Guest post: Why These Fascists Are Not Like Those Fascists

A note from AxesnYarn: The following post is a guest post by a friend of mine. Inspired and rallied by their writing on their personal page I offered them a Guest Post spot. All that follow are their words. As always please comment and treat with respect. 

Content Note for discussion about fascism, islamophobia, Nazis, the American Election and related topics, but actually in my opinion this is a hopeful post. 

I want to talk about Fascism, and why These Fascists Are Not Like Those Fascists.

I first wrote this in my own bubble. Pen asked if I would be interested in making it more widely available through their blog. So, before I begin, I want to introduce myself a little bit to people who don’t know anything about me. I am writing from a relative position of privilege, specifically in terms of wealth, class and education, as well as conditional White privilege. I am also Jewish, queer and mostly invisibly disabled. Because of my family background and personal circumstances I have been spending a lot of this last year thinking about parallels between our current political situation and Hitler’s rise to power.

So I am one of the first one to find the swastikas and literal fascism of the past few months horrendous. But… actually, this is NOT how Nazi Germany Happened. It's important to understand that for all the parallels you can draw and how terrifying that is, this is terrifying for all its own reasons.

The German National Socialists were a fringe minority party who gained power slowly through the build up of several elections from 1919. They had an active, uniformed paramilitary right from 1919, initially formed from mostly WW1 veterans.

Germany was in an internationally marginalised position in the global community.

Fascist views in Germany never split populations close to 50/50 in the way that both Trump and Brexit have. This is key, because it means that solutions such as using constitutional process like the electoral college to refuse to elect Trump in America or Parliamentary votes against Brexit in the UK don't actually make the problem of rising fascism go away. Slightly under 50% of the population will feel increasingly (if potentially falsely) disenfranchised if that sort of action is taken. That is likely to increase polarisation and potentially violence.

The difference between a mob and a paramilitary is that at least someone is steering the fucking paramilitary.

Also, importantly: this has not been caused by complacency and failure to see what's been happening. Approximately 50% of voters have noticed, woah, this seems to be a slide into fascism. Populations are not complacent, they are polarised.

Importantly, and I've said this in a couple of other places, tools that were developed for fighting fascism in the 40s or the 80s are not necessarily going to be relevant today. We live in a world of 24 hour news coverage and social media; the issue is often over-saturation and compassion-blindness / compassion-fatigue, not invisibility of the issues to hand. Especially inside our bubbles. It is incredibly easy to look at the past and say, people should have spoken up more, then. And to try to fix that problem with our actions today. We can’t fix that problem, and this problem is different.

In a world where outrage is cheap and painful and truth easily dismissable we need to get really damn good at Snopesing before we share. Especially those of us in a position of educational privilege. We have the advantage of holding a position which has integrity, let’s make use of it.

I am trying to think before posting why am I posting this? What action, answer, change or response do I expect to come out of this post? If I am shocked, upset, outraged and my instinct is to share that feeling (and it is my instinct, fuck me I've resisted sharing images of swastikas and stories of hijabi women being assaulted alllll fucking morning) then I need to acknowledge that what I am doing is increasing the amount of shock, outrage, upset and pain in my community. Which is sometimes necessary, but a good question I am trying to use is, to what end?.

We do not know what the tools to fight fascism that looks like this look like yet. That's ok. In the 80s, my parents knew that the tools that their parents had used were also out of date.

Anger is good. Love is good. Action is good. Reflection is good. Communication is good. Silence is good. There is no right way to hold up my ideals, and that is fundamental to the nature of my ideals.

We haven't fucked up and we haven't failed. I wrote it in fiction – some of you might recognise these words from a different context - but these times come round and these times come round again. We've done it as tragedy. We've even done it as farce. This is familiar, yes, shockingly uncomfortably, boringly familiar.


But it's also absolutely brand terrifying new. Don't forget that either.