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Nazis. I Hate Nazis.
Strange times we live in when American conservatives — or some of them, anyway — think it makes perfect sense these days for Europeans to get their Nazi groove on. I’ve been hearing this a bit too much on Ricochet of late, so I thought I’d make what in normal times would be an excessively easy call.
Nazis. I hate Nazis. And so should you.
The pro-Nazi argument, as I understand it, is that Europeans have been forced into their moist embrace by a political establishment that has unwisely ignored the larger public’s concern about the large number of migrants and refugees now streaming into Europe.
In discussing this, I’m going to single out comments by BDB not because he’s the only one to represent this argument, nor because I have it out for him, but because he’s tough and I know he can take it. I thus reproduce parts of an exchange we had on another thread:
BDB: You seem to view any opposition to Muslim immigration as such, and especially for cultural reasons, as akin to Nazis. I’m sorry, but that’s a bad fit. This may make sense if you have a worldview that does not value Western Civilization, or which sees no threat to any culture through demographic change, but without at least one of those assumptions operating, mass Muslim immigration is fairly seen as a threat to Western Civilization. And not a single one of them has to intend harm in order to carry it out.
You don’t see danger — I do. That doesn’t make me Hitler. That makes me a conservative — literally — to conserve. It’s disappointing to have to make that distinction here.
CB: No, you’ve misunderstood me, but I made this point on another thread, so perhaps you didn’t see it. I said that I don’t view opposition to Muslim (or other forms) of immigration as illegitimate or akin to the Nazis:
There are political parties in most of Europe that represent a more cautious or skeptical approach toward accepting refugees, but don’t wallow in the language, tropes, ideology, colors, and mud of traditional European fascism — or Putinism, for that matter. Germans who are uncomfortable with Merkel’s approach have the option, for example, of voting for the CSU, a perfectly respectable Christian conservative party. In France, they can vote for the Républicains — not that France under Hollande has taken in anything like an “inundation” of refugees; in fact, the total accepted in France so far is 14,800, with plans to take in another 24,000. It’s a myth that there are no mainstream parties to which voters may attach themselves if they’re uneasy about immigration.
What I view as akin to the Nazis are the parties and movements that are, in fact, explicitly Nazis (in that they say, “We are Nazis”) or very much akin to Nazis, in that they skirt laws or taboos against the formation of explicit Nazi movements by appealing to Nazi language, tropes, and ideology — e.g., Golden Dawn in Greece:
(“The charm of the swastika, the splendor of red and black flag is alive today … our National Socialist task scream full of passion, faith in the future and our visions: HAIL HITLER!”) — Golden Dawn Issue 13.
(“Against the Jewish Life Perception whereby the Ioudaiochristinismos entered the history … Within the National Socialist renaissance dominance holds true religion of Europe paganism as an authentic expression of the religiosity of the Aryan man.”) –Golden Dawn Issue 59, p. 13-14
So I don’t think I’m straying into the territory of paranoia to suggest that Golden Dawn are akin to Nazis.
Some time ago, there were a spate of books written by European leftists like Nick Cohen — you may remember him; he wrote “What’s Left,” as well as by that great windbag BHL. They noted and deplored the European left’s willingness to ignore or justify Islamism in the name of multiculturalism. I see a similar tendency now on the right to ignore or justify the recrudescence of European fascism in the name of fighting Islamism. It’s a grave mistake.
BDB: And a reaction to the first. Given a dominant political position that imports a culture-wrecking crew, do you really see other alternatives? People who do not wish to be shoved off are being forced to lose or get offensive. Nobody chooses to lose.
Well, where do I start. While I don’t see “opposition to Muslim immigration as such, and especially for cultural reasons, as akin to Nazis,” I do see those who suggest that “there’s no alternative to the Nazis” as, very literally, akin to Nazis. That’s inarguable, no? If you’re offended at being tarred with the Nazi brush, I suggest it would be unwise to argue that Nazis are a natural reaction to anything, no less the only alternative in a sea of alternatives.
