Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "bezos"
Not so deep Thinking about the Weimar Republic
Suspending disbelief (within reason) is important when enjoying a work of art, especially for those who are experts in the field that’s being used in a fictive sense. I imagine, for instance, that some people who work as cops, detectives, professional boxers, soldiers, erotic dancers, etc., have seen films or read books in which their specific career is part of the plot. Perhaps their job is even the career of the main character in the movie or book in question. And I would hazard that if the other elements of the story were working -things like character development, action, suspense, etc.- that these pros would be able to overlook some aspects of what they see on screen that contradict what they know of their own profession. If the story’s good enough, and unless you’re a pedant and the type of person prone to writing to cereal companies to complain, you can let most shit slide.
Sometimes when someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about spouts for a long time on some subject, it can initially be kind of funny for the expert to hear the layman pontificate (sort of like being a scientist with NASA, I suppose, and watching something contra the laws of physics happen in some SF movie). But after awhile it has to become kind of painful, or at least irritating.
I don’t know everything about Germany’s ill-fated experiment with democracy in the interwar period, but I have spent enough time studying the subject to know that the “Chicken Little-esque” prognosticators running around proclaiming the Nazi takeover in America is just days away most likely fall into one of three categories: 1) The stupid 2) Those trying to score points with peers, or supervisors (mostly either in soft media or soft sciences), and 3) Those smart enough to know better but who prefer to try to induce panic to gain some form of control over other people.
There’s always a faster gun in the West, as the saying goes. I’m sure there’s someone who knows the minutiae of every footnote in a police report from the Altona Massacre in Hamburg in 1932 and could take me to school on the subject. That said, I’m not a layman and have dived deep into the subject as an undergraduate, graduate, and mostly as an autodidactic weirdo who spends hours at the library with an LED-equipped magnifying glass poring over ninety-year-old police reports that I got from Kent State or Miami U through some interlibrary loan program.
Bearing that in mind (and always willing to have it pointed out where I’m wrong), here are some ways in which I think that the United States of America at this quite acrimonious and volatile moment is still nowhere near the state of Germany in the period of the Preußenschlag (that moment where Nazi-sympathetic elements in government, police, industry, etc. took that first fateful step toward Gleichschaltung, or the coordinated and totalized Nazi State apparatus).
Since the kids like lists, I’ll try my first listicle:
5 Reasons Why America right now isn’t comparable to Weimar Germany’s tumultuous “experiment with democracy.”
1. Bloodbaths are not accompanying funeral corteges (at least that I know of).
If you read about the street-fighting happening between the Antifa and Alt-Right hordes and compile all the fatalities, it is nothing like the scale of what was happening in Germany in the interwar years. Read Ernst von Solomon’s The Outlaws for a taste of what daily life was like in the time of the Sonderwagen (essentially uparmored paramilitary vehicles) and street barricades, curfews and various decrees. Imagine the L.A. riots, but happening with recurring frequency, and with not just the National Guard walking around in body armor with military weapons, but also various ragtag bands of soldiers, and other well-equipped paramilitary squads a bit more similar to what the provisional IRA had. I’m not saying we can’t get there (anything’s possible) but we’re not there yet. And, speaking of the IRA, we haven’t yet seen the zeal of the left or the right in America get to the level of someone willing to show up at the funeral of his enemy and throw a grenade at the mourners (Loyalist Michael Stone did in fact do that). Yes, we’ve seen someone shoot up a Republican softball game, but that’s not quite the same animal. Killings at funerals point to a level of rage, so cyclically-fatalist that one has to realize they’re dealing with another level of violence altogether, something that has taken on a life of its own and has turned the human participants into zombified ciphers who are killing for reasons they can no longer really remember or articulate.
Weimar Germany got there, where humans were at each other’s throats like foaming rabid dogs trapped together in cages. Sometimes people seek out fights or conflict, and then sometimes it gets to the level where the violence is like a living creature, that treats carnage-fatigued human playthings like a horny girlfriend who won’t give her boyfriend a chance to recover in his refractory period. Even the most violent and supposedly bloodthirsty men usually reach a point where they want the violence to stop, and it no longer will.
You can point to chronically and endemically dysfunctional neighborhoods in America, where multigenerational poverty and pain sagas have been playing out in public housing projects for decades now, but (sad as it is to say) that is in the background for most Americans. The violence in Germany was not confined to certain neighborhoods or even the city; industrial areas like the Ruhrgebiet and even rural lands where secret organizations met (like the Vehme and Black Reichswehr) were sites of violence.
