Yes, let's talk about how eerily similar our present moment in history is to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
-Angela Valenzuela
We Need to Talk About Ron DeSantis’s Fascist Paradise
The Big Lie That They’re Coming for Your Kids Is Fascism at It’s Most Dangerous and Sinister
 |
It sounds like something you might have seen a sign for, cruising down a golden, sunlit highway, in your convertible, once upon a time. A motel, perhaps, in shades of seafoam blue-green. Ron DeSantis’s Fascist Paradise. (Well, except for the fascist part, that is.) And yet that appears to be what Florida’s becoming, and no, I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating.
Perhaps you read a recent series of articles and tweets that went viral. One by Amanda Marcotte, worth reading in full, is an excellent summary. Let me cite a little bit of it, which is shocking.
A Florida law signed by DeSantis requires that every book available to students “must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate,” in most cases, the school librarian. This may sound reasonable on its surface, but as the situation in Manatee County shows, in reality, it’s about creating a bottleneck preventing books from getting into the hands of students.
How bad is it? Just how dystopian are we talking? As the journalist Judd Legum pointed out, “Teachers in Manatee County have been told to remove all books from their classroom libraries. On Monday, for example, teachers at Bayshore High School in Manatee County received the following message: ‘Remove or cover all classroom libraries until all materials can be reviewed.’”
Did you get that? Teachers are removing or covering up…all the books. Until they can be “reviewed.” For what, precisely? We’re about to get to that, but first: if that sounds a whole lot like the Taliban, that’s because it is. We should never, ever see — in a modern society, a democracy, a liberal state, and I don’t mean that in a partisan sense, just as in “one founded on notions of liberty”…something like all the books in classrooms or libraries being covered up. (Like, for example, the way women are, under the Taliban, who also do things like ban books, which are dangerous and subversive, because they…enlighten people.)
We should never see books being covered up. This is literal, actual, very real Nazi style stuff. One of the very first things the Nazis did as they came to power was to get rid of the books. In open, loud, violent, symbolic book burnings. Seriously. Read this, for context.
On May 10, 1933 student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings of works that the students and leading Nazi party members associated with an “un-German spirit.” Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the burning of books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann and Remarque, among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish. The largest of these book bonfires occurred in Berlin, where an estimated 40,000 people gathered to hear a speech by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he pronounced that “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and endorsed the students’ “right to clean up the debris of the past.”
Let me say it again. One of the very first things the Nazis did was burn books, by authors they considered dangerous, subversive, antithetical to their ideology. That’s the difference between us and them. Nobody’s burning books — LOL, “books” — by Tucker Carlson or who have you. They’re right there for everyone to read, as absurd as they are. Who does things like burn, ban, cover up books? It’s a pretty good sign you’re dealing with actual, real deal, bona fide fascists.
And so symbolic attacks on books aren’t just some kind of minor-league thing to blithely, pleasantly ignore: they are a warning sign that a society is in troubled waters. A big, clear, blinking, neon red sign of such a thing. Nobody should take this lightly. Whether or not you’re a bookworm or not, because books aren’t just things made of paper — they’re living embodiments of all the values modern societies hold dear. Expression, association, movement, intimacy, equality, truth, justice.
In fact, the Nazi book burnings were one of the things that began to turn America against the Nazis. That was a contentious struggle at the time, as Ken Burns has so sagely documented in his new “America and the Holocaust” series — essential viewing. And now? Here’s America itself, banning, covering up, “removing” the books. Think about how bad that actually is. Big deal
Now. Why is all this happening? As ridiculous as the reason is, you already know it, even if you don’t quite believe it. Let me quote Judd Legum again.
Florida teachers are being told to remove all books from their classroom libraries OR FACE FELONY PROSECUTION. The new policy is based on the premise that teachers are using books to “groom” students or indoctrinate them with leftist ideologies.
Did you get that? Now we’re seeing an even stronger, truer signal that, yes, this is real deal fascism. What signal is that? Teachers are being criminalized. Teaching is being criminalized. Why is that bad — exactly, precisely, even though it’s intuitively obvious? Let me spell it out for you — sorry, long quote, but a very necessary one.
As the Nazis worked to consolidate their power and build a cohesive “national community,” suppression of dissent played a key role. In 1933, the Nazis issued a decree that required Germans to turn in anyone who spoke against the party, its leaders, or the government (see reading, Outlawing the Opposition in Chapter 5). That decree, “For the Defense against Malicious Attacks against the Government,” stated:
Whoever purposely makes or circulates a statement of a factual nature which is untrue or grossly exaggerated or which may seriously harm the welfare of the Reich or of a state, or the reputation of the National government or of a state government or of parties or organizations supporting these governments, is to be punished, provided that no more severe punishment is decreed in other regulations, with imprisonment of up to two years and, if he makes or spreads the statement publicly, with imprisonment of not less than three months.
