Ideological weapons in the 20th and 21st century

Ideology is best understood as a rationalization for coalitions of power, coalitions which in reality are driven by little else than expediency. E.g. Old Left = intellectuals + bureaucrats + white urban working class, and all the ideology just generated from this alliance of expediency.

When and if Blue and Yellow find it expedient to team up in order to defeat Red and Black, you can bet they will come up with an ideology of Greenness, which yellowish-green and bluish-green wings. This ideology will obviously be advertised as principles that are sweet, just and true, while representing the common ground between the group interests of Blue and Yellow. If they happen to win, they will likely turn against each other and Green ideology will be ditched, and its adherents seen as hopelessly old fashioned and suspicious disloyal by both the Blue and Yellow ideologues.

It goes without saying that believing any ideology makes you something sort of a credulous sucker. Only trust ideologies you personally forged. If you want any sort of an ethical choice, beyond just supporting your own group, try to figure out which ideology tends to attract better people or at any rate where do you have the highest chance to force them to actually stick to their publicly advertised principles which all tend to be better than what people in power typically tend to do on their own.

Another aspect of ideology, beyond “selling” the own group is to denigrate the opposing group. Of course Green ideology will represent Red and Black as evil, unscrupulous power hungry maniacs who feed bullshit to their idiotic followers.

But what is more interesting here is that they will tend to conflate their enemies, put them into one common box, even when they are actually different, even when their own coalition is nothing more than expedient either. Because it is easier to sell an us vs. them dynamic to the peasants who are not very good at dealing with nuance and their loyalty is better ensured if the narrative is merely that us the good ones vs. them the evil ones.

This means opposing ideologies are supporting each other, despite or even because of the hatred they preach for each other. While our Green ideology is bullshit, made up to justify an an alliance of expediency between Blue and Yellow, the Red-Black Maroon Alliance will take it seriously, will not point out that that it is bullshit, because for them one common unified enemy is easier to rally support against. So while they may “get our joke” and at some level know we are just temporary allies, they will publicly accept that being Green is totally a thing. Of course, an evil thing, but a thing. And we will do the same with them.

Of course this also means any group not part of coalitions will be nevertheless seen as one. Poor little Oranges, who never joned the Blue-Yellow Green Alliance nor the Red-Black Maroon Alliance will nevertheless be seen by both as belonging to the enemy, because it is  easier to present a common front to your followers. And you can bet if the Greens win Orange will be seen as a hue of Maroon and if the Maroons win it will be seen as a color close to Green.

I am not sure Adolf Hitler had any convictions at all. His whole career seems like randomly picking up stuff that happened to be popular in that age, Socialism, revengist nationalism, Viennese Anti-Semitism of the Dr. Karl Lueger type,  a large amount of British racism from Houston Stewart Chamberlain and of course all kinds of Occultist stuff, which was popular in that age – Swastikas being used by the same kind of people who like to talk about chakras, mantras and auras. He bent his ideology into a pretzel every time it was expedient- when Japan started looking like a handy ally (despite Germany formerly supporting China) they went from being seen as a subhuman monkey race to spiritual Aryans due to Bushido suddenly seen as Aryan in spirit, and when it was expedient to attack Norway, the Norse went from being seen as  racially superior Vikings to people whose Aryan spirit was corrupted by Britain whose in turn was corrupted by Jews. It’s expediency all the way down.

But of course he insisted this Nazi stuff is real. And of course the Allies did not rush to point out it is a hodgepodge of powerful sounding random bullshit, they took it seriously, too. They had to. You cannot motivate a country like the US to invest all in fighting buffonery. The Enemy had to be represented as real, unified, one will in seventy million German bodies, one motivating ideology – evil, of course, evil and despicable, something worth dying to defeat, but real.

This is how opposing ideologies actually support each other. They don’t call out the bullshit. They see each other as real – because they have to represent the other as evil, and evil must be real.

Of course it was a tremendous help to the Allied Propaganda that Nazis were actually, really evil. Not the hodgepodge of racial mysticism called Nazism, the bullshit Hitler made up as he went, that was not coherent enough to be anything, but the actual choices and decisions of the Nazi leadership. Like murdering the Polish elites.

(This is why I actually believe in the Holocaust, people who could do this could likely do that, too. It’s a bit like the old joke, if you would fuck someone for a million dollars you are already a whore and the rest is just haggling the price. If you want to murder all educated Poles, I am going to believe you could easily want to murder all Jews or maybe even all Russians as well.)

Having an actually evil enemy is a tremendous help to any ideologue, any propagandist. I mean, you would accuse them of atrocities anyway, that is how this is done, so if they actually commit atrocities, that is really helpful. A large part of the ideologue’s job is to accuse the enemy of being evil, and these guys were actually evil. Easy job!

Which leads us to the second part of ideology. As I wrote above, it is generally useful to see all your rivals, all your opponents as one unified group, so that you can easily rally support against them. Hence, for the Allied ideologue, the narrative is simple: all my enemies are like Hitler.

The Allies had another name: United Nations. After the Nazis were thoroughly beaten, the United Nations went from being a war alliance to um, something like an peacekeeping international organization, or something like the shadow of a world government. Later on defeated and neutral nations were allowed to join, but the Security Council still reflects the setup of the WW2 victors.

It is not a wild allegation nor a conspiracy theory to say the United Nations was created by the Allies as an organization to rule the world. I mean, they won, so why shouldn’t they rule? Since when do victors not want to rule? All the sacrifices, men and materiel, need to be repaid in the currency of war: power. That is a pretty old rule.

But it is important to notice that we still live in the era of United Nations. Since 1945, we were educated by this era. All our public truths are United Nations truths, Allied truths. Even the Cold War was, very literally, a split within the United Nations, a split within the Allies.

