Auf Wiedersehen, Mein Herr Trump

 

I was watching videos of Liza Minelli singing the title song from Cabaret; Christopher Isherwood had come up in a work connection. Then it occurred to me to also recap “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

We are, after all, living through a similar time. The analogies with the Weimar Republic are overwhelming.

First a period of libertinage; “there is no right and wrong.” Then some organized group emerging, and asserting power for the sake of power.

My sister observes, “beautiful, if you’re not Jewish.”

The two songs are not just ominous for Jews. Most of the people the Nazis outright murdered were not Jewish; and this does not include the tally from the war, not just of combatants but of civilians. Millions died in places like Leningrad or Silesia of starvation. Millions were seized as slave labour. And, had the Nazis won that war, uncounted millions more would have died. The Germans themselves suffered as much as anyone; those young people we hear singing might all be dead within ten years.

But that’s what makes the songs so powerful: because we know how it all turned out. We know where Elsie and Sally’s attitude to life is going to lead, and we know where the young Nazis’ dream led. True beauty is not pretty or pleasant. It must include the sublime. High art must always have an element of sheer terror.

Compare Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” The reference is to the bands the Nazis had playing as they herded people into the gas chambers.

What makes the cherry blossoms so beautiful is knowing that in a week they will all have rotted.

But I digress. The poignancy is especially powerful now because we are now seeing the Nazis rise; in America, a far more consequential nation than Germany in 1933. And not only in America, either.

The parallels are astounding, and everyone is sleepwalking through it all.

No, it is not that Trump is Hitler. He is more Churchillian, conservative, gruff, passionately hated by many for his bombast, with many public vices. Hitler, by contrast, was a radical, an obscure figure, the opposite of a conservative, and had no visible vices. Incorruptible, vegetarian, apparently celibate. He was not hated so much as not taken seriously. Who could be seriously frightened by a little Austrian tramp with a moustache like Charlie Chaplin?

Biden is not Hitler either: he is a Hindenberg, or a Petain, a doddering old figurehead behind whose reassuring familiarity the consequential business of conquering and controlling the government apparatus can be done without interference.

Not, I suspect, by Kamala Harris. She not as Hitler either. She is too corrupt to be dangerous. She is perhaps a Goering or a von Papen, someone prepared to hire out her reputation to Hitler’s cause, for some emolument or chance for graft. Biden can be handled, and she can be bought.

By whom? 

The Hitler will emerge from relative obscurity; he usually does. As Hitler did. Probably someone no one saw coming, some faceless bureaucrat with no particular record like Putin, or some lower-ranking officer like Gaddhafi. Someone obscure enough that no one thought to defend against them. He or she is probably already in position and pulling strings. Someone engineered the nomination for Biden. Something has been going on behind the scenes in the FBI. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.

Antifa and BLM are, of course, the military wing, the stormtroopers, sowing the discord in the streets. Germans in 1933 figured that the way to stop the chaos was to vote for their political masters. Many Americans in 2020 seem to be making the same calculation, and backing the Democrats to stop the rioting. The instincts of the average man seem always to run to appeasement.

We live in interesting times.

Mob Justice for Jacob

My sister sends me a video pointing out that Jacob Blake, the man shot in the back seven times by police in Kenosha, was a serial rapist being arrested in the middle of a crime. Who was resisting arrest and seemed to be lunging for a weapon. 

It is indeed weird how so many―the mobs―seem to ignore the facts of case after case in order to scapegoat police. And will not tolerate due process if it does not instantly deliver the verdict they want. These are eerily like the lynch mobs that used to terrorize and murder blacks; except now they want to string up police.

To be fair, some folks have pointed out that if you look at the videos, most of the rioters seem to be white. You cannot lay this at the doorstep of “black people.”

Then is it because we resist accepting that some people, like Jacob Blake, simply choose to do bad things?

No, because then we would not blame the police either.

Then is it a case of black privilege?

No, because nobody gives a sweet d**n about Blake's victim, who is also black.

I think it is because the people rioting do not see blacks as human, as moral agents, responsible for their actions. They cannot be blamed for their choices, and so do not deserve punishment. They are only following instinct. They are animals.

The outrage at the police looks a lot like the outrage over the killing of Harambe at the Cincinnatti Zoo. The outrage over the American dentist who shot an African lion who had been given a name. The outrage if a crew of game wardens killed an animal in trying to sedate it.

I notice with a wince that commentators invariably note when speaking of any prominent black figure that they are “smart” or “really smart.” They never seem to make the comment about a prominent white person—that would be patronizing. It sounds like Fredo Corleone talking about himself. The tacit assumption is that a smart African is newsworthy, like a man biting a dog; or it is a knowing wink to the audience.

This is actually the form that anti-black discrimination has always taken: the idea that blacks are not moral agents capable of thinking for themselves. This is how slavery was justified. This is now how the welfare culture is justified, and a cycle of dependency that keeps black people on the bottom while one immigrant group after another rises past them.

Maybe the average black is not as smart as the average non-black; IQ results suggest this is so. This of course means nothing in the case of individuals. And this does not matter to their human dignity. They have the right to run their own lives, and not to be treated like children or wards of the state. You do not need to be smart to know right from wrong. And you actually do not need to be smart to succeed. You need to be responsible; you need to see yourself as a moral agent, and act accordingly.

The Gathering Storm

Self-actualization: Mussolini's face on the Fascist Party headquarters, surrounded by the word "Si"--"Yes." 

Is there anything more pernicious, more sinister, than the popular interpretation of Godwin’s Law: that if you compare anyone or anything else to Hitler or the Nazis, you have lost the argument? It is the perfect way to usher in the next Hitler; it almost looks calculated. 

The idea that Hitler and Nazism was a unique phenomenon is obviously wrong. We have seen the same script acted again and again: Stalin and the Holomodor, Mao and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and the Killing Fields, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Armenian genocide under the Young Turks.

Rather than being a one-off, that we managed with brave determination to purge from the Earth, the philosophy we call Nazism has actually been steadily gaining adherents and influence over the years, without significant interruptions. Marcuse was big in the 1960s; same philosophy. Nazism is the doctrine we now usually call “postmodernism.” You can trace it back through “modernism” to Darwin and Nietzsche. I am only too familiar with it from graduate school. Even then, in the 1970s, it was pervasive. I remember checking myself at one point and thinking—“wait a minute. Isn’t that just what Mussolini said?” And then brushing off the thought. Couldn’t be. Fascism was something uniquely horrible, right?

It is at base simply the doctrine that there is no truth, no right or wrong, and all that matters is the imposition of one’s will. Nazism and Fascism never had any more to them than that. And, Nietzsche advised us, this is what is left when you turn away from God.

This necessarily proceeds to mass murder: you will want to murder anyone you think might be able to murder you.

We see the stormtroopers in the streets of the USA today, calling themselves “Antifa” or “Black Lives Matter.” We see how easily they bend the majority to their will, just as the brownshirts and blackshirts did. The majority seems to be on their side.

How will it end? If you accept the premise that a foetus is a human being, we already have a Holocaust underway, far worse than Hitler’s. Nazism did immense havoc when it took government in a second-tier power, Germany. It is already in power in China. What will happen if it takes power in the USA?

Will it be in power if Biden is voted in? We do not know who is behind him; might it be a situation like that of the aged Hindenberg, or Petain--a reassuringly familiar old face, a trembling hand easy to guide? Why did the Democratic Party establishment so suddenly and solidly unite behind him, when other candidates still looked viable?

It is Trump, of course, that everyone is casting as Hitler. They did the same with Churchill.

Can it be stopped? Perhaps only by God. Perhaps that is what the pandemic is for. It is, at least, exposing what has been hiding in dark corners.

A Time for Choosing

Black is the new brown: Stormtroopers enforcing early cancel culture.

Have you ever wondered how you would have behaved had you lived in Weimar Germany, as the Nazis rose to power? Would you have been one of the true believers, falling into line? Or would you have fought at any cost for human decency?

No need to wonder. You are there.

The parallels between Weimar Germany in its death throes and the USA today are obvious. The only difference is the name the Nazis use. Now they call themselves, disingenuously enough, “Antifa” or “Black Lives Matter.”

But the critical elements are the same:

1. The Nazis/Antifa believe that power is the only issue and the only goal. There is no truth but power; there is no morality but power. There are no common values to appeal to. This has long been explicit in postmodernism, and was bound to lead here. Hitler made it plain in Mein Kampf: the objective of the state or the movement or the individual is to get whatever advantage it can for itself. One large arm of Antifa enshrines it in their name: BAMN, “By Any Means Necessary.”

2. Since everything is about power, it is all only a matter of who gets to be on top. There is no equality; there is no fairness. There is no question of compromise, dialogue, or shared interests. Black lives matter. All lives do not matter. Say so, and you may get shot.

3. The action has moved into the streets; it is now moved, inevitably, to a test of strength and resolve. In this atmosphere of chaos, the general populace will immediately crave order, and will gravitate to whichever faction looks stronger in hopes of getting it. We are seeing this everywhere. This is how you make good Germans. This is the strategy we can expect from most people, allowing the worst to take command. For now, BLM and Antifa look stronger. It may be that a strong man on the right may emerge, instead of Antifa or BLM taking over. It makes no difference: it would be a choice between Hitler and Stalin. In fact, the situation automatically favours whichever side is least principled, and the worst will rise to the top, whichever side it is.

4. As in Weimar Germany, it has become a matter of race and of searching for scapegoats. Hitler fixed on the Jews and the Freemasons, and so forth. BLM and Antifa and their acolytes have fixed on “whites,” Republicans, and so forth. The selection is more or less automatic: if the only value is power, you target whomever you suspect of being powerful or potentially rivals for power for elimination. Similarly dire consequences for the targeted are only too likely.

5. As in Weimar Germany, we see the authorities tacitly favouring one side in the battle in the streets. The bias in favour of power that infects the streets has already infected the elite. In both Weimar Germany and contemporary America, it had its main power base in the universities and in the bureaucracy. Those sophisticated sorts who had read Nietzsche and considered themselves supermen; those sophisticates who have read the French postmodernists and consider themselves much cleverer than the common rabble who believe in morality.

6. In Weimar Germany, the authorities generally looked the other way when Nazis acted illegally. When Hitler attempted a putsch, he got a comfortable prison term with writing materials. We see this today in the grossly preferential treatment of leftists both in the popular culture and in the law courts. Witness the prosecution of General Flynn, how figures on the right are not permitted to speak. This may in part be explained by the influence of the postmodern assumptions on the bureaucratic and academic class that feeds the bureaucracy at all levels.

7. Any authorities who are not themselves Nazis seem paralyzed. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” as Yeats described the 1930s. This is ordinary human denial in the face of evil. We do not want to accept the presence of evil, because we know we are ourselves sometimes guilty. Given an essentially unprincipled new movement, one which has embraced evil. this allows them free rein, as it did at Munich. We watch Mitt Romney march with Black Lives Matter. Everybody, even right-wing commentators, is giving them far too much credit.

And so it goes.

Except that the Nazism of the 1930s infected only one power, and only one of the great powers. Hitler appeared and rose when Germany was intrinsically weak, militarily and economically. Even so, thanks to appeasement, he got shockingly far.

Imagine what the Nazis could do if they arose in the world’s most powerful country, or even in a number of countries simultaneously.

Last time, the primary scapegoats were the Jews, only about 6% of the German population. This time, it is “white males,” 30% of the US population. Not to mention the ongoing holocaust of the unborn—and the certainty that white women will be next. Last time it was Freemasons, only a fraction of the German population, surely. This time it is Republicans, essentially half the population.

The Nazis may have bitten off more than they can chew, leading to their rapid collapse. Let us hope so. Because, if not, the potential for carnage and general destruction is exponentially higher.

Which side are you on?

Wild in the Streets

Napoleon emerges: 13 Vendemiaire; the "whiff of greapeshot"

Good luck, all my fellow superannuated hippies. You know that revolution we were all calling for in the Sixties? Looks as though we might finally get it.

What we are seeing in the US is starting, I think, to look like a revolution in progress.

We are at that inflection point at which nobody seems to be in charge, and events move so quickly that it is like a spinning wheel—the basic image of the “revolution”—and you cannot guess where that wheel will stop. The situation seems to change daily. Now we seem to be in the Jacobin phase, when everyone is rushing to the most extreme position they can think of to try to stay in front of the mob—and to seize control, which seems up for grabs, for themselves. Rioting? Defund the police!

How will it end? Actually, we can guess pretty easily where the wheel will stop. Revolutions almost always end in a more authoritarian government: a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Mao, a Lenin, a Cromwell, an Ayatollah Khomeini. A few revolutions that do not: those with a generally recognized leadership from the beginning, who can impose some order. That is something we conspicuously do not have here: who are the leaders of Black Lives Matter? Do any names come to mind? Who are the leaders of Antifa?

Archbishop Vigano has written a letter to Trump, claiming that the “Deep State” is behind all this, and behind them, the Freemasons. I do not believe in such conspiracy theories. There is nobody in control. It all looks planned for destruction because there is a Devil—evil itself has an independent intelligence, a Logos, and works in transpersonal coordination towards its purposes.

When things devolve into chaos, the common man then craves nothing so much as order. From any quarter. This is a golden opportunity for any prospective dictator.

No, if it comes to that, it isn’t going to be Trump. If this is the revolution, the dictator is almost always someone insignificant in the eyes of the world at this early stage. Nobody knew much about Stalin in 1917; or about Hitler, a mere corporal, in the Great War; or Napoleon, in 1789.

First, the revolution devours all existing leadership. Then it devours its children.

Nothing seems more pathetic than, yesterday, images of a worried-looking Mitt Romney leading a march declaring “Black Lives Matter.” Or police chiefs lying prostrate, or washing the feet of the nearest man with dark skin. They imagine this will save them. Whatever happens now, such people will never again hold positions of leadership. The revolutionaries will want someone uncompromised. And so will the reactionaries.

With any luck, the machinery of civil society that the founders set up, that has withstood everything for perhaps two hundred and fifty years, will weather this tempest too. With any luck, Trump is the man who can hold things together. If he just stands absolutely firm in his rhetoric—only his rhetoric--and things hold together well enough to hold a real election in November, things can still work out. Democracy is designed to inoculate against revolution and mob rule.

But we are suddenly remarkably close to the breaking point.

Who the Devil is Behind the Riots?

NYC Draft Riots, 1863.

The current mad rioting across the US seems to demonstrate the reality of the Devil. It looks as though it is organized; yet it cannot be easily accounted for by any human agency. Therefore, the hypothesis that there is some independent malicious spiritual consciousness interfering in affairs. 

There are reports of mysterious pallets of bricks left in prominent public places for mob use; of masked men with umbrellas smashing windows to encourage looting. There is a mysterious gap in the original video that triggered the protests…

The nominal cause for all the unrest is that apparent murder of George Floyd, captured on video. It is supposedly Black Lives Matter, or the black community more generally, demanding justice.

But justice was already apparently being served. The policeman seen killing Floyd had already been arrested and charged with murder. Moreover, the violent protests that we are now seeing are probably ending more black lives, devastating black neighbourhoods, reinforcing police presumptions that black people are violent and lawless, and suggesting to the public the need for more police and greater police powers. If the black community is doing this as a community, they are working against their own interests.

This is itself a hallmark of Satan’s work; that his followers work to their own destruction. But we also see videos online of blacks loudly protesting the looting and violence. And many if not most of the rioters have white skin.

A more plausible explanation is that the rioting, whatever happened to spark it, is driven by general frustration at the long lockdown, desperation at loss of employment, a feeling that the experts and the government have messed up and behaved callously during the epidemic. Yet if this is the impetus, the rioting and looting are again counterproductive. They are perfectly calculated to cause a new outbreak of the virus, forcing us all back into lockdown for longer. And justifying the government in not trusting the people to make their own decisions.

Some of the news media are apparently blaming it all on “white supremacists.” It might indeed fit their agenda, by discrediting blacks. But this presumes a massive, coordinated false flag operation, involving moving large numbers of people into places where they do not live, and having them all chant and spray-paint only slogans they disagree with—an improbable conspiracy theory, and certainly vastly beyond the capabilities of any existing “white supremacist” organization to pull off all across the country on a day’s notice. At least as any kind of organized group, they number only a couple of thousand at most, and these riots are breaking out in cities all over the country.

Some, including the governor of Minnesota, suggest foreign provocateurs are behind it all. This sounds reasonable to some, no doubt, because of current tensions with China. But as with white supremacists, the numbers of foreign agents and resources likely available seems beyond the realm of possibility. As a general principle, I doubt foreign intelligence services really account for much. By their nature, they amount to a group of bureaucrats operating without supervision. What happens when you put together a large group of bureaucrats and remove any supervision?

Nothing.

If individual agents or cells ever do get up to anything, the secrecy generally means they end up operating at cross-purposes, most often for their own narrow self-interests.

And “provocateurs” can only ever be a partial explanation. People must have a predisposition to be “provoked.”

Some, of course, blame the police for it all—it is all, including the killing of George Floyd, an assertion of police bullying. If they only kept the police away from the protesters, similarly, all would be well. Police themselves have not been helping this perception—at one point, they arrested a black CNN crew member on camera.

Yet policemen and police chiefs across the country quickly condemned the original killing. If some policemen have an attitude problem, it does not seem to be an organized or coordinated thing.

The likeliest explanation seems to be that Antifa are behind this. If Antifa is, as claimed, an anti-fascist organization, this would again be counter-productive. Chaos in the streets is a demand for Fascism. But I think it is clear that Antifa is not now, and has never been, an anti-Fascist organization. Rather, it is a Fascist organization seeking power.

If Antifa is behind the curtain, this too would involve moving people in large numbers into neighbourhoods where they do not live—Antifa’s membership is white and middle class. But they at least seem large enough, wealthy enough, and organized enough to make this possible.

It would not be surprising, either, if Antifa were getting funding from some foreign power.