If serious damage to the Reich or a state has resulted from this deed, penal servitude may be imposed.
Whoever commits an act through negligence will be punished with imprisonment of up to three months, or by a fine.
To enforce the decree, the Nazis set up special courts to try people who were accused of “malicious attacks.” In December 1934, the government replaced the decree with the “Law against Malicious Attacks on State and Party,” adding a clause that criminalized “malicious, rabble-rousing remarks or those indicating a base mentality” against the Nazi Party or high-ranking government or party officials.
Did you get that? To consolidate their power, the Nazis criminalized dissent. Against their ideology. But even that’s a poor way to put it, because, of course, dissent again fascist values just means you believe in, LOL, democracy, and its fundamental values of freedom, justice, equality, truth, and so forth. The Nazis didn’t just make dissent a crime — they criminalized believing in democracy itself.
Think I’m kidding? Then let’s keep going — sorry, another long quote, but again, necessary.
Alfons Heck, then a member of the Hitler Youth, recalled the effects of the law. In 1938, he was living with his grandparents when his father came to visit.
In retrospect, I think it was the last time my father railed against the regime in front of me. . . . He wasn’t much of a drinker, but when he had a few too many, he had a tendency to shout down everyone else, not a small feat among the men of my family. “You mark my words, Mother,” he yelled, “that goddamned Austrian housepainter is going to kill us all before he’s through conquering the world.” And then his baleful eye fell on me. “They are going to bury you in this goddamned monkey suit [his Hitler Youth uniform], my boy,” he chuckled, but that was too much for my grandmother.
“Why don’t you leave him alone, Du dummer Narr [you stupid fool],” she said sharply, “and watch your mouth; you want to end up in the KZ [the German abbreviation for concentration camp]?”
He laughed bitterly and added: “So, it has come that far already, your own son turning you in?” My grandmother told me to leave the kitchen, but the last thing I heard was my father’s sarcastic voice. “Are you people all blind? This thing with the Jews is just the beginning.”
As it turned out, the grandmother was exactly right. Eerily and presciently so. She was the only one in the family who picked up on the warning signals. That criminalizing basic democratic values was what made it possible for the Nazis to go out and then commit modern history’s greatest crime, the attempted annihilation of the Jews. Made it possible for them to make average people — who weren’t even German, as Ken Burns documents — to lead and participate in it, like villagers and townspeople across Eastern Europe helped march Jews to trenches where Einsatzgruppen soldiers…shot them by the tens, then hundreds of thousands.
Grandma felt the horror and pain of that as a premonition in her bones, because she understood the threads which hold this thing called civilization together. Criminalize democracy, and you make the rest possible — the worst abuses of all, like genocide.
Obviously, America’s not there yet. So am I, as a certain kind of guy will say, exaggerating? Well, you and I are the ones who saw the abuses of the Trump years coming — and that kind of guy didn’t. And of course that raises the question: what happens next time? If a figure like DeSantis — who’s behind all this — wins?
Why is DeSantis doing all this? The answer’s subtler than you might think. It’s not just that he hates the left or hates gay people or hates women and kids and so forth, though obviously, his ilk do. The answer, though, is about how to drive people out of their minds with fear and rage.
How do you do that? How do you turn, say, an average soccer mom, polite, considered, if harried, still just a normal person…into a frothing, raving maniac? You come for her kids.
Fascists always make it about kids. They’re coming for your kids!! The Nazis said it — what was “lebensraum”, living room, about, the justification for invading half of Europe? Well, it was always accompanied by pictures of families, where bucolic, golden-haired kids sat on dad’s lap, somewhere in a pleasant, green field. Lebensraum was about the kids.
The fascists always tell these stories about the kids — they’re coming for your kids!! Who else tells that story? Well, the Taliban, for one. Banning books and music and film and art is for the sake of the kids, to protect their moral purity. To save their souls.
The fascists tell these stories about people’s kids because doing so triggers a primal level of response, a primal fear. It makes people react, without thinking, in shock and horror, rage and fury, totally mindlessly. Because in this life, well, what wouldn’t you do to protect your kids?
So on the one hand, there’s the scapegoat. The imaginary monster. For the Nazis, it was Jews, along with the LGBT, minorities, and so forth. But on the flip side, there’s the scapegoat’s target. What they’re taking from you. Not just your job, not just your livelihood, not just money — but something deeper. Your kids. And your kids are the part that lives on after you. The hated ones are taking your immortality. They’re taking your soul. Is there anything worse than that?
Nope. And so the scare stories about “they’re coming for your kids!!” — it works. How did the Nazis drive Germany into a frenzy of rage and hate? With precisely this tactic. The kids needed lebensraum. Little Gunther — why, he was the one who was threatened by the evil Jews, the gays, the minorities. Where would he even have room to play? To develop into his genetically superior and fit self? Didn’t we have to invade, for little Gunther’s sake? And so Germans, enough of them, anyways, bought into Hitler’s madness.
