They are all Nazis

Is there a word for a feeling of surprise at something that was completely predictable? That was my feeling after the white riot in Charlottesville, VA last weekend. Something like that was bound to happen with 'god-emperor' trump embedded in the White House like a tick. So now that it has, the three quarters plus of Americans who oppose the republican reign of terror are presented with a choice of how to deal with the other quarter whose white supremacy has been exposed to the world like a festering boil of hate and bigotry. It is as though now that the veneer of ambiguity has been ripped away to reveal swastikas and Nazi slogans alongside the confederate stars and bars it suddenly got easier for mainstream media to drop, at least partially, their go-to defense of both sides are equally bad. Good for them, yes hating Nazis should be something we all agree on and as the new meme goes "antifascist should be the default setting for Americans". So finally we can stand up to the republican menace that sympathizes with white supremacy by calling them what they are. Or can we?

This Vox article crossed my feed when published on August 18th but I didn't get a chance to read it. Written by a PhD student named Lindsay Jones whose project is on female African-American education in Virginia and a native of Charlottesville, she is also an intellectual historian and it is on that score that I have to critique her article. Jones probably knows more about Nazism than I know about African-American education but in the realm of current events the former is more valuable. She argues that the very term that permits corporate media to finally blame these assholes for their violence and hate should be dropped because white supremacy is as American as apple pie. However the weasel words start right from the title:

Don’t call all American white supremacists “Nazis.” Their ideology of hate is homegrown.

Using the term distances us from our reality.

...“Nazis” are easily legible as a long-since-conquered enemy to human decency. Neo-Nazis are easily dismissed as clinging to an antiquated ideology of white racial superiority in an age when the idea of a “master race” has long been banished in polite society.

To utter the term “Nazi” is to invoke universally condemned images of death camps, terror. To say “Nazi” is to imply backwardness — that this ideology is a throwback to a more ignorant and intolerant age in human history. To say “Nazi” is to disavow the Americanness of anyone who dons a swastika or gives a Nazi salute, to reflexively cast them as counter to the values of tolerance and diversity that our nation holds dear.

To say “Nazi” in reference to the mobs who wrought havoc on Charlottesville this weekend, arguably, is expedient. After all, reasonable Americans have reached a consensus that the genocidal violence of Nazi Germany was some of the worst the world has ever seen and that the ideas and actions of today’s neo-Nazis are abhorrent. Why split hairs in a search for more precise terminology? Why not refuse to adopt the terminology of “alt-right” and “white nationalist” and instead use a label that we can all understand and that ultra-effectively resists euphemism?

Some people at Saturday’s rally identified as actual members of the American Nazi Party and carried flags with swastikas. But the label doesn’t encapsulate the people who showed up representing America's homegrown ideology of white supremacy.

For me, as a scholar and a resident of Charlottesville, the Nazi label erases the ordinariness of this impulse to display and defend the symbols of a fallen iteration of white patriarchy. The people I grew up with — the families that fly the flag on their property, the teenage boys who wear the flag stitched onto their khaki baseball caps — are not Nazis. They are ordinary white people who deny that their veneration of a mythologized South amounts to white nationalism. The spectacular displays of violence characterizing Charlottesville’s conflicts over Confederate monuments, when viewed in local and historical context, point to white racial pride that has its source right here in Virginia, not Nazi Germany.

I have some bad news to share with you candidate Jones, National Socialism in Germany was highly and extensively influenced by exactly that homegrown hate you are describing. And shame on you as a scholar to write this article without even a sideways glance in this direction.  Far be it for me to explain racism or hate to you, your story is moving and I have no reason to doubt it's sincerity, but the neo-confederate white supremacy has more in common with nazism than you'd think. James Q. Whitman wrote a whole book on the American roots of nazism that I discovered after less than thirty seconds of searching on Google. Much like the African-American blues men that went to England and enjoyed success, in turn leading to the British Invasion, Hitler looked at American race relations and found much to expropriate. Tortured metaphors aside, Indian removal, westward expansion aka Manifest Destiny, slavery, Jim Crow, Eugenics, the Creel commission propaganda during WWI, the Palmer raids, expulsion of Alien radicals, and immigration quotas were parts of American history that the Nazis wanted to emulate and largely did execute. 

American white supremacy historically took two forms; exclusionary in the North, and dominating in the South. Yankees just didn't want Black folks living anywhere near them. Southerners wanted separation of the races but also wanted to exploit Black folks' labor so they built the convoluted system of segregation, and a system of intimidation through outright KKK style vigilantism all the way to building the monuments to confederate leaders as an ever present reminder of who was in charge. Nazism in Germany borrowed from both of these traditions, even the Lost Cause mythology through their "stab in the back" theory. Though admittedly if you search for any kind of consistency in Nazism you'll be hard pressed to find any. They worshiped technology and strove to return to the land for a simpler life. The only thing that really held them together was the shared hatred of out groups. It is completely understandable that hate is hate from the victims' point of view, but as intellectual historians we must dig deeper no matter how distasteful it may be.

This hatred towards the Other really isn't different than the various strands of derpitude displayed by the mass rally (ho ho) in Charlottesville of white supremacists. Maybe this group hates Jews a little more than immigrants, maybe that one puts Islam at the top of their hate list. Does it really matter? This is one time where generalization is warranted. At a time when good jobs are hard to find and most manual labor has been eased by machines and technology, does the old Klan ideology of keeping African-Americans on the land and in their place hold true? If the Klan no longer seeks to dominate but chants the same slogans of extermination that self-proclaimed Nazis bluster about, is there really any difference between home grown hate and imports? 

It is not expedient to lump them all together, it is necessary. In order to get the elite media to pay attention to this disgusting underbelly we need to shock and sensationalize, or they will just get back to blaming both sides and normalizing the fascist takeover of America. If Hitler and the Nazis in Germany were inspired by what they saw in America, then it is correct to tar them all with the same brush. What word would you like to use instead? This is the area of the internet where we actually can debate ideas. Yes, the hate is real. Yes, it comes from right here in white America. And yes, we absolutely have to shine as bright a light on it as possible so it will slither away again. But to say Nazism is simply an exotic foreign import and puts too much distance between the idea and the actions is doing a disservice to intellectual history.