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It’s Time To Stop Calling Them Nazis
Yeah, it’s cathartic and brings a needed sense of urgency… but it doesn’t work. We need to call them what they call themselves.
There’s an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation wherein Captain Picard finds himself marooned on a planet with an alien — a captain of a starship, like himself. This alien doesn’t seem aggressive, yet appears to have engineered this situation by kidnapping Picard. Worse, our Captain cannot understand what this alien, a Tamarian, is saying. The futuristic universal translators are able to translate the words… but their meaning is incomprehensible.
“Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra!” Declares the alien captain, named Dathon. Picard is confounded. Dathon hands him a dagger, saying “Temba, his arms wide!” When Picard is unable to start a fire to warm himself, the alien sighs “Shaka, when the walls fell.”
Picard comes to realise that his counterpart speaks a language based on citing example. He speaks in metaphor. At this revelation, Dathon cheers “Sokath, his eyes uncovered!”
As with all the best Star Trek, it’s not actually about aliens or distant planets. It’s about ourselves. This episode, Darmok (1991), is a reminder of all the cultural heritage, mythology, and legends that make up human society and history. Some of it is shared widely, some of it applies only to an individual group. This is driven home in the final act of the episode, when Captain Picard comforts a fatally wounded Dathon by telling him the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh. A story from 4,000 years ago in Bronze Age Iraq.
Humans cite examples to make points, to drive home an emphasis, and to remind us of the lessons of our ancestors. Amongst those examples, there are probably none so potent as the Nazis. They are almost globally accepted as a shorthand for cruel, authoritarian, murderous fascism — a regime that slaughtered millions in pursuit of racial purity.
Indeed, so troubling are the times we now live in that we cannot help but liken those we fear to those same Nazis. Trump, Tommy Robinson, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidell, Stephen Miller, Nick Fuentes. Our hope is to sound the alarm: to make others understand what we fear and to, for the love of God, change direction and drive these people back into the sea where they belong.
Some of them, one could make a good case for being Neo-Nazis. Others are White Supremacists. Some are Authoritarian. Still others are racist. Some are just very bad people.
You will have seen any number of articles and YouTube videos from Very Learned Experts, wherein they explain the definitions of fascism, of Nazism, and then declaring whether or not Donald Trump meets that definition. Is Nigel Farage actually racist, or does something else describe him better? What about Weidell? That’s all fine and good, but I’m not here to argue the semantics of whether a fascist can only, technically, be a member of Mussolini’s party. Or whether-or-not the AfD count as Nazis, Neo-Nazis or something else.
I’m here to say that it doesn’t matter.
Our shared cultural shorthand for cruel, vicious, authoritarian politicians is evocative, but not effective. It’s no use telling people that Le Penn is a Nazi. We’ve seen, on all our news feeds, Elon Musk giving a literal Nazi salute and then dismissing it by saying ‘oh, oh the left just call anyone they don’t like a Nazi’, and then laughing.
This is not to say that I don’t think the energised, extreme Right is dangerous. It is. It is very dangerous. That is why I think we need to stop calling them Nazis — no matter how apposite the description. We need to call them what they call themselves, and attach the vicious, crass, and repulsive things they say and do to that name. It should hang around their necks like the albatross in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
Try this:
- MAGA is an authoritarian, racist, white-supremacist movement that intends to punish brown people, black people, queer people and women whilst enabling very bad, very rich people to become even worse and even more rich.
Whether they are Nazis, or how much they have in common with Nazis, is neither here-nor-there. We must tie the millstone of their own awfulness to them and to their name for themselves. Every awful thing that MAGAists do should be welded to that name, so to even speak it is to invoke their monstrous actions and statements.
- Reform UK is a racist, White-Britains-First party that will take every possible opportunity to destroy the lives of Black, brown, and queer people whilst setting Women’s Rights back 70 years. They have no clue whatsoever how to promote employment and economic prosperity for us — they just want another crack at Trussonomics.
The metaphor of Nazis is obscuring the actual horror of who these people are. We can, should, and must bind them to the terrible things they say and do. Every single one of these Reform scandals should be brought to mind when they are mentioned. As the gurning reptile, Farage, himself likes to say “oh every party has scandals” but no others are baked into the ideology of the party. The racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic rot they spout, and the fear-mongering they engage in, is part of the ideological makeup of the party. We need to make that clear.
It’s easy for these people to brush-off accusations of being Nazis. Most of them have been doing it all their lives. What is far harder to brush off are the actual things they do when we make them stick.
YouTube video-essayist Caelan Conrad said that they will happily pivot from using TERF to using Gender Critical. Anti-trans campaigners are trying to get the former to be considered a slur, but that’s not the reason. They eloquently explain that the Gender-Critters say and do some very, very nasty stuff. Plenty of their true-believers have gone down the rabbit holes to an anti-vax, anti-Semitic, conspiracy-theory Never-Never-Land. Caelan’s assertion is that all that nonsense should follow them wherever they go, whatever they call themselves. They want to be “Gender Critical” instead of TERF? Fine. We’ll make the awful stuff they say and do stick to “GC” just like we did with TERF.
We must do the same thing with these hard-Right political movements. All the time we rely on shared cultural metaphor, we are spending time trying to stuff MAGA or RN shapes through a Nazi-shaped slot. That gives them too much room to slip out of our grasp. After all, perhaps MAGA will never do a Holocaust — ‘that’ll make all the libs look stupid, won’t it?’ they’ll say. Perhaps Reform won’t take to blackshirts and fully suspending habeas corpus — won’t that give Farage something to grin about when he chortles about how wrong everyone was to call him names?
We don’t need to spend mental energy looking for ways to perfectly match these ideologies up. We just need to join what they say and do to their names. The awfulness of the January 6th Insurrection should be a synonym for MAGA. The Farage Riots should be a synonym for Reform. Rassemblement national should be a synonym for the white supremacy of the neo-fascist groups they pal around with. These are all real-world events that should be tied to these movements, and we should not let them brush it away.
Until we start doing that, they’ll be able to shrug-off the definitions we apply. ‘I’m not a Nazi’, they might say, ‘because I don’t believe in subjugating women’. ‘I’m not a Nazi, I don’t believe in invading foreign countries’. ‘I’m not a Nazi because the Nazis were pagans’. ‘I’m not a Nazi because the Nazis were socialists’.
Uh-huh.
But you are a Reform-supporter, right? You are MAGA, right? Boy, do I have some very apposite and well-deserved tar for you. Stand still whilst I give you a good coating. This way everyone will be able to see what you are, what you stand for, and what you do when you get the chance.
If you like this article and want more, have a look at some of these previous essays of mine:
- Did You Realise How New Your Rights Are? How recent our freedom is, and how quickly to might be taken away.
- Kicking the Dog: how trans people became the folk-devil of British politics.
- It’s Time to Eat Elon: for the good of us all, he must be turned into a pie.
- The Long Read: The Nazis. The call was coming from inside the house.
- The Triumvirate of Horror. How the Oligarch, the Media Mogul and the Fascist Politician will draw us into the mouth of hell.
