I reject that hypothesis. If it was an oppressed people being othered than it would make sense and the criticism would work, but we’re talking about fascists. Again right wing movie “analysts” like Rob Ager pushes this stuff. Ager has a video called “Killing Private Kraut” that is solely dedicated to pushing this “theory”.
Affording humanity to every human is yet another good thing that good people truly believe, but that fascists insincerely hide behind. They don’t hide behind it because it’s nonsense, they hide behind it because it’s right, which makes it good for hiding behind. Of course, we know that their only problem with dehumaization is when it’s applied to them. Their ideology venerates mass murder, which necessitates the adoption of a nonsensical heuristic that was built backwards from the genocide it exists to justify. They can dehumanize all they want because it does no damage to their play-dough like worldview.
Our heuristic is materialism, the pursuit of understanding, from the ground up, the factors that make something what it is. Fascists can simply say that members of X race are ontologically inferior because they belong to X race, and that doesn’t clash with their worldview at all, because it’s not a worldview actually concerned with truth, it only exists to justify power. We on the other hand understand that fascists are made, not born. There is no gene or skull shape that makes a person ontologically fascist, only an intersection of conditions and experiences. This isn’t to say they deserve no blame, or shouldn’t be removed from society: they still made the choice, and they absolutely must be removed from society. But I dont think we should get in the habit of putting aside our understanding of all the things that motivate people to become fascists when the prospect of having to get rid of them makes understanding them uncomfortable. Fascists kill on easy mode, because killing is their only true value, and they can easily embrace whatever post-hoc justifications. We are blursed with understanding the real causes of these conflicts, the real nature of capital and propaganda, and to embrace an understanding of the enemy as comorehensive automatons feels like a big step back in our understanding, even if it doesn’t change what has to be done.
On the other hand…I also don’t think youre wrong. I think self-identified fascists really have made themselves less human in a real way by hatefully cutting themselves off in their own minds from the rest of humanity, and defining themselves against it. I dodnt know if I’m communicating this part clearly, bit it’s like the ultimate “If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes”. But instead of smelling shit everywhere, they see evil scheming troglodytes everywhere, becoming evil scheming troglodytes themselves in the process of obsessively “rooting out” the hidden enemy they’ve been told is to blame for their conditions.
I guess the root of my disagreement is that there are different ways of dehumanizing, and that the way fascists rhetorically dehumanize others isn’t the same as the way they actually dehumanize themselves. The way the wermacht are portrayed in Saving Private Ryan (stone-faced goons with little self-preservation instinct who run into the protagonist’s bullets, whereupon they emit a puff of torso dust and fall dead immediately, usually not even screaming) is pretty close to the way the americans are portrayed in Nations’s Pride, the nazi propaganda movie in Inglorious Basterds. Then contrast that with the SS officer character from the same movie. Hans Landa is no unthinking ghoul, but that’s not the movie whitewashing nazis: it’s an even stronger condemnation. He’s a human being, with desire and fears, who also just happens to love his job of slaughtering families. Fascism hasn’t reformatted his brain and overwritten the person he used to be; it’s been readily normalized and assimilated into the rest of his personality, and thats fucking horrifying. When he’s triumphant, he takes joy. When his flesh is carved, he screams in pain. Naziism hasn’t scooped out those human feelings, it’s infected and twisted them to it’s own ends. That’s how fascists dehumanize themselves, not by becoming unfeeling automatons but by becoming gleeful sadists. I actually feel that to talk about them as if they’re just robots is letting them off the hook. It’s everyone else who they see as just robots, or who they really really wish were just robots. It’s a mental crutch that they need and we don’t. We don’t need to treat them like zombies or murder robots, because what they actually are is so much worse.
I reject that hypothesis. If it was an oppressed people being othered than it would make sense and the criticism would work, but we’re talking about fascists. Again right wing movie “analysts” like Rob Ager pushes this stuff. Ager has a video called “Killing Private Kraut” that is solely dedicated to pushing this “theory”.
This turned into an effortpost, so
Affording humanity to every human is yet another good thing that good people truly believe, but that fascists insincerely hide behind. They don’t hide behind it because it’s nonsense, they hide behind it because it’s right, which makes it good for hiding behind. Of course, we know that their only problem with dehumaization is when it’s applied to them. Their ideology venerates mass murder, which necessitates the adoption of a nonsensical heuristic that was built backwards from the genocide it exists to justify. They can dehumanize all they want because it does no damage to their play-dough like worldview.
Our heuristic is materialism, the pursuit of understanding, from the ground up, the factors that make something what it is. Fascists can simply say that members of X race are ontologically inferior because they belong to X race, and that doesn’t clash with their worldview at all, because it’s not a worldview actually concerned with truth, it only exists to justify power. We on the other hand understand that fascists are made, not born. There is no gene or skull shape that makes a person ontologically fascist, only an intersection of conditions and experiences. This isn’t to say they deserve no blame, or shouldn’t be removed from society: they still made the choice, and they absolutely must be removed from society. But I dont think we should get in the habit of putting aside our understanding of all the things that motivate people to become fascists when the prospect of having to get rid of them makes understanding them uncomfortable. Fascists kill on easy mode, because killing is their only true value, and they can easily embrace whatever post-hoc justifications. We are blursed with understanding the real causes of these conflicts, the real nature of capital and propaganda, and to embrace an understanding of the enemy as comorehensive automatons feels like a big step back in our understanding, even if it doesn’t change what has to be done.
On the other hand…I also don’t think youre wrong. I think self-identified fascists really have made themselves less human in a real way by hatefully cutting themselves off in their own minds from the rest of humanity, and defining themselves against it. I dodnt know if I’m communicating this part clearly, bit it’s like the ultimate “If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes”. But instead of smelling shit everywhere, they see evil scheming troglodytes everywhere, becoming evil scheming troglodytes themselves in the process of obsessively “rooting out” the hidden enemy they’ve been told is to blame for their conditions.
I guess the root of my disagreement is that there are different ways of dehumanizing, and that the way fascists rhetorically dehumanize others isn’t the same as the way they actually dehumanize themselves. The way the wermacht are portrayed in Saving Private Ryan (stone-faced goons with little self-preservation instinct who run into the protagonist’s bullets, whereupon they emit a puff of torso dust and fall dead immediately, usually not even screaming) is pretty close to the way the americans are portrayed in Nations’s Pride, the nazi propaganda movie in Inglorious Basterds. Then contrast that with the SS officer character from the same movie. Hans Landa is no unthinking ghoul, but that’s not the movie whitewashing nazis: it’s an even stronger condemnation. He’s a human being, with desire and fears, who also just happens to love his job of slaughtering families. Fascism hasn’t reformatted his brain and overwritten the person he used to be; it’s been readily normalized and assimilated into the rest of his personality, and thats fucking horrifying. When he’s triumphant, he takes joy. When his flesh is carved, he screams in pain. Naziism hasn’t scooped out those human feelings, it’s infected and twisted them to it’s own ends. That’s how fascists dehumanize themselves, not by becoming unfeeling automatons but by becoming gleeful sadists. I actually feel that to talk about them as if they’re just robots is letting them off the hook. It’s everyone else who they see as just robots, or who they really really wish were just robots. It’s a mental crutch that they need and we don’t. We don’t need to treat them like zombies or murder robots, because what they actually are is so much worse.