August 13, 2019 • 37 mins
Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone.'
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M. What's Katie and mc Cody's Robert Evans here with
Cody Johnston and Katie Stole And this is a special
seven part episodes Hin the Bastards. Um, Hello, how are
you hell? Doing good? Ready? We're here already, We're back
(00:26):
from vacation. We watched the debates last night. We did.
We're all a little bit strung out, a little strung out,
so let me tell you, let me, let me explain
what's going on today. This is a podcast where every
week I talked about the worst people in all of
history and exhaustive detail, and a couple of months ago
we talked about a particularly shitty person named George Lincoln Rockwell.
(00:48):
Three part episode was to act as a a booster
for a go fund me campaign I had to raise
money for conflict journalism, and in exchange for getting funded,
I promised to write an audio book called The War
on Everyone, which I have written in which I have read,
and by the time this airs will be available on
the website if you go to the War on Everyone
(01:10):
dot com. Uh you following through on your promises? Look
in me following through on my promises? Uh? So. I
also went to Syria with the money made for that
and just now got back. Now. One of the caveats
of doing things like going to Syria for two weeks
is that it would cause me to fall behind and
collapse in on myself like a dying star if I
(01:31):
tried to keep up with my workload. So in addition
to running, just me reading the audio book on the
website for free ad free, as I promised forever you know,
no no cost, no ads, you can just listen to
the audio book. I'm also going to read the audio
book to y'all and have it as a special two
weeks section of the show because that allows me to
(01:53):
both do the trip and not die from overworking. It's
a wonderful plan, So thank you both for helping me
make this possible. Listening to I just want you to
hear how loud this script is. It's hefty. It made
the whole table shake three words. We got a lot
to get through. It's like, yeah, like sixty something pages.
(02:13):
Now to accompany us, I have, of course my traditional
sera lee throwing bagels, but I also have some new
throwing equipment. I have some Mots brand apple juice and
a plastic container. I have a metal Starbucks refreshers. And
I also have a metal can of Lacroix. I have
this mayonnaise squeeze to I'm very excited to see what
happens with that. And I have a partially open sack
(02:35):
of oranges. So, clement Um, the full drinks make me nervous.
We should all be nervous, A little bit slowed on
all this electrical garrity. Might I threw a can of
coffee earlier off the air and it didn't burst. You
also threw a knife at stove Sophie. I threw a
knife towards Sophie show she could open something with it.
(02:56):
What happened though, Well, she ran out of the way.
And also what happened What happened to the knife? Well,
it open when it hit the ground. Do you think
maybe it could have opened with hit her hand if
she tried to catch it. No, that's never happened with
a knife before. You people were not here. You people,
(03:17):
this is your audio. But I could throw the knife too.
That is a good point, Cody, thank you. I'm so sorry.
Well what's fun about that is it's going to bounce
off these soundboards and I don't know what will happen
that it's gonna be interesting. Everyone, protect your eyes. Is
that mayonnaise opened yet? Hasn't been opened? No, it has
been opened. Let's see if it has the foil on it? Yes, okay,
(03:38):
that's what I want to know. Should I brought it up?
And I shouldn't have said anything. Cody hates I do
hate mayonnaise. I have inappropriate nicknames for it. The Devil's come. Okay, Yeah,
see what I told you. Well, at some point in
this episode, I'm going to lick the bottom of this
(03:59):
mayonnaise in a way that will be calculated to make
you feel uncomfortable. Thank you, Thank me, though, I'm fine
with it you maybe Devil's com angels come. There's there's
a distinctly non zero change. We will all have the
apple juice. Sounds delicious, thank you. Yeah, I want the
(04:19):
apple juice, and then maybe one of those refreshers. Yeah,
there's there's more in the fridge. These are for throwing.
What do you do with them post throw? Though? And
everything about what happens to things after I throw them?
So I could scavenge for those potentially, Yeah, theoretically, theoretically,
but I'm gonna wait to throw them until we get
a little bit further into the show today, he's yourself, Cody,
(04:39):
You mean after we've started, after we finally started vamping
for twenty minutes. Yeah, well we had a lot to
get through. Yeah, we had to talk about Devil's com
Angels Come. But why would it be angels come, Cody
saying that I like all kinds of come Devil's Come,
Angels Come. Yes, do I regret it absolutely, because now
(05:01):
it's on the Internet forever and there's no way it
can be edited out. No, you can't edit audio. So
without further ado, the war on everyone. Thank you, Thank
you for that reaction. Chapter one, The Eternal Fascist m hmm.
On November nine, tenth night, Nazi stormtroopers and party members
(05:23):
took to the streets of cities throughout Germany. They burned synagogues,
shattered the windows of Jewish owned buildings, beaten, murdered hundreds
upon hundreds of Jewish people in the streets. This bloody
pegram is known to history as Christal Knocked, the Night
of Broken Glass. It's one of those moments in history
so shocking and brutal that it's become stained in our
collective consciousness. A single moment of horror forever printed on
(05:44):
the human psyche. Adolf Hitler and the other members of
the Nazi high command considered Christal Knock to have been
a failure. Rather than being enthused by the violence, the
German people were horrified by this outpouring of brutality. World
media harshly condemned Hitler's regime, and from their plush offices
in Berlin, the Fewer and his inner circle began to
revise their plans on how to sell anti Semitic brutality
(06:04):
to their people. M Joseph Gebbels decided that film was
the right medium to help crack this nut. His efforts
culminated in the nineteen forty production The Eternal Jew. The
essential through line of this particularly vile piece of propaganda
was the idea that Jewish people were an age old
parasitic force leaching off their host nations and almost habitually
working to undermine and destabilize them. As with most pieces
(06:27):
of racist propaganda, the Eternal Jew reveals more about the
men who made it than it does about Judaism. There
is no eternal Jew, but there might be an eternal Fascist.
Umberto Echo was probably the first person to really grasp
this idea and try to define it. His nine essay
or Fascism is still one of the single best pieces
of writing on the subject. Now Echo is an Italian novelist,
(06:48):
a literary critic, and a professor who was born into
Fascist Italy. In nineteen forty two, at the age of ten,
he won an award in a provincial competition for young
fascists where he gave an elaborate positive answer to the
question should we die for the glory of Mussolini and
the immortal destiny of Italy? I mean, that is a
good question. I asked myself that every day. Good question
for a ten year old? Should we die for the
(07:09):
glory of Mussolini? Um? No, you're not going to get
an award? Yeah? Yeah, no, no is now. Echo came
to hate fascism slightly later in life, and he came
to also love the partisans and rebels who fought back
against Banita Mussolini's regime. As he grew older and began
(07:30):
to analyze his world and the history behind the war
that had torn apart his childhood, Echo found himself drawn
again and again to a single question, what is a fascist? Now?
That's not an easy question to answer. Most dictionary definitions
you will find for the word fascism leave rather a
lot to be desired. Here's Miriam Webster's definition. A political philosophy,
movement or regime such as that of the FASCISTI that
(07:52):
exalts nation and often race above the individual, and that
stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader,
severe economic and social regimentation, and an enforcible suppression of opposition. Now,
like that works for the Nazis, but it does for
like Mao too, like every dictary very frustrating definition. Yeah,
it requires like the end to be what is happening? Yeah,
(08:17):
I like I and kind of that's so frustratingly much
on the internet, Like it's not they're not doing this. Yeah,
so well that's not how it works. Yeah. So does
that mean that, like the Nazi brown Shirts weren't fascist
because there wasn't a regime, but pinpoint the different stages, Yeah,
where they're fashist and yeah, German and twenties or like not,
(08:38):
what do you Yeah, Yeah, it's just it's like picking
an endpoint. And it also it's just like you can
apply that to Stalin and like if the same definition
applies a fascism applies to Stalin and Hitler. I think
it's a good definition of fascist. Also, people just generally
just sort of they switched the word fascist with authoritarian
and that's what they think it is. And no, it's
(09:01):
it's fascism is authoritarian, but authoritarianism isn't fascism. And it's
a square aramb us kind of deal. It's very frustrating, Yeah,
And I think one of the reasons that that definition
is so frustrating to me is that it equates fascism
to like every other system that ends with like dictators
and stuff, like you said, with authoritarianism. And I think
one of the things that it leaves out that's most
(09:22):
important about fascism is that fascism isn't just a system
that involves dictators. It's a system that arises out of
and murders democracies. Like that's where fascism tends to come from,
because it kills republics. It's a frustration with democracy. It's
frustrating a lot of things. It's action to a lot
of things. It's a reaction to a lot of things,
but specifically it um it like like most of their
(09:45):
dictatorships come from another kind of dictatorship, Like you know,
we got the U. S. S R. Out of the CSARS,
and like neither government was good like as opposed to
like we got the Nazis out of Uh, it's a
republic by my republic. Yeah. That's why I like a
lot of what Robert Paxson writes too, because he goes
through the fascism scholar Robert Pattinson actually stages that you
(10:08):
go through. It's like, well, no, it starts here, and
then you go to this phase and then it's this
sort of thing, and it's it's a it's an evolution
of a movement less than it is, like here's what
I want the government to be. Yeah, And what I
like about Umberto Echo is that he understood that fascism
was a singular and specific thing, accepted from the rest
of authoritarianism, and deserved to be studied separately because of
(10:30):
its ability to kill vibrant, healthy democratic societies. Um And
I like that echo when he tried to define fascism
and that or fascism essay, he wasn't just sort of
looking back into the past. He was trying to analyze
kind of the things that are timeless about the mental
impulses behind fascism, so that he could provide a definition
that would be useful to recognizing it again when it
(10:53):
came about in the future, rather than just like being like,
is this what the Germans were doing in nineteen twenty, No,
then it's not fascism. Yeah, is like a good start
to the conversation about what is fascism? Yeah? Yeah, it's
a great start. Um. So in that essay he wrote, quote,
I think it is possible to outline a list of
features that are typical of what I would like to
call er fascism or eternal fascism. These features cannot be
(11:14):
organized into a system. Many of them contradict each other
and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.
