American Nazis Sure are Getting Bold
On Saturday a collection of Nazi groups from across America gathered on the grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, in an armed and violent protest against the removal of Confederate monuments. They wore Nazi arm bands, waved Nazi flags, gave Nazi salutes, proclaimed themselves Nazis openly and with immense satisfaction, and gave Nazi speeches. Attendees included Nazi media darlings David Duke and Richard Spencer, WSU College Republican President James Allsup and Men’s Rights Activist Christopher Cantwell. Three Percenters, the Traditionalist Workers Party, Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, the KKK, the Nationalist Socialist Movement and other, less well known Nazi groups all paraded in force, proudly. These are groups that racists compare themselves to in order to declare they are not really racists. These are groups the so-called alt-right compare themselves to in order to declare that they are not really Nazis. It turns out, shockingly, that the alt-right are Nazis.
After clashes with protesters that did not go terribly well for them and a spot of old fashioned if bizarrely genteel police kettling most of the Nazis fled. Virginia’s Governor reports that the police were scared of the weaponry the Nazis carried about with them, leaving the job of confronting Nazism face-to-face to unarmed college kids. In the aftermath of the clashes, James Fields drove his car repeatedly into protesters. He killed legal assistant and civil rights campaigner Heather Heyer: she stood up to armed Nazis on American soil and was martyred for it. Many others were wounded.
During the rally Nazis proudly showed their faces, chanted their slogans — ‘Jews will not replace us’ — attacked and wounded protesters. Surrounded by their fellows and armed to the teeth they wanted to be so courageous. In the wake of the tragedy they orchestrated their bellies have become streaked in yellow.
Nazis invariably try to shield themselves by building a bridge of false equivalence with civil rights groups and counter-protesters. Their arguments are literally unchanged from their complaints about those who marched and demonstrated and struggled in the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s and those who attempted to abolish slavery in the 19th century.
Those who declare that both sides of issues as morally transparent and obvious as slavery, fascism or the American apartheid are equally guilty or equally abhorrent are, in fact, picking a side. Because slavery, fascism and segregation are horrific acts of violence, and opposing them is a moral obligation. A pretence of neutrality merely encourages indifference and apathy in the face of injustice, which is vital to the success of that injustice. It overwhelmingly ameliorates the crimes of one side while inflating those of the other, if not inventing them wholesale: hence why the people behind such evil keep making the inane equivocation themselves. Repeating the suggestion that opposing Nazism is equivalent to Nazism is to repeat the false arguments of Nazis in order to defend Nazis.
What people stand for matters. Were Black Lives Matter to win tomorrow dangerous confrontations between police and the communities they serve would decline dramatically, neighbourhoods would be safer and more unified, the police would more effectively be able to do their jobs and innocent black people would not be slain without consequence by armed officers of the state. Black people would be another step on the road to enjoying the full social and political rights that America promises its citizens; we would be one step further in acknowledging that their lives, as much as white lives, matter. Whatever problems one may have with using direct and physical violence in response to structural violence, the proportionality of their tactics and its wider political effects, the focus of Antifa is to defeat fascism, often while directly enduring personal risk and often while defending nonviolent protesters. Were they to win tomorrow there would be no more Nazis rallying in the streets and attacking people of colour, no more monuments standing to declare that black people are still second class citizens, no more politicians with an audience for openly tearing down the rights of gay people, women and ethnic minorities. Where Nazis win they bend entire economies towards wasteful and pointless militarisation that aids no one in society and ends in the near-destruction of their nation state, they tear down science and academics, they destroy communities and conduct mass murder and genocide. There is no comparison.
The strategies, bigotry, methods and inherently violent beliefs of American Nazis rather invite comparison to those individuals in western nations who pledge fealty to ISIS. The political relationship between the two is symbiotic, what passes for ideology in their nihilistic killing is almost identical, while their strategies and terror tactics grow and develop from shared experience. Since 9/11, American Nazis have conducted three times as many violent terrorist attacks on American soil as Islamist terrorists and are the pre-eminent threat to American democracy. ISIS terrorists are more lethal, but less organised, less numerous, and less embedded in their communities. ISIS does not get to rally in American streets.
