Political & Social Commentary

Brace Yourselves. Fascism Is On The Way

Posted on May 1, 2018May 23, 2018 by Jeff

…the habit of civilization is fragile; a sudden change in circumstances, and humanity reverts to its primal savagery – Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings — Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism

Our refusal to imagine things getting worse does not mean things can’t get worse — Jeff Siegel

Fascism is coming to America. It won’t be as easily identifiable as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s version, nor will there be designated killing centers, but it will be fascism with an American twist. Fascism is not new in America, but it was always localized. It existed in particular regions, particular states, and particular counties, over the course of our history. This sounds outrageous, but it shouldn’t be.

If fascism is characterized by anti-intellectualism, glorification of death, simplified explanations of the past to justify immoral actions in the present, and separation of people into ‘us’ and ’them,’ then we’ve certainly lived through elements of fascism. With Trump, whose presidency has awoken the previously dormant elements of hate, we’re seeing the growth, on a national level, of a more comprehensive form of fascism.

In the examples below, I make reference to the Nazi era. This is not because it is a direct analogy, but because it had fascistic elements and, because of my readings, it is a time period I’m most familiar with.

Dissolution of DACA: In Nazified Europe, the Jews became vulnerable to expulsion and, eventually genocide, because of their loss of legal status. Without a government to protect them, they were vulnerable to anyone and anything. Currently, at least one million people in the United States have lost, or will lose, the protection of the government. That includes 800,000 DREAMERs, 200,000 El Salvadorans, and 50,000 Haitians.

Identification and Deportation: Over time, the Nazis perfected techniques for identifying those who were declared to be enemies and undersirables. They did not do this alone. In numerous cases, it required the help of the local citizenry in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and so on, to point out who was the enemy. Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is testing and perfecting various techniques of identification, abduction, and deportation that can be used against the selected “enemy.” It already has transit and deportation camps. Though it claims to only deport the worst of the worst, there have been too many stories about doctors, teachers, students, businessmen, and other productive members of society being deported, even though many have been in this country for decades.

Ideology and the State: Nazi ideology had been in existence for well over a decade before Hitler took power in January 1933. Yet it did not become the dominant ideology until it was married to the power of the state. Currently we are seeing the convergence of neo-Nazi and white nationalist ideology, with our police force. Some white nationalists have infiltrated a number of police forces around the country. They are now police officers themselves. The effect of infiltration, or at least sympathy to white supremacist causes, was evident during Charlottesville where the police force seemed to remain on the sidelines as white supremacists became violent. A recent court case in California shows a disturbing instance of the police working with and shielding neo-Nazis, as they looked for anti-fascists. In addition, we’ve heard neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology come out of the mouths of Republican politicians and Republican candidates for office. In an ironic twist, white supremacist ideology comes out of the mouths of Orthodox Jews, minus the anti-Semitism. Just listen to Ben Shapiro.

Metaphor: Human beings understand the world through metaphor, and act in accord with those metaphors. They do not kill human beings. Killing requires stripping human beings of their humanity, making it easier for us to kill them. For the Nazis, the Jews were vermin, quite literally, and in need of extermination.

What do words, metaphors, tell us about the mindset of those who use particular metaphors? What types of discussions were taking place in the White House when Sean Spicer said that Hitler did not gas his own people, as if German Jews were not, somehow, German? What does it tell us when the moral leader of the country sees wife beaters and neo-Nazis as good people? Before anyone is killed they must be classified into a category that justifies it. No one kills human beings. But people do kill gooks, kikes, niggers, and so on.

Morality: Robert Jay Lifton’s, The Nazi Doctors, showed how healing was redefined, making it possible for doctors to believe that euthanizing “undesirables” was a way of healing society. Killing becomes healing. There’s a strange echo of this with the idea of arming teachers. Those who are to love and protect children are also expected to be able to quickly pick out the bad children, the ones with the rifle, and kill them. This seems straightforward, but we’re asking teachers, like the Nazis asked the doctors, to differentiate human beings into those to be saved and those to be killed for the purpose of saving others. What is a teacher to do if there is a threat, not by a rifle, but a child who picks up a chair? Or a child who is physically stronger than the teacher?

Coordination: The Nazis had a process that is translated as “coordination,” though it goes much beyond that. It is the alignment of all aspects of society — from the largest political and religious organizations, to social and recreational groups, to individual behavior and thought — with Nazi ideology. We see the early rumblings of this sort of coordination.

Some religious leaders see Trump as god or, at the least, chosen by God. We see a growing intolerance of opinions that are critical of Trump. We see simple signs of independence or protest, such as taking a knee, or not clapping when Trump speaks, as a slap in the face to the administration, as an affront to the country, as constituting treason. We see people being fired all of the time because they do not conform to Trump’s vision.