But it is enough that one of them be present
to allow fascism to coagulate around it. Like that idea
that it's like there's a couple of different things that
fascism like it's magnetic that it pulls these things in
and it becomes fascism. Um, But it's not guaranteed to
(11:34):
do so, because each of these things can form other
things too, Yeah, and they can fall apart. Yeah, yeah,
you know, it can start and then it just doesn't,
like it did. We talked about Oswald Moseley together, like
it started to in England but then fell apart. Yeah,
it doesn't always continue to that endpoint. Marion Webster was right,
but it's still that was fascism. It's just not the Yeah,
(11:57):
so echoes concept of eternal fascism start it with a
cult of tradition, the belief that truth has been already
spelled out once and for all, and we can only
keep interpreting its obscure message. Um, whether you're looking at
like the Nazis and their concept of like the the
Aryan civilization, or you're looking at say modern American fascism
and this idea that there was a point in which
America was great and perfect that we need to get
(12:19):
back to. Like that that that seems like a really Yeah,
that seems like a key aspect of fascism. Um now
it it You could kind of translate this to conservatism,
which doesn't mean that conservatives are all fascists, but it
does mean that fascism always just states inside a conservative movement. Yeah,
usually like a reaction to like liberal movements. Liberal developments. Yeah, yeah,
(12:43):
and if that's another frustrating thing where like you don't
want to say, like you're all fascists, but it is
there is no end of like a lot of these
beliefs and a lot of these things you're holding onto
can uh like it's coagulated around it. And yeah, I
just the word coagulate. I love the word coagulated. I
(13:03):
think a good way to look at fascism is like
conservatives are the crew of the Nostromo in the first
Alien movie, and fascism is the chest burster that comes
out of that guy's chest dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like
he's not an alien, but he gives birth to one
in the same way that conservatism can give birth to fascism.
(13:26):
And then yeah, and then they help, and then they
can many can slowly turn into them. Yeah, and some
of them fight it with flamethrowers but fail because they
wind up getting into the vincent stuff. And like, you
shouldn't fight an alien in the events, nor should you
fight fascism on its own terms. There's a lot of
political lessons to be gleaned from Alien And that's your
next audio book. What Ridley Scott's Alien has to teach
(13:48):
us about the nature of fascism. So the next thing
that Echo stated as sort of like a key to
fascism or is like a piece of earth. Fascism is
a rejection of modernism, particular, literally a rejection of modern
depravity as traditionally marginalized in a press group stand up
for human rights and modern societies. Fascists will inevitably seek
to reverse these trends. The first books The Nazis Burned,
(14:11):
where Magnus Hirschfeld's library of research on transgender individuals. Hatred
of transmitted women is still a central unifying tenant of
modern fascism. And then there's the cult of action for
action's sake, expressed as a worship of the soldier, of
the man with a gun in his hand, willing to
do violence at a moment's notice. For fascists, according to Echo,
thinking is a form of emasculation. Great line, Yeah, king
(14:33):
is a form of emasculation. Yeah yeah. Thinking too long
about something is like it's unmanly. You just got to
take action now. Echo also recognized a rejection of criticism
and disagreement as central to fascism. Quote, the critical spirit
makes distinctions and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. Now.
I find this interesting because in our modern era, eight
(14:56):
Chance poll Board is one of the largest gathering places
for neo Nazis on the Internet. It's the community that
spawned both the christ Church massacre and the Pawey Synagogue shooting.
It was formed as a direct result of gamer Gate,
and gamer Gate was of course a reactionary movement inspired
by rage at video game critics and reviewers, primarily female
video game critics interviewers. We're talking about. Yeah, I find
(15:20):
it interesting that back in the nineteen nineties, Echo looking
back at the past determines that, like, it's a rejection
of criticism. Um. And then where do we see this
modern movement first really start to bubble up in a
meaningful way. It's two thousand and fourteen in gamer Gate.
That's the precursor to the Trump campaign in a lot
of ways. Definitely has a lot of the same shades. Yeah. Yeah,
(15:41):
really interesting to me, and part of why I think
echoes analysis is so good because you can look forward
from the analysis and see that he really nailed something. Yeah,
mostly everything he says in that it's like oh yeah, yeah,
fuck fuck yeah. So racism and hatred of diversity, exploitation
of the natural, fear of differences. Uh, these are the
(16:03):
other other characteristics of earth fascism. Echo recognized earth fascism
as derived from social frustration, generally rising out of an
appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from
economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by
the pressure of lower social groups. You could translate that
in America as fear of white people in the disappearing
(16:25):
white middle class of you know what is reality just
like growing a quality of lower other color and social groups,
but looks like losing grounds if you sort of self victimization,
kind of like viewing yourself as a victim when that's
not actually not quite seems like everywhere all the time
would be ripe for fascism because you know, hit complex
(16:48):
society I think is yeah, there's diversity and democracy and
things like that and just like um, you know, a
manipulation of these innate human based years. Yeah, a complex
free society is never more than about four years away
from fascism, I think. Yeah. I think America is especially
(17:10):
unique to just because of our our claimed to drive
for like multiculturalism and and you know, or a country
of immigrants, all that kind of talk. It's easy to exploit,
yeah and blame. Yeah, and it's it's like part of
the appeal of fascism is that in times of growing inequality,
(17:30):
it promises all of its members a type of equality,
which is, like, we're all members of this nation, right,
But that's like great, even though like we may occupy
very different places within this nation, Like we can all
feel superior to everyone else because this is the best
nation for these people. I'm a winner. I'm one of
(17:50):
the winners in this world. Because you're here, you're a
winner too. Yeah. It's more like class collaboration, yeah than
class conflict. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's kind of key. Now. Fascism,
of course, requires an absolute rejection of pacifism. Since life
has lived for struggle, war is permanent under fascism. We
see this translated in our modern fascist movements in an
(18:11):
obsession with the tools and aesthetics of war, black and
camo and tactical everything. Earlier in the day I wrote this,
I was browsing Twitter and I came across a photo
of someone's bugout bag. He wrote in the Twitter post,
how's this for a bug out boogaloo set up. Now,
if you aren't aware, Boogaloo is a far right term
for the civil war that they believe is coming, as
in Civil War two Electric Boogaloo. Now, this fellow's emergency
(18:33):
preparedness kit for Boogaloo contained no food, no water, no
medical supplies. His gas mask did not have actual filters
with it, but he did have an a R fifteen rifle,
a twelve gage shotgun, a glock side arm with a
thirty round magazine, and a forty four magnum revolver, along
with a tomahawk as a throwing knife, stylish green body
armor the same shade as his tactical backpack and helmet. Um. Yeah,
(19:00):
thirty pounds of weapons and no food. He's like just
like hyperma cheese, more like gamer dorks. Yeah, he's going
to be able to shoot his food, you guys. Yeah,
there were a lot of veterans being like, so you
brought four different calibers of weapons. Yeah, that's really Are
you planning on losing a lot of them? You know?
