‘There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.’ (Jan. 27, 2021)
The title is from this quote:
QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded
Gregory Stanton/ Just Security
September 9, 2020
A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.
Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.
I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.
The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.
There is no shortage of quibbling with terminology when we decide to use the ‘f word’, including the farcical claim that fascism is a distinctly European political pathology:
The F-Word: No Other Way to Describe Trump’s Fascism 2.0
If Trump’s lengthy rap sheet of lies, threats, obstruction, and incitement doesn’t add up to fascism, then what would?
Connect all these dots. What do you see? “They all have one purpose,” said Sally Yates, past acting attorney general, “to remove any check on his abuse of power.” The emerging picture is not transactional conservatism but rather a deviant fascism American-style. (For those still offended by the F-word, there’s more: For the first time in 58 elections, a president is refusing to agree beforehand to abide by the results.) That’s not mainstream but extreme. (emphasis added)
…there’s a binary choice: fascism for the few or democracy for all.
And we all know what came after the election.
We need to view fascism as a pathological worldview that emerged from colonialism, and has cross-pollinated between Europe and the US:
What the Nazis Learned from Jim Crow: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the U.S. Racial Caste System
In her extensively researched new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues the United States’ racial hierarchy should be thought of as a caste system, similar to that in India. In a wide-ranging interview, she describes how she also looks at the ways Nazi Germany borrowed from U.S. Jim Crow laws. “The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate,” Wilkerson says. “But what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States, to study and to research how the United States had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African American population.”
The Europeans learned how to be better fascists from the Jim Crow south, and then the Confederates took inspiration from European fascists, who actually decided to roll out tanks and gun people down in the streets.
What we saw on 1.6.21 was the US strain finally getting their chance to emulate their hall of fame heroes.
We need to talk about fascism, and the members of the fascist crowd:
None were duped: the psychology of crowds— fascists are not led, they congregate. (Jan. 20, 2021)
For all the derangement on display, for all the rabid violent intent (make no mistake, Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have been brutally murdered by the criminal thugs who entered the Capitol, just as they beat a police officer to death), it is a convenient and comforting fiction to refer to the insurrectionists as unusual, somehow separate from the larger fascist crowd that makes up the GOP.
But who entered the Capitol with firearms and incendiary devices, waving Nazi and Confederate flags?
A real estate agent who flew in her private jet to participate.
Off duty police officers from around the country.
Current and former GOP state representatives.
School teachers.
Lawyers.
Ordinary individuals from every profession, most financially in no distress:
"They were business owners, CEOs… [w]hile "any crowd that size is bound to include people who are struggling financially," Serwer said, the bulk "weren't 'low class.' They were respectable," rioting because "they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule."...
The criminal thugs who assaulted police, intent on murder and the destruction of our democracy, are indistinguishable from the GOP rank and file as a whole.
They live in non-descript communities, and are your neighbors, co-workers, former classmates, perhaps erstwhile friends. Some might be part of your family.
They are the literal embodiment of what Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil...
Too many on the left slept while fascism encroached, because ‘decent white Americans shouldn’t lumped together with the obvious fascists’.
The problem, of course, is viewing anyone who has aligned with the GOP/fascist cabal over the past half century as anything other than nakedly white supremacist...