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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@Weird Eddie
Bingo. Canada’s a textbook example of this. Setting the myriad First Nations aside momentarily to focus on the old colonial powers, Canada’s foundation as a nation hinged on an uneasy co-existence between Anglican English-speaking pro-Britain Loyalists and Catholic Francophone anti-Britain Quebecois. By Sarah Chung’s logic, the Quebecois should have ceased being a Francophone enclave, spoke English and joined the Church of England, all in the name of “””unity”””.
I linked the Manitoba Schools Question because it’s the most blatant example of the government interfering exactly in that manner. It ended up taking down two Conservative Prime Ministers and resulted in the election of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. I’m curious whether or not Chung is familiar with that shameful chapter of Canadian history (I’m guessing not).
AFAICT, the Mexicans, the Asians, and the Muslims for the most part assimilate just fine, behaviorally. They get jobs, they pay their bills, they carry on day-to-day business just like anyone else in North America, and mostly are law-abiding, upstanding citizens, and most of them speak English intelligibly.
It’s just there’s a subset of people who still won’t consider them to have assimilated until they also magically turn white.
@ Surplus:
That’s the whole problem… until the “immigrants” blend to the point where they are nearly indistinguishable from the “white folx”, they’re NOT REALLY ‘Muricans (or Canadians)
Additionally, if they have any cultural elements that are different from the “McWasps”, they get the “WE don’t want THEM here”
Of course. If you defined it, it would quickly turn out that nobody actually agreed on the definition.
I’ve noticed that myself, with the nationalists in my country. They crow about national identity and tradition, but they rarely define it (aside from not-so-subtle cues to how important it is to be white).
I think it’s less about what the supposed culture is and more about what it’s not. Specifically, it’s not the same as those people over there.
The fact that those people tend to be brown is entirely incidental, I’m sure.
Speaking of pulling up the ladder after oneself, the current British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is another such: even though she has family members who came to the UK from Uganda in the 70s when Idi Amin’s regime started persecuting Asian people, yet she has been positively unrestrained in her glee at the prospect of halting free movement post-Brexit. Oh, and she was fired from her previous government post for corrupt arms deals; she only owes her political rehabilitation to the fact that Boris Johnson had a very shallow pool to draw from when it came to filling posts in his Cabinet. A thoroughly repugnant individual.
To add to the immigrants against immigration idea:
I work with a man about the same age I am. He is of Armenian descent, and his parents are immigrants from Armenia. However, he is always rambling about how “America is for Americans” and various other conservative talking points. Because he’s bigger than me and somewhat intimidating, I haven’t challenged him by asking about his parents. He’s not the only immigrant or child of immigrants that I know that opposes immigration.
I’m guessing that these people have a mentality of “well, my family did it legally, so it’s different,” which is obviously an elitist mentality. In addition to the racism of his views on immigration, my coworker is also vehemently antifeminist (he might be an MRA) and transphobic, so this is rather in line with his other bigotries.
“Oh those rules will only apply to others, I’m one of the good ones” isn’t just an attitude fascist women adapt, it’s the same mentality that lets Ellen hang around with a war criminal who tried to strip gay people of human rights. Although in her case it’s “I’m one of the rich ones.”
@Jenora Feuer
The comparison to elitist antiabortion activists seems accurate. I would imagine that fascists are antiabortion (at least in terms of white women), seeing as they oppose bodily autonomy.
@Naglfar:
Unless, of course, it’s their mistress that gets pregnant…. /s
As long as the MENZ decide which woman does what, it’s fine.
re: American “dominant culture”
warning: brutal cynicism ahead…
our (white) culture really consists of football (American), bigotry, guns… and a MULTITUDE of cultural elements stolen from other cultures….
I think a lot of it is, “well, I’M here, so I’M good… fuck the rest”… kinda like survivors of a shipwreck kicking at people trying to get into “their” lifeboat
@Katamount:
And Laurier was a wonderful example of the classic Canadian ‘trying to please everybody and pleasing nobody’ aspect. Witness the establishment of the Royal Canadian Navy, which annoyed both the hard monarchists who thought Canada didn’t need a navy because we had England, and the hard republicans/nationalists who thought that Canada should have a real navy capable of holding our own. Never mind that this was during the build-up to WWI, and ‘having a navy’ was a rather contentious international issue at the time.
@Naglfar:
Well, fascists, at least the local ones, are anti-abortion when it comes to poor people, at least. Rich white people can do whatever they need to do. I was about to say ‘poor white people’ because they really don’t mind if black people die so much, but a lack of abortion is also one of the ways to help keep people in poverty, and I suspect for a lot of these folks keeping black people poor so they can be looked down and abused on is more important than potentially reducing the population.
And, of course, what the ‘my family did it legally, so it’s different’ people ignore is that a lot of the people they’re actively turning away now are also trying to do it legally. At least part of Bernier’s approach is basically to fine tune the filtering system to prioritize people who are already rich (even more than they are already). He’s not trying to keep out ‘illegal’ immigrants, he’s trying to keep out otherwise legal ones who can’t bribe their way past the deliberate obstacle course.
Let me say that, regarding FeMRAs and anti-immigration immigrants and other conservatives of more marginalized, they’d consider liberals as being “privileged”, and complaining about more minor problems in their eyes. To them, we’d be “attention seekers”.
I don’t know how we can challenge this, although I believe the MRA movement is built around this ideal.
I doubt immigrants today are actually assimilating any differently than 19th century European immigrants did. The children of immigrants and immigrants who came here as small children are completely assimilated IME. It’s common for people who immigrate as adults to not ever become fluent in English and to only spend time with fellow immigrants from their home country, but that’s sure nothing new. I have ancestors from Norway who didn’t learn English when they came here.
My grandparents on my mom’s side were German immigrants to Canada, and yet they are vehemently anti-immigration.
I’d say that I don’t understand but I’m pretty sure I do understand. It’s just racism. It’s not that deep.
(Apologies in advance if this gets double-posted.)
See my comment above: She’s not even familiar with the history of her birth country (either that, or she is willfully misrepresenting it), so I’d say that in all probability she does not know about Canada’s history either.
@Naglfar:
Just for clarity, I wasn’t trying to criticize you at all. Just expanding from where you started and trying to communicate my own feelings of shock.
@Naglfar
Re the Armenian gentleman you mentioned: reminds me of an Indian (sub-continent) gentleman I interact with on a limited basis.
He works in a local convenience store I frequent. Everytime I walk in, he’s got Slush Bumbaugh on the radio. I asked him once how he could stand to listen to that drivel.
“Oh, RL’s all right.”
I’ve never asked him if he doesn’t realize that he is one of the types Bimbaugh is railling against and whom he would turn on in a heartbeat if the right circumstances presented themselves.
SMDH at it all– none so blind as those that will not see…