And are you planning on like carrying different AMMO for
(19:21):
all those different guns? Yeah? Very dumb. Yeah, but seeing
This post brought to mind what Echo wrote about the
fascist armageddon complex quote. Since enemies have to be defeated,
there must be a final battle, after which the movement
will have control of the world. But such a final
solution implies a further era of peace, a golden age,
which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader
(19:42):
has ever succeeded in solving this predicament, you know, Yeah,
because they get murdered. It doesn't work over well, because
it's a death call. Yeah. Interesting that it's the The
constant warfare is interesting too to me, just because of
the United like the United States being very unique to
that and just like maybe two years of its entire existence,
(20:06):
it's not been a war maybe, I mean, we had
we had the we had the nineties. We didn't get
involved in much war in the ninth much, but there
are still war, yeah, police action. But it's like now
this age where it's like, I mean there are people
that uh, I don't maybe not yet, but within like
a year or two, we'll be fighting in Afghanistan, but
(20:28):
they will not have been born when we got that's
i mean, you're you're born in you but at this
point that Afghanistan is not a war, it's a tradition.
Well exactly exactly. It it's weird how it starts to
not I mean, it feels like a war, but it
doesn't feel like a war. It's just been this lingering
thing that's going on. We've got troops over there. It's
(20:50):
a state of we don't even see a lot of
like what happens. We don't remove from it completely any who. Yeah,
speaking of permanent war and after Anistan, it's time for
an AD pivot. Yes, for the products and services creating
a little pivot. Don't profit from the war in Afghanistan
(21:11):
that you never know, you never you never know. Buy
these products unless the product is the war in Afghanistan,
which would be a weird product to advertise on my podcast.
Don't buy it. That sounds really expensive too. It's not
a good deal. It's not. It's just all the money
we would spend on healthcare Act we were a sane country.
(21:34):
I don't buy that anyway. Ads, we're back. So if
he was very proud of me for that ad transition,
moving like pros clipping right along, So back to her fascism.
(21:55):
Umberto Echo goes on to name contempt for the week,
the cult of the hero, machines moo, and a sense
of tempt for women and femininity, as other key aspects
of incipient fascism. For a fascist movement to evolve, a
number of these things must coalesce together, generally around the
personality of a single charismatic man with dreams of power.
This man will, of course, never admit to desiring power. Instead,
(22:15):
he claims to speak for some broad mass of the population,
a claim to majority that stands behind him at his movement.
Echo called this qualitative populism and noted that in the
modern era, quote, we no longer need the pas of
an Easia in Rome or the Nuremberg stadium. There is
in our future a TV or Internet populism in which
the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can
(22:37):
be presented and accepted as the voice of the people. Yeah,
not that some amount of years later. Yeah, Yeah, that's
the selective. The qualitative populism is the one where I'm
always it's just the most obvious thing. Yeah, And no
one seems to, at least in the media, seem to
(22:59):
care or like pointed out that, like he's not actually
speaking for America. Yeah, he says he is. I don't know.
I just don't like it. I'm not a fan, not good,
don't know who I'm talking about. Just yea hypothetically, hypothetically,
if there were a fascist in America, to general, he
could have been a her. So that's what I've got
to say about umberto echoes or fascism. Um. I think
(23:21):
it's a really good analysis. I think he gets a
lot of things, but I also think he missed something. Uh.
And since y'all are listening to my audio book, or
in this case, helping me present my audio book, I
hope you'll forgive my arrogance and adding one new element
of fascism to echoes list comedy. Irony might be a
better way to phrase it. Uh. Fascism often wraps itself
(23:43):
in humor as a way to disguise it's true intentions
as black comedy and test the waters for its most
extreme goals. If you're someone who's paid attention to the
rise of fascism on the Internet, if you followed my
work on a Chan or read about the ault right,
and you understand what I'm getting at, But you probably
view this as a new wrinkle in the history of fascism.
The truth is that it goes back all the way
to the beginning. If you want a picture of the
(24:06):
personality of the Fewer, what he was like on a
day to day basis, to the people he liked and trusted.
Hitler's table talk is about the best resource that exists.
Starting in nineteen forty one, Martin Borman, Hitler's secretary, convinced
his boss to allow a series of aids to transcribe
his private conversations for posterity. Oh my god, Oh yeah,
it's quite a read, Katie, Oh my god, how did
(24:27):
I not know about this? Oh? It's it's some hot fire.
Also sounds really stupid of him to allow. Yeah, well,
but yeah. So some of these were the traditional hitlery
ranting monologues you'd expect. Others were just, you know, chats
between courses during dinners and the like. There's a lot
of debate as to how truly off the cuff any
(24:47):
of these were, but Hitler's table talk is generally regarded
as an incredibly useful resource for understanding the minds of
the top Nazis. In his nine book Explaining Hitler, journalist
and historian Ron Rosenbaum turned to the Table Talk record
several times in his attempt to understand in essence, how
bouncing baby Adolph turned into the genocidal warlord we all
know and hate. At one point, he focuses on a
(25:09):
single passage, in particular quote the passage in which Hitler, Himler,
and Hydrick Reinhard Hydric, one of the architects of the Holocaust,
are ostensibly debunking the rumor, which they know to be true,
that the Jews are being exterminated. It's silly that people
should say such things, Hitler piously avers, when we're only
parking the Jews in the marshy parts of Russia, although
he adds that if it were true, it would be
(25:30):
no less than the Jews deserved. It seems to me
a transparent charade in which the three architects of the
Final Solution were becoming the first Holocaust deniers, the first revisionists,
so to speak, and doing so in a particularly repulsive,
winking and nodding way. So Rosenbaum brought his theory to
another scholar, a fellow named Lang, who agreed that this
was probably evidence of Hitler and company concealing their crimes
(25:51):
via humor. Both to keep explicit discussion out of the
historic record, and so that those in the know could
laughingly revel in their crapulence. Lange said, the invent fiveness
seems to me in some ways to really come to
the heart of the matter, even though it's subtler than
the brutality. Primo Levi used the phrase needless violence, which
is not quite what I'm saying. It's the element of gratuitousness,
it's but it's more than the gratuitousness. There seems to
(26:13):
be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified
in art forms, in which in art we usually take
to be indicative of a consciousness and artistic consciousness of
an overall design. Now this is interesting to me because
one of the things that you find when you really
browse through a lot of eight chan conversations is a
lot of talk, joking talk about how the CIA or
the FBI carried out these false flag attacks, which if
(26:35):
you just read it straight you could see as people
like legitimately thinking that there was a conspiracy to slant
to their website. But I think the more I read,
none of these people really believe in that. It's just
it's part of the joke. Like they're joking that, like
these massacres were carried out by like a state agency
to slander fascist website, like to people that they agree
(26:56):
with and they're glad, yeah, and are happy that they're
doing it. Yeah. Yeah, So for Nazis and their modern
descendants descendants, shittiness is a form of art. It's never
enough to gain power or even to hurt or kill
your rivals. These people's ultimate goal is to shift the
nature of reality itself to be further in line with
their own narcissistic beliefs, and irony is a powerful tool
for achieving that. Lane goes on. Brutality is straightforward, it's
(27:20):
not imaginative. This isn't just brute strength. It seems to
me that there is a sense of irony constantly. The
sign over the entrance gate to Auschwitz, you know, are
bite mocked, fry work will make you free. It's like
a joke. It is a joke, the orchestra playing as
these people go out to work. We're back now. Hitler's
(27:43):
sense of humor is not something we talk about much,
but perhaps we should. Ironic humor was used regularly by
the Early Fewer during his rise to power. In August
of during one of his first speeches, Hitler told an
audience that he supported quote removal of the Jews from
our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence.
We congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company.
(28:04):
This line was met with widespread laughter. It's yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Lucy Dividowitz, the Holocaust scholar who brought that
speech to Rosenbound's attention, believe that the joke and the
thing Hitler's audience was laughing at, was not the line
we congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company,
but the earlier line, we do not begrudge them their existence.