Let me quickly establish two important points. First, that the parties and movements we’re discussing are indeed Nazi parties. They are not misunderstood Jeffersonian Democrats with a curious but incidental taste for cuffbands, chevrons, belt buckles, commemorative badges, regimental standards, trumpet banners, field caps, service medals, shoulder flashes, permits, passes, boots, leather, chains, Iron Crosses, swastikas, and the Horst Wessel song. Their penchant for nattering on about Jewish Conspiracies and Blut und Boden is not a meaningless historic coincidence.
Here again is Golden Dawn:
Still not convinced?
No? Perhaps this will persuade you: When Nazi slogans were painted on Nikaia cemetery in Piraeus, Greece’s largest Jewish burial ground, they left behind their calling card: Hrisi Avgi — Golden Dawn. In May 2012, they ran under the slogan, “So we can rid this land of filth.” Party Leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos placed an adorable marble eagle on his desk. Here’s Golden Dawn MP Eleni Zaroulia during her inauguration, wearing the Iron Cross. Oh, and what have we here? Panagiotis Iliopoulos, another Golden Dawn MP, displaying his tattoo: Seig Heil! Then there’s Artemis Matthaiopoulos, another Golden Dawn MP and the frontman of the tastefully-named band “Pogrom,” which churns out hits such as “Auschwitz” with lyrics such as “[redacted] Anne Frank” and “Juden raus.“
Beginning to believe me yet? Well, let’s continue. Spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris quoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a speech to parliament on 23 October 2012. Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, denied the existence of gas chambers and ovens at Nazi extermination camps:
“There were no ovens — it’s a lie. I believe it’s a lie. There were no gas chambers either,” Michaloliakos said in an interview with Greece’s private Mega television, broadcast on Sunday.
Then Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris said it outright, in the Greek Parliament: He’s a Holocaust denier.
It’s not just the rhetoric, either: It’s the action:
Late on Thursday, about 50, wielding blunt objects, violently confronted Communist party members in the Greek capital while they were passing out flyers … Nine leftists were hospitalized after sustaining severe wounds.
“The way in which they acted and the weapons employed … are evidence of the murderous nature of the attack. Among the Golden Dawners, some of whom had covered their faces or wore helmets or [party] shirts, were their leaders, well-known fascists and thugs.”
In April 2014, Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros described Hitler as a “great personality, like Stalin,” and denounced homosexuality as a “sickness.” He described immigrant Muslims to Greece as, “Jihadists; fanatic Muslims” and claimed that he supported the concept of a one-race nation, stating, “if you are talking about nation, it is one race.”
Look: If looks like a Nazi, swims like a Nazi, and quacks like a Nazi, it’s not a duck.
They’re now the third-largest party in the Greek Parliament, by the way.
Now, suppose you’re a normal Greek, not a Nazi, and you’d like to vote for a party that takes a tough line on immigration. Well, you could vote for ANEL, the Independent Greeks — they’re not particularly attractive; a bit of that old anti-Jew stench off hangs off of them, too — but at least they’re not outright Nazis. They have a strong anti-immigration agenda; they want a 2.5% quota for non-Greeks residing in the country, the mass expulsion of illegal immigrants, and a hierarchy of “preferred” immigration by country of origin, heavily biased towards western and Latin American countries. They’re a little crazy and little conspiracy-prone, but at least they’re not Nazis. Or you could vote for the perfectly sane, center-right New Democracy Party, which proposed during its recent time in office to introduce a strict immigration policy. They recently strengthened this part of their platform. Or perhaps you could vote for the Popular Popular Orthodox Rally, which describes itself as “Hellenocentric,” opposes illegal immigration, and suggests deporting all undocumented immigrants. “I don’t want them to become a majority,” party leader Giorgis Karatzaferis says.
But frankly, if you’re Greek, it doesn’t seem that immigration is anything like the biggest of your concerns, no matter what you think Greeks should think. According to opinion polls — for what they’re worth — immigration barely even ranks in their top concerns. If you’re Greek, your biggest concerns (at least, as of last year) were “International Financial Stability,” (95 percent), followed by “Global Climate Change” (87 percent), followed by Iran’s nuclear program (64 percent). I certainly understand why the first and the third issues are sources of concern. As for the second, I am beginning to doubt that the Greeks are a fully rational people, but then again, Americans too seem much preoccupied by this fear.