Funeral corteges were many times the site of skirmishes between members of the KPD (German Communist Party) on the one hand, and the NSDAP and its forerunners like the DVP (German Peoples’ Party) on the other. All kinds of ceremonies (and even certain minor baubles like safety pins and monocles) were banned by ordinances to keep people from killing each other in the street, or to stop the killing when it was already in progress.
2. The Gentry Right doesn’t like the Alt-Right
Do even a little cursory reading about the political situation in Germany from the time of the Second Empire through the collapse of the Third Reich and you will notice that there was a strong tension between the “Old Guard” right and the younger conservatives whose view was more futurist and in line with what we associate with Italian or Spanish iterations of fascism. The old guard were into all kinds of medieval ceremony, viewing themselves as a latter-day knightly caste with a duty to defend the Holy Land of Teutoberg and Luther, Goethe, etc. These people looked down their noses at Hitler and his sort of plebian Nazi friends with their brown shirts and jackboots and garish newspapers (even Hitler was embarrassed by Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer). But the gentry types in Germany, tied into things like industry (names like Krupp, Bayer, IG Farben, and Siemens still ring bells) were willing to tolerate the Nazis and use them as streetfighters to establish inroads against various liberal and outright anarchic movements whom they feared much more. We know how things turned out, with the Nazis running roughshod over both their ostensible street soldiers (the SA) as well as muzzling the nobility and vestiges of the Junker class, but I don’t think that’s where things are going in America.
The “radical right” seems to have a large presence online, and in meme wars, but move into meatspace as some people call it, and they can barely muster a couple hundred people. Besides which, mainstream conservatives like Paul Ryan or Jonah Goldberg are quite comfortable with being a sort of foil to their opponents across the aisle; living in some lush green suburban satellite of the Imperial Capital of D.C. and sending one’s kids to the best schools and having your healthcare taken care of are small prices to pay to lose fights in congress over small policy differences. Does anyone believe that, say, someone like a Lindsey Graham, is more eager to ignore the outstretched hand across the aisle (filled with goodies) as well as to shun donors, and instead form an alliance with unstable Millenials walking around looking like Sergeant Schultz and trying to pick fights in front of Confederate statues while on break from shifts at Little Caesar’s or the vape pen kiosk? I’m thinking the answer is “no.”
3. We haven’t experienced anything like the Privation or Terror endured by the Germans in the interwar Period
A lot of historians claim that the Second World War was born in the trenches of the First World War, that the mass slaughter in the first totally industrialized war (with more than 18 million deaths, just counting combatants) with its mustard gas, flamethrowers, tanks (still in their infancy) and relentless death under machinegun fire, primed people to become desensitized, callous, and perhaps collectively psychotic in some sense. I was in Iraq and while the war was no picnic, one cannot compare our current shameful sandbox fiascos to what happened in the trenches of Verdun or the town of Ypres or Guillemot. Take all of the men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in over a decade-plus and realize that that many people died in less than twenty-four hours in the Great War.
Then remember that this was shortly followed by a massive outbreak of Spanish Influenza that killed even more people than the war. And just to quickly gloss over a few more factors before moving on to the next point: The Turnip Winter from 1916-1917 caused hunger so intense that people would strip leather upholstery from chairs and seatbacks and try to chew the material in the hopes of stopping the pain (glue has protein in it). I still occasionally ride the metro bus in the city, and I’ve seen quite a few poor people who not only weren’t chewing on the handholding strap above their head, but were quite overweight and playing with smartphones that (even adjusting for inflation) would have been outside of the price range of Germans in the interwar period, even after the hyperinflation was over and some stabilization came with the Rentenmark. Being poor and unemployed right now probably means crashing on your cousin’s couch and watching reruns on Netflix while smoking weed and ignoring his increasingly loud demands to “get a job and quit eating my food!” In Weimar Germany it meant hoping you could find some steam-producing grates in front of the Bahnhof to sleep on, or otherwise potentially freezing to death in the Tiergarten. Incidentally, people were so hungry during the hyperinflation years that someone managed to kill a kangaroo in the zoo and carry him off for his meat; Germany was filled with slaughterhouses and had the world’s most expert butchers, and I imagine someone could have made quick work of a kangaroo and had its body parceled and wrapped in wax paper before the Schutzpolizei found the animal’s habitat empty the following morning.
