Seth Cotlar: Some people have taken Noah's thread to be a minimization Hitler's antisemitism. That's not how I read it. I read it as emphasizing the importance of time & "political culture" for understanding fascism...and the distinction between what people in the general public will ACCEPT vs. what they WANT.

Some people have taken Noah's thread to be a minimization Hitler's antisemitism. That's not how I read it. I read it as emphasizing the importance of time & "political culture" for understanding fascism...and the distinction between what people in the general public will ACCEPT vs. what they WANT.

Fascism is a *process*, not a fixed state. That process almost always involves an extreme minority getting a larger minority (and almost never a majority) to ACCEPT certain dehumanizing propositions as politically legitimate, even if they don't 100% agree w/ their most radical implications.

Fascism as a political practice has little to do with persuasion & is all about intimidating one's opponents into silence, ultimately via state sanctioned murder. But the murder part is the last stage of a much longer process of imposing the minoritarian will of the fascists on society more subtly.

This is why I consider the political culture of Trump's GOP to be fascist because when is the last time you heard a Republican make an evidenced-based, rational argument for some policy? Or heard Republicans have a serious, evidence-based policy argument amongst themselves?

I follow the online conversation amongst active Oregon Republican fairly closely, and I can't tell you the last time I saw a meaningful exchange across political difference in which people used evidence and logic to try to convince one another. It's all about personalities & loyalty to Trump.

Part of this is undoubtedly just a symptom of what social media does to all of us. But another part is about the desperation of a party that (in Oregon) has been loosing grievously for many decades now and has resorted to conspiratorial delusions to explain it, rather than change course.

I wrote about those conspiratorial delusions here. On one hand, they're hilariously absurd. But on the other, they're terrifying...because what was Nazi discourse about Jews if not a "conspiratorial delusion" transformed into a deliberate governing strategy? sethcotlar.substack.com/p/its-funny-...

It's funny until it's not; why I've stopped finding absurd right wing conspiracy theories so hilarioussethcotlar.substack.com What is there to do, really, other than laugh at stuff like this? Candace Owens investigates…lol. Candace’s grim look is the icing on the cake—putting on her best Katie Couric “this is very serious” f...

I've said it before and will say it again: when you've been told for 50+ years that you're the "Silent Majority" and "Real America" and you keep losing elections or barely eking out the wins you do get, you have a choice between admitting you're the minority or calling shenanigans on the opposition.

The active Oregon R's are almost all deluded, no matter the issue. I mainly follow a couple of local school boards who have suffered from deluded members. It gets wild! Trying to use facts and logic simply won't work with them. They get very suspicious, then angry.

This right here. Trump presents a, "who you gonna believe me or your lying eyes?" problem every single day that he heads the Republican party and they have made their choice quite clear.

🎶It’s a Vibe World After All🎶

1991

(Unsarcastic answer, it's the last time the GOP had a hard conversation about fiscal responsibility that included revenue and not just expenditures and literally every conversation since has been bullshit)

Hindsight about fascism is 20/20. In the process, not so much.

Good grief, Seth, you are right on it today!

And even elimination is deliberate and slow (usually), using the same public acceptance and or apathy - hence the development of the T4 program!

WRT to state sanctioned murder, Canada's MAiD program is getting attention re creeping overreach. I once served brain cancer/other oncology pts & respect narrow role of medicine in easing death. Yet what press/some peers say re MAiD frightens me now. Prospect fascists use of MAiD should terrify us.

ugh s/b "Prospect of fascists use of MAiD should terrify us." Sigh.

I wrote a term paper on how the Nazis used expatriation/denaturalization as a legal means to go after Jewish Germans. And I agree, it was a deliberate process. The first list of people to be expatriated was met with a lot of (international/national) protest. Five years later, nobody cared.

IMO the biggest contribution that Martin Luther made to the future Nazi state wasn't his own antisemitism (there were plenty of other cultural influences to that point in Europe), but that he definitively broke the revolutionary spirit of the German people. A culture of acquiescence enabled Nazism.

but in another way, isn’t fascism a “fixed state” (sorry)

Niemöller's poem is about how first they brought violence against the factions in civil society who would resist them politically, before turning to broader cultural targets.

Berlatsky has a point. It's not widely known that the Nazis pragmatically downplayed their antisemitism to achieve electoral success in 1930 and 1932. An April 1933 boycott of Jewish stores failed to attract popular support and was quickly called off (Evans 2005, p. 15).

They were testing the limits of what they could get away with on smaller groups.

The Roma were targeted before Jewish people were. The GOP starts with small groups to test the waters. Trans people then queer people then all allies. Undocumented immigrants then all immigrants then all minorities then all allies. Poor urban minorities then all poor urbanites then all poor people.

Remember, the only class who has ever mattered to the GOP is the wealthy. You can buy your way out of fascism’s grasp. Upper-middle- and middle-class white Christians still think they matter. Naw, in the end only rich lives matter.

Noah takes one book on German Fascism (be it a VERY good one) and completely devalues Coonz's argument and post-WW1 German history. Anti-Semitism was INSTRUMENTAL in German nationalism and building the Volksgemeinschaft. Noah is absolutely minimizing Hitler's anti-Semitism.

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