By David Futrelle
Earlier today, a gunman killed two in Halle, Germany in a failed assault on a synagogue; had he been able to get into the building itself — the door was locked and quickly barricaded — the death toll would have been much higher. He was quickly taken into custody.
Apparently inspired by the Christchurch shooter, the gunman live-streamed his attack, taking time out before starting the attack to identify himself as “Anon,” in what appeared to be a nod to chan culture, and to declare the Holocaust a hoax. He also took a few moments to rail against feminism, which he blamed as “the cause of declining birth rates in the West, which acts as a scapegoat” — I think he meant “excuse” — “for mass immigration,”
He went on to name “the Jew” as the “root of all these problems,” a reference to alt-right conspiracy theories charging Jews with concocting feminism — and encouraging mass immigration — as part of their alleged plan to destabilize the West.
It’s not surprising to discover that this raging antisemite and apparent alt-rightist is also a rabid antifeminist, because, as Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley notes in his book How Fascism Works, misogyny has always been central to “the logic of fascist politics.”
Hitler and his fellow Nazis wanted women, as far as was practical, confined to the arena of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” — that is, “children, kitchen, and church.” As one Nazi ideologue put it in 1933,
to be a woman means to be a mother … the highest calling of the National Socialist woman is not just to bear children, but consciously and out of total devotion to her role and duty as mother to raise children for her people.
Alt-right neo-Nazi men today — and the alt-right is overwhelmingly male — similarly dream of marrying virginal tradwives who will happily stay home and raise a brood of perfect Aryan children.
Neo-Nazis today aren’t just worried about declining birth rates as a cause of what they melodramatically call “white genocide.” They are also concerned with why they’re falling — because women have the ability and the desire to engage in non-procreative sex, to separate female sexuality from motherhood. This is due in part to better birth control and the availability (currently being eroded) of abortion; it’s also due to the sexual autonomy promoted by feminism.
All this weakens the patriarchal family, and anything that weakens the patriarchal family is a threat to fascist ideology, itself based on a notion of political hierarchy centered around a father-like leader of the nation.
All this is why the alt-right is so freaked out by declining birthrates, And this is why Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer insists that a white women’s womb is “OUR WOMB – that’s right, it doesn’t belong to her, it belongs to the males in her society.”
Antifeminism — rooted in deep misogyny — is baked into fascist ideology. And so it’s disturbing, but not surprising, to see the latest alt-right shooter invoke it as one of the reasons for his inhuman terrorist assault.
H/T — The historical examples in this post all come from Stanley’s How Fascism Works, an excellent book you all should read.
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It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. So sad to hear that this happened. We need to stop white nationalism everywhere, before more people are killed.
I’m sickened again. People are like “only two people were killed” i just wanna cry. That’s two too many.
The “west” is doing a bang-up job of destabilizing ITSELF…
I have no words. It is very sad to read this. I’ve heard German laws against Neo Nazis have more teeth than American laws. I hope this is true. This man should not walk free in society, ever.
This is the kind of thing where it’s impossible to communicate what it means to have an attack on Yom Kippur. It’s not just that it’s a holy day, or a High Holy day, or “the holiest day of the year”.
It’s the day of atonement. We’re seeing our own wrongs in stark relief and asking that, despite our faults, we get a chance to do better over the next year.
Two people won’t get that chance.
And I can’t even communicate what that might mean to a truly observant jew (not like me) who was there, at synagogue, on this day of all days.
“Never again” in our promises, but “not again” on our lips.
…It’s less and less that I know what else to say.
Re: German anti nazi laws
They do have more teeth, but getting a conviction for ‘Volksverhetzung’ is a badge of honor in neo nazi circles.
And the German justice system, especially the police, is still blind on the right eye.
What I think might happen is a life sentence for ‘Mord aus niederen Beweggründen’ plus ‘besondere Schwere der Schuld’ so possibility of parole after 30 years instead of 15. On a good day they might even throw in ‘Sicherungsverwahrung’, which would make it an actual life sentence.
Die Ärzte still put it best when they said
“ARSCHLOCH”.
https://youtu.be/6X9CEi8wkBc
And you should have seen the Islamophobes and ultranationalists/isolationists crawl out of the woodwork on some sections of social media, then have to crawl back in when it was pointed out that:
1) A synagague congregation was attacked on Yom Kippur (that’s
what set off the Islamophobes.)
2) The customers of a kebab shop were also attacked (according to
the BBC report I read.) The proprietors of such an establishment in
Germany are likely to be Turkish or German Turks, and probably
Muslim. (Some people even tried doubling down on their social
media unpleasantness at this point.)
3) The cops announced they had a German neo-Nazi in custody.
I’ll not draw much satisfaction from their correction. People were murdered. But they must have found it galling the perpetrator was one of their own, or, more likely, that the public were aware of it.
@Crip Dyke
Yes, I simplified the idea somewhat by calling it the holiest holiday, mostly because I was still in shock when I wrote that. This was the first thing I noticed when I checked my phone after the holiday ended and after I had been at a synagogue, and all I can think about is that we aren’t safe. This happened in a country that actually has gun control, that actually has laws against Nazis. I live in a country that doesn’t have those, but has far more Nazis and a president that supports them.