(28:25):
And when to quote again from explaining Hitler, this Divido
which suggests is an inside joke for party members who
know the secret meeting that in fact they do begrudge
they are dedicated to eradicating the Jews existence. Now, reading
that quote brings to mind a post I found on
h n's poll board during one of my regular sessions
browsing that image board, and between the mass shootings carried
out by its members and one threat, I found a
(28:45):
non's discussing the value of comedic memes about mass killing
is a way to camouflage their very real efforts to
inspire more massacres. One user typed, the best thing about
this is that they, being the FBI and the CIA,
will never be able to discern an ironic tongue in
cheek frog poster from a man of action like Arrant
or Bowers. We have all the plausible deniability in the world,
and unless they're going to start locking people up for
(29:06):
ship posting, we have nothing to fear. Yeah, it's okay,
it's the okay sign Yeah. All the also an illustration
of how bad their sense of humor is. Yeah, these
aren't jokes. Yah, what are you doing? Just done? Sophie
is signaling her membership and the far right delightedly, might
(29:29):
I add delightedly. In the decades since Adolf Hitler shot
himself in that bunker, ironic racist humor has been one
through line connecting every Nazi and fascist movement that's arisen
around the world. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founding father of
American Nazism, had his minions dress up in racist guerrilla
costumes to interrupt events and distract attention from civil rights activists.
The main weakness of Rockwell's humor was that it was
(29:50):
far too overt and hateful to be viewed as ironic
by most Americans. But down through the years his descendants
have gotten much better. It's straddling the fine line between
dog whistling to people in the know and maintain plausible
deniability one A good example would be Count Dankula, a
failed UK political candidates. Like before, you said, yeah, we're
on the same Yeah, they're vibing right, we are vibing hard.
(30:14):
Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate who first achieved
notoriety for a video in which he trained his dog
to sig hyle. When he was fined for this, he
was able to frame himself as a free speech crusader
and raised thousands of dollars while claiming to fight back
against political correctness. There is tremendous power within humor. It's
why satirists and comedians are some of the first people
purged by any dictatorial regime. It's why nothing is more
(30:36):
important to fascist than to look cool and serious and powerful.
Getting hit by a milkshake is worse for a Nazi
than getting hit by a brick. Blood looks cool, Milkshakes
look like milkshakes. But humor also has an incredible ability
to act as a sort of ideological trojan horse, allowing
ideas to sneak into someone's mind cloaked as jokes. Actual
fascists know this. It's why the Nazis on eight chance
(30:58):
been so much timecrafting memes to bread their ideas. But
this process can take place even within the head of
an individual fascist. We're back. In two thousand and sixteen,
Joe Cox, a member of Parliament for the Labor Party
in the United Kingdom, was shot and stabbed to death
by a fascist terrorist named Thomas Mayer. Mayor's chief stated
influence was an earlier British fascist terrorist, David Copeland. Back
(31:19):
in the year two thousand, Copeland killed three people and
injured dozens more by setting off a series of nail bombs.
He picked the locations he bombed because they had high
Black and Asian populations. According to the Guardian quote, he
came up with the idea when a bomb went off
in Centennial Park during the Olympic Games in Atlanta four
years ago. He told the police that the notting Hill
Carnival was on at about the same time, said Mr Sweeney,
(31:41):
He began to wish that someone would blow up the
Notting Hill Carnival. To start off with, he treated the
thought as a joke, but he could not get it
out of his head. The thought became stronger. He woke
up one day and decided he was going to do
it now. Last year, I carried out a study for
the journalistic collective Belling Cat. I come through hundreds of
online conversations between the fascist activists who planned first Deadly
Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. My goal was to
(32:03):
find out how these men had been red pilled or
converted to their extremist beliefs. Over and over again, these
fascists mentioned the influence ironic jokes that had on their
ideological evolution. One conversation stands out in particular to me.
In it, one fascist recalled how his first red pill
came during an argument over an anti Semitic joke Kisoft
posted the Facebook. The jokes spawned an argument and quote.
(32:23):
Then I saw people negging Jews, so I joined in
as a meme first off, then all of a sudden,
it's stopped being a meme. Much of the War on
Everyone will discuss moments in the history of the American
fascist movement that are much bloodier and a lot less
silly than ship posters on the Internet. We will talk
about a hard bitten militiamen, vicious acts of terror, and
methodical and methodical plans of genocide that are anything but ironic.
(32:45):
When we talk about the original Nazi Party, or George
Lincoln Rockwell, the American militian movement that culminated in the
Oklahoma City bombing, or today's meme spouting ironic fascists, It's
easy to look at all these things as separate, discrete
problems spouting up at different times and inspired by different causes.
But I think that's as wrong as looking at men
like Timothy McVeigh or Brenton Tarrant as lone wolves. Each
(33:05):
Swellen surge of fascism across the world and across time
is more like the eruption of a cold sore. The
underlying causes a virus that is ever present. During World
War Two, we bombed it into submission for a while,
but like the herpes virus, it never quite goes away.
It continued to learn underneath the surface, hiding an off
color jokes at bars, handprinted magazines, and eventually Internet forms
(33:25):
until our nation's immune system grew weak enough for it
to flare up once more. It's anyone's guess what happens next.
Man comparing fascism to herpes is very good. Yeah, that
that's really like the one that, like I've considered like
cancer and like a virus, but like that you can
suppress that. They're really there isn't a cure for like
you can, but it's going to come back. Yeah. Cancer
(33:47):
is closer to capitalism, just to keep growing and growing
and going. Yeah. Yeah, so that's chapter one. I feel
like I should sign off by throwing one of these
cans as you wanna have a preference as to what
I throw first. Mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, Yeah, he did. It almost
hit Katy. Cody would have been bad. Well, it wasn't
(34:11):
real bad. It didn't explode. Fine, it didn't explode. Cody
says he hates mayonnaise, but he was secretly hoping that
Devil's coming. He's lying. That would have been like Satan
ejaculating on the back of his head. I was hoping
that too, that it would just burst. Yeah, it was.
I was really hoping. I guess that's like the best
place for it to happen in my head. That's like
(34:31):
acidic started burning my scalp and then I die. Cody,
if you had a bunch of mayonnaise in the back
of your head, you would be mad for days. I
would be mad for days. I would leave, he would leave.
He would never stop obsessing about it. He'd be asking,
do I smell like mayonnaise? Is there? Still? It feels greasy?
I just feel like it's greasy. I'm gonna go wash
my hands again, even though it didn't touch my hands.
(34:52):
We have a washing machine here. You could just do
the next episode or two naked inside the washing machine.
Well know, take back be in the washing machine. I
feel like I would have to go in the washing
machine to take care of it. My first cat died
in the washing machine. WHOA just too real? Didn't I
fu fascism? I thought I thought of that. When in
(35:16):
the episode The Airs Tuesday, we do that cat segment
and one of the cats survived in the washing machine.
I was like, oh, case cat didn't. Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Yeah, clothes, yeah,
actually and misremembering it was the dryer still just as bad,
way worse, way worse. Okay, Yeah, he thought it was
(35:36):
cozy Sophie. Her name was Barbie. I wasn't creative. I
was three or four. Anyway, I don't have damage. You're fine.
Speaking of damage, you'll want to slug. Yeah, we're already there. Yeah. Yeah,
you know what. We got a Patreon some more News
(35:58):
Patreon dot com slash more News. Didn't dot com slash
some more News. I'm not a practice. Uh yeah. We
got a podcast called even more News. We got a
YouTube show called some more News. That's the name of
a Twitter account. Also, yeah, and I'm Katie Stole on Twitter.
I'm Dr mr Cody on Twitter. Can't change it now,
can't d r M I s t r cr do.
(36:18):
I basically just used his aim screen name. Didn't there
was my uh my blogging name when I wrote for Cracked.
What might column is Dr mr blogg with Dr mr Cody. Yeah,
I remember that back in the day. Well, I'm not
going to plug anything at the end of this, and
I'm going to stare at Sophie while I talk about
my refusal to plug anything, because I think it's going
(36:38):
to get old if I plug everything. At the end
of every one of these episodes, Sophie's walking over to me.
Now she's furious. I can see the rage. Like she's
shuffling like like the printing of a book. Oh nope,
she's just here to depose it. So this episode is done.
There's another fucking six ones to come. So strap end.
What do I plug? Sophie T Shirts? Buy a T shirt?
(37:04):
Anyone's T shirts store? So you guys want to plug
your store? Uh something? It's a te public store. Yeah,
if you go to our on Twitter, I believe that
Penn tweet has to like to our store. Great, excellent.
We also have a T public store. You know, go
to our website you're wanting the bastards dot com for footnotes,
and also to go to our merch store. We have shirts.
(37:27):
We have no comment. Wow, you're fired. Well this is
the end of the podcast. But you know, follow at
bastards plot on the tw Instagram. Yeah, it's ta public.
It's too public. Was right, it's public. We've all, all
of us have been traveling and gone and this is
we're easing back into it. We're easing back into it.
