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[Editor's note: April Fools!] Look
Closer
Given
all the focus on health care reform, you may have missed this
scintillating tidbit: Clarence Thomas’ wife has formed a lobbying
group to serve members of the “Tea Party” movement. As one
news report oh so diplomatically put it, Justice Thomas “may
have some impartiality and conflict of interest” problems
ahead. Frankly, I’m not sure it changes anything: It just
makes plain another of the links between reactionary members
of the out-of-power party in government and the lunatic fringe
that presage the rise of fascism (as I discussed last summer
in “This Is It,” Looking Up, Aug. 20, 2009) and Hitler worship.
Now, I know, people like to throw the word “fascism” around
a little too freely, usually whenever they’re told they can’t
do something they want to do even though it’s dangerous or
antisocial. And right-wingers sure do like to draw little
Hitler mustaches on pictures of Obama for no logical reason.
But that doesn’t mean that all comparisons to Hitler are inaccurate.
It’s important not to let right-wing/libertarian/lazy abuse
of the “Hitler card” get in the way of recognizing his ongoing
influence in our arguably proto-fascist society. Nazism is
not something we want to risk repeating because we were afraid
to call a spade a spade.
Take for example, our dependence on cars. Most of us know
that it’s unsustainable in the extreme, polluting the air,
using up precious fuel reserves, and encouraging sprawl that
eats up farms and forests while hollowing out cities. Bad
news. But if you don’t understand the root causes of a problem,
you’ll never fix it. The divided highway system comes to us
from Hitler, who conceived of and began construction of the
speed-limitless Autobahn before an interstate highway system
was ever even floated in the United States. He intended it
to “build up the community of the German people.” (He also
designed the prototype of the Volkswagen Beetle on a café
napkin, to be a “car of the people.”) Apparently we thought
boxing people into their own vehicles and divorcing them from
their surroundings did a good enough job of building community
for 1930s Germany to want to repeat it here. And we wonder
why there’s a breakdown in civil society. (Thanks to reader
Bernie “Beatnik” Continelli for reminding me of this connection.)
If you doubt that we’re still living in a Nazi world every
day, look no farther than downtown Albany and the Empire State
Plaza: A vibrant neighborhood full of Jews and Italians swept
away for a sterile, militaristic, Bauhaus-inspired governmental
complex designed to impress visiting foreign dignitaries and
house an increasingly dysfunctional state government where
party loyalty (almost) matters more than violent assaults,
and certainly more than functionally serving the people of
the state (but when in doubt, blame things on “those people”—i.e.,
people from New York City, even though they contribute more
to state revenues than they receive.” But in any case, there
they are, fascist architecture dominating the heart of one
of America’s oldest cities. Too bad they can’t be toppled
like a statue of Saddam Hussein.
Even being a theoretically rabidly anti-fascist hippie doesn’t
protect you from the subtle and lingering influence of Hitler’s
thought. Take, for example, vegetarians. No other dietary
choice presumes to have the right to inflict itself on everyone
else. If you took an otherwise unrelated community event and
appended a potluck or meal that was required to be exclusively
gluten-free, kosher/halal, low-carb, in season/grown within
100 miles, or grown without the use of exploitative human
labor, there would be outrage and refusal, or at best amused
condescension for your obsessive devotion to a cause. But
despite our region’s struggling family farms for whom livestock
is an efficient and ecologically sound component of their
livelihoods, vegetarianism is made the rule of the day left
and right at public and private social and cultural events
without even a flicker of introspection.
Does this sort of fascist behavior sound familiar? Remind
you of one of the most famous vegetarians of all time? Of
course it does. Though he didn’t choose to prioritize spreading
his vegetarianism, that was a tactical matter. Hitler didn’t
tolerate ethical debate. His worldview wasn’t subtle enough
to incorporate golden means, moderation, or a humble look
at humans’ place within a complex ecosystem. No. He looked
for absolutes, final solutions, social rules based on emotion
that you would first be ridiculed, then shamed, then carted
away for flouting. Secretly, militant vegetarians envy his
effectiveness and so adopt his approaches.
If we’re going to build a better world, first we have to get
used to looking closer and not getting lulled into going with
the Nazi flow.
What’s that? You think it isn’t useful to see Hitler everywhere
you look? Look closer. Who’s feeling foolish now?
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
April
1, 2010
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