I’m kind of at a loss for words.
The arsehole apparently wanted to demonstrate that you can go on a murder spree with homemade weapons to “inspire” others to do the same.
[Side note: doesn’t he realise he would have “inspired” other kinds of arseholes, like ISIS, to use these weapons too? Maybe they do realise that they’re more violent than ISIS, at least in Europe and for the moment. Or maybe he didn’t think it through.]
Anyway, the home made weapons kept jamming. The live stream shows him repeatedly pointing his gun at someone only for it to jam. Bad as it is, it could have been far worse.
And the Guardian says he got the designs from a Philip Lunty, who lived only a mile or two from where I grew up.
Damn Philip Lunty.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/10/halle-attack-homemade-guns-jammed-repeatedly-video-shows
In all seriousness, if the shooter is releasable at all (AKA if he ever show actual remorse and awareness of what he did), 15 or 30 years of prison is already a big enough punishment.
That being said, few peoples are releasable after 30 years of prisons. It’s too destructive on anyone’s mind, which is part of why the “war on drug” is so fucked up. In the case of that shooter, I am much less sympathic, but I start to not be so sure that it’s better than just executing him, outside of the fact outlawing death penalty mean we alway can liberate someone wrongly convicted.
As for the shooter itself, I thought about the shooting in the commute. I was seeing someone play a phone game where you use a sniper rifle to kill people. Coincidentally or not, both the victims he shooted during the brief time I looked at its phone were black civilians.
Bullshit. If it’s yours, it’s in YOUR body. If it’s not, you have no say over it. Women don’t want white ethnostates, we want sovereignty over our own bodies and lives. We will not be your baby dispensers.
And THAT, in a nutshell, is why women reject fascism, fascists, and the whole idiotic concept of white nationalism.
My father’s extended family is from Halle. I don’t know if any live there any longer, but it certainly had me scanning the internet for the identity of the victims. Granted, they aren’t Jewish so would unlikely be at that scene… still leaves a worry in the back of my head.
*sigh*
It’s infinitely telling that all the Bernier supporters I interact with online use exactly the same talking points.
@Ohlmann:
I don’t know what prisons you are referring to, but German prisons very different from the American ones.
There is only ever one inmate to a cell, they wear their own clothes, they cook their own food.
They are encouraged to work. They get normal wages. Half of their wages get put in a savings account for after their release.
Plenty of inmates are only in the prison at night.
German prisons actually manage to rehabilitate and general recidivism rate is rather low.
German prisons are quite like the Norwegian ones.
@Bina
Unfortunately, there are some women who do support fascism, much like the FeMRAs. Lana Lokteff, Faith Goldy, Justine Tunney, Andrea Hardie, and a few others come to mind. Thankfully, they’re few and far between.
However, among the fascist women that exist, I generally notice that they seem to only want fascist ideas like rape and forced pregnancy for other women and see themselves as exempt from it all. Fascists tend to not to think things through, and these women clearly have not. They don’t seem to realize that fascist societies would not exempt them.
Fascism is awful. I can only hope that more people step up to oppose it as it rears it’s ugly head around the world.
@Knitting Cat Lady
Your prisons sound much better than those in the US. My hope is that one day we’ll have prison reform here to be more like those in Europe. IMO prisons should work to rehabilitate criminals for reintegration into society.
@Katamount, somewhat off-topic, re Bernier:
I work up in Markham-Unionville, where the People’s Party candidate is from Malaysia: Sarah Chung. (She won an Olympic medal in Taekwando for Malaysia.) Apparently she’s also a case processing officer for Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada. And she’s running for the most anti-immigrant and anti-government party on the ballot. (It looks like she was previously trying to be an MPP in Ford’s government, but he appointed someone else to run in the riding. And previously lost an election to be a Toronto city councillor.)
I’ve kept thinking to myself (and this applies to FemRAs, Log Cabin Republicans, and a number of other groups)… how do these people not see that the group they’re fronting for is fundamentally opposed to their interests? That being ‘one of the good ones’ only means they’ll get thrown under the bus later rather than immediately?
One article I saw summed it up nicely:
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/10/09/news/chicken-voting-colonel-sanders-meet-public-servants-running-peoples-party
@Jenora Feuer @Naglfar
Because to them, men are better than women. I read some post about how this was considered the case in a Catholic community somewhere (can’t remember where it was) and the girls just sadly seemed to accept that, at least according to the author who remarked on this.
I don’t know. I think women are better than men because at least women aren’t responsible for most of mankind’s heinous crimes. Murderers are overwhelmingly male. Rapists are overwhelmingly male. I will also sound a little bit like an MRA, but in a few respects, especially regarding self-expression, women are far freer than men in doing so.
But honestly, I feel ashamed that I have to be the same gender as that murderer and that many people of my assigned gender believe this as well as several women too (no thanks to religious fundamentalism and racism).