The danger with Trump is that, like Hitler, he is beginning to believe his own rhetoric. He believes he is the cause of anything good that happens, and that bad things are always caused by others. He believes he was instrumental in pushing through the Republican tax plan. Now he wants a success on a larger scale. If he succeeds with North Korea, or Syria, however his warped mind may define success, the drug addict will need another fix. He will push for more changes in the country and in the world, for more wins.

Yet this only scratches the surface.

We see the vindictiveness and grand scale thievery of the Trump Crime Syndicate. Every day is more and more madness, yet we engage in magical thinking. We console ourselves with the coming “blue wave,” that all of this will miraculously be reversed in November 2018. We even believe we’ll have elections in November 2018. There is nothing that Trump has done, nothing the Republican Party — his political brownshirts — has done, to lead us to believe that civility, tradition, law, honor, and integrity, will make a reappearance. Everything is crumbling around us and it seems that few Americans understand the danger to our entire way of life. We remain passive, putting our faith in hope and hashtags and a far-off election. If history will not be kind to the Trump Crime Syndicate and the Republican traitors, neither will it be kind to the millions who watched it fall apart, who waited for a miracle that deep down they knew could never occur simply by pulling a lever in a voting booth. If ever there was a time to get out into the streets, to knock on doors and engage in discussions with neighbors, to read voraciously the writings of thinkers, philosophers, economists, and our own history in all its glory and all its ugliness, to become politically active in any way possible, this is it.

Updates

Nazi Fun Fact: The Nazis relied on doctors, nurses, and teachers to report on those who should be removed from society. Our Secretary of Education has said that teachers can report undocumented children.

Nazi Fun Fact: The Nazis referred to Jews as vermin, not in a metaphorical sense but in a literal sense. Some Jews, like any other group of people, had engaged in some criminal activities. However, the Nazis expanded a few bad apples into ALL Jews are criminals.

Eric Trump had stated in 2017 that Democrats aren’t even people. (You can view the video here.)

Hitler is Alive and Well

Posted on April 2, 2018April 2, 2018 by Jeff

This is the text of a letter I sent to our local newspaper in response to a letter published on March 30, 2018. You can read the original letter, the one I’m responding to, here.

The Oedipus Complex may no longer have much weight in the field of psychology, but Freud’s concept of “projection” is alive and well. We saw a textbook example of this in the March 30th letter, “Don’t Remove 2nd Amendment Freedoms,” written by E. Rose. The author ascribed Hitler-like tactics to a perceived enemy by employing Hitler-like tactics.

Hitler placed the blame for all of Germany’s problems on the Jew. The Jew was behind every war, behind every economic collapse, behind every revolution. The Jew was cunning, and would stop at nothing to assure victory. It didn’t matter that the majority of Jews in Europe were poor, or that, in Germany itself, many of the Jews were assimilated and fought in World War I on behalf of Germany. The Jew was the enemy and needed to be destroyed.

For Rose, the all-powerful enemy is the Progressive Left. This group is pushing its “progressive agenda” which, in this case, is some sort of sensible gun control. The Left, like the Jew, is quite powerful, and is so determined to win that there is “no depth to which the left will not stoop.” They have even “weaponized the IRS and the FBI against political enemies.” The Left, like the Jew, aspires to complete control of society, having infiltrated our universities where they’ve used “goon squads that act like the Hitler Youth and enforce ideological conformity with physical violence.” The Left, like the Jew, are “would-be tyrants of the authoritarian collective state.”

This projection of evil onto the Left (or the Jew) masks the evil that lies within Rose. It is an evil that has no empathy, no conscience. Like those Germans who were told to ignore the pleading and the screams of those who were being hauled away, tortured, and killed, the evil represented by Rose will not be swayed by the deaths of children. Hence Rose writes that while “[W]e all feel terrible for the tragedies at these schools…public policy must not be based on emotion and hysteria.” That statement should make us pause, and should frighten us. When someone writes a public letter stating that our decision-making should not be influenced by the killing of children, we have a clear indicator that our society has crossed a dark line. It is also indicates that the letter writer, not the fictitious enemy, is the one who has crossed into Hitlerian territory.

Jeff Siegel

The image below was posted on Twitter. The young gentleman in the image is David Hogg, one of the survivors of the mass shooting in the high school in Parkland, Florida.

How Democracy Will End

Posted on February 24, 2018February 24, 2018 by Jeff

If we have the 2018 midterm elections, and if the Democrats win big, the results will be invalidated, the losing Republicans will remain in office, and that will be the end of elections. Here’s how it will happen.

The Democrats will win back control of the House.
The Republicans will say that the Russians hacked the election, therefore the results are invalid.
The Democrats that won will not be allowed to take office until the investigation has been completed.
While we are waiting for the results of the investigation, the Republicans that lost will stay in office.
The Democrats will cry foul.
The Republicans will use the results of the Mueller investigation and various committee investigations, which examined Trump-Russia collusion, as proof of Russian meddling on behalf of the Democrats. (We’ve already heard this upside-down version of reality many times on Fox News.)
The Democrats will remain in a powerless position and, therefore, will not be able to do anything about it.
People will take to the streets but they will be dismissed as “crisis actors,” “dupes of Soros,” and “enemies of democracy.”
This will eventually become a matter for the Supreme Court which, as we saw in Bush v Gore, has shown a willingness to overturn election results.

