The Rise of the American Nazi
The Rittenhouse Verdict is America’s Turning Point From Fascism to True Nazism
umair haque
Follow
Nov 20 · 11 min read
Image Credit: Jim Henton
It’s not often that I stare at the page with a sense of dread. That I feel sickened and disgusted by what I have to write. Because, well, my obligation is to tell you the truth so far as I see it. Why else bother, on my end, or yours? But I do feel that way today. Repelled, nauseated, horrified. I’m going to try to put the Rittenhouse verdict in perspective for you, because I think even at this juncture, Americans are badly, badly minimising it.
If you’re white and you believe that this really was self defense, perhaps you should take a second to read the room and try to understand why everyone else is horrified and upset.
You could see it coming from a mile away. I held back from tweeting all week “Rittenhouse is going to be acquitted,” because, well, Twitter’s awful. But it was as plain as day. A judge who wouldn’t let victims be described as…
victims. Who used the word — sorry, slur — “
a black,” as in
person. Who
interceded on his behalf every day, in more and more bizarre and flamboyant ways. An almost all-white jury. Nobody much was surprised, in the end.
And yet the horror of this moment hits deep. Let’s recap what Rittenhouse did. He’s a teenage Trumpist who carried a machine gun, and shot at three protesters, murdering two of them, and wounding another. He
murdered two people — political opponents —
in cold blood.
The defence called all this self-defence, and the jury bought it. Of course, it wasn’t self defence. If you’re carrying a machine gun, there are about a hundred things you can do before shooting to kill
multiple times, and then shooting someone
in the back with a “kill shot.” You can fire over their heads, you can fire at the street, you can fire in the air. You can lay down your gun and take out the bullets and walk away. You can do literally a thousand things instead of murder people in cold blood.
Murder is not self-defence when you are the only carrying a machine gun.
But the jury bought it. So did the judge. And then the conservative half of the nation went crazy. What does it all mean?
The Rittenhouse verdict is the moment that American fascism became American Nazism. In case it’s not clear what that means, consider that the Proud Boys called for “
bodies to piled up like cordwood” shortly afterwards, while conservative Congressmen called for “
Rittenhouse Day” to be made a national holiday. America’s conservatives are now openly celebrating mass murder — and calling for more. The far right is now indistinguishable from the everyday right. They both agree on one thing: murder is perfectly OK, desirable even, because it’s “self defense.”
That is a turning point. American fascism is now Nazism proper. A particularly brutal and chilling one. Those of us who’ve lived through and studied fascist collapse can tell you why. There is a difference between fascism and Nazism. Fascism is an abstraction, a way of thinking and feeling, associating, a sense of hate and rage and persecution, which welcomes violence in the future. Fascism is a political project. Nazism is the everyday application of fascist violence, the institutionalisation of fascism, murder in the streets by foot soldiers like Kyle Rittenhouse. And it’s what happens
next.
What’s going to happen to Rittenhouse? He’s going to get rich, famous, and powerful. He’s been
invited to intern on Congress. He’ll get book deals and a movie about him made and become a Fox News “analyst.” He will find himself walking the corridors of power, armed not just with bullets, but with money and fame and control.
You don’t get punished for murdering people in the streets, if you’re a conservative, if you’re on the hard right. You get
rewarded. You’re showered with money, fame, and power. They celebrate your name.
It’s exactly like ISIS or the Taliban.
So why wouldn’t there be more Kyle Rittenhouses?
Of course there will be. Every Trumpist with a gun is now going to be out for blood. There is absolutely no question about that. But what will those Rittenhouses want to do?
Rittenhouse murdered people who were at a Black Lives Matter protest. Jewish people. “Race traitors,” in white supremacist parlance. You can see the point being made here with extreme violence very, very clearly. It’s open season on Jewish people. Black people. Anyone who opposes the political project of fascism. They can
wave a plastic bag at you, desperately — while you wield a machine gun at them — you can
shoot them, once in the hip, once in the face, another time in the stomach, finally finish them off with a kill shot to the back — and you’ll be acquitted, emerge as a hero, win money, fame, and power.
Maybe all that will line you up for a seat in Congress. Maybe you’ll be tomorrow’s Tucker Carlson. Maybe they’ll name a street or a day after you. That is the transition from fascism to Nazism. And nothing, I mean nothing, can be more dangerous for a society.