4. Hard on the Left/Easy on the Right?
The saying in Weimar Germany was “Hard on the Left, easy on the Right,” the point being that the government (and especially the police and the judges on the bench) tended to be conservative. If not in total sympathy with the uncouth paramilitary groups on the right, they were at least less frightened of a native, organic form of fascism as opposed to the alien threat of Bolshevism looming from the Slavic East (Read some German history about the struggles between Germany and Poland on the Kashubian Frontier and in Pomerelia and you’ll discover that German xenophobia toward the Poles and Russians was sometimes more intense than antisemitism).
The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in which rightwingers attempted to overthrow the newly established government resulted in some light slaps on the wrist for the instigators. And in point of fact it’s rumored that while Hitler was serving his laughably short sentence for his participation, he managed to finish writing the unreadably turgid Mein Kampf, whose publication helped him to defray some of the legal costs he’d incurred for his crime.
Several of the participants in the confrontations in Charlottesville will be doing more time (barring appeals) than some rightwing footsoldiers who killed members of the KPD and dumped their bodies in the Spree or Havel Rivers in Berlin.
A lot of what gets called the Left in America is just corporate lip service to ill-defined and nebulous things like diversity or multiculturalism as promulgated by Jill from Human Resources, but it would still be much more accurate to say that our elite go hard on the right and easy on the left. Racism can have a synergistic relationship with capitalism, as in colonialism, but in general I believe that Dr. Noam Chomsky (who just turned 90 the other day) is correct when he claims that capitalism is inherently anti-racist, because it seeks to abolish all identities not based on wealth. A system of the virtues of extolling some race (grounded in pseudoscience or even in rigorous DNA study) just is not compatible with trying to sell things to the largest group you can target.
America is a big mall, and management at malls like to discourage violence because it scares away shoppers.
This isn’t to say that America doesn’t have tensions between the police (believed usually to be sympathetic to the right), and the people. But due to the reality of racial-coalition politics it’s also bad business to side with the cops over the people.
I remember that in the aftermath of the Dallas Shooting, in which a black Army vet named Micah Johnson killed five cops, Hillary Clinton went to a black Methodist church and talked about how maybe hectoring cops about implicit bias would ease tensions (this is a bit like a cop showing up to a crime scene where a woman has a black eye and her husband is looming over her, and the cop responding that perhaps the woman should learn how to cook a steak or anticipate when her man might want another beer).
Yes, Hilligula was fishing for votes (knowing she wouldn’t be able to equal Obama’s performance) but I think that the State in America is likely to go hard on the right and easier on the left. Even speaking too much about the Nation-State at this point really ignores the way spheres of influence work. Hitler and the Nazis had industry behind them, but we’re in a post-industrial civilization where Silicon Valley (along with Wall Street) still calls the shots. Someone like Jeff Bezos has more power than, say, Donald Trump, and I think he’s more interested in amassing a fleet of drones to deliver Ramen Noodles than he is in creating a postmodern Luftwaffe. You never know, though; most of our Silicon Valley/IT Overlord class could eventually have us working in barbwire- and concertina-secured Amazon Fulfillment Concentration Camps (Zuckerberg is definitely a sociopath down to his last pixilated atom). But I think it’s more likely that the gulags will be stocked with alt-righters than with leftists or Jills from Human Resources or Micah X’s or feminists.
5. Trump just isn’t Hitler
I haven’t been on facebook in a long time (I highly recommend disabling or deleting it), but I used to constantly see things on there comparing Trump to Hitler, and sometimes people mentioning that Trump was antisemitic. In the wake of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the topic of Trump’s antisemitism and amorphous charges of creating a climate of hate (presumably with his Rube Goldberg-esque hate machine) were once again levied, along with charges of Trump being an anti-Semite. I still read Paul Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and he’ll occasionally pepper his posts with some such pro forma allegations, usually out of the blue and unrelated to the theme of his post.
This idea of Trump as Hitler 2.0 doesn’t really bear closer scrutiny. Even ignoring the testimony of Robert Bowers (the guy who shot up the synagogue) who claims that he despised Trump because he was too cozy with Jews, one would also be faced with the inconvenient evidence that Trump’s son-in-law, grandchildren, and daughter are Jewish. He has spent most of his life in either the New York real estate market or in the casino world, dealing with some of the most prominent and powerful Jews in the world, some of whom he butted heads with competitively (Steve Wynn) and some of whom financed his campaign directly (Sheldon Adelson), none of whom he appeared to hate.
