As I’ve mentioned here before, I am on BlueSky, and overall I quite like it. Friendly interface, effective tools for curating your feed and/or blocking and muting people, and most of the people I liked to follow on Xitter are now active there.
But one issue I have with it is, I think, related to the fact that most of the people there are there because they hate Xitter now that it has become overwhelmed with Nazis: people really, really want to be nice. Like, it’s not enough to just not actively call for genocide or throw around racial slurs, but in order to differentiate the new place from the old place, a lot of people really really want the new place to be as nice as humanly possible, and they are very annoying about policing the behavior of others.
At first, there was a big push to block every right-winger who joined the platform, before they could even post something. Fine! Cool, fine. Then, there was an admonition to never quote-dunk on anyone, because quoting a person’s bad idea and replying to them so everyone can see just spreads that person’s bad idea. I have mixed feelings on that, mostly because I enjoy seeing idiots get dunked on, and I enjoy dunking on idiots. But okay, if this new platform doesn’t like that, I won’t do it. Well, let’s be realistic: I’ll do it a little less than usual.
But in the past few weeks I’ve noticed a new form of behavior policing. Every week or so, there’s a new viral post explaining why we must accept the MAGA Republicans who are now suffering because of their actions, instead of admonishing them. For instance, here’s a person stating, “friendly reminder that the best case scenario over the coming years is that a lot of people say ‘I supported Trump but this isn’t what I wanted at all’ and when they do that it’s gonna be really, really important that we say ‘welcome in,’ not ‘fuck you, we told you so.’”
And this week:
“If you see someone who voted for Trump and is now facing unexpected consequences, I encourage you to sympathize with them and tell them they were misled and lied to.
This is an opportunity to recruit people against Trump. That has value and is useful.
Antagonizing them is not helpful.”
And I’m sorry, but this is where I simply must draw my line. Not only will I not be doing that, but every time I see another post on BlueSky telling me to be nice to a Trump voter, I’m going to go out of my way to find a Trump voter and be mean to them. I’m going to push a Cybertruck into some mud, rendering it useless. I’m going to spit on someone’s well done steak with ketchup on it. I’m not going to pick up my dog’s shit in the yard flying the Confederate flag. Et cetera.
I kid, but also I do not kid. Because here’s the thing, guys, I’ve been accidentally reading a lot about Nazis recently. I don’t mean the current Nazis running the US government, I mean the original Nazis, 80 years ago. Recently I’ve been randomly choosing books and movies without knowing what they’re about, and inevitably they end up being about Nazis. I swear to god, it was happening so often that to make sure I could take a break from all the Nazis I grabbed a random detective novel. It opened with this title page. I can’t win.
(It was Five Decembers by Edward Kestrel and it was really entertaining.)
Besides the detective novel, though, I’ve noticed that several of the books all shared a similar theme: the idea that Nazis were not evil.
Okay, admittedly I said that in a purposely unsettling way, so let me explain: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, Anthony Doer’s All the Light We Cannot See, and the film Zone of Interest, which I later learned was adapted from a book by Martin Amis, all explicitly push back on the modern myth that Nazis were a grand, inevitable, overwhelming evil that could be cut out of humanity with something as simple as a war. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
When it came down to it, the Holocaust happened not simply because of a handful of power-mad sociopathic bigots who were justly punished at Nuremberg. The Third Reich’s power came from the will of the people, who either actively supported it and joined in, or else remained silent and hoped to get through it.
You may think that this humanization of the average German Nazi sympathizer would lead me to embrace the idea that here, today, in Nazi America, it IS in fact incumbent upon us all to embrace MAGA voters who now regret their choices, so that we can gain a supportive majority and stop this monster before more lives are destroyed. Because of course, the people who voted for Donald Trump last November are not evil. They are our family members and our neighbors. They have their good qualities and their bad qualities. Sure, some openly embrace the proud Nazis in the new administration, like Elon Musk and his Xittler Youth in DOGE. But others just weren’t paying attention! Some just liked the anti-immigrant rhetoric, or the anti-trans rhetoric, or they just really thought we needed Trump to bring down the cost of eggs.
Yes, Trump and his fellow Republicans were very, very clear that they were going to cause this destruction, that they are fascists who want nothing more than to get rich while holding onto power at all costs, but outlets like Fox News provided them cover. Even CNN and the New York Times and NPR failed to adequately convey the simple facts to the majority of American voters, and so in a way, many of them WERE tricked. Like tricking a baby to think you’ve disappeared by hiding your face behind your hands, but sure. Tricked.
This isn’t new: powerful people have been convincing the poor and oppressed to fight amongst themselves for decades. Centuries! Millennia! It’s practically a feature of human society: keep the poor white man voting against his interests by convincing him that if he doesn’t, the poor black man is going to steal whatever he has left.
So yeah. A lot of Trump voters were victims of an elaborate scam.
But here’s the thing: I’ve been studying scams for several decades now, and one of the most obvious ways to know if someone is going to get scammed is knowing that they already got scammed before. Because even if a person realizes they’ve been scammed, they may not know WHY they fell for the scam, and so they haven’t fixed the root problem. Are they horribly lonely? Are they looking for easy money? Do they see other people as subhuman because of their race, gender, or other characteristic?
