Nina-Bytes: Indoctrinating A Dystopian Future
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A Paint By Numbers Path to Fascism
There’s only so much you can “learn” from a movie, particularly one about dancing, but when I was young one of my formative experiences involved watching a flick called “Swing Kids.” In many ways the film was typical Hollywood fare; a group of teens who love swing music and are alienated from the society around them are determined to dance the nights away even though adults don’t understand and regard swing music as a dangerous moral perversion. The catch however, is that the teens are German, and the society they’re alienated from is a country falling step by step into Nazism during the late 1930’s.
Like many movies loosely based on historical events, the film took a few liberties with the source material, but what stuck out to me is the way it depicted a fascist effort to target young people by simultaneously stamping out forms of expression that threatened Nazi cultural hegemony, and actively educating (and re-educating through coercion) German youth with fascist ideology, sometimes against the will of wiser adults around them. Unlike many films about Hitler’s “Third Reich,” Swing Kids didn’t pretend fascism was something that “just happened” but instead actively explored the idea that racialized hatred, extreme nationalism, and fascist ideas were something you had to indoctrinate people into, and that the Nazis knew it would work better if they got to their targets while they were young.
Of course, while it was just a movie, it instilled in me a desire to study the question of “how fascism could happen”- something I have continued to spend a significant portion of my life examining. Astonishingly, when I later found myself studying the rise of Nazism in Germany, I discovered that this silly movie had in fact gotten that bit right; the Nazis succeeded in part by targeting German youth and teaching them to be the kind of monsters that could support Nazism without question and would even turn on their own parents.
I bring this up because I’m concerned that many adults in the Pig Empire haven’t really been watching what fascists (of all stripes) have been doing to our education system, and the young people we’re sending off to be shaped by it. For more about the reactionary war on not just higher education, but history itself, let’s look at this August 18th, 2024 article by
The Right’s Push to Whitewash History Is a Precursor to Fascism
“Beneath this sweeping repression aimed at silencing dissent, free speech and critical inquiry lies a series of right-wing policies that threaten to undermine education’s role as a democratic public sphere and its commitment to fostering critical thinking. In this environment, we can expect a sustained assault on critical pedagogy, historical understanding, informed judgment, faculty job security, critical literacy, civic awareness, and any effort to connect learning with civic engagement and democratic values.
For instance, far right legislators in states like Florida, Tennessee and Idaho are banning books and prohibiting the teaching of concepts related to race, LGBTQ+ issues and social justice. Public and higher education institutions are being defunded, particularly if they address diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many public school libraries are being stripped of resources, with some being transformed into detention centers. Students are bankrupting their future because of high tuition costs and staggering student debt.“
I think part of what makes it so difficult for many people to recognize the alarming authoritarian transformation occurring in our larger education system, not just in America, but across the entire Pig Empire, is that the assault on history, humanities, and critical thinking itself is taking a variety of forms, and being conducted by a variety of actors in both the public and private sector. When Techbro authoritarians advocate for the elimination of humanities departments at all universities, fascist Republican politicians work to ban the teaching of accurate history about America’s dark past, or religious fundamentalists force biblical instruction into everyday school curriculums, our media and influential observers tend to treat all of this as separate phenomena.
If you take a step back however and ask yourself why the forces of reaction are uniting to silence educators, erase the past, and prevent young people from learning about important, mind-expanding social issues like colonialism, slavery, critical race theory, sexism, gender identities, genocide, and what fascism looks like, it becomes very clear that we’re looking at a coordinated attempt to control not just what the adults of tomorrow think, but how they think about it. There is of course a reason for that, and that reason is indoctrination; if you can control what the next generation of people think about, and even more importantly how they think about it, you can also to a great degree control how they feel, and how they act in society at large. As author George Orwell observed in the novel 1984, “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” While Orwell meant this observation to be a warning, it is increasingly clear that the powerful forces of reaction in our society have taken it to heart as a “how-to” manual for installing a fascist order.
Furthermore, as our society exceeds the limits of extractivism and its ability to hide the glaring contradictions of capitalism behind the façade of faux liberal democracies, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the pursuit of indoctrination is being embraced as a necessary condition by leaders, institutions, and centers of power all across the (very narrow) spectrum of acceptable political thought in the capitalist Pig Empire. While the quote I featured here naturally focuses on the fascist American right’s attempt to erase history and thereby legitimize white supremacy, extreme nationalism, and the demonization of LGBTQ identities, it’s important to understand that this transmutation of educational institutions into a functional arm of a reactionary police state is by no means restricted to the Republican Party and its adherents. The othering of American students and educators speaking out about and opposing extractivism, imperialism, and an unfolding US-backed genocide by Israel in Gaza, as criminals, terrorists, and “violent antisemites” is widely supported by so-called “liberal” administrators and lawmakers in the “brave new world” of our modern Pig Empire, for example. Teaching and enforcing fascism via coercion remains the same, serves the same purpose, and produces the same results no matter who is doing it, or what justifications they offer for doing so.
The uncomfortable truth here is that as our society becomes increasingly authoritarian across the political spectrum, as dictated by capital, this repression, indoctrination and assault on critical thinking is both a logical outcome of that authoritarianism, and a perquisite condition of conducting capitalist extraction in a world where humanity is out of planet, and mass extinctions are imminent. After all, if you’re going to kill billions of people as neocolonial capitalism boils the planet like soup for the benefit of ruling class billionaires, you can’t rightly teach the next generation of leaders and drones that this is morally unacceptable and must be fought against. How do you expect folks to make the trains run on time while that slaughter continues if you don’t teach them to be fascists while they’re young?
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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