Only fortune prevented Jan6 from becoming a blood bath, at which point martial law would have been a very real possibility. They will be better at it next time, unless we make sure that there is no next time. Of course, first we have to convince those same you spoke of that there was a first time.
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That’s very astute. People with privilege have a strong desire to rationalize this behaviour in some other way besides “these famous and important people are monsters”. They become Nazi apologists for no reason other than a subconscious need to hold their world view in one piece.
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I don’t know if it’s astute, but it comes out of understanding how people experienced things like the rise of fascism in the 20s and 30s…
That’s a lot of it yeah… I think it’s also because some of them agreed with the nazis, and they gained benefits by aligning with them. I’m thinking of someone like Martin Heidigger, who fucked Hannah Arendt for 4 years, and then back the Nazis, because of the position it afforded him in the university system there…
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In my specific example (my nephew and sister at dinner trying to dismiss Kanye as “just joking”), they end up sounding like apologists, but for no good reason other than they don’t take the recent rise of fascism seriously enough. In their bubbles of privilege, the world is still 1995. Through that lens, Kanye’s remarks don’t seem as big a deal, I guess? I mean there’s no time period where those remarks are okay, but I hope my point makes sense. They don’t interpret his remarks as “I’m a Nazi” because they still live in an imaginary world where nobody is actually a Nazi anymore, thus there must be some other explanation. They haven’t caught up to where we are now because they haven’t needed to care about it (they are cishet white upper middle class normies).
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I wish people understood that once you get to the “camps” portion of fascism, it’s far too late…
I don’t know… I think it was a big deal then, too. It was around that time that David Irving was in court for holocaust denial in the UK and there was a definite problem with white power skins across the country (and in Canada, the UK, etc). It was not too long after the OKC bombing, Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc… I think it just seemed less urgent because there wasn’t a whole ass political party stanning white christian supremacy? I think if law enforcement had taken away different lessons from what was happening in the 90s (that there were serious attempts to build a world-wide white supremacist movement using the internet to spread their message), things might be bit different now…
Yeah… totally a privilege bubble. I mean technically, I should be in that category (cishet, white, upper middle class, etc… not very normie, though), but since I study history, it’s hard to ignore this stuff, because it impacts people I know and love, and even people I don’t know at all…
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Before 9/11 the FBI had an entire division devoted to shutting down the armed white supremicist militias and their ilk. They spent a lot of time and energy going after those guys in the 80s and 90s. They were seen as an internal threat. The bad outcomes from Waco and Ruby Ridge made them much more hesitant to move aggressively against them, until we ended up with the Mahleur Bird Sanctuary standoff and the Bundys. Of course, having the entire organization pivot to deal with “Muslim terrorists” after 9/11 didn’t leave much attention for the homegrown whack-jobs anymore. They were all patriots, right?
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