Popehat: /3 The Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws that forced more and more people to be complicit in enforcement and part of the machine excluding, shunning, and abusing Jews. The American Right wants abortion laws, IVF laws, contraceptive laws that will make more and more doctors, nurses, etc. complicit.

It would be wrong to see this as just a prudish or Victorian or even sincerely religious attitude about sex. It’s about control. It’s about the authority of the state intruding into more and more parts of life, and about making more and more people complicit in the abuse of power. /1

/2 The Nazis’ increasingly all-encompassing laws didn’t just serve policy goals. They served to normalize the idea of the state having authority in every segment of life, and to make more and more people complicit in enforcing that authority. That’s what totalitarianism means.

/3 The Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws that forced more and more people to be complicit in enforcement and part of the machine excluding, shunning, and abusing Jews. The American Right wants abortion laws, IVF laws, contraceptive laws that will make more and more doctors, nurses, etc. complicit.

/4 The fundamental concept is that most people, rather than stand up and say “I’m a terrible person if I go along with this,” will go along and rewrite their mental map to agree with it rather than think themselves terrible.

/5 The anti-trans movement illustrates this. They KNOW there are very few trans kids, but they want to make as many people as possible — coaches, teachers, administrators — complicit in policing and excluding them. Same with the push for censorship of books.

The problems are intrinsic to reactionary ideology aka fascism. State it's self is not the source of the problem but rather is the tool being used by the fascist to implement there will. Just like the nazis did in Germany. It wasn't the government. It was the people in power

To bring it back @kenwhite.bsky.social talked about the relation to power and state, where I pointed out that both are not intrinsic. Not sure where people got confused with the state itself being a necessity

Karl Polanyi had something to say about that 80 yrs ago. Fascism hijacks any kind of state apparatus because it is not fundamentally political, it is organised atavism

Karl Polanyi on the Rise of Fascism and Market Economyeconomicsociology.org A spectre is haunting the US, parts of Europe and the world — the spectre of Fascism and authoritarian Neoliberalism, veiled as "defensive democracy" and "common-sense patriotism", disguised as social...

It's worth noting that there are really valid critiques of nation states as structures.

But without states human relations become unmanageable. With states we have have a structure of law and practice to deal with thesethings.

Nation states are one way of managing these things? And while we have laws we've yet to see them live up to being equally applicable to all inhabitants, and we haven't seen them be up to the very important tasks of guarding human life and well-being, often prioritizing some peoples over others.

Nations states exist to make sure the needs of the people are met. When slthose needs are met and become self sufficient the state goes away (this a very simplified analysis of a very complex issue)

And your suggestion is?

There are a lot of non state configurations for societies that prioritize democracy/agency/well-being of people in them. There are books on the subject? I'd recommend Graeber's Dawn of Everything as a fun place to start.

And they want to normalize the policing of any divergence from gender norms by cis people.

Yup. Policing and excluding the most marginal is the gateway to policing everyone and anyone.

Interesting theory to how shame becomes weaponized via compliance/implication. Is there anything written on this?

Lots. There are likely 1000s of psychology books written about Cognitive Dissidence, illusory Truth effect, Dunning Kruger. What there isn't is a way to predict or stop it from happening. Humans are fallible to psychological weaknesses.

I’m more interested in this kind of strategy where average people become implicated in these reactionary policies and the implication becomes a way of disseminating culpability for any harm.

The study of just those 3 effects alone explains a lot of that. There's more to it of course but the human psyche and it's flaws are the basis of most of it.

Someone should really do something about it then!

It's what makes the use of dehumanizing language in today's political discourse so frightening. Vermin, groomer, illegal...all serve to make an other that is easier to rewrite that mental map.

remember the days when many of us knew this was true in theory because we studied history, but had trouble imagining it actually happening in real life? I miss those days

Me too.

Quite. People will more often than not go along with what they perceive as the authority in a given situation.

Good thread, thanks for posting. We don’t even have to go back to the last century, really; Russian public support for Putin’s stagnant regime & monstrous war is evidence enough of how easily people can be induced to go along with the unthinkable.

Time to reup a couple of @courtneymilan.com’s threads: bsky.app/profile/cour...

If you want to be one of the ones who resist tyranny, then pay attention to how people fold to it, and ask yourself what you would do under the circumstances. People who fold to petty bullshit often haven’t thought about it and we are socialized to go along with what authority figures say.

And bsky.app/profile/cour... (Yep, it’s about the Hugos, but broadly applicable)

Ways to handle censorship if someone asks you on the DL to censor your award. 1. “No, this isn’t in our rules. Is this going to be a problem? I can let the community know that the Hugo rules aren’t going to be applied if so.”

📌

"DONT AGREE IN ADVANCE" like the first point in the 2017 book On Tyranny by Snyder !!!!

The play GOOD by C.P. Taylor demonstrates how this happens incrementally really well (recently saw a livestream from the National theatre): www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/whats-on/nat...

Not just Nazis. Jim Crow employed basically the same mechanics in the US South (and beyond).

Nazis literally took notes from the American South, and then watered them down for wider German support

The thing that people forget is that genocide doesn't start in the camps. It starts when the state legally singles out a group of people, uses its machinery and bureacracy to isolate them, which is several years prior

That’s not how all genocide starts. And the Holocaust by bullets started way way way before ovens.

Yep christians are just as bad.

While there is significant overlap, I wouldn't paint them as the same. For starters, a majority of Black Americans identify as Christian. Also, there are churches that dare to help, and this is how the GOP treats them: bsky.app/profile/josh...

NEW: Texas AG Ken Paxton sues to shut down El Paso Catholic nonprofit after it resists immediately handing over migrant client records

Ken Paxton sues to revoke an El Paso nonprofit’s state registration a…www.texastribune.org Annunciation House, a network of shelters that serves migrants, sought relief from the attorney general’s demand to immediately release information about its clients. Paxton accused the religious gro…

[tosses the local Methodist ally in, complete with rainbow flag]

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