DeSantis is using the same tactic. It’s a fiendishly clever psychological one. For a double reason. Because in destabilized societies — the ones where fascism flourishes — well, pessimism’s taken hold. Living standards are falling. Downward mobility’s the norm. And so we’re all worried about our kids. Even our kids are worried about themselves, depressed, fumbling for a future, unsure. And in that milieu, that context? Ginning up scare stories about scapegoats who are coming for your kids has a devastating psychological effect. People are ready to believe it. Precisely because they do see their kids as failing, flailing, falling apart, and so, hey, they must be under attack by those monsters.
Couple that with another tendency all too common in destabilized societies — a reversion back to fundamentalist religion, or at least to pre-modern notions of purity — and it’s doubly devastating, because now the monsters, the hated ones, are going to steal away your kids souls, or their genetic purity, same difference, in this theology.
It works. It has worked, time and again, in human history — creating moral panics by blaming already marginalized minorities as the ones who are responsible for the plight facing people’s kids in downwardly mobile societies. In fact, let me give you another example. Why has Britain destroyed its own future? Well, right now, just today, hundreds of kids…disappeared. Refugee kids. Is there anybody — anybody — more vulnerable on earth? Disappeared from Britain’s custody. Shocking, no? And yet the nation barely cares, because the government is telling people, every day, that those kids are the ones to blame for their own kids woes. And they believe it, to the point that Brits would rather have someone to hate than…LOL..a functioning National Healthcare Service. The Big Lie that they’re coming for your kids? It works, almost without fail, in societies plunging into failure.
Now. DeSantis might know this, consciously, or he might just get it, how to be an effective demagogue, unconsciously, because he’s a creepy and gross dude. Either way, it doesn’t matter. It’s propelling his rise to the top. This set of tactics is working. He’s gone from a nobody, a laughingstock, to a governor of a major state, to a GOP power-broker and front-runner, and he’s done it by using a certain strategy, which is to gin up the moral panic that they’re coming for your kids.
Let me now put all that a little more precisely. DeSantis is triggering people’s primal fears. That means: their deepest and most fundamental ones. We humans have three: being abandoned, being betrayed, and being annihilated. Telling people they’re coming for your kids triggers all three of those. That’s why it’s so devastating — it’s like a psychological knockout punch, which simply stops a whole lot of peoples’ brains from even working, thinking about whether any of it even makes sense, at all. They just react.
And that helps radicalize them. They become believers in paranoid collective delusions — like “Great Replacements.” Our kind are being replaced! By who, precisely? Why, by those people. By gay people, by people with a different religion or skin color or creed. Soon our kind will be….gone. Annihilated.
And therefore, it’s only justifiable to strike first. To do that to the very people who want to do it to us. That is how you justify fasicsm. Get people to really believe in it. Watch Ken Burns new doc on the Holocaust, and you’ll see scenes that are mind-blowing in their utter horror: villagers and townspeople marching their own neighbors and their kids to their deaths, and watching, with grins on their faces, as they’re massacred in front of their eyes by Nazi shock troops.
How do you get people to do that? You create a sense of panic in them so deep that they believe the only way out is to strike first, in a genocidal way, to annihilate those are trying to annihilate them. By coming for their kids. That means that it’s totally OK to gun down their kids, too, right before your very eyes.
This happened. History teaches us how powerful this Big Lie really is. It is one of the most dangerous of all. We should all be incredibly concerned that DeSantis has learned to wield it. Like a terrible weapon, that destroys everything in its path — truth, minds, democracy. “Covering up books”? It’s a Big Deal. Because it’s a sign that this most dangerous and destructive and sinister Big Lie of all is taking root — they’re coming for your kids. That’s the one that justifies fascism, creates true believers in it, right down to smiling as your neighbors’ families get executed en masse, and dumped, like so much waste, into trenches.
It is that ugly. That is where it ends. I’m not mincing words because nobody should.
You see, nobody’s coming for anybody’s kids. Books are there to prevent exactly things like Holocausts and genocides, by liberating minds when they’re young, from the old demons of hate, ignorance, folly, violence. They’re there to sow salt on the bitter harvest of fascism rising ever again. That’s what the bad guys know, and why they begin with the books, my friends. It’s a sign that a society’s strains of fascism are hardening into the worst variants we know, true Nazism, anchored by bona fide hate, designed to drive people out of their minds with collective delusions of persecution — which means we must annihilate them, the hated ones, first, before they do it to us.
Ron DeSanti’s Fascist Paradise. I wasn’t kidding. That is what Florida’s becoming. It’s a warning to the world — and to the rest of America, too. In a deeper way, I think, than many yet know. Remember Grandma? She was the only who understood. Let us learn from her, and see what they couldn’t see then, before the old poisons consume us again.
Umair
January 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment