Thought-Crimes and Appeasement

NinaIllingworth August 25, 2020November 5, 2022 1994 crime bill, 1st amendment rights, against the left, Amerikan Musik, anarchists, Andrew Jackson, anticommunism, antifa, antifascists, Black Lives Matter, CA4, CC3, Charlie Dent, Cold War Pig Empire fascism, conspiracy theory, cult, DoJ, Donald Trump, Downmarket Mussolini, Essays, FA1, fascism, fascists, First They Came, George Orwell, Homeland Security, informal writing, JA5, Joe Biden, Journals, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris is a cop, liberals prefer fascism to sharing, Martin Niemöller, Mass incarceration, MP6, murderpigs, neoliberal police state, neoliberalism, neonazi, Never Trump Republicans, Newspeak, Nina Illingworth, Opinion, panopticon, police state, police violence, Politics, QAnon, reactionaries, rigged election, right wing nutjob, Settle for Biden, ST2, the 2020 presidential election is rigged, The Assassination Of Patrice Lumumba, tough on crime, Trump and Nixon Law and Order campaign, Trump is a Nazi, Trump will do a fascist coup, Trumpism is fascism, Vichy Democrats, Weimar Dems, Weimar Republic, white nationalism, white supremacists

Author’s note: as I mentioned in a recent (and perhaps my last) Facebook journal, the creeping fascist takeover in America is now leading giant “futurist” tech companies and mainstream liberal media to essentially agree with Trump’s explicitly reactionary argument that anarchists and antifascists are terrorists. This means there is a high degree of probability that my informal journals are no longer welcome on Facebook or at least will no longer be welcome soon enough.

In other words, I need a new place to put them and I’ve got so many half-finished projects on the go, I simply don’t have time to create a new blog somewhere right now. For now, that place is going to be here on ninaillingworth.com but I hope to migrate them off site as soon as possible because I don’t like it when my journals crowd out my more formal, academic-style writing.

I am also, as you can imagine, quite vexed by this news so you’re going to have to forgive me if this journal is a little more free-flowing than normal.

Worrying in a Weimar Wasteland

Well dear readers perhaps it’s finally time for us all to break out the Lucky Stripes and funeral rum here in late August, because I am now quite certain our time together is growing short. Today we can truly say that the American death spiral into fascism has reached a point of no return and history says those marked for destruction by the reactionary state rarely have much time for tipping cups. Let us mark this moment for posterity and in solidarity for perhaps the last time. After all, it’s not every day that one wakes up to the definitive realization that many people reading this, and perhaps even the woman writing it will soon be forced into hiding or risk imprisonment, even murder at the hands of fascists, their sympathizers in the general populace and their appeasers in the Weimar liberal establishment.

Ah yes, I did say Weimar didn’t I? I can already hear the history students, educated by men who admire the likes of Niall Ferguson, furiously chitttering their displeasure in the back. “The German government was dominated by Christian conservatives and nationalists” they’ll say; ignoring the fact that Democrats just had a national leadership convention in which they openly surrendered to center-right Christian neoconservatives in the minuscule Never Trump movement. “Weimar Germany was facing unprecedented economic collapse” they’ll say; ignoring both the fact that other countries that did not produce the Nazi state were facing the same hyperinflation crisis and global Depression Germany did, as well as the fact that we too are today facing an unprecedented global economic collapse because of the coronavirus. “The nominal centrists were in power in Weimar Germany, they’re only the opposition in America right now” they’ll say, and well for that argument I have no reply except to state that I doubt actually losing an election to Hitler would have slowed down the Third Reich’s progress towards a fascist totalitarian state.

Of course none of this is to say Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler exactly, but he doesn’t really have to be either; Mussolini or even Andrew Jackson will do when he has ghouls like Stephen Miller helping him navigate the exact course that eventually spawned Nazi Germany.

Unless you’ve been living under rock, you by now aware that the Trump administration, the Republican Party and the far right have all joined together in a massive propaganda campaign to convince America that “antifa” and “anarchists” are in fact violent terrorist groups that are far more dangerous than neonazis, who don’t even exist and are definitely not receiving dog whistle support from the US government. As I have pointed out as far back as 2017 this is a very serious problem for three key reasons:

A) Antifa is not a group at all, but merely short for anti-fascist, while anarchism is simply a left wing political philosophy built around hyper-democratic and decentralized organizational practices. If you’re arguing that being antifascist and wanting to restore political power to the labor class is terrorism, you’re saying pretty much anyone who opposes the Trump agenda is a terrorist and that’s effectively thought-crime.