In London, England, Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians on a busy street. A few months later, in the same city, Darren Osborne drove a hired van into Muslim worshippers exiting Finsbury Park Mosque. In Charlottesville, Virginia, James Fields drove his car into civil rights protesters opposing a Nazi demonstration. In Berlin Anis Amri drove a lorry into a Christmas market. A white supremacist German army officer built a false life as a Syrian refugee in order to conduct a false flag terrorist attack which would blame refugees for a terrorist atrocity. In Paris, ISIS terrorists planted faked Syrian passports in order to falsely implicate refugees in the atrocity they were committing.
Their amplifiers in media organs and politics — such as Donald Trump, Infowars, Breitbart, Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins, The Daily Mail and Daily Express and various Fox News personalities — glorify Islamist terrorist attacks, dramatically exaggerating their effectiveness and directly pleading with the public to be scared in order to support fascist initiatives and policies. They literally regurgitate Islamist propaganda in their verve to do so. Nazi murders and Nazi attacks are excused, apologised for and minimised. Islam is portrayed as innately political by mere virtue of the fact that religious values inform the views of religious people, from Buddhists to Christians to Sikhs to Muslims. But this banal and obvious fact is used to dismiss Islam as a religion and legitimise the oppression, assault and murder of Muslims.
Our victory in this depends on the means of our resistance and the institutions we have imbued with authority and power in our nations. The President, who appointed open white supremacists Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon to key roles in his cabinet, who has pursued white supremacist legislation and used white supremacist lingo, unsurprisingly echoed the language of Nazis in the wake of Charlottesville. Feebly he repeated the Nazi narrative that there was a confused and vague ‘egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides’. Thus declaring that standing up to Nazis is the same as Nazism.
The President’s statement was so cartoonishly cowardly and doltish that even his oleaginous colleagues in the Republican party balked, under fierce public opposition, into forcing him to finally explicitly condemn neoNazis, even as he whined, falsely, that he had already done so. Intense public pressure — and a glimmer of morality — meant that some Republicans finally joined Democrats in explicitly condemning white supremacy in the wake of Charlottesville and rightfully blamed it for what happened, in words, if not in deeds.
Of course, the problem with the President runs much deeper. Denouncing Nazis enthusiastically and unreservedly is incredibly low hanging fruit which he is unable to pluck, and instead he suggested only leftists will do so. Trump sympathises with Nazis for he is a white supremacist, and Nazis are his political allies. Thus, several days later, he literally asks ‘what about the alt-left’ — a Nazi term for those who believe in democracy — ‘that came charging at them.’ He stated there were ‘some very fine people on both sides’. He defended Nazis, fascists and racists by repeating their asinine lies.
In addition to the surge in terrorist attacks they have conducted and rallies they engage in Nazis have made inroads in undermining and dismantling democracy in America through various worrying victories in mainstream politics; as ever, doing so through a mixture of legal and illegal tactics. To this day it is commonly believed that Hitler won elections democratically —in truth Weimar Germany’s right wing militia, the Freikorps, were sympathetic to his cause and allowed his thuggish marches and street battles to continue relatively unmolested. When he was finally arrested a sympathetic right wing judge allowed Hitler to use his own trial as a soap box for his politics and raise his public profile, then sent him to a cushy prison to write an autobiography. A President, Vice Chancellor and industrialists who thought they could manipulate fascism for their own ends appointed Hitler to the Chancellorship of Germany despite his repeated failure to win an absolute majority. He lined the Reichstag with uniformed thugs during key votes to dismantle the checks and balances of the state, banned opposition parties, had politicians that were wise to him beaten and murdered, and carefully deployed referendums in the wake of terrorist attacks he may or may not have presided over himself in order to get the desired outcome. Democracy is not merely about votes but about the rights and liberty necessary for democracy to be informed and free. This veneer of legality is important — hence Trump’s weird blathering of which protesters had a ‘permit’ (he was lying and counter-protesters did too, if you were wondering)—and is crucial to the fictional narrative Nazis weave that they have the will of the people behind them. By the same token rallies in favour of genocide, the worst violence imaginable, are cast as ‘free speech’ rallies.
