi scum fuck off!”

But I’m not taking some kind of “regressive left” stand against freedom of speech here. For the last week, I’ve been posting about my reading some classic works of John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of liberal free speech values, talking about how he links freedom of speech with the responsibility to build a peaceful society.

As Karl Popper picked up the idea, freedom of speech can’t allow the freedom to advocate shutting down freedom of speech, belief, or expression.

Most people still don’t realize the horrifying roots of the “free speech” rhetoric that racists today use to defend their right to call for mass-deportation and the banning of religious practices.

I hope you’ll read this piece on the history of 4chan culture, the community of people who form the hard core of the modern “free speech” movement online. If I can summarize, they are the wasted of the modern economy.

Unable to build a decent life for themselves according to 20th century standards of success, they’re trapped in a gig economy that keeps them underpaid and impoverished. Socially awkward, they’ve lived in internet forums for literally decades now.

They’ve given up on life in the real world, and support destructive, racist politics because they literally have nothing else to live for. This is a world where suicide and murder-suicide is called “becoming a hero.”

The 4chan fascists of the 21st century want only to laugh while the
world burns in an orgy of violence, suffering, hatred, and rage. You
know – for the lulz.

I’ve seen a few articles since the rise of Trump that have returned to Hannah Arendt to understand contemporary authoritarianism. But I think the better guides are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

They wrote about fascism as the political expression of Freud’s death drive. The militarism of Nazi Germany was a cultural expression of a death wish – murder-suicide on a national, and hopefully global scale.

The Trumpists of 4chan desire the same thing – they want to spur racism, hate crimes, violence, authoritarian clampdowns on democracy and resistance, economic and ecological collapse, the end of human civilization. All because they have no hope left. That’s what it means to live for the lulz.

I will fight this with every ounce of energy I have. Even though I’m not even sure if we can ultimately win. Forces of tolerance, acceptance, and real freedom – the freedom that is bound up in responsibility and ethics – may win some victories.

But it’s entirely possible and quite probable that the destructive processes in Earth’s climate can’t be held back from catastrophe any long. And Trump may still do too much damage to the world with American military and ecological destruction while he’s in power to overcome. We may lose. It may be impossible to win.

But I’d rather go out fighting for what’s right than give in to despair. I’ve fought despair too hard in the last few years to let those forces have that victory over me.

We are one people in all our great human diversity. We can live in a world of peace, brotherhood, and fairness.

And you Nazi punks, fuck off!

Not Quite the Essence of Totalitarianism II: Death Drives, Research Time, 10/03/2015

Continued from last post . . . Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom has some interesting comments about the role of ideology in totalitarian regimes. They’re utterly mistaken about the nature of ideology itself, but it’s nonetheless interesting. I think this is why doctrinaire libertarians* continually parrot the common Tea Party message that Barack Obama’s policies put the United States on a track to a Hitlerian or Stalinist state.

* Such as the former friends of mine who have supplied, for better and worse, my primary examples of doctrinaire popular libertarianism. I’ve been exploring libertarian political forums lately to discover how representative they were, and that’s certainly been confirmed. There are many nuanced people on libertarian forums, but quite a number of people who parrot empty messages like “Government Regulation Bad! Private Control Good!”

Actual socialists find it hard to understand what precisely
is so socialist about Obama's policies.

I always found the idea that Obama was a Nazi (at best a Nazi who didn’t know it) unsettling, kind of racist, and a completely weird thing to say. But finally reading Hayek has shown me the rational and quite profound (if terribly mistaken) argument that lies behind this insane-sounding rhetoric. 

Hayek directs the philosophical critique of The Road to Serfdom at the bureaucratic institutions of the state, particularly the totalitarian state. He begins the book with a scathing criticism of mainstream ideas in political life of Europe, even in proudly democratic countries, that a complex technological economy could only function properly under the directed management of a bureaucracy whose power covered all activities and territory of the nation.

The politics of the time when he was composing The Road to Serfdom was the violent confrontation of democratic countries and authoritarian regimes. Hayek saw the spectre of tyranny in the politics of economic nationalization and state industrial planning. This was a political program whose goal was the elimination of all restraints on the government’s bureaucratic power over people’s lives. This is a feature of totalitarian politics.

But it isn’t the only facet, because totalitarianism includes an element of racism that Hayek thinks is insignificant. He devotes a long chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the role of ideology in totalitarian governments. And he’s unique among the philosophers I’ve read so far in that he doesn’t think it’s very important. 

Understanding disciplinary modes of governance
and population control is why libertarians and the
modern liberal right wing should read Michel
Foucault and take him seriously.

Hayek analyzes how people with the personalities of brutish thugs are drawn to positions of power in regimes that bureaucratically manage nationalized industries. It requires disciplining an entire population to follow the orders of a hierarchical authority, the government. The population of the whole country must follow orders without question, and people who are accustomed to giving and following orders without question are best suited to this.

Such thuggish people aren’t typically very intelligent people. Once they’re in positions of power, says Hayek, they would act through their petty motivations. But as the dictators of a nation, they have to justify their actions as grounded in a philosophically nuanced set of moral and political concepts. 

So they commit some violent act against their country’s population or a segment of it, and create a post hoc justification by appeal to the common prejudices that thuggish brutes understand well. Add a bunch of these cobbled together justifications of empty brutality together, and you have the ideology of a totalitarian regime.

I don’t know for sure why Hayek was blind to what was obvious to Arendt. Arendt was a Jew who lived in Germany itself as the Nazi movement grew in that culture. She saw friends, acquaintances, and even her lover Martin Heidegger fall into the most virulent anti-Semitism. 