B) America is a country that has collectively decided and even codified into law that there is no violation of human rights or civil liberties too extreme to fight terrorists and terrorism. You might be tempted to think the War on Terror police-state Panopticon only applies to Islamic extremists, but fear of “the enemy within” after 9/11 has granted wholly Trump-loyal institutions like the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security extraordinary powers to fight “terrorists” – you might have noticed Trump using some specious legal arguments to take advantage of those powers recently to kidnap protesters off the street using paramilitary thugs in unmarked uniforms and vans.

C) Virtually anywhere in America you find the common people resisting Trump’s fascist agenda through protests and street action right now, you will find that three particular groups the administration is targeting are clearly over-represented: anti-fascists, anarchists and the Black Lives Matter movement, which in the unhinged reactionary telling of events is a Soros-backed coup working with the anarchists and “Antifa” to topple God-Emperor Trump. In other words, the entire American right is explicitly arguing that exercising your First Amendment right to protest the Trump administration is explicitly anti-American terrorism.

Of course perhaps at this late stage of the fascist takeover, as the Klepto Kaiser masses his brownshirts and we steam towards a clearly rigged election, this is all to be expected. As even mainstream liberal historian Robert Paxton has noted, fascism ultimately results in a dictatorship against the left, amidst popular enthusiasm – because only the left, can stop the fascist creep once it has begun.

So it is that Trump who is a fascist, his party which is controlled by fascists and his fascist followers are enacting a propaganda campaign to justify using the powers of the American state against their least photogenic and most effective enemies. This is terrifying to be sure, but it if you’ve been reading my writing about America’s descent into overt fascism these past four years, you’ll realize that this isn’t much of a change in the (objectively terrifying) status-quo in the US today.

Pick Your Poison

So why am I toasting my readers with funeral rum and talking about the Weimar Republic? Well let’s return to Paxton’s analysis and in particular the phrase “popular enthusiasm.” It is of course disastrous for antifascists, anarchists and regular people protesting against racialized police violence to be labeled by the president, and his security forces as “terrorists” but the reactionary right does not as of yet represent a majority of our society. As such if you didn’t know better, you could be forgiven for hoping the vaunted liberal-centrist fetish for process and norms would lead them to oppose Downmarket Mussolini’s direct attack on everyday people opposing his fascist agenda. Naturally because we live in hellworld and the term “Vichy Democrats” is more than just a clever online insult, you would be wrong.

Yes, that’s right my friends, after being successfully trolled by fascists in the Trump campaign and the right wing media, mainstream liberal or recently-converted leaders and media figures lead primarily by the Democratic Party, Joe Biden and his campaign have repeatedly worked to low-key disavow anarchists, “Antifa” and “a small minority” of violent protesters who engage in property destruction or arson, while essentially refusing to aggressively dispute Trump’s extremely dangerous argument that the only folks fighting fascists in the street are terrorists or at least dangerous criminals. That last little bit of sophistry is clearly a nod to the Biden campaign’s quixotic attempts to pretend they support the Black Lives Matter movement while also denouncing their demand to “defund the police” – a maneuver which in and of itself requires a truly absurd level of mental gymnastics now that Biden has chosen racialized mass incarceration poster girl and former self-proclaimed “Top Cop” Kamala Harris as his running mate. Just this morning, former Republican-Governor-turned-Biden-supporter Charlie Dent actually said “I agree with you. I am absolutely opposed to ANTIFA and all that they represent and these radicals who are torching our cities and frankly the Democrats are vulnerable on public safety right now because many of their elected leaders at a local level have an appalling indifference towards public safety. We agree on that, Sean” on live television.

Of course it’s not entirely clear why Biden, his newfound “moderate Republican” allies and the liberal media would engage in such dangerous behavior when they are fully aware that Trump is a fascist, he’s rigging the upcoming Presidential election and there is a very real possibility Democrats will need people marching in the the streets to get Trump out of the White House. Does Biden sincerely believe that the US army will operate on US soil to remove a President who just lost the election, or that a mob of Wall Street bankers and Bush-era conservative spin-doctors are going to battle their way through Homeland Security and Q Anon militias to pry Trump from his secure bunker? The truth is that he likely doesn’t give a damn because his rich donors hate protesting anarchists who break windows and want healthcare, more than they hate the fascists – let’s all “Settle for Biden” indeed.

