Re: <nettime> In God We Tryst

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 25 Jan 2021, at 13:40, McCorkle T. Diamond wrote:

> This  idea has been on my mind for a while and is serious. The U.S.
> equivalent of de-Nazifying white supramacists needs to be done. When  
> -
> immediately. How, is the question.

Pretty hard, given that they've rightist lore about "brainwashing" and 
"mind control" has been an article of faith for them for many years. As 
with lots of conspiracy theorizing, you'll find lots of little truths 
scattered throughout the fictions. In this case, citations and 
references to '50s-era scholarly studies of mass-manipulation, 
interrogation techniques, and so on are a staple in Whitist fantasies. 
It serves a few purposes: it provides a ~genealogical link to 
McCarthyite anti-communist rubbish and POW–MIA dolchstossquatsch, 
which is both legitimizing and nostalgic. It serves as a preemptive 
rhetoric of projection ("You're brainwashed, not me!"). And it functions 
as a kind of conceptual vaccination, by internalizing a basic critique. 
It's worth noting that these functions all kind of blur together and 
form a sort of continuum — which is pretty much what epistemologies 
do, isn't it? So de-nazifying would mean de-epistemologizing.

In the case of Germany post-WW2, the fact that the country — its 
people, landscape, government, institutions, economy, and more — had 
been shattered certainly made the task of de-nazification more 
tractable. If the physical proofs that nazism worked were broken, it 
didn't require a big leap to conclude the nazi worldview was broken too. 
In the US now, it would require a leap-in-place: believers would have to 
wake up one morning believing all their Whitist stuff is true, after N 
days have passed, wake up and see, smell, hear, and do all the same 
things yet believe their Whitist nonsense is false. That kind of thing 
is extremely difficult for an individual to do, let alone a population 
stretches across an entire continent. I don't believe it's possible.

But the first thing we'd need is get past the starting gate and build a 
consensus that Trumpism is more 'like' nazism than not. The last four 
years of Arendt-splaining, scholastic quibbling about how Trump isn't 
*really* fascist, how 500K killed by the use of biological agents for 
partisan ends isn't *really* genocide, how using every legitimate and 
illegitimate lever of power to overturn or overthrow a democratic 
election isn't *really* a coup — all this has made it plainly clear 
that the historical analogy is a non-starter. Seriously, if Trump openly 
acknowledged a trove of documents that explicitly said "I will use every 
power I have to cause Covid to kill 25% of the Democrats in the US so 
the GOP can establish a one-party system that lasts for 500 years," 
within a few days you'd have Serious People arguing that Democrats 
aren't ethnically homogeneous and 500 isn't a thousand. The first step 
to solving a problem is admitting you have one, but the dominant chatter 
in the US is all denialist.

Fortunately, I think the whole epistemology analysis overstates the 
case. AFAICT, the number one factor that's caused the Qrazies, Three 
Percenters, and their spoor to chill out is the de-platforming of Trump. 
It takes a LOT of energy to maintain absurd, obsessive, and 
action-oriented beliefs, and that energy comes from relentless torrent 
of nazi media. Turn that off and it turns out the vast majority of the 
believers are deplorable but not much beyond that.

So, basically, the first big step toward de-nazifying the US would just 
be a functional FCC.

Cheers,
Ted
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