(37:47):
It's gonna be a machine by the end, sleeping really
yea
M. What's Katie and mc Cody's Robert Evans here with
Cody Johnston and Katie Stole And this is a special
seven part episodes Hin the Bastards. Um, Hello, how are
you hell? Doing good? Ready? We're here already, We're back
(00:26):
from vacation. We watched the debates last night. We did.
We're all a little bit strung out, a little strung out,
so let me tell you, let me, let me explain
what's going on today. This is a podcast where every
week I talked about the worst people in all of
history and exhaustive detail, and a couple of months ago
we talked about a particularly shitty person named George Lincoln Rockwell.
(00:48):
Three part episode was to act as a a booster
for a go fund me campaign I had to raise
money for conflict journalism, and in exchange for getting funded,
I promised to write an audio book called The War
on Everyone, which I have written in which I have read,
and by the time this airs will be available on
the website if you go to the War on Everyone
(01:10):
dot com. Uh you following through on your promises? Look
in me following through on my promises? Uh? So. I
also went to Syria with the money made for that
and just now got back. Now. One of the caveats
of doing things like going to Syria for two weeks
is that it would cause me to fall behind and
collapse in on myself like a dying star if I
(01:31):
tried to keep up with my workload. So in addition
to running, just me reading the audio book on the
website for free ad free, as I promised forever you know,
no no cost, no ads, you can just listen to
the audio book. I'm also going to read the audio
book to y'all and have it as a special two
weeks section of the show because that allows me to
(01:53):
both do the trip and not die from overworking. It's
a wonderful plan, So thank you both for helping me
make this possible. Listening to I just want you to
hear how loud this script is. It's hefty. It made
the whole table shake three words. We got a lot
to get through. It's like, yeah, like sixty something pages.
(02:13):
Now to accompany us, I have, of course my traditional
sera lee throwing bagels, but I also have some new
throwing equipment. I have some Mots brand apple juice and
a plastic container. I have a metal Starbucks refreshers. And
I also have a metal can of Lacroix. I have
this mayonnaise squeeze to I'm very excited to see what
happens with that. And I have a partially open sack
(02:35):
of oranges. So, clement Um, the full drinks make me nervous.
We should all be nervous, A little bit slowed on
all this electrical garrity. Might I threw a can of
coffee earlier off the air and it didn't burst. You
also threw a knife at stove Sophie. I threw a
knife towards Sophie show she could open something with it.
(02:56):
What happened though, Well, she ran out of the way.
And also what happened What happened to the knife? Well,
it open when it hit the ground. Do you think
maybe it could have opened with hit her hand if
she tried to catch it. No, that's never happened with
a knife before. You people were not here. You people,
(03:17):
this is your audio. But I could throw the knife too.
That is a good point, Cody, thank you. I'm so sorry.
Well what's fun about that is it's going to bounce
off these soundboards and I don't know what will happen
that it's gonna be interesting. Everyone, protect your eyes. Is
that mayonnaise opened yet? Hasn't been opened? No, it has
been opened. Let's see if it has the foil on it? Yes, okay,
(03:38):
that's what I want to know. Should I brought it up?
And I shouldn't have said anything. Cody hates I do
hate mayonnaise. I have inappropriate nicknames for it. The Devil's come. Okay, Yeah,
see what I told you. Well, at some point in
this episode, I'm going to lick the bottom of this
(03:59):
mayonnaise in a way that will be calculated to make
you feel uncomfortable. Thank you, Thank me, though, I'm fine
with it you maybe Devil's com angels come. There's there's
a distinctly non zero change. We will all have the
apple juice. Sounds delicious, thank you. Yeah, I want the
(04:19):
apple juice, and then maybe one of those refreshers. Yeah,
there's there's more in the fridge. These are for throwing.
What do you do with them post throw? Though? And
everything about what happens to things after I throw them?
So I could scavenge for those potentially, Yeah, theoretically, theoretically,
but I'm gonna wait to throw them until we get
a little bit further into the show today, he's yourself, Cody,
(04:39):
You mean after we've started, after we finally started vamping
for twenty minutes. Yeah, well we had a lot to
get through. Yeah, we had to talk about Devil's com
Angels Come. But why would it be angels come, Cody
saying that I like all kinds of come Devil's Come,
Angels Come. Yes, do I regret it absolutely, because now
(05:01):
it's on the Internet forever and there's no way it
can be edited out. No, you can't edit audio. So
without further ado, the war on everyone. Thank you, Thank
you for that reaction. Chapter one, The Eternal Fascist m hmm.
On November nine, tenth night, Nazi stormtroopers and party members
(05:23):
took to the streets of cities throughout Germany. They burned synagogues,
shattered the windows of Jewish owned buildings, beaten, murdered hundreds
upon hundreds of Jewish people in the streets. This bloody
pegram is known to history as Christal Knocked, the Night
of Broken Glass. It's one of those moments in history
so shocking and brutal that it's become stained in our
collective consciousness. A single moment of horror forever printed on
(05:44):
the human psyche. Adolf Hitler and the other members of
the Nazi high command considered Christal Knock to have been
a failure. Rather than being enthused by the violence, the
German people were horrified by this outpouring of brutality. World
media harshly condemned Hitler's regime, and from their plush offices
in Berlin, the Fewer and his inner circle began to
revise their plans on how to sell anti Semitic brutality
(06:04):
to their people. M Joseph Gebbels decided that film was
the right medium to help crack this nut. His efforts
culminated in the nineteen forty production The Eternal Jew. The
essential through line of this particularly vile piece of propaganda
was the idea that Jewish people were an age old
parasitic force leaching off their host nations and almost habitually
working to undermine and destabilize them. As with most pieces
(06:27):
of racist propaganda, the Eternal Jew reveals more about the
men who made it than it does about Judaism. There
is no eternal Jew, but there might be an eternal Fascist.
Umberto Echo was probably the first person to really grasp
this idea and try to define it. His nine essay
or Fascism is still one of the single best pieces
of writing on the subject. Now Echo is an Italian novelist,
(06:48):
a literary critic, and a professor who was born into
Fascist Italy. In nineteen forty two, at the age of ten,
he won an award in a provincial competition for young
fascists where he gave an elaborate positive answer to the
question should we die for the glory of Mussolini and
the immortal destiny of Italy? I mean, that is a
good question. I asked myself that every day. Good question
for a ten year old? Should we die for the
(07:09):
glory of Mussolini? Um? No, you're not going to get
an award? Yeah? Yeah, no, no is now. Echo came
to hate fascism slightly later in life, and he came
to also love the partisans and rebels who fought back
against Banita Mussolini's regime. As he grew older and began
(07:30):
to analyze his world and the history behind the war
that had torn apart his childhood, Echo found himself drawn
again and again to a single question, what is a fascist? Now?
That's not an easy question to answer. Most dictionary definitions
you will find for the word fascism leave rather a
lot to be desired. Here's Miriam Webster's definition. A political philosophy,
movement or regime such as that of the FASCISTI that
(07:52):
exalts nation and often race above the individual, and that
stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader,
severe economic and social regimentation, and an enforcible suppression of opposition. Now,
like that works for the Nazis, but it does for
like Mao too, like every dictary very frustrating definition. Yeah,
it requires like the end to be what is happening? Yeah,
(08:17):
I like I and kind of that's so frustratingly much
on the internet, Like it's not they're not doing this. Yeah,
so well that's not how it works. Yeah. So does
that mean that, like the Nazi brown Shirts weren't fascist
because there wasn't a regime, but pinpoint the different stages, Yeah,
where they're fashist and yeah, German and twenties or like not,
(08:38):
what do you Yeah, Yeah, it's just it's like picking
an endpoint. And it also it's just like you can
apply that to Stalin and like if the same definition
applies a fascism applies to Stalin and Hitler. I think
it's a good definition of fascist. Also, people just generally
just sort of they switched the word fascist with authoritarian
and that's what they think it is. And no, it's
(09:01):
it's fascism is authoritarian, but authoritarianism isn't fascism. And it's
a square aramb us kind of deal. It's very frustrating, Yeah,
And I think one of the reasons that that definition
is so frustrating to me is that it equates fascism
to like every other system that ends with like dictators
and stuff, like you said, with authoritarianism. And I think
one of the things that it leaves out that's most
(09:22):
important about fascism is that fascism isn't just a system
that involves dictators. It's a system that arises out of
and murders democracies. Like that's where fascism tends to come from,
because it kills republics. It's a frustration with democracy. It's
frustrating a lot of things. It's action to a lot
of things. It's a reaction to a lot of things,
but specifically it um it like like most of their
(09:45):
dictatorships come from another kind of dictatorship, Like you know,
we got the U. S. S R. Out of the CSARS,
and like neither government was good like as opposed to
like we got the Nazis out of Uh, it's a
republic by my republic. Yeah. That's why I like a
lot of what Robert Paxson writes too, because he goes
through the fascism scholar Robert Pattinson actually stages that you
(10:08):
go through. It's like, well, no, it starts here, and
then you go to this phase and then it's this
sort of thing, and it's it's a it's an evolution
of a movement less than it is, like here's what
I want the government to be. Yeah, And what I
like about Umberto Echo is that he understood that fascism
was a singular and specific thing, accepted from the rest
of authoritarianism, and deserved to be studied separately because of
(10:30):
its ability to kill vibrant, healthy democratic societies. Um And
I like that echo when he tried to define fascism
and that or fascism essay, he wasn't just sort of
looking back into the past. He was trying to analyze
kind of the things that are timeless about the mental
impulses behind fascism, so that he could provide a definition
that would be useful to recognizing it again when it
(10:53):
came about in the future, rather than just like being like,
is this what the Germans were doing in nineteen twenty, No,
then it's not fascism. Yeah, is like a good start
to the conversation about what is fascism? Yeah? Yeah, it's
a great start. Um. So in that essay he wrote, quote,
I think it is possible to outline a list of
features that are typical of what I would like to
call er fascism or eternal fascism. These features cannot be
(11:14):
organized into a system. Many of them contradict each other
and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism.