Through an electoral system designed to calm the concerns of slaver states that were terrified about a possible outbreak of justice and democracy an open white supremacist — by far not for the first time — was appointed to the Presidency and he immediately, if incompetently, attempted to pass prejudiced and idiotic directives. He appointed white supremacists, racists and bigots to key positions of government and the courts. Lawmakers in Tennessee and North Dakota have proposed legalising the maiming of protesters by driving into them. During his campaign Trump encouraged supporters to assault protesters, offering to pay the legal bills incurred by these crimes. Republican Greg Gianforte, himself tied to numerous white supremacist organisations, assaulted a Guardian journalist for asking him a difficult question and then won a special election to the House of Representatives. Trump froze funds to anti-fascist governments and groups after having been warned by the FBI and DHS that white supremacist terrorist attacks were on the rise and vastly outnumber other sources of terrorism. Alabama and North Carolina currently prevent local councils and jurisdictions from removing Confederate monuments to white supremacy; North Carolina did so via a law they saw fit to pass in the wake of Nazi Dylan Roof’s spree murder of black churchgoers. Shortly after Nazi Jeremy Christian murdered two men protecting a woman he mistook for Muslims in Portland, Oregon, a DHS officer asked far right militia for assistance in arresting a counter-protester. Armed white supremacists seized a federal wildlife preserve in Oregon; a jury sympathetic to the movement nullified the verdict, meaning that its orchestrators walked free despite the huge volume of evidence against them.
Even after the killing the so-called alt-right seeks to promulgate the notion that they are just bored kids messing around with cartoon frogs, just 30-something adult kids who happen to be hanging out with middle aged, middle class men who have swastikas tattooed on them and go to rallies armed with guns. The alt-right wish to paint themselves as more interested in offensive in-jokes and memes than the murder and white supremacy they promote. They dress in goofy costumes and have hair like David Beckham. Early news reports after Trump’s inauguration lavished them with puff pieces about their hipster dress.
Some argue that the young men involved in rioting and demonstrating in favour of slavery and genocide are not actually dyed in the wool nationalists. Perhaps socially awkward, perhaps feeling economically vulnerable, national socialism becomes a reinforcing social circle, a tribal group where they may be freely violent with few consequences — which some young men have a hankering for — and feel like they stand for something, the details of which are irrelevant. Their political beliefs may be incoherent or veneers for inchoate anger and performative in-group signalling rather than deeply held ideals. Many of their leaders, such as they are, are only in it to make easy money, happy to repackage bigotry in entertaining ways to sell the prejudices of dolts back to them.
It’s unclear how this distances them from other Nazis. Nazism has always been ideological gibberish — Hitler’s Mein Kampf is ignorant drivel, so confused and poorly written as to be barely readable. Its main thrust is a construction of race that is historically and biologically false. Hitler was a lazy, uneducated failed artist who looked and sounded absurd. What passes for the intellectual crème of fascist thought has always been scientifically untenable, economically garbled, philosophically disjointed and internally inconsistent. The point of Nazi intellectualism is not to offer solutions to problems but to look like it does.
Nazis have always played dress up in military-like fatigues and armed themselves to confront unarmed foes, then bleated about the horrors they faced. They have always played dress up in stupid looking costumes in order to downplay the seriousness of the murders they conduct (even the dumb hipster thing has been a part of Nazi culture since long before the rise of the modern American attempt at rebranding as ‘alt-right’). They have always followed gobbledegook-spouting leaders with weird voices, bombastic word salad rhetoric and bizarre mannerisms. Our ancestors heard and saw the same things you do when you see photographs and watch videos of these people. Hitler, Franco, Pinochet, Ceaușescu and Mussolini really did talk and write like complete boobs, they really did make up gestures, marches and salutes that everyone could see were silly. The KKK look like a gaggle of morons in daft sheets, because they are. Nazis are weird and stupid people.
But fact and reason and science and problem solving and nation building are not the point. They’re not charismatic or persuasive in the sense of being smooth talking, quick-witted and philosophically well-considered geniuses looking to make their nations great. When their backs were against the wall Dönitz, Göring, Eichmann, Speer and Wolff all claimed they weren’t really anti-semites and didn’t give a damn about solving the Jewish question with genocide. They just banned Jews from public life, orchestrated pogroms, murders and tortures, devoted time and resources to devising and delegating the means of exterminating Jews, enjoyed the convenience of using Jews as slave labour, and carried out the responsibility of their ranks and positions in conducting the Führer’s orders. The crimes of the Reich against the Jews were really carried out because of the inextricable threat of Communism — Jewishness as a political and racial identity was the enemy, the Nazis said. Jewish-Marxists were undermining Germany and orchestrating the world’s opposition to Nazism. The Nazis were just defending themselves, claimed the Nazis.
Nazis are natural cowards. What any Nazi really thinks as they carry out atrocity after atrocity while singing its praises to the nation is as irrelevant as what Milo Yiannapoulos or any other grifter who relies on their sexual or ethnic identity to make money in the ‘alt-right’ really thinks: whether he is lying about his bigotry is besides the point. What they say and how they act is who they are.
