This article was originally published on 11/9/2017 at https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/, where Adam Piggott publishes regularly and brilliantly. You can purchase Adam’s books here.
The Nazi Larper event at Charlottesville occurred a week before I was due to go on holiday. This was somewhat unfortunate as I was strung out at the time and a little on edge. The holiday cured me of my angst and now I’m looking at the posts that I made that week with a more detached eye.
But the great Nazi argument continues on the alt right blogosphere. Not only that but it’s now making headlines in major papers. The Australian had two articles (last) weekend, both by Chip Le Grand, that equated the alt right with extremist movements. The Nazi bugbear was conveniently placed in the very first sentence of the main article.
Vox Day debated the nut job behind The Daily Stormer website on the topic of what is national socialism. I listened to some of the debate and the whole thing felt uncomfortably weak. I began wondering if I had simplified matters too much in my article on how to correctly label Nazis.
Then today I read two more pieces on the subject. Over at XYZ is a piece that defines Nazis as being the right wing of socialism. Apparently the addition of “of socialism” will settle the matter once and for all. But as I said, I think that the oversimplification of this topic is just playing into the hands of progressives. Yes, you’re defining what Nazi means but you’re defining it on their terms. They have set the battlefield and we’re reacting to them.
The basic premise of the progressive left is that the right can only exist in opposition to them.
But then we come to the second piece that I read. I had to read it a few times to fully understand the nuances. It’s courtesy of The Z Man and his position is that the Nazis, and Fascism in general, existed in a specific point in time as opposition to Bolshevism.
“Any effort to connect modern political movements to fascism, therefore, is nothing more than rhetoric or cynicism. The conditions in which both fascism and Bolshevism were born no longer exist and are unlikely to exist again …
“The fact is, debating the place of fascism and the relevance of Nazism to our current age is a pointless waste of time. It lets grifters like Dinesh D’Souza peddle books to well-meaning normies and it lets internet pranksters generate some laughs, but otherwise, fascism, as a political force, has no relevance in our age …
“The debate itself underscores the fact that we are at the end of a cultural cycle, one born in the Great War, defined by the Second World War and formalized during the Cold War. Modernism as a cultural force has come to an end. Those in charge of the brittle husk that is the prevailing orthodoxy keep reaching into their past for villains to maintain support among the faithful. Those in opposition find themselves without fully formed alternatives in the present, so they are rummaging around in the past for whatever they can find.”
Progressives accuse everyone of being Nazis because it not only works as an ad hominem smear, it also sets the current tone in a battle that ended 70 years ago. The key to understanding progressives is in their name. They haven’t progressed at all. They are simply regurgitating the same lost causes that require the same already long fallen and vanquished foes for it to make any vague resemblance of coherency.
To react to this is to not only play their game, it is to accept their deceit as truth. The terms left and right do not make any sense any more. As The Z Man points out, nationalism versus globalism is just as flakey.
“The great divide today is not over economics. It is biological. The cultural struggle that is developing, therefore, will be how our people will thrive in a world of modern challenges and modern threats. What will drive politics in the West, in the coming decades, is what Steve Sailer calls the world’s most important graph. How to survive as a people in a world dominated by races unable to escape the neolithic without white people, is not something contemplated by Bolsheviks or fascists. Therefore, they offer us nothing of use today.”
Trump’s election victory and the Brexit vote underline this new reality. The common people instinctively understand that biology is the real issue today and they are voting accordingly. The next Australian election will be decided on the issue of immigration. The current hoopla over gay marriage is in some ways simply a farcical distraction.
Arguing with progressives over whether we are Nazis or not is like arguing with flat earthers over at what point will we fall off the planet. The simple way to defeat the Nazi slur is to simply react to it as if someone had accused you of being a Conquistador. The other way is to not use the Nazi tag ourselves, like the brain dead idiots did at Charlottseville. Because using it not only makes no sense at all, it also demonstrates that the user has zero understanding of what is currently in play.
You can’t win a war if you have no clue as to what you supposedly stand for, and you can’t win if you persist in fighting a war that already finished some time ago.