I also have trouble envisioning Hitler declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel and relocating the German foreign embassy to Tel Aviv. Yes, I know Israel didn’t exist in the thirties, and that Zionists were still working on acquiring their state when Hitler came to power, and various Jewish paramilitary groups had already been formed to achieve this end violently (see Irgun), but Hitler’s initial plan for the Jews (prior to the “Final Solution” agreed upon at the Wannsee Conference) was to relocate them to Madagascar (!) or some other land deemed by the Reich to be inhospitable and of no value in a Lebensraum sense.
Trump also bears zero resemblance to Hitler when it comes to things like his constitution or even his rhetorical style. Hitler was an ascetic vegetarian who abhorred meat, whose (lack of a) sex life is still a massive blank canvas, terra incognita in toto notwithstanding all the early psychiatric reports that Hitler engaged in all sorts of weird paraphilias like coprophagy (eating shit).
Eva Braun (Hitler’s longtime companion) claimed that she and Hitler were never intimate (though the rumors of Hitler losing a testicle are false, and he was only wounded in the leg at the Somme, so being short a nut probably wasn’t the reason the Fuhrer withheld dick from his Liebling).
Contrast that with Trump, who’s on-tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, who enjoys well-done steak with ketchup, who is much more the hedonist than the ascetic. With his red bloated face, and sort of sated king smile, he looks more like a jolly early Medieval warlord whose mind never wanders far from his appetites, and whose ken doesn’t extend much further than the court attendants around him, and the next twenty-four hours of his day. He’s not dumb, as his harshest critics would have you believe; he used his cellphone and his twitter account to annihilate two political dynasties and pull off the biggest political upset in human history. But he’s not the kind of person who has the long-range thinking that Hitler exposed in his “Table Talk” books (generally agreed to be authentic, although imprecise transcriptions). Hitler talked about what might be happening a thousand years hence; I just don’t see Trump being capable of that kind of long-range thinking. I frankly think Trump’s a little too self-absorbed to spend enough time contemplating other people, even hatred of other people, to engage in something like genocide. I think he’d rather golf or leer at tanned big-breasted courtesans at Mar-a-Largo. Also I think he’d much rather hang out with rich black celebrities (like Puff Daddy or Don King, or even “the Reverend” Al Sharpton) than some flyover state coalmining Oakie who shows up waving a MAGA poster at some indoor rally.
That’s just my take, though.
Sometimes when someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about spouts for a long time on some subject, it can initially be kind of funny for the expert to hear the layman pontificate (sort of like being a scientist with NASA, I suppose, and watching something contra the laws of physics happen in some SF movie). But after awhile it has to become kind of painful, or at least irritating.
I don’t know everything about Germany’s ill-fated experiment with democracy in the interwar period, but I have spent enough time studying the subject to know that the “Chicken Little-esque” prognosticators running around proclaiming the Nazi takeover in America is just days away most likely fall into one of three categories: 1) The stupid 2) Those trying to score points with peers, or supervisors (mostly either in soft media or soft sciences), and 3) Those smart enough to know better but who prefer to try to induce panic to gain some form of control over other people.
There’s always a faster gun in the West, as the saying goes. I’m sure there’s someone who knows the minutiae of every footnote in a police report from the Altona Massacre in Hamburg in 1932 and could take me to school on the subject. That said, I’m not a layman and have dived deep into the subject as an undergraduate, graduate, and mostly as an autodidactic weirdo who spends hours at the library with an LED-equipped magnifying glass poring over ninety-year-old police reports that I got from Kent State or Miami U through some interlibrary loan program.
Bearing that in mind (and always willing to have it pointed out where I’m wrong), here are some ways in which I think that the United States of America at this quite acrimonious and volatile moment is still nowhere near the state of Germany in the period of the Preußenschlag (that moment where Nazi-sympathetic elements in government, police, industry, etc. took that first fateful step toward Gleichschaltung, or the coordinated and totalized Nazi State apparatus).