And so it is that activists primarily on the left have now become just one more sacrifice to the Democratic Party’s new Never Trump Republican masters, in an effort to prove they too are “tough on crime” and thereby sway the loyalties of suburban “moderate” Republican voters who all gleefully voted for a fascist last time. As so it is also that we all stride one more step closer to the precise circumstances that have lead to a fascist dictatorship and millions of innocent dead in the not-so-distant annals of human history. “It can never happen here” they said and yet it is happening here, precisely because the only thing America learned from World War II is that using fascists to fight communists is an acceptable alternative to being forced to share the wealth of the ruling classes with common people.

History Says This Ends Badly

There is a famous poetic confessional about the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, written by a German Lutheran pastor named Martin Niemöller. Although the “poem” began as an oft repeated speaking device used throughout Niemöller’s post-war life, it has come to be known to us merely by its haunting first refrain “First They Came (for).” The phrasing itself has a fascinating and darkly comic history particularly when used by folks who were not Martin Niemöller, because it has been widely appropriated as a cry for personal justice by all manner of activists and pressure groups in Western societies. Some of these groups can rightly claim persecution by reactionary power; but some them, like Congressman Henry Reuss of Wisconsin who read a version of the poem composed by business leader Howard Samuels mentioning “they” coming for “the industrialists,” into the US Congressional record in 1968, most certainly cannot.

The truth however is that Niemöller’s poetic prose wasn’t a cry for justice at all. As the author himself made explicitly clear during his life, the poem was a confessional about the cowardice and indifference of a German establishment order (including of course Niemöller himself) that allowed the Nazi state to persecute and exterminate its enemies one at time, simply because that establishment didn’t care much for the people the fascists were harming either. This has lead to a social paradox that would be deliciously ironic if it wasn’t going to eventually put me in a concentration camp. Namely that all the affluent American liberals quoting Niemöller today believe themselves cast in the role of the Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps in the poem, and yet are actually faithfully fulfilling the part of Niemöller the repentant collaborator himself and a German establishment that sided with the fascists against the undesirables and in doing so, ultimately abetted the Holocaust.

There is perhaps one more lesson about our present situation that can be gleaned from “First They Came…” or at least its effect on our society. During his life and by Niemöller’s own recollection, the author would frequently change up which groups he mentioned in the poem depending on his target audience, but he always began with “first they came for the communists” and he most frequently included lines noting that eventually the Nazis even came for the “Social Democrats” and “Trade Unionists” – groups who would roughly translate to everyday liberals in American life, although certainly not their wealthy leadership. Yet the most famous inscription of the poem we can find today is at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and contains no mention of the word communists, beginning instead with “first they came for the socialists” – a word no one has ever been able to prove Niemöller used while reciting the phrases of his prose at all.

As George Orwell’s classic essay “The Principles of Newspeak” (included, ironically, as an appendix to his famous novel 1984; itself a piece of profoundly anticommunist propaganda) so aptly demonstrates, there is great magic and power in the proper and improper use of words. The designers of the Holocaust Museum in Washington understood this when they chose to erase the word “communists” from Niemöller’s poem in a display in the heart of the Pig Empire and as it engaged in a global war of destruction against the Soviet Union, or anyone left wing enough to believe Belgium had profited long enough from the Black blood spilled in the Congo. Watching Downmarket Mussolini and his fascist allies on the American right skillfully manipulate the similarities and differences between “Antifa” and “anti-fascist” in the public consciousness to justify an authoritarian crackdown on the only people who can stop him before November, demonstrates that the fascists also understand the power of words only all to well.

Of course Joe Biden, the Democratic Party and the elite liberal establishment also understand the power of words, that’s why they’ve been awkwardly fumbling around for weeks to find a way to express solidarity with violent cracker murderpigs putting down (primarily Black) protests on behalf of a fascist president, without alienating every African American voter in the country. It’s not that they don’t understand, it’s that they don’t care and might even want the fascists to destroy the American left for them; better to surrender the most powerful faux-Democracy on earth to the tender mercies of the Klepto Kaiser than have to answer anymore goddamn questions about Medicare for All, right?

Hey, tell me again why it can’t happen here?