I get it, egotistical of me to make a thread about my own (repeated) bannings, but hey, I am something of an egotist.
Fascism is not a distant thing. It did not emerge in America when some people decided to try and take over the Capitol Building because their favorite gameshow host lost an election. It didn’t arrive here on the back of disgraced veteran and military propagandist George Lincoln Rockwell with his swastika covered VW bus full of boys in Hitler Youth outfits which he drove from university to university complaining about how he had been cancelled by the communists in academia. It didn’t arrive along with the German Bund in the Interwar, funded by the Nazi state and owning a white colony in upstate New York that remained redlined until, uh, 2000 or so. It did not arrive with the police, descended from slave catchers and enforces of redlining and Jim Crow, the perpetuation of chattel slavery for a more developed form of capitalism. It didn’t arrive with the original KKK, whose violent terrorist campaigns doomed reconstruction in the name of “States Rights” and healing the divisions between the ruling elites of America and their failsons. It has always been there from the start, always a possibility as part of a nation built on colonizing the other, dominating the weak, slaughtering for the righteous purpose of ruling a continent for the profits of unworthy men who view themselves as gods. After all, our founders raped their slaves and burned the homes of natives for the sake of their own divinely ordained lebensraum. It is no wonder that Hitler based many of his own beliefs on a distorted image he saw of the American west, with the domination of the native and the exclusion of the foreigner save for the purpose of slave labor.
When the nation was defined, when borders and peoples were built out of historical myths and bloody wars of colonial conquest, fascism took hold in the western ethos, one step away from a possibility at every turn. When race became real in its consequences, while “cosmopolitan” “multi-ethnic” nationalities were built, there was a demand for a new myth to unify the “citizen” under Jacobin fraternity. But to unify citizens you must define what they are not, and in this act there is a repeatable process that is born, describing some new group as outside of the proper ethos of national myth and citizen. We must have illegal non-citizens to have citizens, must have lesser races to create our new “nationalities” whole cloth.
There is nothing “special” about the Nationalism of the Nazis versus our own. Nothing special at all. After all, they learned it from us. Not just the US, of course, but the British, the French, etc. They were a late arrival to the genocidal forms and methods of nation states. The British killed millions in India, the Belgians millions in Africa, the French millions the South East Asia, the US millions in North America, all for near identical reasons. But one day the same kinds of men who killed in the colonies took over Italy, Germany, and Spain. And the other great nation states of Europe did nothing, because they saw little difference between themselves and the fascists. They were the same kind of thing after all. They waited until it was far too late, and actively conspired against those who volunteered to fight fascism abroad.
So now that fascism has come home to roost here, that it is rising, I view it as highly important to keep an honest focus on what it is, how it operates, who is part of it. You cannot fight a thing if you don’t know who or what it is. Those who carry water for these movements aren’t far outside of acceptable American politics, they don’t have to explicitly call for mass genocide and the end of democracy. Their traits are contradictory, effectively on purpose. They’re farcical and sad, but no less terrifying as a result if you’re aware that such a factor is universally true for fascists. But you still have to try, as the alternative is looking over at Hitler and Mussolini and thinking, as the world once did, that they’re not that far outside of the norm.
In short, I still think Houseman’s a fascist and won’t stop calling him one because to do so is idiotic, suicidal, and pointless, particularly the last of those three as I absolutely do not care what happens to my ability to post and a thrice bankrupted gaming website. If you don’t “get” that, you’re either dramatically overrating the value of pretending to be friendly with strangers on the internet, or you’re simply too ignorant of history for any of this rant to have been even mildly worth it.
Fascism is not a distant thing. It did not emerge in America when some people decided to try and take over the Capitol Building because their favorite gameshow host lost an election. It didn’t arrive here on the back of disgraced veteran and military propagandist George Lincoln Rockwell with his swastika covered VW bus full of boys in Hitler Youth outfits which he drove from university to university complaining about how he had been cancelled by the communists in academia. It didn’t arrive along with the German Bund in the Interwar, funded by the Nazi state and owning a white colony in upstate New York that remained redlined until, uh, 2000 or so. It did not arrive with the police, descended from slave catchers and enforces of redlining and Jim Crow, the perpetuation of chattel slavery for a more developed form of capitalism. It didn’t arrive with the original KKK, whose violent terrorist campaigns doomed reconstruction in the name of “States Rights” and healing the divisions between the ruling elites of America and their failsons. It has always been there from the start, always a possibility as part of a nation built on colonizing the other, dominating the weak, slaughtering for the righteous purpose of ruling a continent for the profits of unworthy men who view themselves as gods. After all, our founders raped their slaves and burned the homes of natives for the sake of their own divinely ordained lebensraum. It is no wonder that Hitler based many of his own beliefs on a distorted image he saw of the American west, with the domination of the native and the exclusion of the foreigner save for the purpose of slave labor.
When the nation was defined, when borders and peoples were built out of historical myths and bloody wars of colonial conquest, fascism took hold in the western ethos, one step away from a possibility at every turn. When race became real in its consequences, while “cosmopolitan” “multi-ethnic” nationalities were built, there was a demand for a new myth to unify the “citizen” under Jacobin fraternity. But to unify citizens you must define what they are not, and in this act there is a repeatable process that is born, describing some new group as outside of the proper ethos of national myth and citizen. We must have illegal non-citizens to have citizens, must have lesser races to create our new “nationalities” whole cloth.
There is nothing “special” about the Nationalism of the Nazis versus our own. Nothing special at all. After all, they learned it from us. Not just the US, of course, but the British, the French, etc. They were a late arrival to the genocidal forms and methods of nation states. The British killed millions in India, the Belgians millions in Africa, the French millions the South East Asia, the US millions in North America, all for near identical reasons. But one day the same kinds of men who killed in the colonies took over Italy, Germany, and Spain. And the other great nation states of Europe did nothing, because they saw little difference between themselves and the fascists. They were the same kind of thing after all. They waited until it was far too late, and actively conspired against those who volunteered to fight fascism abroad.
So now that fascism has come home to roost here, that it is rising, I view it as highly important to keep an honest focus on what it is, how it operates, who is part of it. You cannot fight a thing if you don’t know who or what it is. Those who carry water for these movements aren’t far outside of acceptable American politics, they don’t have to explicitly call for mass genocide and the end of democracy. Their traits are contradictory, effectively on purpose. They’re farcical and sad, but no less terrifying as a result if you’re aware that such a factor is universally true for fascists. But you still have to try, as the alternative is looking over at Hitler and Mussolini and thinking, as the world once did, that they’re not that far outside of the norm.
In short, I still think Houseman’s a fascist and won’t stop calling him one because to do so is idiotic, suicidal, and pointless, particularly the last of those three as I absolutely do not care what happens to my ability to post and a thrice bankrupted gaming website. If you don’t “get” that, you’re either dramatically overrating the value of pretending to be friendly with strangers on the internet, or you’re simply too ignorant of history for any of this rant to have been even mildly worth it.