But it is enough that one of them be present
to allow fascism to coagulate around it. Like that idea
that it's like there's a couple of different things that
fascism like it's magnetic that it pulls these things in
and it becomes fascism. Um, But it's not guaranteed to
(11:34):
do so, because each of these things can form other
things too, Yeah, and they can fall apart. Yeah, yeah,
you know, it can start and then it just doesn't,
like it did. We talked about Oswald Moseley together, like
it started to in England but then fell apart. Yeah,
it doesn't always continue to that endpoint. Marion Webster was right,
but it's still that was fascism. It's just not the Yeah,
(11:57):
so echoes concept of eternal fascism start it with a
cult of tradition, the belief that truth has been already
spelled out once and for all, and we can only
keep interpreting its obscure message. Um, whether you're looking at
like the Nazis and their concept of like the the
Aryan civilization, or you're looking at say modern American fascism
and this idea that there was a point in which
America was great and perfect that we need to get
(12:19):
back to. Like that that that seems like a really Yeah,
that seems like a key aspect of fascism. Um now
it it You could kind of translate this to conservatism,
which doesn't mean that conservatives are all fascists, but it
does mean that fascism always just states inside a conservative movement. Yeah,
usually like a reaction to like liberal movements. Liberal developments. Yeah, yeah,
(12:43):
and if that's another frustrating thing where like you don't
want to say, like you're all fascists, but it is
there is no end of like a lot of these
beliefs and a lot of these things you're holding onto
can uh like it's coagulated around it. And yeah, I
just the word coagulate. I love the word coagulated. I
(13:03):
think a good way to look at fascism is like
conservatives are the crew of the Nostromo in the first
Alien movie, and fascism is the chest burster that comes
out of that guy's chest dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like
he's not an alien, but he gives birth to one
in the same way that conservatism can give birth to fascism.
(13:26):
And then yeah, and then they help, and then they
can many can slowly turn into them. Yeah, and some
of them fight it with flamethrowers but fail because they
wind up getting into the vincent stuff. And like, you
shouldn't fight an alien in the events, nor should you
fight fascism on its own terms. There's a lot of
political lessons to be gleaned from Alien And that's your
next audio book. What Ridley Scott's Alien has to teach
(13:48):
us about the nature of fascism. So the next thing
that Echo stated as sort of like a key to
fascism or is like a piece of earth. Fascism is
a rejection of modernism, particular, literally a rejection of modern
depravity as traditionally marginalized in a press group stand up
for human rights and modern societies. Fascists will inevitably seek
to reverse these trends. The first books The Nazis Burned,
(14:11):
where Magnus Hirschfeld's library of research on transgender individuals. Hatred
of transmitted women is still a central unifying tenant of
modern fascism. And then there's the cult of action for
action's sake, expressed as a worship of the soldier, of
the man with a gun in his hand, willing to
do violence at a moment's notice. For fascists, according to Echo,
thinking is a form of emasculation. Great line, Yeah, king
(14:33):
is a form of emasculation. Yeah yeah. Thinking too long
about something is like it's unmanly. You just got to
take action now. Echo also recognized a rejection of criticism
and disagreement as central to fascism. Quote, the critical spirit
makes distinctions and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. Now.
I find this interesting because in our modern era, eight
(14:56):
Chance poll Board is one of the largest gathering places
for neo Nazis on the Internet. It's the community that
spawned both the christ Church massacre and the Pawey Synagogue shooting.
It was formed as a direct result of gamer Gate,
and gamer Gate was of course a reactionary movement inspired
by rage at video game critics and reviewers, primarily female
video game critics interviewers. We're talking about. Yeah, I find
(15:20):
it interesting that back in the nineteen nineties, Echo looking
back at the past determines that, like, it's a rejection
of criticism. Um. And then where do we see this
modern movement first really start to bubble up in a
meaningful way. It's two thousand and fourteen in gamer Gate.
That's the precursor to the Trump campaign in a lot
of ways. Definitely has a lot of the same shades. Yeah. Yeah,
(15:41):
really interesting to me, and part of why I think
echoes analysis is so good because you can look forward
from the analysis and see that he really nailed something. Yeah,
mostly everything he says in that it's like oh yeah, yeah,
fuck fuck yeah. So racism and hatred of diversity, exploitation
of the natural, fear of differences. Uh, these are the
(16:03):
other other characteristics of earth fascism. Echo recognized earth fascism
as derived from social frustration, generally rising out of an
appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from
economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by
the pressure of lower social groups. You could translate that
in America as fear of white people in the disappearing
(16:25):
white middle class of you know what is reality just
like growing a quality of lower other color and social groups,
but looks like losing grounds if you sort of self victimization,
kind of like viewing yourself as a victim when that's
not actually not quite seems like everywhere all the time
would be ripe for fascism because you know, hit complex
(16:48):
society I think is yeah, there's diversity and democracy and
things like that and just like um, you know, a
manipulation of these innate human based years. Yeah, a complex
free society is never more than about four years away
from fascism, I think. Yeah. I think America is especially
(17:10):
unique to just because of our our claimed to drive
for like multiculturalism and and you know, or a country
of immigrants, all that kind of talk. It's easy to exploit,
yeah and blame. Yeah, and it's it's like part of
the appeal of fascism is that in times of growing inequality,
(17:30):
it promises all of its members a type of equality,
which is, like, we're all members of this nation, right,
But that's like great, even though like we may occupy
very different places within this nation, Like we can all
feel superior to everyone else because this is the best
nation for these people. I'm a winner. I'm one of
(17:50):
the winners in this world. Because you're here, you're a
winner too. Yeah. It's more like class collaboration, yeah than
class conflict. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's kind of key. Now. Fascism,
of course, requires an absolute rejection of pacifism. Since life
has lived for struggle, war is permanent under fascism. We
see this translated in our modern fascist movements in an
(18:11):
obsession with the tools and aesthetics of war, black and
camo and tactical everything. Earlier in the day I wrote this,
I was browsing Twitter and I came across a photo
of someone's bugout bag. He wrote in the Twitter post,
how's this for a bug out boogaloo set up. Now,
if you aren't aware, Boogaloo is a far right term
for the civil war that they believe is coming, as
in Civil War two Electric Boogaloo. Now, this fellow's emergency
(18:33):
preparedness kit for Boogaloo contained no food, no water, no
medical supplies. His gas mask did not have actual filters
with it, but he did have an a R fifteen rifle,
a twelve gage shotgun, a glock side arm with a
thirty round magazine, and a forty four magnum revolver, along
with a tomahawk as a throwing knife, stylish green body
armor the same shade as his tactical backpack and helmet. Um. Yeah,
(19:00):
thirty pounds of weapons and no food. He's like just
like hyperma cheese, more like gamer dorks. Yeah, he's going
to be able to shoot his food, you guys. Yeah,
there were a lot of veterans being like, so you
brought four different calibers of weapons. Yeah, that's really Are
you planning on losing a lot of them? You know?
