Where Have All The Nazis Gone?

So, I missed the latest hissy fit about “Substack Nazis.” Apparently, a writer named Jonathan M. Katz published an article in The Atlantic — that bastion of literary anti-fascism whose editor-in-chief is a former IDF prison guard who helped bamboozle the American public into launching a war of aggression against Iraq based on a lie about WMDs — demanding that the senior Substack executives answer to him (i.e., Katz) and the Substack Antifa regarding Substack’s “platforming and promotion of Nazis,” which triggered a Nazi-related shitstorm on Substack Notes, or something more or less along those lines.

Whatever it was that happened, exactly — and I don’t care enough to delve into the details — most of it appears to have happened last week while I was busy harassing German journalists and offering free lessons on “The Fascist Mentality” on Twitter.

I found out about it because Matt Taibbi posted a piece responding to Katz, which I read, which prompted me to check my Substack Notes feed, which I hadn’t done in a while, and there it was, the shitstorm. Open letters had circulated. Apoplectic notes had flown back and forth. Vicious insults had been traded. Clearly, a bona fide Nazi-related brouhaha had broken out, and I had missed the whole thing.

But I don’t mean to make light of the ongoing threat of Imminent Nazi Insurrection that has been tearing away at The Fabric of Democracy and loosening the bowels of supercilious ninnies like Katz & Co. for the last eight years. We’re talking LITERAL NAZIS here, folks, not just a pathetic subculture of attention-seeking, Hitler-heiling geeks posting anti-Semitic garbage on the Internet! Drastic measures must be taken!

What we need to do is haul Christopher Best and Hamish McKenzie in front of some kind of formal Nuremberg-style tribunal (comprised of Katz and the Substack Antifa, of course), make them answer for their “monetization of Nazis,” and then carry out a systematic Substack-Denazification campaign … or at least publish a few more open letters hysterically demanding “accountability” and shrieking about “NAZI TERFS!” and whatever.

Anyway, all this reminded me of a column I published in August of 2018, back when Literal Russian-Asset Hitler was still in office and Putin-Nazi paranoia was sweeping the nation. My Substack archives don’t go back that far, so I’m reposting that column here (i.e., in the Oddments section of my Substack) for your amusement.

I hope you enjoy it. Plus ça change … and so on.

Where Have All the Nazis Gone?

First published in CounterPunch, August 17, 2018.

So, it appears Antifa has scared Trump’s army of emboldened Nazis back into their hidey holes, or at least that’s the spin the Resistance is putting on the deeply weird events of last Sunday.

In case you missed it, what happened was, thousands of “anti-fascist” protestors converged on the streets of the nation’s capitol to deny a platform to (or just beat the snot out of) twenty or thirty racist idiots who were trying to assemble in Lafayette Square and stand around shouting racist slogans at each other. The organizer of this idiotic fiasco (i.e., the racist fiasco, not the protest thereof) was the same attention-seeking, racist idiot that had organized the original “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville in 2017. During that weekend, as I’m sure you’ll recall, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman, numerous other people were assaulted, and a few hundred racists in polo shirts and khakis marched around with tikki torches hollering neo-Nazi gibberish in an attempt to launch some sort of race war, or protest the removal of a statue, or something.

Last Sunday was a bit less dramatic. Basically, these twenty or thirty racists were escorted by hundreds of riot police and Secret Service to Lafayette Square, where they found themselves surrounded by thousands of protesters, many of whom intended to stomp their guts out. This must have been a bit unsettling, because the racists reportedly fled their own “rally” before they had even had the chance to holler any Nazi gibberish at each other.

This was extremely disappointing for the militant “anti-fascist” contingent, which had been counting on another balls-out street fight. According to The New York Times, a group of frustrated militant types tried to burn a Confederate flag, but it wouldn’t catch fire, so they were forced to rip it apart with their hands and jump up and down on it. Other militant “anti-fascists” threw anti-Nazi eggs at the cops, presumably as a form of “preventative self-defense,” or just to ensure that Breitbart had some video to paint them as “terrorists” with. The not-quite-so-militant “anti-fascist” contingent, most of whom never even caught a glimpse of the “emboldened” Nazis they had come to resist, apparently dispersed without incident.

The corporate media and the rest of the Resistance had been flogging this event for months. That infamous photo of the tikki torch Nazis had been repeatedly reprinted all summer long. Features on Kessler, the organizer, whose activities seem to have been mostly funded by his grandmother, with whom he had also been living, had been published in major international broadsheets.

The coverage peaked going into the weekend. On Saturday, he was featured on National Public Radio, where he shared his views on “racial intelligence.” Go ahead, google him, and marvel at the amount of free publicity bestowed on this geek.

And it wasn’t just the corporate media. No, the militant “anti-fascist” left had also been promoting this so-called “rally” as the Return of the Revenge of the Bride of Charlottesville. Affinity groups had been activated. “Anti-fascist” posters had been printed. Militant Twitter hashtags created. Snappy “anti-fascist” slogans, like “It takes a bullet to bash the fash,” and “Drive out Trump/Pence fascist regime,” had been applied to signs and banners. By Sunday morning, social media was buzzing with thousands of tweets and posts by people hoping to “punch a Nazi.” Antifa was obviously looking forward to some hardcore “preventative self-defense” … all they needed were a few hundred Nazis.

So it was a little embarrassing, to put it mildly, when only a dozen or two racists showed up, instead of the hordes of swastika-tattooed, Sieg-heiling Nazis the Resistance was hoping for. After all the energy and money they’ve invested in convincing millions of credulous liberals that America is being existentially threatened by legions of fascists “emboldened” by Trump (and somehow connected to Vladimir Putin), to then have this paltry bunch of racist misfits show up for “the big Nazi rally” … well, it kind of makes a mockery of the official narrative they’ve been selling everyone.