Let me put that another way. This trial may have acquitted Rittenhouse. But it condemned
America. As
a Nazi country. You might not like me saying that, so consider the facts. A judge
intervened repeatedly on his behalf. The jury deliberated for days, to find a half-baked reason to acquit him that might sound vaguely plausible in public. There was little real doubt that Rittenhouse would ever go to jail. There was the feeling that systems and institutions would acquit him. And
they did.
So this trial is itself damning. The jury who acquitted him, the judge who interceded and pleaded for him? All that’s a judicial system, and a set of social norms, which are badly, badly corroded. That, too, is the transition from fascism to Nazism. When a judicial system exonerates fascist foot soldiers murdering people in the streets, that’s just fascism anymore, some abstract project — it’s real-world Nazism. When a jury acquits a teenage murderer because he’s one of them, and plenty of them buy the argument that killing unarmed people on the side of hated subhumans is “self-defence,” that’s not just fascism — it’s Nazism.
And what happened after that is Nazism, too. When a killer like Rittenhouse walks the halls of Congress, that’s not just fascism — that’s Nazism. Nobody in a democracy’s halls of power should have to suffer that disgrace — having to walk besides a murderer, who killed hated subhumans, and pretend that it all just never happened. Memory hole.
Fascism. When the entire GOP explodes in jubilation over
the acquittal of violent murder in the streets, that’s not just fascism anymore, as some abstract political project — it’s real-world Nazism.
They are cheering on murder.
These moments are great and grave turning points for societies. Why? Well, for the reason you probably already suspect. They teach the hateful part of a society that violence isn’t just permissible, but desirable. That you can commit atrocities on the streets, and not just get away with it, but become somebody through it. These are the moments which
create Nazi institutions, norms, and values.
I want to express this to you in simple but clear terms.
Think about that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Why is there? Well, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering: “Are they really cheering on
murder in the streets?” “Do they really want to annihilate people they consider subhumans?
Really?” “Do they really…
enjoy the ultraviolence, the bullets, the kill shots?” “
What is wrong with these people?”
A normal person is left with a sense of horror and repulsion over situations like these. All you have to do is watch the video. You will quite clearly see people being murdered, needlessly, by a man wielding a machine gun. That makes a person with a working moral compass, a soul, a functioning and healthy psyche,
feel sick.
Murder is not something that normal people enjoy. It is the most disgusting and repulsive act a human being can commit, period, full stop.
But here we have America’s conservatives literally seeming to delight, to revel, to
enjoy the act of murder. Not one has said something like, “well, that was terrible,” or “that was wrong,” or “that made me feel sick.” You see, they jumped straight to the bizarre and ludicrous defence of self-defence without seeming to feel anything at all. Their response is
not normal. It is deeply weird, sinister, profoundly
wrong.
It’s as if America’s conservatives feel a kind of
visceral thrill watching a
snuff film played out by Kyle Rittenhouse executing hated minorities in cold blood.
Isn’t it like that?
This whole time, there’s been a barely disguised grin behind that total lack of feeling. As if conservatives were gleeful, watching the murder happen, but couldn’t
admit it in public. And the moment Rittenohouse was acquitted, they exploded in glee. There wasn’t a moment of remorse. A thought for the victims. An expression of sadness or sorrow.
What does that tell you?
They are revelling and delighting in the violence. In
murder.
And that tells you something about the kinds of people we are dealing with now. They are not normal. They have been
fully radicalized. They are overjoyed with the most depraved forms of human behaviour there can be, like murder. Their minds and psyches don’t work anymore. They crave violence because it validates their notions of strength and weakness and persecution and being the master race and all the rest of it.
Only people who have been fully radicalised can delight in murder. Think of ISIS. Think of the Taliban. That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with now, only it seems to be most American conservatives, who clap and cheer in applause watching the Rittenhouse snuff film. That’s the end, folks. When a society gets radicalised like that — it’s
game over.
It cannot endure as a democracy.
Let me put it to you a different way. Can you imagine this happening in, say, Canada? Europe? Imagine some far-right teenager there pulled a Rittenhouse. Even conservatives would have reacted very, very differently. They wouldn’t have had the same slavering bloodlust. They would have reacted in horror and disgust. That’s because conservatives there are still, by and large, decent and normal people. They may be wrong politically, but they’re not
fully radicalised yet. At least the average one isn’t.