So don’t tell me that becoming a Nazi is a perfectly understandable reaction to an ambient political class that won’t take seriously your concerns about the assault on European culture — especially because most Greeks, from what I can tell, don’t share your concerns. They seem to want to do the decent thing toward these boat people, and I find it impossible to blame them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOVx_reOlXQ
This post is too long as it is, but I’ll continue tomorrow by looking at other countries, other parties, and other plans for handling the refugee influx beyond The Nazi Option. I will, I hope, convince you that there are many alternatives to Nazis. Stay Tuned.
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Zafar, I think you’re on stronger ground when you say, look to the experience–but figuring out how to think about this is far more important than you acknowledge. First, you describe fascism as a universal tendency, & give it a banal psycho-pathology which means every war between tribes in world history was fascism or could have been!
Fascism is a specifically modern kind of tyranny. It has something to do with this religious impulse–avoiding uncleanliness or impurity. It has something to do with defense of a tribe. But these are only the vulgar parts that could easily be attributed to other psychological facts. What defines fascism in a way that the people involved knew & which makes sense for politics is the notion that utter commitment or fanatical loyalty to one’s own is the minimum condition for survival & greatness. The tribe is supposed to remind people of who we is as opposed to them. The vagueness betrays a storybook character. There is no experience of the tribe needed for fascism or available to it. But the experience of fanatical commitment is there, available & useful. That turns inequality as fact or claim into perpetual war, because among unequals greatness & survival are the same thing.
Dostoevsky gets the psychology without difficulty in The devils / possessed.
Thank you James.
I think many could have been, at their core.
And an imagined (past, pure) tribal identity is kind of key to fascism, don’t you think?
My feeling: fascism takes on the characteristics of each age – it isn’t intrinsically modern.
Also: it is totally vulgar.
Please do. I opened it, too, because it’s about Schmitt…, rather like the title–we need more Producers jokes!–but have not read it yet. I’m interested in your thoughts on it-
I think it’s disingenuous to talk about fascism when what you mean has nothing to do with any specific political event. If you think that the politics of what people call bigotry or chauvinism–also modern names, but not associated with specific regimes & ideologies–is worth the name fascism, you had better have a good reason.
That fascism is vulgar I would not deny, but there is a difference between silly talk about the tribe or fantasies about greatness, on the one hand, & tyranny & war, on the other. The latter case is horror.
The biggest artistic movement attached to fascism was futurism. The cult of youth and dynamism, the fascination with technology, and the belief in the possibility of a relatively short path to a material utopia all require a fast changing and fast improving world to make sense. I can see the dating of fascism back to the French Revolution; a lot of people do that. I’m not sure I can see anything like it before then.
Zafar seems to think violent bigotry is it. He does not seem to take as seriously the modern stuff about struggle–violent struggle–leading to greatness through total commitment. The suppression of liberal individualism does not make sense without that liberal individualism. I rather think it is important to remember fascism said it would be both destruction & improvement of liberalism–the transformation of the private-public civil society-state opposition specific of–& only of–liberalism into the fascist ‘everything in the state, nothing outside, nothing against it.’
Titus
Bigotry, chauvinism, fascism – all seem to be expressions of the same urge. Perhaps it is a continuum rather than a binary?
You can have Communist substance (nationalization etc.), but not Communist procedure (murder etc.) and be called a Communist. Thus there are many successful Euro-Communist parties, even though murderous communism would not be welcomed. Even the most ostentatious member of Der Linke doesn’t go about implementing the murder of Kulaks.
You can have Fascist substance (Hitler and Mussolini’s reforms), but not Fascist procedure (murder etc.), but then you have to be called a Social Democrat, a Socialist, or some such. Those parties are generally much more successful than the Communists.
The problem with people calling themselves Nazis today is not so much that we distinguish morally between Hitler and Stalin (although we do admittedly do that to far too great a degree; there were Soviet agents and stooges, but no Nazi agents or stooges, in America throughout the Cold War), but that the people who call themselves Nazis today don’t want syndicalism or a richer environmental law, they just want the atrocities.