Since the kids like lists, I’ll try my first listicle:
5 Reasons Why America right now isn’t comparable to Weimar Germany’s tumultuous “experiment with democracy.”
1. Bloodbaths are not accompanying funeral corteges (at least that I know of).
If you read about the street-fighting happening between the Antifa and Alt-Right hordes and compile all the fatalities, it is nothing like the scale of what was happening in Germany in the interwar years. Read Ernst von Solomon’s The Outlaws for a taste of what daily life was like in the time of the Sonderwagen (essentially uparmored paramilitary vehicles) and street barricades, curfews and various decrees. Imagine the L.A. riots, but happening with recurring frequency, and with not just the National Guard walking around in body armor with military weapons, but also various ragtag bands of soldiers, and other well-equipped paramilitary squads a bit more similar to what the provisional IRA had. I’m not saying we can’t get there (anything’s possible) but we’re not there yet. And, speaking of the IRA, we haven’t yet seen the zeal of the left or the right in America get to the level of someone willing to show up at the funeral of his enemy and throw a grenade at the mourners (Loyalist Michael Stone did in fact do that). Yes, we’ve seen someone shoot up a Republican softball game, but that’s not quite the same animal. Killings at funerals point to a level of rage, so cyclically-fatalist that one has to realize they’re dealing with another level of violence altogether, something that has taken on a life of its own and has turned the human participants into zombified ciphers who are killing for reasons they can no longer really remember or articulate.
Weimar Germany got there, where humans were at each other’s throats like foaming rabid dogs trapped together in cages. Sometimes people seek out fights or conflict, and then sometimes it gets to the level where the violence is like a living creature, that treats carnage-fatigued human playthings like a horny girlfriend who won’t give her boyfriend a chance to recover in his refractory period. Even the most violent and supposedly bloodthirsty men usually reach a point where they want the violence to stop, and it no longer will.
You can point to chronically and endemically dysfunctional neighborhoods in America, where multigenerational poverty and pain sagas have been playing out in public housing projects for decades now, but (sad as it is to say) that is in the background for most Americans. The violence in Germany was not confined to certain neighborhoods or even the city; industrial areas like the Ruhrgebiet and even rural lands where secret organizations met (like the Vehme and Black Reichswehr) were sites of violence.
Funeral corteges were many times the site of skirmishes between members of the KPD (German Communist Party) on the one hand, and the NSDAP and its forerunners like the DVP (German Peoples’ Party) on the other. All kinds of ceremonies (and even certain minor baubles like safety pins and monocles) were banned by ordinances to keep people from killing each other in the street, or to stop the killing when it was already in progress.
2. The Gentry Right doesn’t like the Alt-Right
Do even a little cursory reading about the political situation in Germany from the time of the Second Empire through the collapse of the Third Reich and you will notice that there was a strong tension between the “Old Guard” right and the younger conservatives whose view was more futurist and in line with what we associate with Italian or Spanish iterations of fascism. The old guard were into all kinds of medieval ceremony, viewing themselves as a latter-day knightly caste with a duty to defend the Holy Land of Teutoberg and Luther, Goethe, etc. These people looked down their noses at Hitler and his sort of plebian Nazi friends with their brown shirts and jackboots and garish newspapers (even Hitler was embarrassed by Julius Streicher’s Der Sturmer). But the gentry types in Germany, tied into things like industry (names like Krupp, Bayer, IG Farben, and Siemens still ring bells) were willing to tolerate the Nazis and use them as streetfighters to establish inroads against various liberal and outright anarchic movements whom they feared much more. We know how things turned out, with the Nazis running roughshod over both their ostensible street soldiers (the SA) as well as muzzling the nobility and vestiges of the Junker class, but I don’t think that’s where things are going in America.
The “radical right” seems to have a large presence online, and in meme wars, but move into meatspace as some people call it, and they can barely muster a couple hundred people. Besides which, mainstream conservatives like Paul Ryan or Jonah Goldberg are quite comfortable with being a sort of foil to their opponents across the aisle; living in some lush green suburban satellite of the Imperial Capital of D.C. and sending one’s kids to the best schools and having your healthcare taken care of are small prices to pay to lose fights in congress over small policy differences. Does anyone believe that, say, someone like a Lindsey Graham, is more eager to ignore the outstretched hand across the aisle (filled with goodies) as well as to shun donors, and instead form an alliance with unstable Millenials walking around looking like Sergeant Schultz and trying to pick fights in front of Confederate statues while on break from shifts at Little Caesar’s or the vape pen kiosk? I’m thinking the answer is “no.”
