sulla
29d ago
The root of it is the recognition on the “young right” of WWII as the founding myth of the modern regime, combined with opposition to said regime. The myth is that Hitler, out of sheer hatred, decided to kill all Jews, and on an unrelated notes, to conquer Europe/the world. The US and the allies, of course, saved the day, and we all learned an important lesson about why right wing politics are evil.
The myth is false and the reality is a bit more complicated, and does not really support the weight of the founding myth upon deep interrogation. So young right wingers rebel against the lies by pretending to be nazis. They embrace the villain in order to deny the myth its power.
In my opinion, it’s not really possible for non-Germanic US citizens in 2025 to be “Nazis.” It’s like if a faction of ethnically Chinese citizens identified as Zionists. It makes absolutely no sense because the ideology is tied to a specific people at a specific time. Even hating Jews doesn’t make you a Nazi. Lots of factions have hated Jews throughout history and most of them have little else in common with Nazis. I also believe in some degree of revisionism, and that we learned many of the wrong lessons from the war.
However, I also think the explicit anti-semitism is quite self-defeating. They take a reasonable premise, that the US spends too much on Israel and hypocritically accepts it as an ethnostate (arguably true), and stretch it to an unreasonable extreme - that almost every conservative politician is thoroughly compromised by the jews and are therefore evil/untrustworthy (schizo). Or that Jews are overrepresented in media (true), therefore media exists to push a Jewish agenda (schizo).
There is a bit too much tolerance for the schizo prediction in some of these groups. The problem is not that it will lead to a second Holocaust, so much as it makes us look insane and unsympathetic. At the same time, the general breakdown of Hitler-as-myth is likely immensely helpful to the modern right-wing cause, and jokes or ironic embrace of Hitler do serve this purpose effectively at times. But it is a delicate line between schizo and funny.
Most commonly they will choose a set of characteristics that describes the modern group they don’t like, but that fails to uniquely describe historical Nazis, or fails to describe the consensus “bad parts” or historical Nazis and instead focuses on the contested parts (Hitler liked dogs, Nazis were pro-family, etc.)
More options
Context Copy link