Was Sparta a fascist state? Why? Why not?
Do you mean that they’re the same sort of thing? How are you defining bigotry here? Specifically, are you using the OED/ Wiki’s definition of opposition to those who disagree intellectually with one, or do you mean an equivalent to racism, sexism, and such?
Was the prophet Ezra a fascist, Zafar?
Are you sure you know what you’re talking about anymore?
Attachment to one’s own & liking things to which one has become habituated cannot be removed from politics without destroying politics. It cannot be allowed, however, without allowing, too, a related dislike of what is unfamiliar & what is not seen to be one’s own.
Calling this bigotry is for the most part a polemical move, & deceptious.
All people need government, but cannot have it together. Governments are inevitably plural. Liking one’s own is going to lead to war with others inevitably.
To know this much & yet to think that people can be lied to or lie to themselves about this does not seem to me serious. Do not we all agree then that the enmity any association will have for others is part of the human things? It’s always needful to discuss what can or should be done in any situation or predicament; there is no way it can go away…
Sparta as fascists. They weren’t. Here’s one way to think about it. They had no concept of ideology. “Racism,” “values,” or non-ideological constructs like “state” vs. “society” were alien to them — as Titus has nicely sketched. “Humanity” as a political concept was at the level of saying “1 + 1 = 3.” (Titus will know, Seth Benardete gets into this in his inimitable way, p. 167 of Encounters & Reflections).
A Spartan king (Archidamus) says somewhere, in so many words, in Thucydides: “sure, all human beings may be equal by nature” — he even uses the word nature, discovered by philosophers. “But that’s irrelevant! What make a man what he is, is a nomos or law.” Nomos, in their self-understanding, was not remotely conventional. (Straussians typically translate nomos as convention…).
Cut to the chase: when the Spartans put down the Helots or conquered other peoples, they did not for a second think they were doing these peoples any favors. Or improving them.
Liberals think they are improving you — doing you a favor — by stripping you of your freedom. Ultimate extreme thereof: Stalinism and Maoism. Here, quite literally: “we are killing you for you own good.”
Raise humanity to the ultimate political level — where the question of what is a human being is the decisive political question — and you get the killing fields. We’re killing you for you own good.
Mao, Stalin, were humanists. Liberals eat at trendy Mao’s Kitchen. But they revile a Pinochet. He’s inhuman.
I shrink from defining fascism, as Jonah Goldberg did in his book on it. I agree with him that fascism and communism have more in common as heresies of socialism than the supposed left-right polarizers would have us believe. Fascists were called rightists by other leftists because they were insufficiently leftist, like one sort of Nigerian calling another sort “white” for being insufficiently black.
One reason that fascism is so “dead” and reviled while communism gets a pass is that communism won WWII, even in the far east, while the fascists lost. Communism also won the idiot years (1990-2009), leading up to the pre-war period (2010-present). So they got that going for them.
I think my friend Mr. Lux can be blinding at times. I think I see sense in what he says & I’ll try to make sense of his leaps & bounds.
First, Sparta. The way Spartans–as the most political race known to history–think about politics & therefore life is pretty obvious in the way they speak. They do far less lying with abstractions when waging war than we do when we make our grocery lists. (Not to say they’re simply better; at least we do not slaughter untold numbers…) Spartans know necessity & they know their own laws, taught painfully since youth. They know what they want & are untroubled & unburdened. Their experience of justice in Sparta makes them adamant that doing injustice beyond Sparta–doing injustice to strangers–is the only way to go. Strangers are not & cannot be expected to be Spartans. Spartans are not commercial people & have no port. Spartan justice is good for Spartans.
Secondly, the least political world imaginable, modern liberalism. My friend wants to shock you by saying, the worst criminals are the most humanistic people imaginable, even in nightmares. I think we all have an experience of someone saying, in so many words, I know better than you what’s good for you, so do what I tell you. Compulsion justified by knowledge or science is not foreign to us, is it?
