Hedgehog on a Diet; Or, America’s Heavy Petting With Fascism (Part 1)
FASCISM IS IN THE NEWS AGAIN, up to its old tricks by doing the only thing it can do well: Rallying an angry mob to destroy the lives of an arbitrarily selected group of people.
BUT FEAR NOT, MY FRIENDS! For I am here to remind you that fascism always loses in the end. But that doesn’t they won’t destroy the world on the way out, if we let them.
Can actually fascism win wars? Create a half-way decent piece of art or architecture that isn’t bombastic, derivative, and cold? Build a 1,000-year reich? Build ANY kind of government that doesn’t collapse after its initial charismatic leader dies?
Hitler’s artistic obsession with nostalgia, architectural precision, and lack of interest in his human subjects led him to be called the “Thomas Kincaid of Germany”.
Often not! Nevetheless, as climate change continues to limit restrict resources, destabilize the planet, and cause mass migrations, far-right, nationalist death cult authoritarians will rise. When times are scary, everyone wants a strong daddy. Sure Trump, Putin, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Orban are bad. But the ones who come afterwards, like Khan, GAMERTAG: HITLER-69–420, Immortan Joe, Sky Marshall Dienes, and the Allied Mastercomputer may be far worse.
THE REAL DANGER IS THAT UNCLE SAM HAS ALWAYS HAD A BIT OF A SOFT SPOT FOR AUTHORITARIANISM, particularly its marriage of wealthy oligarchy, private enterprise, and nationalistic/racial purity. America supported some pretty terrible regimes and political movements in the 20th century, provided they were ostensibly anti-communist (Dominican Republic, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Central America, Indonesia, Congo/Zaire, Iran, Guatamala, Nicaragua, post-War Japan, Haiti, Cambodia, The Philippines, South Vietnam, Afghanistan, and a couple of dozens more). For freedom. And also mineral rights.
IT’S A PROFITABLE RACKET! Fascism CAN can you rich and it CAN discover innovative ways to slaughter people. Besides using plenty of cheap, disposable slave labor (slaves lack strong unions), a classic economic practice in Nazi Germany was to “seize” wealth from racially or politically undesirable citizens and “redistribute”(!) it to the Right people. Nazis loved to share the wealth (with other Nazis), and there was much loot to be made in the German War & Holocaust Machine. Major companies that did quite well included Krupp, BMW, IBM, Bayer, Nestle, Deutchebank, Siemens, Standard Oil, Audi, Fanta, and Hugo Boss (all still in existence as of 2019).
I RECENTLY FINISHED READING “EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM” which was interesting, which I guess is a bland way of putting it. The case was more complex than I knew, insofar as he was less complicated than I thought. He was a grasping bureaucrat and “compulsive joiner” (weak, loser), but not much of a die-hard Nazi ideologue like other S.S. psychopaths. An extreme careerist, if anything. He visited Auschwitz once at the beginning, vomiting from the horrors he saw.
Then he returned to Berlin and redoubled his efforts to get the trains moving faster in order to please his masters: Heydrich, Himmler, and Hitler. He either had extreme cognitive dissonance or, more likely, he was such a hollow narcissist that he could easily compartmentalize the ramifications of his job when the people he he killed were reduced to numbers on balance sheets. He was sometimes rewarded with shiny medals, and this also helped.
That said, Hannah Arendt was kind of a bitch (sorry, it’s true), who at times seemed more sympathetic to Eichmann than to the Israeli courts or even the Holocaust victims. She regularly chastises the dead for so going easily to their annihilation. Easy for her to say. She was an educated, well-off German Jew who had the knowledge and means to escape when things got bad.
Not so much so for the poorer, less-educated Jews of Poland and eastern Europe, who she and most American Jews saw as embarrassing peasant rabble. It’s hard to fault a consistently dislocated people for not anticipating that THIS was going to be the time that they were fed to a genocidal-industrial-complex.
BUT WAIT WAIT CHIN UP, OLD CHUM BECAUSE
In 2009, AN ENGLISH ALBINO HEDGEHOG named Snowball who was put on a diet. Care was administered at St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Buckinghamshire. He was put on a diet of low-fat kitten food and an exercise regimen of swimming and running. After this, he was released into a sanctuary for hedgehogs. Although Snowball has likely have exceeded his life expectancy by this time, we would be within our rights to assume that his final years were peaceful. Some light jogging, sleeping, and the eating of berries.