3. We haven’t experienced anything like the Privation or Terror endured by the Germans in the interwar Period
A lot of historians claim that the Second World War was born in the trenches of the First World War, that the mass slaughter in the first totally industrialized war (with more than 18 million deaths, just counting combatants) with its mustard gas, flamethrowers, tanks (still in their infancy) and relentless death under machinegun fire, primed people to become desensitized, callous, and perhaps collectively psychotic in some sense. I was in Iraq and while the war was no picnic, one cannot compare our current shameful sandbox fiascos to what happened in the trenches of Verdun or the town of Ypres or Guillemot. Take all of the men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in over a decade-plus and realize that that many people died in less than twenty-four hours in the Great War.
Then remember that this was shortly followed by a massive outbreak of Spanish Influenza that killed even more people than the war. And just to quickly gloss over a few more factors before moving on to the next point: The Turnip Winter from 1916-1917 caused hunger so intense that people would strip leather upholstery from chairs and seatbacks and try to chew the material in the hopes of stopping the pain (glue has protein in it). I still occasionally ride the metro bus in the city, and I’ve seen quite a few poor people who not only weren’t chewing on the handholding strap above their head, but were quite overweight and playing with smartphones that (even adjusting for inflation) would have been outside of the price range of Germans in the interwar period, even after the hyperinflation was over and some stabilization came with the Rentenmark. Being poor and unemployed right now probably means crashing on your cousin’s couch and watching reruns on Netflix while smoking weed and ignoring his increasingly loud demands to “get a job and quit eating my food!” In Weimar Germany it meant hoping you could find some steam-producing grates in front of the Bahnhof to sleep on, or otherwise potentially freezing to death in the Tiergarten. Incidentally, people were so hungry during the hyperinflation years that someone managed to kill a kangaroo in the zoo and carry him off for his meat; Germany was filled with slaughterhouses and had the world’s most expert butchers, and I imagine someone could have made quick work of a kangaroo and had its body parceled and wrapped in wax paper before the Schutzpolizei found the animal’s habitat empty the following morning.
4. Hard on the Left/Easy on the Right?
The saying in Weimar Germany was “Hard on the Left, easy on the Right,” the point being that the government (and especially the police and the judges on the bench) tended to be conservative. If not in total sympathy with the uncouth paramilitary groups on the right, they were at least less frightened of a native, organic form of fascism as opposed to the alien threat of Bolshevism looming from the Slavic East (Read some German history about the struggles between Germany and Poland on the Kashubian Frontier and in Pomerelia and you’ll discover that German xenophobia toward the Poles and Russians was sometimes more intense than antisemitism).
The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in which rightwingers attempted to overthrow the newly established government resulted in some light slaps on the wrist for the instigators. And in point of fact it’s rumored that while Hitler was serving his laughably short sentence for his participation, he managed to finish writing the unreadably turgid Mein Kampf, whose publication helped him to defray some of the legal costs he’d incurred for his crime.
Several of the participants in the confrontations in Charlottesville will be doing more time (barring appeals) than some rightwing footsoldiers who killed members of the KPD and dumped their bodies in the Spree or Havel Rivers in Berlin.
A lot of what gets called the Left in America is just corporate lip service to ill-defined and nebulous things like diversity or multiculturalism as promulgated by Jill from Human Resources, but it would still be much more accurate to say that our elite go hard on the right and easy on the left. Racism can have a synergistic relationship with capitalism, as in colonialism, but in general I believe that Dr. Noam Chomsky (who just turned 90 the other day) is correct when he claims that capitalism is inherently anti-racist, because it seeks to abolish all identities not based on wealth. A system of the virtues of extolling some race (grounded in pseudoscience or even in rigorous DNA study) just is not compatible with trying to sell things to the largest group you can target.
America is a big mall, and management at malls like to discourage violence because it scares away shoppers.
This isn’t to say that America doesn’t have tensions between the police (believed usually to be sympathetic to the right), and the people. But due to the reality of racial-coalition politics it’s also bad business to side with the cops over the people.
I remember that in the aftermath of the Dallas Shooting, in which a black Army vet named Micah Johnson killed five cops, Hillary Clinton went to a black Methodist church and talked about how maybe hectoring cops about implicit bias would ease tensions (this is a bit like a cop showing up to a crime scene where a woman has a black eye and her husband is looming over her, and the cop responding that perhaps the woman should learn how to cook a steak or anticipate when her man might want another beer).