Why should humanism descend into insanity?–For humanists, acting to secure the human good is unencumbered by sacred limits, even theoretically!
My working hallmark of fascism doesn’t fit well with merely Nazi partisans. I loosely understand a key symptom of fascism as a state closer to the children than the parents. Imagine fearing denunciation by your little Johnny, the state a cuckolder in every household. How horrible to watch your children lit from within with a bright and shining evil.
Like I said, it’s not effective t characterizing racist mobs. Are #BlackLivesMatter fascists? #DeathToIsrael crowds?
I agree that Zafar’s attempt simply sideswipes a bunch of unpleasant or disfavored things. If every civil war is fought by fascists, then we have a new definition of both. Whom in Syria is not fascist today?
I think you’ve got the key thing with the state taking over the children. That’s what perfect justice always seems to require. It was not news when Plato pointed that out in the Republic. Do you really want to fix every grievance in your country? You’re going to have to tyrannize over everything in your country, even nature. Some people jump at the opportunity. This is so modern because previously tyrannies were to a large extent shockingly patriotic & un-ideologic.
Modernity taught people that science can take over human life & nature. Then it turned out there’s a problem there–if scientific knowledge is the only source of truth, & scientific knowledge admits no humanity or freedom, then what’s left for people? A war on science & nature & previous history.
Nicely put. Love of one’s own, or more primally, attachment to our bodies, means war is inevitable. Eros always implies war (I have this penciled in, p. 162 of Strauss’s City & Man, where Strauss speaks of Thucydides’ “advanced education”…). I rather like how Catherine Zuckert put it; I’ve quoted this elsewhere:
cont’d…
–Catherine Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida, p. 199.
To completely derail this talk, let’s get to eros & the body.
So the problem with eros is its twofold character. In our age, eros is tamed by economists who tell us that people reveal their preferences or desires or eroticism in their buying & consuming & so forth. Now, this is a pathetic view of man, but it is built on fear: Let’s not talk about when eroticism means crimes of passion, as the laws used to say, only too honestly…
But the stupidity of this view, as opposed to its immorality, is that desire is a radical political force as well. Nice people might think desire is satisfied in being satisfied: Want a piece of chocolate, have it, there you go. But desire is in a very important sense satisfied as desire–without any satisfaction. This is most obvious in its tyrannic negative expression. It does not matter if I’m killing myself eating too much, if someone says stop, if someone tries to deny my desire, then it’s time to go crazy!
The piety of economics, if there is such a thing, consists in the hope that human beings are not essentially erotic, that eroticism is merely an accident to do with scarcity or a kind of sex farce–a problem with communications. Give people enough of what they consume & they will stop making trouble! Sure, bright eyes, you can try that… It’s the same as the opinion that only poor people make war.
Now, so far as what it means to have a body or to be embodied, might explain in what sense war is always caused by poverty. The body is vulnerable in a way to which contemplation is blind. Why should people react to danger with insane panics or hysteria? Why should people feel enthusiasm, come to that? Why cannot people be more rationally detached from their own situation & predicament!
Again, we have scientists trying to cure us of these excesses by telling us about the science of the body–that is to say, trying to persuade people to get out of their bodies & look at them as some kind of inanimate thing. These scientists could explain an erection without blushing & without pleasure at the same time…
The result of this should be, if liberalism works out, the welfare-healthcare state, where fear of danger is ubiquitous & cheap. Everyone is always afraid of being insufficiently healthy or longlived, but no one ever suffers harm, because the care is so expertly administered. The world a hospice, & no man sick. The soul would be the sickness then…
But this happy end might not work out, however intensely clever people massage the old Adam. Awareness of our bodies inevitably separates us. The body shows up again in our names, which are next to meaningless, like clothes serving to shield us from others, to conceal us. We desire privacy intensely. We wage wars to secure ourselves against other people who might be like us.
Lol. Okay I’m turning in now, it’s 4:30am here in Montreal. Definitely want to continue this derailed discussion!
