I’ve read a lot of Nazi history in the last fortnight. Not WW2 combat, stuff about ideology, policy, and personalities.

One depressing thing: the frequency with which the racist activities of the US South was either invoked or replicated by German national socialists. On many societal levels. Compare and contrast KKK rituals and things like the torchlight marches. Compare and contrast Jim Crow and the Nuremburg laws. I mean, Italian fascists contributed to the rhetorical style and material culture, too, but the overlap and borrowing from the South is big.

Further depressing thought: people in the US went right back to discriminatory social engineering and terror targeted at African Americans—including the works programs and infrastructure transformation of FDR, which took the legs out from beneath African American by cutting them out of benefits and making them eat the negative consequences of the changes—while inflating larger and larger the mythology that we had unique moral clarity because we fought the Axis.

Himmler described national socialism as “socialism for people with good blood” and if you look at the implementation, it was a kleptocracy. Take from the “wrong” people by merging criminality and identity—you are a crime because you are—apply asset forfeiture and collective guilt. Basically, there’s a pyramid chart of who gets how much booty, and always the threat that you can be dropped to a lower status, including the very bottom where you’re deemed an unperson and subject to resource extraction as opposed to just privation.

Furthermore, the concept of the “right” people means infinite mutability of who is in the in-group (and thus deserving) so the distribution of spoils is always a carrot/stick means of demanding compliance: that the ethos makes no sense—the pseudo-science race genetics, the conspiracy theory-rich reading of political philosophy, the empty set of threatening “elites” to be despised and dismissed—is a bug not a feature. All the concepts are instrumental…race, blood and soil, “culture,” et cetera…to justifying the hierarchy and the spoils system, and are deliberately hollow and inconsistent. Bad faith is built into the thought-world at a basic level.

The Obvious Diabeetus Nazis at the rally today are disgusting and can fuck off forever, but it’s important to note that there are a lot of folks who share their thought-world who are considered legitimate commentators on politics and policy, and a long US-distinct history of stripping people of alien culture of assets, justified by their designation—mostly based on white/non-white distinction. Camps and pogroms are terrifying and “never again” should be everyone’s watchword, but the subtler redistributionist system that national socialists push—and I’d argue we’ve had national socialists by another name in our politics since the get-go—we also have to watch out for.