thomas leverett weblog

Rise of Nazism

The shooting in Pittsburgh hit close to home, because I used to live in Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood of Pittsburgh where it took place. I lived there only a summer, as I was staying with my brother (who lived there perhaps five or six years), but I remember clearly the people, Jews and others, who called the place home. The rise of Nazism means everyone becomes overly conscious of their identity, racial, biological, clan-associated, or whatever. If you're Jewish, you have to worry about your safety as you attend your temple or synagogue. I would think, if you're Muslim, same. Eventually you'll feel that way even if you go to a concert, or a bus station. Better take stock of the color of your skin, your background, your papers, etc., as somebody's watching and might just haul you off.

I track the rise of Nazism back to 9/11. People were electrified by the attack on the heart of our nation and they began to question whether it was ok to have diversity around, to let people in, to not fortify ourselves better against the scary violent world out there. Let's not confuse Nazism, which I take to mean absolute rule that tends to blame Jews for all our problems, and a more general tribalism, which is not anti-Semitic so much as just pro-white or pro- whatever group you happen to be born into. I see tribalism as taking over much of the world, with the Balkans first, eastern Europe, even central Europe, Brazil - it's a general trend everywhere. It makes people smaller, and makes them tend to close off from everyone they don't consider "one of them." And white folks in the USA are not the only ones guilty of it.

Nazism is a subset of tribalism, one where displaying the swastika is now a symbol of believing in killing Jews, getting rid of non-white people in an area, or preferring absolute rule by an iron-fisted steel-boot authority over the messiness of democracy or working together. We have the guns and the soldiers, we should just maybe use them? I think this underground rise of Nazi symbolism (it's still not considered acceptable to wear swastikas around, yet they have appeared in various places recently) is part of a deeper feeling among white folks that they're losing the ground beneath their feet, that the "white" country that they knew and loved might be slipping away from them. It's driven by fear. And that fear will get worse as Trump goes down: he loses elections, his corruption makes it impossible for him to stay in office, and the wheels of justice move in on him and his.

Trump himself is not overtly fascist, although he's shown contempt for democracy and the mechanisms the Constitution has set up to block absolutism or monarchy. He wants to use an executive order to remove birthright citizenship, but, if any president can by whim remove any law, what will happen with the next President? Or one who is similarly irresponsible on the left? Maybe the "coming out" of swastikas is not his fault, but in the sharp veer toward despotism it is clearly visible in the mirror. After Charlottesville he says, there are good people on both sides. Yes, and all kinds of good people were complicit in the Holocaust that killed seven million. They were ok people, and they sat around and lived their lives, and said nothing, and the smell of furnaces was right across the valley.

posted by tom @ 9:49 AM