How It Happens Here

 

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Sleepwalking Into an Amerikan Nightmare

I’m not going to lie to you, the situation is bad and rapidly deteriorating. If you aren’t some kind of mouth-breathing fascist or open nihilist, nothing I’m about to tell you is going to sound like good news. It isn’t. When I write about the fact that mainstream American society, and in particular its media, bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for the rise of violent, overt fascism in American politics, the recent mainstream media coverage of the Republican National Convention is a very good example of what I mean.

Right now mainstream media outlets and Very Serious People(tm) all over the anglosphere are covering what is literally the biggest nazi rally since the production of Triumph of the Will like they’re reporting on the fucking Met Gala, and what we’re really here for is the “ownz.” Simultaneously, the entire goddamned crowd full of cracker American nazis, populated by the kind of professional class pig fascists who can afford to attend the Republican National Convention, are waving matching, professionally designed and mass produced signs in GOP/Trump campaign colors that say “Mass Deportation Now!” And yet somehow this rates less coverage and commentary in our media than the fact that Downmarket Mussolini fell asleep during his nazi failson’s speech.

Meanwhile the very same professional media and political classes that are too squeamish to even utter the word fascism to describe the obvious fascism we’re watching, are clutching their pearls and trying to tell me that some 20 year-old loser reactionary taking a shot at America’s Fuhrer-To-Be means people who are correctly identifying Trump and his movement as fascist need to “turn down the temperature” and “moderate our rhetoric.” I feel like I’ve been transported to some kind of nightmare realm where cracking a joke about someone taking a shot at Adolf Hitler is completely unacceptable, but open calls for ethnic cleansing in America are unremarkable forms of protected political expression. The problem however, is that I’m wide awake and the nightmare is real.

If you somehow still think I’m engaging in hyperbole, I’ve got a bloody newsflash for you. Not only are mass deportations part of what we as a society legally define as genocide on their own, but millions of people currently living in America aren’t just going to surrender their lives and quietly disappear. “Mass Deportation Now” means “organized political violence” and it’s accomplished by the application of real-as-fuck deadly force; it’s only a matter of time before some clever fucking nazi points out that bullets are cheaper than boats. At this point the GOP is fully, totally, and completely a literal fascist party and your goddamn “sensible adult in the room” instincts to criticize both-sides and punch left in political discourse are actively HELPING the new American Nazi Party to install a violent, genocidal, overtly-fascist political and social order as we speak.

Furthermore, I don’t want to hear any bullshit about the Democratic Party being the instrument of our salvation, because I haven’t been in a fucking coma for the past decade. I literally just watched a bunch of “Very Serious” and powerful liberals respond to an incompetent assassination attempt that can only be classified as fascist on fascist violence, by trotting in front of microphones one at a time to say they were very happy American Hitler is okay and they were praying for his family; all while arguing that what we need now is civility and to seek “unity” in America, with the very same goddamn fascists waving “Mass Deportation Now” signs on my TV screen. Trump has been actively transforming the GOP from a crypto-fascist money cult into a violent, overtly fascist movement before our very eyes, and yet I can only think of literally only one fucking time US President Joe Biden said the words “semi-fascist,” only to then spent three days hiding in his basement because the fascist-aligned right wing media actively supporting a real-as fuck-fascist and his openly fascist political party, howled up a goddamn storm about how dare anyone call them and their cracker fascist voters, fascists.

Do you want to know how Nazism and the Third Reich happened in Germany? It was rather a lot like this. A bunch of “Very Serious” and “Very Important” so-called centrists pretending everything is normal, punching left, while bowing and scraping to appease literal fucking nazis because “loud noises” and “what if the fascists get angry” and “both sides.” Whether it’s because these people are cowards or whether it’s because they agree more with the fascists than they agree with you is completely fucking irrelevant. The reality is that mainstream America, its media, its political class, and its business sector are either frog-marching or sleepwalking you into a nazi nightmare that will end in mass fucking killings, because the whole cursed capitalist Pig Empire order is fundamentally built to appease fascists and smash the underclasses – the traditional wellspring of antifascism – in the process.

These arrogant, myopic muppets don’t have a plan; they are not the wise ones here, and when they fucking lose to these nazis our chattering classes are going to go back to their wine cellars, pour themselves a big ole drink and say “well we tried our best; the rabble are to blame” while you and yours are getting straight up fucking enslaved and murdered. The Very Serious People(tm) in American society are never going to save you; in fact they’re not even prepared to tell you what fucking time it is. As such, I strongly suggest you stop listening to them and start committing yourself to antifascist action, because that really might be the difference between surviving this nightmare, or digging your own shallow grave while pundits cry about the death of bipartisan unity and blame you for your own demise.

I did warn you that the situation is dire, but the plain truth here is that pretend is not a strategy and you can’t make-believe your way out of a fascist takeover. Nobody on your TV screen is going to come out and tell you that the nazis are winning and they’re about to start stacking up bodies, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Stop waiting for the “adults in the room” to confirm what you already know, and start planning accordingly.

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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