And are you planning on like carrying different AMMO for
(19:21):
all those different guns? Yeah? Very dumb. Yeah, but seeing
This post brought to mind what Echo wrote about the
fascist armageddon complex quote. Since enemies have to be defeated,
there must be a final battle, after which the movement
will have control of the world. But such a final
solution implies a further era of peace, a golden age,
which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader
(19:42):
has ever succeeded in solving this predicament, you know, Yeah,
because they get murdered. It doesn't work over well, because
it's a death call. Yeah. Interesting that it's the The
constant warfare is interesting too to me, just because of
the United like the United States being very unique to
that and just like maybe two years of its entire existence,
(20:06):
it's not been a war maybe, I mean, we had
we had the we had the nineties. We didn't get
involved in much war in the ninth much, but there
are still war, yeah, police action. But it's like now
this age where it's like, I mean there are people
that uh, I don't maybe not yet, but within like
a year or two, we'll be fighting in Afghanistan, but
(20:28):
they will not have been born when we got that's
i mean, you're you're born in you but at this
point that Afghanistan is not a war, it's a tradition.
Well exactly exactly. It it's weird how it starts to
not I mean, it feels like a war, but it
doesn't feel like a war. It's just been this lingering
thing that's going on. We've got troops over there. It's
(20:50):
a state of we don't even see a lot of
like what happens. We don't remove from it completely any who. Yeah,
speaking of permanent war and after Anistan, it's time for
an AD pivot. Yes, for the products and services creating
a little pivot. Don't profit from the war in Afghanistan
(21:11):
that you never know, you never you never know. Buy
these products unless the product is the war in Afghanistan,
which would be a weird product to advertise on my podcast.
Don't buy it. That sounds really expensive too. It's not
a good deal. It's not. It's just all the money
we would spend on healthcare Act we were a sane country.
(21:34):
I don't buy that anyway. Ads, we're back. So if
he was very proud of me for that ad transition,
moving like pros clipping right along, So back to her fascism.
(21:55):
Umberto Echo goes on to name contempt for the week,
the cult of the hero, machines moo, and a sense
of tempt for women and femininity, as other key aspects
of incipient fascism. For a fascist movement to evolve, a
number of these things must coalesce together, generally around the
personality of a single charismatic man with dreams of power.
This man will, of course, never admit to desiring power. Instead,
(22:15):
he claims to speak for some broad mass of the population,
a claim to majority that stands behind him at his movement.
Echo called this qualitative populism and noted that in the
modern era, quote, we no longer need the pas of
an Easia in Rome or the Nuremberg stadium. There is
in our future a TV or Internet populism in which
the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can
(22:37):
be presented and accepted as the voice of the people. Yeah,
not that some amount of years later. Yeah, Yeah, that's
the selective. The qualitative populism is the one where I'm
always it's just the most obvious thing. Yeah, And no
one seems to, at least in the media, seem to
(22:59):
care or like pointed out that, like he's not actually
speaking for America. Yeah, he says he is. I don't know.
I just don't like it. I'm not a fan, not good,
don't know who I'm talking about. Just yea hypothetically, hypothetically,
if there were a fascist in America, to general, he
could have been a her. So that's what I've got
to say about umberto echoes or fascism. Um. I think
(23:21):
it's a really good analysis. I think he gets a
lot of things, but I also think he missed something. Uh.
And since y'all are listening to my audio book, or
in this case, helping me present my audio book, I
hope you'll forgive my arrogance and adding one new element
of fascism to echoes list comedy. Irony might be a
better way to phrase it. Uh. Fascism often wraps itself
(23:43):
in humor as a way to disguise it's true intentions
as black comedy and test the waters for its most
extreme goals. If you're someone who's paid attention to the
rise of fascism on the Internet, if you followed my
work on a Chan or read about the ault right,
and you understand what I'm getting at, But you probably
view this as a new wrinkle in the history of fascism.
The truth is that it goes back all the way
to the beginning. If you want a picture of the
(24:06):
personality of the Fewer, what he was like on a
day to day basis, to the people he liked and trusted.
Hitler's table talk is about the best resource that exists.
Starting in nineteen forty one, Martin Borman, Hitler's secretary, convinced
his boss to allow a series of aids to transcribe
his private conversations for posterity. Oh my god, Oh yeah,
it's quite a read, Katie, Oh my god, how did
(24:27):
I not know about this? Oh? It's it's some hot fire.
Also sounds really stupid of him to allow. Yeah, well,
but yeah. So some of these were the traditional hitlery
ranting monologues you'd expect. Others were just, you know, chats
between courses during dinners and the like. There's a lot
of debate as to how truly off the cuff any
(24:47):
of these were, but Hitler's table talk is generally regarded
as an incredibly useful resource for understanding the minds of
the top Nazis. In his nine book Explaining Hitler, journalist
and historian Ron Rosenbaum turned to the Table Talk record
several times in his attempt to understand in essence, how
bouncing baby Adolph turned into the genocidal warlord we all
know and hate. At one point, he focuses on a
(25:09):
single passage, in particular quote the passage in which Hitler, Himler,
and Hydrick Reinhard Hydric, one of the architects of the Holocaust,
are ostensibly debunking the rumor, which they know to be true,
that the Jews are being exterminated. It's silly that people
should say such things, Hitler piously avers, when we're only
parking the Jews in the marshy parts of Russia, although
he adds that if it were true, it would be
(25:30):
no less than the Jews deserved. It seems to me
a transparent charade in which the three architects of the
Final Solution were becoming the first Holocaust deniers, the first revisionists,
so to speak, and doing so in a particularly repulsive,
winking and nodding way. So Rosenbaum brought his theory to
another scholar, a fellow named Lang, who agreed that this
was probably evidence of Hitler and company concealing their crimes
(25:51):
via humor. Both to keep explicit discussion out of the
historic record, and so that those in the know could
laughingly revel in their crapulence. Lange said, the invent fiveness
seems to me in some ways to really come to
the heart of the matter, even though it's subtler than
the brutality. Primo Levi used the phrase needless violence, which
is not quite what I'm saying. It's the element of gratuitousness,
it's but it's more than the gratuitousness. There seems to
(26:13):
be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified
in art forms, in which in art we usually take
to be indicative of a consciousness and artistic consciousness of
an overall design. Now this is interesting to me because
one of the things that you find when you really
browse through a lot of eight chan conversations is a
lot of talk, joking talk about how the CIA or
the FBI carried out these false flag attacks, which if
(26:35):
you just read it straight you could see as people
like legitimately thinking that there was a conspiracy to slant
to their website. But I think the more I read,
none of these people really believe in that. It's just
it's part of the joke. Like they're joking that, like
these massacres were carried out by like a state agency
to slander fascist website, like to people that they agree
(26:56):
with and they're glad, yeah, and are happy that they're
doing it. Yeah. Yeah, So for Nazis and their modern
descendants descendants, shittiness is a form of art. It's never
enough to gain power or even to hurt or kill
your rivals. These people's ultimate goal is to shift the
nature of reality itself to be further in line with
their own narcissistic beliefs, and irony is a powerful tool
for achieving that. Lane goes on. Brutality is straightforward, it's
(27:20):
not imaginative. This isn't just brute strength. It seems to
me that there is a sense of irony constantly. The
sign over the entrance gate to Auschwitz, you know, are
bite mocked, fry work will make you free. It's like
a joke. It is a joke, the orchestra playing as
these people go out to work. We're back now. Hitler's
(27:43):
sense of humor is not something we talk about much,
but perhaps we should. Ironic humor was used regularly by
the Early Fewer during his rise to power. In August
of during one of his first speeches, Hitler told an
audience that he supported quote removal of the Jews from
our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence.
We congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company.
(28:04):
This line was met with widespread laughter. It's yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Lucy Dividowitz, the Holocaust scholar who brought that
speech to Rosenbound's attention, believe that the joke and the
thing Hitler's audience was laughing at, was not the line
we congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company,
but the earlier line, we do not begrudge them their existence.