According to that official narrative, which the global capitalist ruling classes and the corporate media have been disseminating since Hillary Clinton lost the election, America and democracy are under attack by a vast conspiracy of Russians and Nazis (I’ve been referring to them as “the Putin-Nazis“), nominally led by Donald Trump, but actually controlled by Vladimir Putin, who is trying to annihilate “the West” and establish a Russian-Nazi Empire which he will personally rule with an iron fist.

As the story goes, back in 2015, Putin and his Russian Nazis, infuriated at us for fomenting a coup with our Ukrainian Nazis on their southern border, finally activated Donald Trump, who they had recruited back in the 1980s (and then blackmailed with a sex tape twenty years later) and who had been posing as a narcissistic billionaire ass clown while awaiting the “go code” from his handlers in Moscow.

Trump sprang immediately into action, announcing his candidacy on June 16, and set about “emboldening” the millions of American Nazis who had been patiently waiting for the day when a racist New York real-estate huckster would rise from the depths of reality television to lead them to victory in RaHoWa, or whatever.

Up until Trump announced his run, these American Nazis had been keeping a low profile by having swastikas tattooed on their faces, flying Confederate flags in their yards, burning crosses, posting calls for genocide on Nazi websites, and occasionally murdering people of color and bombing churches and day care centers. Once Trump hit the hustings, however, the Nazis abandoned all restraint and got right down to the business of posting Nazi frogs on social media, touring campuses with Nazi book tours, and gathering in upscale Italian restaurants to be photographed mimicking Hitler-salutes.

All this emboldenment culminated in the infamous rally in Charlottesville last summer, which, as the Resistance pointed out, was just like Kristallnacht … except that Charlottesville was not a pogrom and ninety-one Jewish people weren’t murdered. But, aside from that, it was exactly the same. Trump emboldened it, then openly condoned it, and given that he’s a Russian agent, we can assume the orders came directly from Putin, who presumably has agents in the fascist underground, possibly in Kessler’s grandmother’s basement, and who’s been poisoning people randomly in Salisbury (i.e., Putin has, not Kessler’s grandmother), and possibly orchestrating Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazification of the Labour Party, and who has been influencing people with Facebook posts, and God knows what other horrors he’s been up to … at this point, it’s hard to keep it all straight.

In any event, following the Charlottesville Kristallnacht, the Resistance went to work hunting down Nazis, getting them arrested or fired from their jobs, or just showing up at their pathetic little gatherings and stomping the living Hitler out of them. Being mostly idiots, they weren’t hard to find … or at least not the tikki torch Kessler variety. We’re not talking about the Aryan Brotherhood here. We’re talking about creeps like the Crying Nazi, Richard Spencer (another media darling), Andrew Auernheimer, a/k/a “weev,” groups like the Proud Boys (who you’ve probably never heard of unless you travel in “anti-fascist” circles), and other such idiots who have absolutely nothing to do with wielding power in the United States, or anywhere else.

Which, of course, is the point of the Nazi hysteria the Resistance has been barraging us with, that is, when they are not too busy barraging us with the Trump-is-a-Russian-Agent hysteria. As I have outlined in several other essays, there is no “Russian Attack on Democracy,” nor is there any “blood-dimmed tide” of emboldened neo-Nazism menacing the West. All that is really happening is, the global capitalist ruling classes are conducting a counterinsurgency PSYOP, the objective of which is to put down “populist” resistance to the spread of global capitalism. There is no clutch of global capitalists sitting in a room conspiring to do this. It is simply the system responding (as a system) to eliminate an internal threat and reestablish control of its environment, which in this case happens to be the whole planet (as global capitalism has no external enemies).

One part of this counterinsurgency PSYOP is to delegitimize anyone and anything that stands in the way of global capitalism. It does not matter one iota whether the opposition stems from what most of us think of as the “left” or the “right.” Global capitalism does not care. It simply cannot have major disruptions like the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump screwing with its Privatization of Everything (which it began in the early 1990s, immediately after the end of the Cold War). Such populist insurgencies feed each other. One day, it’s the nationalists abandoning the EU, the next day, it’s socialists boycotting Israel, the day after that it could be Americans demanding universal healthcare, subsidized college education, or demilitarization of the nation’s police. Things could get out of control pretty quickly.

The other part of this counterinsurgency PSYOP is manufacturing as much mass hysteria and paranoia about Russian agents and emboldened Nazis as humanly possible. This aspect of the PSYOP sells itself … opposing global capitalism is difficult work and not very rewarding. It’s so much easier (and much more fun) to hunt down imaginary Russians and Nazis. And if you don’t know any Russian operatives, or can’t find any actual Nazis, no worries, there are plenty of Assad-apologists, Putin-apologists, Alex Jones-apologists, terrorist-apologists, transphobic racists, anti-Semitic British socialists, and crypto-Red-Brown fascist entryists, not to mention Susan Sarandon and everyone else who didn’t vote for Clinton. You can hunt them down and call them names on Facebook from the comfort of your home. I’m relatively sure the Internet monitors at the Atlantic Council won’t mind if you do. Just watch what you say about the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the other valiant corporations and non-governmental organizations that are “working together to secure the future.”

Oh and if you do see any of those actual Nazis crawling up out of their hidey holes, or anyone who looks they might be about to commit an act of verbal genocide, go ahead and gouge their eyes out or something … because we can’t afford to give these Nazis an inch. Have a nice day, and happy hunting!