Living in Interesting Times

 

Fascist headquarters in Rome: Hope and Change

How you would have reacted had you been a German in the 1930s? As Hitler rose to power? Would you have been one of the good guys? Even at personal risk?

No need to wonder. We are in a comparable time. Have you even noticed? Will you be proud of your role when, one day, your grandchildren ask?

We have a much larger Holocaust, of the unborn. Seventy million a year and counting.

We have the moral relativism that backstopped the Nazis. As with the Nazis, we have decided that morality is purely cultural and subject to choice. All we think about now is power and the triumph of the will. If I say I’m a woman, I am a woman. You must submit.

We have learned to see one another as ethnicities, rather than fellow humans. As “whites,” or “indigenous,” or “people of colour,” or even as the “gay community.” We have embraced the concept of corporate ethnic guilt, of blood libel. Moreover, if morality is purely a matter of cultural convention, all other ethnicities are immoral. 

We have established the same close collusion between government and large corporations that defined Nazism as an economic system. Big businesses are increasingly protected from competition by regulation, their profits guaranteed. In return, they enforce government policies. They have become, in effect, an arm of government.

We have seen totalitarian measures and the suspension of liberties: in the Covid and vaccine crisis; in the draconian response to the trucker protest in Canada; in the crackdown on “hate speech” and “misinformation” online. Governments keep pushing this envelope.

We have seen the police and courts subverted to political ends, as enabled the rise of Hitler in the Weimar Republic. We see eager prosecution and severe penalties for those on one side of the political aisle, while overlooking or barely punishing offenses on the other side.

And we have seen the Reichstag fire, in the reaction to the January 6 riot. Trudeau tried it in Canada as well, claiming the Freedom Convoy was subversive and the product of “foreign influence.” 

We have also seen the antisemitism, expanding rapidly, increasing in intensity, since October 7th. Now it is even okay again to kill Jews. Hamas did, and everyone on the left supports Hamas. The Jews are always the canaries in the mine. They are the first targets when morality breaks down.

All that is yet missing is the Fuhrer principle, the impulse to hand dictatorial power to a supposed “genius,” bypassing conventions and established systems.

Those on the left are actually accusing Trump and Musk of this. They are calling them Fascists or Nazis. 

Musk’s concentration of powers of all kinds has to be worrying, on Lord Acton’s principle that all power corrupts. And Trump is not good on keeping to social conventions.

But there is a critical element of Nazi leadership that they lack. The Fascist dictator is a narcissist, not a real genius. He only plays one in his own mind, and seeks to impose that illusion on others. This is why he seeks power. You expect him therefore to emerge from nowhere, without significant prior accomplishments. Like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Jacinta Ardern, or Justin Trudeau. Like Muammar Ghaddafi, or Stalin, or Saddam, or Putin.

Trump and Musk are, instead, actual known geniuses. They had achieved distinction before entering politics. 

It takes strong leaders, after all, to combat Nazism: a Churchill, a DeGaulle, a Tito.

And so the course for good men is clear.

What will you tell your grandchildren? Assuming they have not been aborted?