(28:25):
And when to quote again from explaining Hitler, this Divido
which suggests is an inside joke for party members who
know the secret meeting that in fact they do begrudge
they are dedicated to eradicating the Jews existence. Now, reading
that quote brings to mind a post I found on
h n's poll board during one of my regular sessions
browsing that image board, and between the mass shootings carried
out by its members and one threat, I found a
(28:45):
non's discussing the value of comedic memes about mass killing
is a way to camouflage their very real efforts to
inspire more massacres. One user typed, the best thing about
this is that they, being the FBI and the CIA,
will never be able to discern an ironic tongue in
cheek frog poster from a man of action like Arrant
or Bowers. We have all the plausible deniability in the world,
and unless they're going to start locking people up for
(29:06):
ship posting, we have nothing to fear. Yeah, it's okay,
it's the okay sign Yeah. All the also an illustration
of how bad their sense of humor is. Yeah, these
aren't jokes. Yah, what are you doing? Just done? Sophie
is signaling her membership and the far right delightedly, might
(29:29):
I add delightedly. In the decades since Adolf Hitler shot
himself in that bunker, ironic racist humor has been one
through line connecting every Nazi and fascist movement that's arisen
around the world. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founding father of
American Nazism, had his minions dress up in racist guerrilla
costumes to interrupt events and distract attention from civil rights activists.
The main weakness of Rockwell's humor was that it was
(29:50):
far too overt and hateful to be viewed as ironic
by most Americans. But down through the years his descendants
have gotten much better. It's straddling the fine line between
dog whistling to people in the know and maintain plausible
deniability one A good example would be Count Dankula, a
failed UK political candidates. Like before, you said, yeah, we're
on the same Yeah, they're vibing right, we are vibing hard.
(30:14):
Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate who first achieved
notoriety for a video in which he trained his dog
to sig hyle. When he was fined for this, he
was able to frame himself as a free speech crusader
and raised thousands of dollars while claiming to fight back
against political correctness. There is tremendous power within humor. It's
why satirists and comedians are some of the first people
purged by any dictatorial regime. It's why nothing is more
(30:36):
important to fascist than to look cool and serious and powerful.
Getting hit by a milkshake is worse for a Nazi
than getting hit by a brick. Blood looks cool, Milkshakes
look like milkshakes. But humor also has an incredible ability
to act as a sort of ideological trojan horse, allowing
ideas to sneak into someone's mind cloaked as jokes. Actual
fascists know this. It's why the Nazis on eight chance
(30:58):
been so much timecrafting memes to bread their ideas. But
this process can take place even within the head of
an individual fascist. We're back. In two thousand and sixteen,
Joe Cox, a member of Parliament for the Labor Party
in the United Kingdom, was shot and stabbed to death
by a fascist terrorist named Thomas Mayer. Mayor's chief stated
influence was an earlier British fascist terrorist, David Copeland. Back
(31:19):
in the year two thousand, Copeland killed three people and
injured dozens more by setting off a series of nail bombs.
He picked the locations he bombed because they had high
Black and Asian populations. According to the Guardian quote, he
came up with the idea when a bomb went off
in Centennial Park during the Olympic Games in Atlanta four
years ago. He told the police that the notting Hill
Carnival was on at about the same time, said Mr Sweeney,
(31:41):
He began to wish that someone would blow up the
Notting Hill Carnival. To start off with, he treated the
thought as a joke, but he could not get it
out of his head. The thought became stronger. He woke
up one day and decided he was going to do
it now. Last year, I carried out a study for
the journalistic collective Belling Cat. I come through hundreds of
online conversations between the fascist activists who planned first Deadly
Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. My goal was to
(32:03):
find out how these men had been red pilled or
converted to their extremist beliefs. Over and over again, these
fascists mentioned the influence ironic jokes that had on their
ideological evolution. One conversation stands out in particular to me.
In it, one fascist recalled how his first red pill
came during an argument over an anti Semitic joke Kisoft
posted the Facebook. The jokes spawned an argument and quote.
(32:23):
Then I saw people negging Jews, so I joined in
as a meme first off, then all of a sudden,
it's stopped being a meme. Much of the War on
Everyone will discuss moments in the history of the American
fascist movement that are much bloodier and a lot less
silly than ship posters on the Internet. We will talk
about a hard bitten militiamen, vicious acts of terror, and
methodical and methodical plans of genocide that are anything but ironic.
(32:45):
When we talk about the original Nazi Party, or George
Lincoln Rockwell, the American militian movement that culminated in the
Oklahoma City bombing, or today's meme spouting ironic fascists, It's
easy to look at all these things as separate, discrete
problems spouting up at different times and inspired by different causes.
But I think that's as wrong as looking at men
like Timothy McVeigh or Brenton Tarrant as lone wolves. Each
(33:05):
Swellen surge of fascism across the world and across time
is more like the eruption of a cold sore. The
underlying causes a virus that is ever present. During World
War Two, we bombed it into submission for a while,
but like the herpes virus, it never quite goes away.
It continued to learn underneath the surface, hiding an off
color jokes at bars, handprinted magazines, and eventually Internet forms
(33:25):
until our nation's immune system grew weak enough for it
to flare up once more. It's anyone's guess what happens next.
Man comparing fascism to herpes is very good. Yeah, that
that's really like the one that, like I've considered like
cancer and like a virus, but like that you can
suppress that. They're really there isn't a cure for like
you can, but it's going to come back. Yeah. Cancer
(33:47):
is closer to capitalism, just to keep growing and growing
and going. Yeah. Yeah, so that's chapter one. I feel
like I should sign off by throwing one of these
cans as you wanna have a preference as to what
I throw first. Mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, Yeah, he did. It almost
hit Katy. Cody would have been bad. Well, it wasn't
(34:11):
real bad. It didn't explode. Fine, it didn't explode. Cody
says he hates mayonnaise, but he was secretly hoping that
Devil's coming. He's lying. That would have been like Satan
ejaculating on the back of his head. I was hoping
that too, that it would just burst. Yeah, it was.
I was really hoping. I guess that's like the best
place for it to happen in my head. That's like
(34:31):
acidic started burning my scalp and then I die. Cody,
if you had a bunch of mayonnaise in the back
of your head, you would be mad for days. I
would be mad for days. I would leave, he would leave.
He would never stop obsessing about it. He'd be asking,
do I smell like mayonnaise? Is there? Still? It feels greasy?
I just feel like it's greasy. I'm gonna go wash
my hands again, even though it didn't touch my hands.
(34:52):
We have a washing machine here. You could just do
the next episode or two naked inside the washing machine.
Well know, take back be in the washing machine. I
feel like I would have to go in the washing
machine to take care of it. My first cat died
in the washing machine. WHOA just too real? Didn't I
fu fascism? I thought I thought of that. When in
(35:16):
the episode The Airs Tuesday, we do that cat segment
and one of the cats survived in the washing machine.
I was like, oh, case cat didn't. Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Yeah, clothes, yeah,
actually and misremembering it was the dryer still just as bad,
way worse, way worse. Okay, Yeah, he thought it was
(35:36):
cozy Sophie. Her name was Barbie. I wasn't creative. I
was three or four. Anyway, I don't have damage. You're fine.
Speaking of damage, you'll want to slug. Yeah, we're already there. Yeah. Yeah,
you know what. We got a Patreon some more News
(35:58):
Patreon dot com slash more News. Didn't dot com slash
some more News. I'm not a practice. Uh yeah. We
got a podcast called even more News. We got a
YouTube show called some more News. That's the name of
a Twitter account. Also, yeah, and I'm Katie Stole on Twitter.
I'm Dr mr Cody on Twitter. Can't change it now,
can't d r M I s t r cr do.
(36:18):
I basically just used his aim screen name. Didn't there
was my uh my blogging name when I wrote for Cracked.
What might column is Dr mr blogg with Dr mr Cody. Yeah,
I remember that back in the day. Well, I'm not
going to plug anything at the end of this, and
I'm going to stare at Sophie while I talk about
my refusal to plug anything, because I think it's going
(36:38):
to get old if I plug everything. At the end
of every one of these episodes, Sophie's walking over to me.
Now she's furious. I can see the rage. Like she's
shuffling like like the printing of a book. Oh nope,
she's just here to depose it. So this episode is done.
There's another fucking six ones to come. So strap end.
What do I plug? Sophie T Shirts? Buy a T shirt?
(37:04):
Anyone's T shirts store? So you guys want to plug
your store? Uh something? It's a te public store. Yeah,
if you go to our on Twitter, I believe that
Penn tweet has to like to our store. Great, excellent.
We also have a T public store. You know, go
to our website you're wanting the bastards dot com for footnotes,
and also to go to our merch store. We have shirts.
(37:27):
We have no comment. Wow, you're fired. Well this is
the end of the podcast. But you know, follow at
bastards plot on the tw Instagram. Yeah, it's ta public.
It's too public. Was right, it's public. We've all, all
of us have been traveling and gone and this is
we're easing back into it. We're easing back into it.
(37:47):
It's gonna be a machine by the end, sleeping really
yea
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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