Post Script: I discussed this “end of democracy” scenario with a trusted friend. Her response was, “Don’t post it. You don’t want to give them [Republicans] any ideas.” I’ve often worried about things like that. There are things that I don’t post because I worry that I may give someone a crazy, diabolical idea. However, I’m not a genius. I’m sure others have figured out what I’ve written here. Further, I believe that the only way to prepare for the future is to engage in these types of speculative thought experiments. Hopefully someone in the DNC is already strategizing how to deal with this “end of democracy” scenario.

Wake Up Sheeple

Posted on January 25, 2018January 29, 2018 by Jeff

1. There will never be a DACA deal. The Dreamers are a bargaining chip used by the Republican proto-Nazis, the same people who joyfully voted to take health insurance away from 24 million Americans. As I noted in a post on May 4, 2017,

…the passage of H.R. 1628 by the Republicans, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, does not rise to the level of Nazi torture. Yet the result bears a striking resemblance. It was no secret that upwards of 24 million people would be impacted by the bill’s passage. It was no secret that people would die as a result. It was no secret that millions looked to the Republicans for help. With a glee that echoes that of Amery’s torturer who, after landing blow after blow, stopped to admire his handiwork and enjoy a cigarette, the Republicans rejoiced in their victory over the helpless, the sick, the weak. Like good Nazis, they congratulated themselves for having broken the social contract and ignored pleas for help. (See: Republican Nazis)

2. The death of “The News” is not news. But with the election of Hair Füror has come a resurgence of the importance of real, fact-based news. While there’s still an audience for Infowars-style “news” (Conspiracy theorists, like the poor, will always be with us), we have seen audiences for fact-based reporting, such as that from Rachel Maddow to the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and other news sources, grow at an enormous rate. Many who had ignored politics have woken up to the realization that it might be as important as sports. They’ve also realized that maybe they should have paid attention during those school lessons about the way democracy works. While it’s never too late to learn, we better learn fast. (I include myself in that collective “we.”) The walls are tumbling down. Much like the early years of the Nazi regime, we’re at a critical period.

We’re not Nazi Germany and are not in danger of becoming exactly like Nazi Germany. But then, history doesn’t really repeat itself in the exact same way. It does, however, echo across time and space. If you listen carefully, “Work For Medicare” has a faint echo of Arbeit Macht Frei, the latter being shorthand for a fast and efficient killing machine, the former for a slower form of mass killing. There are other echoes of the past.

The Germans depended on their legal system to save them, so the Nazis installed judges who were loyal to their cause, and pushed out those who were not. (Sound familiar?) The Germans assumed that, after a few outbursts of violence, the good nature of Germans would prevail. (Sound familiar?) However, relentless propaganda — Jews are murderers, rapists, thieves — (sound familiar?) taught them to hate the Jews, and they learned their lessons well. (How do you get one group of people to turn against another group of people? See The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-semitic Newspaper Der Sturmer by Randall L. Bytwerk, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945 by William Sheridan Allen)

At this point in the post I’m supposed to end on a hopeful note, so here goes. I’m hopeful that people will wake up to the danger. I’m hopeful that they will educate themselves. I’m hopeful that Good will triumph over Evil. But I worry that people think a single election will fix everything. I worry that our unwillingness to imagine awful outcomes somehow means that awful outcomes cannot occur. (It took nearly twenty years for the Nazis to gain power. There were people with the foresight to see what was coming. See the chapter on the Munich Post in Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler.) It took over forty years to get to where we are now. It will take a decade or more of sustained pressure and political engagement to fix what has been broken. Hashtags, Likes, and Shares alone will not do it. We, the Sheeple, need to wake up, need to get educated, and need to get engaged with the world of politics.

3. I obsessively check Twitter. I listen to news podcasts. I read the Guardian, the Washington Post, even the New York Times (though I hold my nose). I feel like a hunted animal, forever on the lookout for signs of danger, worried that if I stop being vigilant, something crucial will happen that will forever alter my life. In this anxiety-ridden ritual I hear echoes of Nazi Germany, when people would hang onto any bit of news and rumor in search of hope. I imagine that the DREAMERS must be feeling the same way, always on the lookout for danger, searching for bits and pieces of hope.

4. We’ve become strangers in our own land. We don’t recognize our institutions. We don’t recognize our neighbors. When James Comey was fired, I protested by rehanging, upside down, the American flag in front of my home. Two neighbors yelled at me for being unpatriotic. A letter was sent to the local newspaper, informing the police that I may be a “person of interest.” I received an anonymous letter telling me to leave the country. From this experience I learned that there are those who only give lip service to free speech. I also learned that there are some neighbors who will gladly give my name to the Gestapo.