@Jenora Feuer
Ah, and the plot thickens with respect to Sarah Chung: https://canadafreepress.com/article/why-multiculturalism-has-to-be-made-an-issue-this-election
She basically lays out her opposition to multiculturalism there, namedropping Neil Bissoondath (whose fiction I studied in university) and Ujjal Dosanjh to back up her claim of the divisive nature of Canada’s multicultural policy. And introduces a sixth element to add to the five I named above: trauma stemming from ethnic divisions in their country of origin. They fled ethnic and cultural strife, so they see anything less than conformance to the dominant culture as the first step on that road here.
Yet despite all the references to “shared identity” and a “collective memory” with respect to a core “Canadian culture”, it goes entirely undefined! As it always does, because the arc of Canada’s entire history has been one of mediating our differences, with plenty of failures to go along with our successes. The English-French divide is only the most obvious, but the divides were also along religion and class. Heck, Confederation itself was a union of disparate British colonies, each with their own sense of self (paging Louis Riel). Multiculturalism is the way that we co-exist under a secular governance and legal model. It’s better than burning down Parliament Buildings and rioting in the streets.
We’ve also seen the alternative to a robust pluralistic model Far too often.
@Jenora Feuer, @Katamount:
I wonder if it’s a combination of wanting to pull the ladder up after oneself, and work burnout turning one against the clients, with an end result of: “I came to this country fair and square, but these people whose cases I process are having it too easy!”
As you say, she’s allied her self with the crowd who’ll throw her under the bus once she’s no longer useful.
I can feel a little more sympathy for that view, though I still think it’s wrong. Sort of like one of my high school classmates who I no longer follow on Facebook because he’s farther to the right than I can communicate with, but I suspect it’s all because his father grew up in East Germany (and he himself is currently living in Saigon) so he thinks any policy even slightly to the left of the current Tories is a slippery slope into Soviet repression/the Khmer Rouge.
Where is Andrew Anglin hiding anyway? Is he really so competent that he has managed to avoid detection and outing ALL this time, despite heading what is arguably the worst page on the internet?
I keep on thinking that we, as a society, need to go beyond the Nuremberg trials and adopt treaties regarding Hate Speech. Without the tools to dehumanize vulnerable groups it will be far more difficult for fascists to recruit, or spread their bile.
I’m still at a loss at how AlD is allowed to exist in Germany after what Nazism did to the country, and to the world.
WordPress appears to have eaten my earlier response, but in addition to noting the “pulling the ladder up behind” mentality, Sarah Chung appears to be a fundamentalist Christian to boot, tagging in Tanya Granic Allen while promoting an anti-gay and anti-trans panel she was on.
So there’s a religious fundamentalism angle here too.
Correction: Sarah Chung competed in, but did not win medals at, the Olympics. She was a regional Asian taekwondo medalist, though.
Also, I find this statement in the article linked by @Katamount very galling:
An explanation of the myriad ways how this statement this is wrong would go on for pages, but the TL;DR is that Singapore’s separation from Malaysia was because its ruling party’s advocacy of multiculturalism threatened the political system in Malaysia, which was (and continues to be) drawn along racial lines.
So, yeah, I guess you could take away the lesson that multiculturalism divides nations from that.
@Naglfar:
I hadn’t seen your last message when I posted mine, but yes, there’s a lot of ‘oh, those rules will only apply to other people, not me, I’m one of the good ones’ in fascist support from people you’d think should know better than to support that.
Like a lot of the anti-abortion support from women is pretty classist, being both biased by being rich enough to take advantage of options unavailable to everyone (travel to other states in the U.S., travel to England from Ireland, etc) as well as the standard sort of ‘keep your legs shut’ attitude that assumes only lower-class people are stupid enough to need that sort of thing.
@Katamount:
Can’t say I’m surprised about the fundamentalism angle. A good chunk of the support for Ford came from various fundamentalist ‘how dare you teach my innocent children that icky gay people exist’ groups, who may not have agreed on much of anything else.
The only good thing is that (as far as I understand it) Ford’s actual changes to the updated sex ed curriculum were just a minimal amount of shuffling of years topics were taught at and making it easier for parents to pull their children out of the classes.
To me, the obvious problem with this (and it’s been the mainstay of “assimilation” thought for decades) is, THERE IS NO FUCKING “DOMINANT CULTURE” TO ASSIMILATE!!
There is a dominant SKIN TONE, a dominant RELIGIOUS HERITAGE, a dominant GENDER EXPRESSION, etc., but these aren’t traits that can be acquired.
In the late 19th/early 20th Centuries, the immigrants were from Europe, so even if they didn’t meet some of the assimilation criteria, they could (with more or less success) hide that shortcoming, and, hell, after a couple generations, no one could tell the difference.
I’ve discussed this with trumpanzees, and when they want to know WHY the “mexicans, the asians, the muslims, etc.” don’t assimilate, I respond “BECAUSE YOU FUCKING WON’T LET THEM!”
regarding Sarah Chung and “one of the good ones”…
“First they came for the Communists…”