Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

> contempt mingled with envy (paraphrase)

I reckon that's a good tell, even today.

This gets posted a lot, something like four times in two years.

And I don't particularly buy it. It seemed to me to be something to comfort the Harpers readership with.

There are a few nuggets of useful insight scattered amongst the flat caricatures here, but the reason this not a useful guide to our modern affliction of growing fascism is it frames Nazism as a foreign invading ideology with the subtext of “who among us will bend the knee if those monsters invade and win” rather than an organically homegrown response to certain conditions of our societies.

Fascism is a cancer of the body politic. The ideas that form its foundation as a philosophy are there in every society, and each culture manages them the way most bodies contain pre-cancerous cells that will never metastasize because the body is healthy enough to maintain itself despite its underlying flaws. The far more interesting question than “who”, for me, is “what”? What are the conditions and triggers that cause the cancer of fascism to overwhelm the counterbalancing philosophies. To fester, grow, and ultimately become terminal to a healthy society.

I saw this years ago. What strikes me is even though the author tries, it seems to me it has many stereotypes in it. Probably due to the year it was published (1941). So back then it probably got its point across fine.

Is this nazism or simply extreme ideologies in general? I think more people than we would like to admit will rally behind whatever they're compelled to by authority or culture.

I don't know if I agree with the thesis, but that's bloody good writing, of the kind it's hard to find anywhere today. I think in the past the people who took writing jobs where those who had a certain natural inclination to education and culture, whereas today it's the people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

... oh dear. That's a bit mean. I'm sorry about that.

>>more susceptible to Nazism than most people

Any implication that external forces put people in positions that cause them to be 'more susceptible to Nazism' ignores the certainty that for every 1,000 people in the exact same position, some become Nazis while others do not.

The external conditions are irrelevant. No matter how you change the conditions, there will always be a portion that 'become Nazis'.

It is my belief that is because there is something inside them that makes them Nazis to begin with. The external conditions simply present the opportunity for their inner Nazis to express itself.

I don't have time right now to go pull the multiple books on this topic I have sitting on my bookshelf, but the scholarly work has been fairly consistent that there are two main demographic groups easily exploited into authoritarian ideas. First, you've got an entrepreneurial / business owner crowd that are often the backbone of their communities. They are drawn to authoritarianism because they feel like they've worked hard and have earned their place and more or less want to protect it from "those" people, whoever they might be. They are your civics committee members, your civics club members, not necessarily "the elite" but the people with means who want to pull up the ladder and protect their status. The second group is the disenfranchised and undereducated. They see a family they've never had, acceptance, opportunity, and a way to rise above people they feel have wrong them or looked down on them. Over the past few years as I revisited a lot of the scholarly material, what struck me is how easy it is to look around your own community and how these demographics resonate regardless of era and location. For example, I've got a retired banker friend who is very active in the community. She describes herself as a moderate, but when you actually hear her talk, it might as well be out of the Nazi playbook - and she has no ideas she's doing it or how easily she's manipulated by modern political propaganda. And that's the insidious part that Ahrendt talked about - how mundane evil really can be.

EDIT: Reading the article now, these archetypes line up perfectly with many other post-war research sources.

"Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi."

In my experience, "Secure people never go Nazi and are generally kind, good, happy, and gentlemanly."

I had been surprised by Ezra Pound going (not Nazi but) Fascist, because I had thought he had translated chinese poetry in his youth. Then, when I recently discovered his "translation" process was to start from someone else's prose translation and re-poetise from there, it started to make more sense.

(well, that and Il Duce pretty much said that he needed a poet who could rail against the global financial establishment, which is a line I could see many conspiracy-minded artists falling for)

In an America where fascism seems to be on the rise, we must understand history so to avoid repeating it.

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