Heidegger, one of Arendt’s most intimate friends throughout her life, developed a profound and difficult philosophy that venerated German volk as having the potential for near divinity, and Jewish existence as irredeemably inadequate to being, capable only of “empty rationality and calculability,” as he wrote in his Black Notebooks. 

Heidegger demonstrated the immense power of
philosophy by articulating ideas that, most of the time,
are the most brutal and stupid racisms as profound ideas
that enrapture thousands of readers.

Arendt saw the power of philosophy to make what at a cursory glance appears to be a crude racism into a profound conception of existence itself. Such power, to make the thoughts of one person mythic and mystic, is philosophy. Heidegger’s was a philosophy for a totalitarian time, one that wrote racism into the fabric of being itself.

Philosophy is irreducible to biography, of course, for the same reason that it’s irreducible to historical context alone. But your life experience shapes how you see the world, what you notice more easily than other things. 

Hayek was the cousin of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but was himself Austrian nobility. He moved to Britain to work at the London School of Economics in 1931. He still had family and friends in Austria, but his daily life was in Britain, where he watched the rise of Hitler from afar. With his eye only on the relation of state institutions to individual people, he couldn’t see how the ideas themselves gave life to the Nazi movement, the most horrifying death drive in human history.

Arendt saw totalitarianism as a social movement that permeated every interaction of individuals. It was not a matter of state bureaucracy having such a power, but the power of the death drive itself percolating from every human interaction and institution. Nazi ideology was a movement to destroy individuality in the collective movement of the volk, and to purify the volk through destroying all that was different.

Hayek saw profundity as the empty justifications of petty idiocy, dull wits like Hitler and Göring justifying their brutishness and prejudice. Arendt saw profundity as the power of an idea to make people its puppets in a process that overcame the will of any individual. Totalitarianism was the formation of the mass man, the nation as a unity expressed in the will of the Leader driving Germany (Germanity?) to suicide, extermination. To be continued . . .

Political Devotion to Purity and Unity, Research Time, 30/04/2014

This is Adolf Hitler, Leader of the Nazi Party.

My comments a couple of posts ago about using imagery from Triumph of the Will to underscore the weirdness of Lucy’s Newfoundland nationalist political propaganda in A Small Man’s Town reminded me to check out the film, which until last night, I had actually not seen in full. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, with terrifying images of creepily Aryan boys (the Hitler Youth sequences carry just a hint of pedophiliac eroticism, which only makes the film more disturbing) and Nazis and swastikas marching in freakishly perfect unison.

Its core ideas feed into some of the notions I’ve been developing for the Utopias project: the devotion to a political cause as an all-consuming religious faith, the unity of the entire people in the political movement, defining the political movement as the literal expression of the Leader’s will. In many ways, the Utopias project is a critique of the idea that a political movement that overwrites the individuality of its members in a single movement or an ideal social form. Such a movement is inherently violent, but its inspiration comes from the attractiveness of that ideal shape for society. Who wouldn’t make any sacrifice to achieve paradise?

Contrary to the last few years of political propaganda from
his opposition, this is not Adolf Hitler.

Nazi political ideology was, in my view, the most pure expression of this notion, that one must devote oneself to a political movement to the point of sacrificing not just your life, but your very individuality to achieving your political goal. It was also the most disgusting, and profane such ideology, which is certainly a help to me in my argument that this kind of idealism in politics is inherently destructive. Of course, I’m not so dumb as to believe that I, or anyone else, can actually succeed in an argument whose form consists of, “The Nazis were the perfect expression of Edenically idealistic politics; Nazism is evil; therefore, Edenically idealistic politics is evil.” I’ve seen enough examples of Godwin’s Law, as well as two decades worth of propaganda against George W. Bush and Barack Obama to know just how badly that method works. 

If I can say at such an early stage in the project that Utopias has any central core, it’s the notion that the problem of Edenically idealistic politics, the political movement that calls on a devotional faith to sacrifice all to achieve a vision of a perfect world, is too simple. It ignores the existence of difference in existence, and that an ecosystemic world, which all life constitutes, is inherently driven by difference. 

Contrary to the political propaganda of his opposition in
my youth, this is also not Adolf Hitler.

Living systems only survive through the increase of diversity because diversity in a system itself encourages health. For my editing job, I’ve come across some biological studies on the development of industrial agriculture, and one critical focus of these works is the destructive effects of razing diverse ecosystems to create monocultural farms. Immense numbers of complex nutrient cycles among plants, mammals, insects, birds, thousands of fungi genii, and God-probably-can’t-keep-track-of how many kinds of bacteria are all thrown away and flattened to create corn and wheat fields. A simple, pure, unified ecology replaces a messy, absurdly complex one.

The result is soil that loses its nutrients and can’t even grow these simple fields of plants within a few decades. Consider this an analogy for politics. Any movement or idea that would see its goal as the implementation of a uniform political program according to a single, simply set of principles is as politically and socially destructive as the monocultural farm is ecologically destructive. Nazi ideology was not only a simple image of a political Eden to which the party strove, at great cost and sacrifice, for two decades. It was also, even for ideologies, a simple one. It valued absolute unity of a diverse people (and the German people, with their cultural heritage in all those towns and duchies with their own unique histories and traditions, is remarkably diverse) in the will of a single man. It valued total uniformity of political, moral, and religious beliefs. It valued total purity according to a childishly simple theory of ontological race.

Absolute uniformity is death.