But America isn’t like this. It’s never been like this. Because, of course, it wasn’t so long ago that Black people were being lynched. That “interracial marriage” was illegal. America was the world’s largest apartheid state until 1971 or thereabouts. So the existence of today’s Kyle Rittenhouses is hardly a surprise — just a dismal, foregone conclusion. America’s always been the original Nazi society — the
German Nazis studied America intently, admiring it. And now, it seems, America’s heading right back to being what it always was. A place built on supremacy, socially bonded by hate, where ultra violence was used to enforce the distinction between human and subhuman.
Unwittingly, the jury in the Rittenhouse case, too, laid down the final plank of Nazism in America. Nazism is always about “self defence.” The German Nazis had “
lebensraum,” or “living room,” meaning they invaded Europe in self-defence. Nazis see themselves as the persecuted ones, the dispossessed master race, who only need to take back what’s theirs with ultra violence, to
prove it. Hence, the Nazi mind is always “just” acting in “self-defence.” It was “self-defence” when the Nazis began to kill Jewish people too, because of course, according to the hate, the
Jews were somehow the ones persecuting the Nazis.
We’ve come to know, those of us who are a little bit educated, the Nuremberg defense — “I was just following orders.” But what we don’t often know is the Nazi Principle underneath it. Orders to what? Orders about what?
Self defence. Of the tribe, of our “heritage,” of “our” way of life. I was just following orders, sir. So was Kyle Rittenhouse. Who ordered him to go out there and shoot some subhumans? I don’t have to tell you that, do I? Trump did. Every two bit conservative pundit did. Not explicitly. With dog whistles and flimsy code words.
You might think I’m exaggerating. Then let me tell you what “14/88” means. It’s one of the codes the white supremacist movement has long used. The 88? It’s HH, or “Heil Hitler.” The 14? It’s two fourteen word phrases. “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” followed by secondary (and less commonly used) slogan: “Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth.” I know, I know, the second one’s kind of comical. The Nazis want to protect…the beauty of “their” women? LOL. But see the theme, the point.
Self-defence.
Rittenhouse’s verdict is about all
that. About a jury buying into this larger Nazi frame of “self defence.” About a judge
offering it
to him. About judge and jury — almost all white — pulling together to “secure a future” for one of their children, Kyle Rittenhouse. About Rittehouse being elevated to power and fame and wealth, his “future secure,” because he acted to “secure the existence of our people.” Meanwhlle, AOC
gets death threats from sitting members of Congress — now she’ll have to walk the halls with
a literal murderer. Fascist? Super, super, mega, ultra
Nazi.
And it’s about one last, fatal thing, too. America — the white half, the conservative half, both, define it how you want — not just gleefully, thrillingly watching a snuff film, where Kyle Rittenhouse executes minorities in cold blood, then jubilant over his exoneration, but unified in the belief that all that was “self defense.”
It can never be self defence if you’re the only one with the machine gun.
The only way you can really believe that is you think that you have to “secure the existence of our people and a future for our children.” If you buy into the larger Nazi sense of persecution, and it’s craving for self-defence. You know who else uses that justification? Suicide bombers do. Radicalised Muslim paramilitary armies do. “Securing an existence for our people,” the true of faith and pure of blood.
How deep does white supremacy run in America? How much does white supremacy run America? Now we know. So much so that the Rittenhouse Trial became the moment where Trumpist fascism turned into true Nazism, murder on the streets, ultra violence celebrated by half a country, who appear to have lost their minds and souls.
Because nobody, and I mean nobody, should ever be happy about murder. Something has to be deeply wrong with you. That something, of course, is Nazism.
There are dark, dark days ahead for America —
the darkest of all. This was a turning point from fascism to Nazism, and that means more violence in the streets, more openly, more aggressively, legitimised and directed politically, used to destabilise society and democracy.
If you thought things in America were bad now?
Wait until today’s foot soldiers become tomorrow’s SS lieutenants and Gestapo commandants, tomorrow’s Congressmen. Think they won’t be capable of a Holocaust? Think the base won’t
want one?
Wait until there’s a Kyle Rittenhouse
in every town — and he’s aiming a machine gun at you and your kids. And he’s laughing, because he knows he can come to your door, kill you, and
be celebrated for it.
Umair
November 2021
