There is no upside to the rise in overt Nazi activity in the United States, not to mention other places where billionaires, foreign and domestic have promoted neo-Nazism. With Nazism there is no upside to its existence. But one thing it has done is make it impossible for people to pretend that the American right doesn't have a significant neo-Nazi component that the majority of the American right won't gratify as it tries to harness it for other, mostly economic, ends.
I know it was NPR's "woman who can't open her mouth without a cliche coming out of it" Susan Stamberg who I first heard repeat the conventional piece of fucking idiocy, "the first person to say 'fascist' loses the argument" I know because when it was on the radio it was one of the few times my mother ever heard me say the words, "bull shit". But she wasn't the only enforcer of the NPR-New York Times illusion of normalicy delivered in such pity aphorisms, the "it can't happen here" consensus in which Republicans like Nixon and Reagan and Bush I - all of whom used racism and bigotry to gain power - were entirely acceptable.
American Nazism is and has always been related to our indigenous form of it as found in the KKK and other venues of racism and white supremacy. The Nazis,in their own literature, knew of and learned from American white supremacists and racists and genocidalists. And there were direct contacts from the most vulgar to the most elite among them. That is an historical link that goes back into the 1920s. And its presence, under various names and banners has been an intrinsic part of our politics all through. One difference is that in West Germany, after the war, there was a de-Nazification effort that was never done here. Or in Communist East Germany, which is quite relevant to Nazisms resurgence in Europe, as it turns out. In some ways "Nazism" and "facism" having a formal definition and identification as foreign ideologies has been the white wash, or, perhaps more appropriately, white hood covering up the fact that those are not really different at their most fundamental levels.
With the Nazi-Klan-etc. tiki-torch parade in Charlottesville and the cowardly mass murder of elderly Jews in Pittsburgh mere days ago, there is no more pretending that what we are seeing isn't it happening here, right before our eyes. And happening as the great American free press doesn't carry water for them, exactly as they carried water for the earlier incarnations of the same thing. The country, in general, has made some progress since the 1930s and even the 1950s, the elite, including those who run even the most august parts of our media, not so much so. If you want an example of that I will point out to the pre-Pittsburgh piece in the New York Times that presented the degenerate thug Gavin Mcinnes as a normal part of our politics.
We will find out tomorrow how big the trouble we are in is. Of course, for people who are and have always been the focus of this American Nazism, they already knew it, it's various groups of white people it comes as a surprise to. The last ones to get that are the affluent and among those probably the last to get it will be the ones you might figure should be among the first, the media, journalists. But that's not how it works with the American free press under the ACLU-Supreme Court doctrine of free speech absolutism because as long as they say the right things, no one is going to go after them. And their owners, all affluent, most of them as ruling class as it gets, will be in on it until they can't be anymore.
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