Yes, Hilligula was fishing for votes (knowing she wouldn’t be able to equal Obama’s performance) but I think that the State in America is likely to go hard on the right and easier on the left. Even speaking too much about the Nation-State at this point really ignores the way spheres of influence work. Hitler and the Nazis had industry behind them, but we’re in a post-industrial civilization where Silicon Valley (along with Wall Street) still calls the shots. Someone like Jeff Bezos has more power than, say, Donald Trump, and I think he’s more interested in amassing a fleet of drones to deliver Ramen Noodles than he is in creating a postmodern Luftwaffe. You never know, though; most of our Silicon Valley/IT Overlord class could eventually have us working in barbwire- and concertina-secured Amazon Fulfillment Concentration Camps (Zuckerberg is definitely a sociopath down to his last pixilated atom). But I think it’s more likely that the gulags will be stocked with alt-righters than with leftists or Jills from Human Resources or Micah X’s or feminists.
5. Trump just isn’t Hitler
I haven’t been on facebook in a long time (I highly recommend disabling or deleting it), but I used to constantly see things on there comparing Trump to Hitler, and sometimes people mentioning that Trump was antisemitic. In the wake of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the topic of Trump’s antisemitism and amorphous charges of creating a climate of hate (presumably with his Rube Goldberg-esque hate machine) were once again levied, along with charges of Trump being an anti-Semite. I still read Paul Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and he’ll occasionally pepper his posts with some such pro forma allegations, usually out of the blue and unrelated to the theme of his post.
This idea of Trump as Hitler 2.0 doesn’t really bear closer scrutiny. Even ignoring the testimony of Robert Bowers (the guy who shot up the synagogue) who claims that he despised Trump because he was too cozy with Jews, one would also be faced with the inconvenient evidence that Trump’s son-in-law, grandchildren, and daughter are Jewish. He has spent most of his life in either the New York real estate market or in the casino world, dealing with some of the most prominent and powerful Jews in the world, some of whom he butted heads with competitively (Steve Wynn) and some of whom financed his campaign directly (Sheldon Adelson), none of whom he appeared to hate.
I also have trouble envisioning Hitler declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel and relocating the German foreign embassy to Tel Aviv. Yes, I know Israel didn’t exist in the thirties, and that Zionists were still working on acquiring their state when Hitler came to power, and various Jewish paramilitary groups had already been formed to achieve this end violently (see Irgun), but Hitler’s initial plan for the Jews (prior to the “Final Solution” agreed upon at the Wannsee Conference) was to relocate them to Madagascar (!) or some other land deemed by the Reich to be inhospitable and of no value in a Lebensraum sense.
Trump also bears zero resemblance to Hitler when it comes to things like his constitution or even his rhetorical style. Hitler was an ascetic vegetarian who abhorred meat, whose (lack of a) sex life is still a massive blank canvas, terra incognita in toto notwithstanding all the early psychiatric reports that Hitler engaged in all sorts of weird paraphilias like coprophagy (eating shit).
Eva Braun (Hitler’s longtime companion) claimed that she and Hitler were never intimate (though the rumors of Hitler losing a testicle are false, and he was only wounded in the leg at the Somme, so being short a nut probably wasn’t the reason the Fuhrer withheld dick from his Liebling).
Contrast that with Trump, who’s on-tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, who enjoys well-done steak with ketchup, who is much more the hedonist than the ascetic. With his red bloated face, and sort of sated king smile, he looks more like a jolly early Medieval warlord whose mind never wanders far from his appetites, and whose ken doesn’t extend much further than the court attendants around him, and the next twenty-four hours of his day. He’s not dumb, as his harshest critics would have you believe; he used his cellphone and his twitter account to annihilate two political dynasties and pull off the biggest political upset in human history. But he’s not the kind of person who has the long-range thinking that Hitler exposed in his “Table Talk” books (generally agreed to be authentic, although imprecise transcriptions). Hitler talked about what might be happening a thousand years hence; I just don’t see Trump being capable of that kind of long-range thinking. I frankly think Trump’s a little too self-absorbed to spend enough time contemplating other people, even hatred of other people, to engage in something like genocide. I think he’d rather golf or leer at tanned big-breasted courtesans at Mar-a-Largo. Also I think he’d much rather hang out with rich black celebrities (like Puff Daddy or Don King, or even “the Reverend” Al Sharpton) than some flyover state coalmining Oakie who shows up waving a MAGA poster at some indoor rally.
That’s just my take, though.