Perhaps the upshot of these riots needs to be a concerted investigation by the FBI into Antifa.

Conquering White Supremacy: What Whitey Can Do

Fighting racism since 1922

Here is a helpful article by a black writer advising “Five Ways White People Can Fight White Supremacy.”

It makes clear that when those on the left say “white supremacy,” what they mean is the current situation, the stuff in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, for example, in which, nominally, all are equal before the law, regardless of race; and despite that, there are specific laws favouring people whose skin colour is of a darker hue, such as “affirmative action” programmes. This is all “white supremacy.”

In other words, like so many terms on the left, “white supremacy” does not mean white supremacy. It is a euphemism. It means not being racist in favour of blacks. War is peace, freedom is slavery, and equality is supremacy.

The author goes on to say: “Black people cannot cure racism. It is a contagion carried and spread by white people among white people.” So only white people can be racist. What could be more racist than such an assertion? He goes on to point out that white people can be racists even if they have never had a racist thought in their lives. So it is not just that white people can be racist, and black people cannot. It is that being white makes you racist. “Racist,” it seems, now means being white.

The writer also says that, in order not to be racist, you must always treat people differently on the basis of their skin color. He objects to the assumption that “everyone is the same.” Human equality? A racist idea!

“After your uncle has had a few glasses of Wild Turkey at Thanksgiving, or your homeboy has had a few too many shots of ... ummm ... Wild Turkey, and says something that sounds like an excerpt from an “alt-right” speech, you should say something.”

He has a remarkable insight into the true dynamics of a typical “white” family, does he not? What gives him this insight? I’m sure everyone in America of European ancestry sees themselves here.

Or not. Sounds pretty racist, actually. All white people, or at least one person in every white family, drinks Wild Turkey, drinks too much of it, and says racist things when he is drunk? The writer is self-conscious enough to “apologize for the stereotype,” but not really—he is actually apologizing for it being true. It is okay to stereotype “white” people, however outrageously.

He then goes on to insist that one’s culture is a part of one’s race: “What if they understood that African Americans, Mexicans, Muslims and others deserve freedom and equality without having their heritage and culture separated from their humanity?” Here we see why measures like Canada’s recent M-103 resolution are so dangerous. It is now commonly asserted on the left, as here, that culture is genetic.

People now belong to their particular culture, and it is part of their “humanity,” their essential being.

This is the fundamental assertion on which Fascism was based. Not an obvious model of anti-racism.

It also argues strongly against immigration, doesn’t it? People coming from another culture are not going to fit in. Indeed, it seems obviously impractical to expect “whites” to live cheek-by-jowl with these culturally different blacks. Of course they are not going to want to eat in the same restaurants, watch the same movies in the same theatres, or drink from the same water fountains. Segregation forever?

And how dare you, then, protest what Hitler did to the Jews? It was just a part of the Nazi culture, after all. Jews were cultural pollutants. The did not belong.

How dare you object if this or that group refuses to treat outsiders equally, rejects freedom and equality for others? It is a part of their culture!

How dare you object to slavery? It was a part of antebellum Southern culture.

The author then writes, bizarrely:

“There is no need for safety pins or self-congratulatory pats on the back if you are truly “about that life,” because the truth is, there is not a “that life.” It is just a life. Your life. Our lives.”

Does he realize that he is speaking here directly against the “Black Lives Matter” movement? This is the very assertion that they have been regularly shouting down. So obviously they are racist, right?

But no, they cannot be, because they are black. The writer shows no awareness of this contradiction, in any case.

Indeed, he is speaking against what he himself has just said, only a few paragraphs up: that you have to make a distinction at all times among people on the basis of their race and their culture. So which is it? Even if there are always different rules and standards based on your skin colour, who is he talking to? He seems in both cases to be talking to “whites,” and the piece is addressed to them.

He writes, in a moving summation:

“It is remarkable to witness how children don’t care about race, color, religion or nationality when they are young. But at some point, it seeps into their souls and they inherit the generational curse of racism.”

“Every single prejudice and fear we have was acquired from someone else.”

This is the opposite of the truth, and the truth is pretty obvious. As anyone knows who has lived in a foreign country visibly ethnically distinct from their own, children are instinctively racist. They will always be afraid at first, or cry at, the scary-looking foreigner. A little older, and they may run after him in groups and taunt him.

It is the herd instinct. People are herd animals. It is almost self-evident that this should be so, in evolutionary terms. A child is vulnerable, and has good reason to cling to familiar-looking folks.

It is this that has to be educated, or familiarized, out. Educating people out of it is one of the great triumphs of civilization.

But I think this writer is on the other side. Civilization is “white supremacy.”