Tag: Nazis

The rise of Nazi thoughts and deeds in American politics – a marker

Around a decade ago, I put a marker on my blog regarding Peter Thiel, because I thought it worthwhile to track his decline. Last week the pattern of Nazi related activities in the American right got to the point where I thought: I need to start noting these.

First off, Peter Thiel is giving a lecture on “The Antichrist: A Four-Part Lecture Series” of all things. One thing that stood out for me was the reference to Carl Schmitt. In case you don’t know much about Schmitt and his relationship with the Nazis, you can read this.

Next up, JD Vance (who is also aware of Schmitt), said, “I don’t know why we accepted that it was reasonable to have crazy people yelling at our kids. You should not have to cross the street in downtown Atlanta to avoid a crazy person yelling at your family. Those are your streets.” Read that, I thought, I wonder if we should be prepared for someone in the Trump administration to propose Aktion T4. This is a marker to see if they are going to go down that road.

None of this Nazi infused thinking is new. Mike Godwin in 2023 said comparing Trump to Hitler was not wrong, in light of Trump “calling people vermin” and “talking about blood poisoning”.

Godwin’s Law — “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1.”  — is good to keep in mind. It’s easy to reach for comparison of the American right wing to the Nazis, and that comparison should be resisted. Many authoritarian actions that the Trump administration has been doing are terrible but such actions are not strictly limited to Hitler and company. But as these actions pile up, and as right wing thought and action echo behaviors of Germany after 1933, it’s worthwhile keeping track. Actions like the formation of a secret police, the use of concentration camps, the attacks on the museums and the arts, or the takeover of cities by the military.

(Photo of Miller, Hegseth and Vance with the National Guard in Washington D.C.)

P.S. For people who say, Americans would never do anything terrible, I would simply start by by pointing out CIA Black Sites, where Americans would “detain, interrogate, and often torture suspected enemy combatants” in extrajudical locations outside the U.S.

The American Right is familiar with Carl Schmitt and you should be too (for different reasons)

Nuremberg Laws English.jpg

I would have thought that Carl Schmitt is someone who should have been assigned to the dustbin of history. I would have thought wrong.

According to this piece in the New York Times from the summer of 2024:

J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio who is vying to be Donald Trump’s running mate, declared: “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power. And the goal here is to get back in power.”

Masterful bit of projection there by Vance of his own ideas on to the American left.

Give the rise of Nazi thought on the American right, it should not be surprising that some of its members are turning to Schmitt. For those who are unfamiliar with him, his Wikipedia entry starts with this:

Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. An authoritarian conservative theorist, he was noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism.His works covered political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology. However, they are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for, and active involvement with, Nazism.In 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and utilized his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime. Schmitt supported many of Hitler policies including the Night of the Long Knives purge and the Nuremberg Laws.

Based on what we have seen so far, expect to see the Trump administration put more of Schmitt’s ideas in action over the length of Trump’s latest term in office.

To learn more about Schmitt and his ideas, you can read the Times piece and the wikipedia page. You can also check out a review of this book on him. For German readers, you can read his defense of the Night of the Long Knives, here.

(Image credits: By Government of Germany – Flickr: Nuremberg Laws English, Public Domain, Link. It’s important to see just where Schmitt’s ideas lead, hence why I included this terrible diagram. After all, “he praised the Nuremberg Laws for dispensing with the commitment to “treat aliens in species and Germans equally.” – NY Times)

Two rules for dealing with political opposition

Rule #1: accurately assess the strength of your opponent. When you are in control, your opponent is going to try and stop you from doing things, and when then are in control, it is your job to stop them. If you underestimate the strength of your opponent, you will get overrun by them. If you overestimate their strength, you will retreat or surrender too easily. (Seeing a lot of that right now.)

Rule #2: know the difference between an opponent and an enemy.  You can work with your opponent on things you have in common, despite having other things you disagree with. You cannot work with your enemy: they must be defeated. If you don’t defeat them, they will defeat you.

If you believe in democracy and freedom and the person on the other side is a nazi or a fascist, they are your enemy, not your opponent. It’s foolish to think otherwise.

Reading as a defence against those that would ban and burn books

I’ve been thinking a lot about libraries recently. This started when I read about The Empty Library, shown above. As Wikipedia explains:

The Empty Library (1995), also known as Bibliothek or simply Library, is a public memorial by Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman dedicated to the remembrance of the Nazi book burnings that took place in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany on May 10, 1933. The memorial is set into the cobblestones of the plaza and contains a collection of empty subterranean bookcases.

Just one of the many evil acts by the Nazis repudiated by others.

One way to defeat those who would commit such evil acts is to read more. One way to read more is by doing what Austin Kleon is pushing us to do here and take on a summer reading assignment. Do what he says: go to the library, get a card, check out some books. Read anything and everything the library can provide. Read recklessly. Read at whim. Read however you prefer. Read for pleasure. Read knowing that you stand against those who would prevent it if they could.

Book banning is not just something that happened in the past in Germany. It’s happening now in America and elsewhere. Push back when and where you can. One book at the time.

P.S. The story of the artwork, The Empty Library, is fascinating. I highly recommend it.

On the importance of intolerance and how it plays out in real life

Intolerance has a bad reputation. People will talk about having “zero tolerance” for something, which means they are intolerant of it, but they don’t want to use the “I” word in case it makes them look terrible. That’s too bad.

We need to be intolerant at times. Otherwise we run the risk that comes from the paradox of tolerance. If you are not aware of that paradox, I recommend you read this.  You may have even come across practical examples of it, such as this: Bartender explains why he swiftly kicks out Nazis even if they’re ‘not bothering anyone’ – Upworthy.

Being intolerant is not just something that is limited to Nazis. I was thinking of this recently when the “trucker rally” moved into Ottawa. That band of malcontents were tolerated by the officials of that city, and things got out of hand.  Meanwhile, they were not tolerated in other cities like Toronto, and things went better for the citizens there.

We see levels of intolerance on a smaller scale on social media. Blocking people is a form of intolerance. I generally put up with bad comments from people if they are infrequent, but others do not and block them immediately. That doesn’t make me a better person, just someone with a higher (and perhaps wrong) level of tolerance.

It can be hard to know what to be intolerant about. Too much intolerance is also bad. Too much intolerance can lead to rigidity which can lead to loss of opportunity, lack of understanding, bad feelings, and even destructiveness. Not all unwelcome behavior leads to a bad end for the tolerant. Be as tolerant as you can be, but have firm limits for those rare instances when you have to be intolerant towards those that overstep them (while understanding what if anything you lose when you take action).