Yeah I was a bit blinding and making jumps, but I had the following excerpt swimming around in the back of my mind — indeed, it’s been there a long time. I just now re-read this section from Neumann’s unpublished book — which, if he had lived to get it into a publishable form, would utterly blow away the Zuckerts, the Rob Howses, and others writing about Strauss: The Dilemma of Socratic Politics: Humanity is not a Political Concept.
Fittingly enough for Ricochet, he begins by invoking Paul Rahe who sees that this anachronistic application of fascism to Sparta is very off:
More here.
I won’t dispute Claire’s description of these Nazis as Nazis. I don’t know and I barely care. Perhaps I should look into it more closely — I have heard of Golden Dawn and the rest of the acronyms are foreign to me. They all sound like thoroughly unpleasant men, and I hope they get colon cancer.
The problem I have is that the argument against massive immigration of non-assimilating culture is met with one of two reactions — a process argument about polls and treaties, and a winking, nudging mention of all the Nazis … somewhere. The actual assertion itself, however weak, that this wave of migration is in and of itself a threat to Western Civilization is met with “I don’t think so,” and some anecdotes about a neighborhood in France where nothing is burning.
So the issue I see is that Claire is quite pro-Muslim-immigration, and is disposed to discount arguments against it, and to emphasize bogey-man quality arguments describing opposition to it. Perhaps I am just as guilty in discarding surveys of migrants as to their asylum eligibility, but I respectfully submit that those aren’t worth the paper used to record the answers. And no amount of treaties written in optimistic agreement should require a people to suffer cultural death, after which they are no longer a people, and this is where the nationalism comes in — I’m for it.
Doesn’t make me a Nazi. Makes me a proud American.
Yeah, this is the stupidity most famously associated with Karl Popper, who famously taught the world about falsifiability & related scientific gibberish. This was the man who blamed Hegel & Plato for the evils of ideology, which is supremely vulgar. But he did not say, Moses equals Stalin. Ezra equals Stalin. Why not? Why did not he say the Athenian polity that executed Socrates is the USSR or Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy?
Let’s get back to this when your tomorrow meets my today. Thanks for the book-
I agree that the issue has to be met at a far more serious level. I think Miss Berlinski is aware of the old adage, leadership is mostly temporizing. People want to obey long-standing rules & leave processes to move in their own ways. Things are better now, worse now, but they go along for the most part.
But you’re saying, no, we have to make an issue of this: Let’s have a crisis! It is not enough for you to say, I am not making up the crisis, it is really happening! Something is happening, but there is no people or electorate or large group of protesters in Europe who agrees that what is happening is a crisis or that the crisis is engulfing that country’s politics, much less Western Civilization!
Therefore, the fight politically is between those who want things to go on without a crisis & the others. The former say: Let’s not make a crisis of this, let’s deal with it in the usual way–try to make things work out, lie about what’s going on–is there any government anywhere which tells no significant lies?–& see how things change in the future… The latter say: Let’s make a crisis of this now, while solutions are still pretty handy–let’s not wait until later, when things will have arrived in hell or the vicinity thereof.
Almost inevitably it’s a shaky grasp at best. Perhaps you can help me?
What I am saying is that there are political expressions of fascism (like the Nazis) but these are grounded in a cultural fascism – in which I would include things like bigotry or racism. You could not have the first without the second (though you may have the second without an expression of the first).
A fascist system of government isn’t initially imposed on a completely unwilling population by a political party. A critical mass of them like it enough to invite it in and (unwisely) seat it at the head of the table. Why? Because it appeals to their already held beliefs about themselves and the world. (Like any successful political party does.)
I know this doesn’t align with ‘fascism is completely alien and has nothing to do with [our] culture’, but I don’t believe that. It’s not at all alien – it’s deeply rooted in human cultures – which makes it subversively and intimately threatening. jmho.
(Ezra sounds awful – busting up mixed marriages because mixed does seem pretty fascist.)
The latter.
I actually said that not all civil wars are fought by fascist. But some civil wars – Lebanon, Sri Lanka – certainly were.
I don’t know about Syria – I’m sure that there are some fascists – I’d call IS fascist – but perhaps there are some factions who are not.
Quite right! Sorry to have misquoted you.