The economic argument about the genesis of Nazism, however, falls short, and if anything plays into self-serving Nazi narratives. We may never abdicate our moral responsibilities and it is a failure of reason to blame the illegitimate and wrong things we do on the world around us. A great many people are disadvantaged without ever turning to violence or oppressing others as a means of salving their insecurities. While large minorities of the working class voted for them and this was necessary for their success neither Trump nor Hitler managed to win a majority of the working class: their electoral success, and neither won a majority of the public either, was dependent on the machinations of the wealthy who saw opportunity in the rise of fascism and who broadly agreed with its aims. Racism and sexism were a far stronger predictor of whether a person would vote for Trump than personal financial circumstances or wider economic concerns.
Our ancestors fought and so many of them died in a globe-spanning cauldron of unimaginable horror in order to defeat Nazism: now, while the threat is still nascent, the risk to us is much smaller but is very real and very capable of growing in unpredictable ways. It is a threat not only to Jewish and Muslim and black and brown and LGBT people but to liberal democracy, to the way we live, to the rights, securities and amenities which make us safe, strong, educated: which give us our voice in how our countries govern themselves, which give us so much luxury and power over our lives.
And of course Nazis would wish to compare themselves to those heroic enough to stand up to Nazis. Nazis are, after all, evil; opposing them is the duty of all moral people. We must oppose them with whichever tools are available to us. We must ridicule them, belittle them, vote against them and their sympathisers, vote against their policies, protest against them — not that the American public need be told any of this; their active mass resistance is inspirational. We must demand publishing companies not lend the imprimatur of their name and use of their printing presses to them and boycott them if they fail in this duty. Stop Funding Hate is a British crowdfunded group that pressures companies, with some success, to stop buying ads in openly fascist yet completely mainstream newspapers such as The Sun, The Daily Mail and the Daily Express, aiding, in a small way, their implacable decline to irrelevancy. Boycotts and public pressure stripped Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs initiative of CEOs who realised the potential financial cost, maybe even had personal moral alarm, in being so publicly aligned to a President who failed to unreservedly damn Nazi violence. After bleating that such men were replaceable in his indomitably loud, hollow fashion, he was forced to dismantle the initiative after further walk outs.
We must confront friends and family who hold racist beliefs, and those who edge towards it by holding to spineless uncertainty in the face of outright and unrepentant fascism. It is difficult, sometimes crushingly so, and easier to make insulting and patronising excuses about their age or circumstances or education or social links. It is easier to smother your own unease at expressions of racism and religious bigotry with the ties of shared experience and loyalty that bind all of us to our loved ones. But because it offers no solutions fascism will only ever self-reinforce: black people or immigrants or Muslims or Jews or Catholics or benefit scroungers or judges or foreigners or democracy will increasingly be the source of the problems that anger them because nothing will be done about them, because nothing can be done about them. They’re not the problem in their lives and in many cases make the comfort they enjoy possible.
For their own sakes and for the improvement of the communities in which we live we must strive to return people we fear are being radicalised back to compassion and thoughtfulness for each other, the normal state of human beings. They are human, and loved, and worth the effort to rescue them. And in the rare event that we are presented with reasons to fear they will commit acts of violence we must find the heart to report them to the police, to disown them publicly. And, if we are able, we must expose them to the public.
Where we have the means we must hope for the courage to confront Nazis by counter-protesting in the street. If we do not, we must celebrate those that do. If we are not actively pulling down their monuments to white supremacy we must cheer on those courageous enough to face legal sanction in doing so. Mealy-mouthed Nazi fiction is that this is violence or contradicts freedom of speech. This is complete nonsense: Nazism is violence, and to rise up against them is to rise up against their censorship, their book burning, their abrogation of democracy. They build statues and place plaques to men who killed Americans to defend slavery. They built them to glorify a denialist fairytale and to remind black people what those in power feel their role should be in American society. Already the realisation that these statues literally exist to give succour to Nazis has led to them being taken down by mayors who have more of a moral compass than their President.
Nazis wave flags that symbolise the genocide of the Jewish people and the mass murders of Roma, democrats, homosexuals, black people, Slavs, and the physically and mentally disabled. Making our voices heard in opposition and destroying those structures of the state that oppose the full legal, political and social equality of all people is noble and right. Those with the backbone to stand up to Nazis when they head out looking for a fight are good and right.