Personally, I have yet to see a groundswell of Trump voters expressing anguish and regret because random people who may or may not have committed any crime are being shipped to a concentration camp on Guantanamo. No, the very few who are upset are upset at extremely specific ways in which they themselves have been hurt: they lost their federal job, or their spouse was deported, or, most frequently of all, the price of eggs is still too high. These are not, and never will be, my allies. Because they haven’t learned any lesson. They have not developed empathy. They still support Donald Trump hurting people other than themselves.
After the fall of the Third Reich, historians have pointed out that an initial plan of strong “denazification” was eventually abandoned in favor of democratization, with former Nazis allowed to retake high ranking jobs. More than half of those employed with West Germany’s Federal Ministry of Justice were Nazis. Even high-ranking Nazis who had passed death sentences during the war were forgiven and allowed to move on, and the prevailing mood up through the Cold War was that the German people were, in fact, victims. For instance, Hannah Arendt noted that when chatting with a German gentile after the war and referencing her own Judaism, the response is “not a personal question, such as “Where did you go after you left Germany?”; no sign of sympathy, such as “What happened to your family?”—but a deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered (true enough, of course, but beside the point); and if the object of this little experiment happens to be educated and intelligent, he will proceed to draw up a balance between German suffering and the suffering of others, the implication being that one side cancels the other and we may as well proceed to a more promising topic of conversation. Similarly evasive is the standard reaction to the ruins. When there is any overt reaction at all, it consists of a sigh followed by the half-rhetorical, half-wistful question, “Why must mankind always wage wars?” The average German looks for the causes of the last war not in the acts of the Nazi regime, but in the events that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.”
In his book, “Aftermath, Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955,” journalist Harald Jähner details the extent of German victimization in detail. He discusses how prevalent the sentiment was that Germans had been duped by Hitler, as if evil had become like a virus and it’s not your fault if you catch it. Thus, Nazis who committed atrocities were free to live their lives in peace, at times even returning from hiding and retaking their real names. The anti-semitism, the nationalism, the bigotry all still remained inside them and wormed its way through the new, more democratic society where many Jews still had good reason to feel unsafe. For instance, he describes the Kielce pogrom of 1946, when 42 Jewish refugees returning from the concentration camps were massacred because of blood libel, and the survivors were forced to flee back to Germany, where they experienced virulent anti-semitism for not fitting in.
And thinking about all this, I just wonder: is that we want? Do we want to defeat Donald Trump, to stop his fascist administration, and then allow all the bigots who supported him to claim victimhood and move on with no further introspection? For Elon Musk’s little Nazis to end up in Congress because they say they were just doing as they were told?
And to use an example that I’m sure people have in their heads when they post these insipid pollyanna screeds on social media, do you really want to join forces with someone who was and still is okay with the deportations, with the trans erasure, with the destruction of women’s bodily autonomy, but they now agree that Donald Trump is bad because of the cost of eggs? Because I don’t. This isn’t about ideological purity. I can agree to disagree with someone on whether or not we should build more high speed rail, or how much to tax the 1%, or whether property tax should be tied to inflation. But not about the right of people to exist. Not about whether someone should be thrown in a camp for people with mental illnesses. Not about the real Nazi shit.
I’ll mention that Jähner doesn’t seem to agree with me on that, actually. In Aftermath, he argues that allowing Nazis and Nazi sympathizers to fade back into society was “a necessary prerequisite” to Germany being rebuilt as a democracy, a paradox that a New York Times reviewer labeled “infuriating, yet hard to dismiss.”
I’ll admit that I’m no professional historian. I’m just someone who accidentally picks up and reads way too much stuff about the Nazis. But I do have to wonder if it was, in fact, a necessary prerequisite to moving on. It’s honestly an open question, to me: when so many people are aligned on an “evil” purpose, is humanity’s only option to allow them to forgive themselves, or reframe themselves as the true victims, with no accountability, no fundamental change in their philosophy? Can we not expect more of people? Or do we have to treat bigots as venomous snakes who, once their political power is destroyed, have been defanged? So, who cares if there’s still a bunch of snakes slithering around your house? They can’t hurt you anymore. At least for 80 years or so, when their fangs grow back and they launch another genocide. Sorry, that metaphor was cruel to snakes. Some species CAN grow back their teeth but as far as I know no species do genocides.
Even if the general amnesty for the Nazis was necessary to rebuild Germany, I’d rather try something new for the new Nazis. Honestly, I don’t think a substantial number of Trump voters are going to switch side to make a difference in the current fight, which is being led by progressives and our remaining bureaucrats, lawyers, and judges who have spines. I don’t think we’re gonna push this movement over the edge because some doofus on TikTok just noticed that a check they get every month comes from the government and isn’t showing up any more.
But even so. FUCK that doofus. Because it’s too late: he voted for Trump and now we’re stuck with him for another four years or until he dies. And when it comes to the next election, he’s going to fall for the same scam again: some politician who will trick him into voting against his own social security check, because he hasn’t done the work and fixed the problem in his own heart: the bigotry, the fear, the loneliness. Being warmly welcomed into the Never Trump camp isn’t going to fix that. He has to do it. As a society, we can help: we can teach kids better critical thinking skills, we can elevate diversity, equity, and inclusion, we can encourage reading, we can prioritize higher education, we can make sure everyone has access to food and housing and healthcare, but we’re not going to do that for at least another four years. So in the meantime, please: let’s just fucking shun these Nazis. Or at least stop lecturing me because I choose to shun them.