We are not living in some neutral era where truth rules supreme. Was there even one? There is always an official ideology. And it is highly important to see that the United Nations is an organization that is rooted in an alliance for defeating Hitler. The Allied ideology, which we live and breathe every day, in 1945, in 2016, is this: The Name Of The Enemy Is Hitler.

The enemy is of course always evil, and it really helps that Hitler was actually evil and not merely portrayed so. If he was not, he would be portrayed so anyway, but propaganda is a whole lot easier when it is actually true. The real problem is that of course anyone who opposes the Allied ideology will be portrayed as Hitler.

I mean, this always happens so and it is very handy. An evil that was thoroughly defeated is just an ideal thing to conflate your opponents with. Some people value ethics, others value strength, success, and power. Nobody respects an unethical evil who was defeated, humiliated and proven to be weak. It is really the ideal accusation.

My point is, Nazism and Fascism ain’t even real. They were generated as ideologies, power justification mythologies by Hitler and Mussolini. They were just as flimsy as any other one. Or likely even more, because of all ideologies, the least amount of intellectual firepower went into these. Mussolini even ignored ideology for a while and then basically made it the hobby project of one semi-capable philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, to come up with something. So yeah, they were even thinner veils than competing ideologies, like Communism or Liberalism.

But once these Axis governments proved to be a real danger for other nations, and thus the Allies were formed, of course they too took that ideology seriously because the Allied propagandists had to rally support and forge unity, by presenting the Enemy as unified and dangerous, one will in many bodies, driven by One Unified Ideology Of Evil: Nazi-Fascism.

So this is how something ain’t even real was seen as something real. BOTH the Nazi and Allied propaganda departments had a clear interest in seeing Nazism as an actual real ideology.

And of course after WW2 it was very handy to portray any enemy of the Allied ideology as a Nazi-Fascist. Evil and defeated, evil and weak: the ideal accusation.

But what is this Allied ideology anyway? Were the Allies up to anything else than beating Hitler?

Well, just look at the setup in 1945. There is the Soviet Union at the height of its power. There is Roosevelt’s New Deal America. There is also Churchill’s conservatism but that was largely seen as a relic of old times and quickly defeated by British New Dealers i.e. the Attlee-Beveridge types. De Gaulle hardly mattered. So in short, global politics, Allied politics, United Nations politics leaned rather heavily to the Left.

In fact Allied leaders were so far Left they wanted to install a Socialist leadership in West Germany, the only problem was that the Nazis either killed or corrupted all possible Socialists, so if they wanted a guy who was alive and not corrupted by Nazism they had to settle for Christian Democrats i.e. Moderate Conservatives, Adenauer, Erhard, who were more into mixing Socialism and Capitalism, hence the Wirtschaftswunder.

As I wrote above, ideology is largely bullshit made up to justify expedient coalitions of power. The Left – we are talking 1945, so Old Left – largely meant intellectuals and bureaucrats teaming up with the lower classes. If you read the summary of the Beveridge Report, for instance, and have a little practice reading between the lines, it is easy to see that it promised a lot of benefit not only to the lower classes, but a lot of important, powerful and likely well paid jobs to intellectuals and bureaucrats as well. Imagine being a recently graduated college student in one of the easier humanities and looking for your first job. You could be a third-rate clerk at a corporation. Or… join the British – or any other – version of the New Deal and be part of something BIG. A war on ignorance, want and squalor! Wow! Doesn’t this just sound like an awesome power trip, a badass thing to do, becoming important and influential and writing history in the name of Good?

But there are all those pesky people who oppose this all. For various reasons. Some of the better-off taxpayers don’t like footing the bill, others are religious and think this sounds like a secular religion, a competitor, some believe in older-fashioned values and other think this is a terrible moral hazard. Or just consider it stupid. Or plain simply it threatens their power – much of this work was already done by other people and all these new jobs threatened theirs. How do you deal with  such detractors?

Why, they are the Enemy, of course. And the basic rule is that in the Allied ideology, The Name Of The Enemy Is Hitler.

At this point you are no longer surprised why the media sweats blood to try to make Donald Trump look like Hitler. The mechanism was already there in the forties. In fact I think it was there around the Spanish Civil War, that must have been the turning point in history, but that is a discussion for another time.

The point of this discussion isn’t to convince you that Nazism wasn’t evil. The Nazis, as individual people, were of course very much evil. Nazism as an ideology was neither evil nor not evil, but it wasn’t even a thing, it wasn’t even real enough to be anything, it was just yet another bullshit justification made up as they went, just one in the many kinds of rationalizing power with mysticism. The most important fact of the Nazis is that they lost.

They lost and now we are ruled by the people who defeated them, ruled by the coalition whose main justification was that they teamed up in order to defeat Nazis. So of course now anyone opposing them will be portrayed as a Nazi.

This is the point I would like to get across. Ideologies are justifications for coalitions of power and the enemies of an ideology take the bullshit just as seriously as their true believers because it is easier to rally support against it that way.

Once a coalition of power is defeated, obviously its proponents cannot keep the bullshit alive anymore. But the victors can, and will, because that way all the support rallied against the old enemy can be easier rallied again against a new one if they say they are just like the old ones.

So victorious coalitions of power keep the ghost of the bullshit generated by their defeated enemies around, as an ideology-zombie, simply to pin it on anyone who would challenge them or try to dissent.

Whatever “Nazi” and “Fascist” meant in 1942, in 2016 and counting it is a narrative of power, it is basically just saying “you are as bad as my old enemy and I will kick your ass just like I kicked theirs”.

The point of this discussion is to convince the reader that the next time someone gets called a Fascist by the global media i.e. the heirs of the Allied propaganda machine, it is simply a way to brand one an enemy, a dissenter, a rebel. It wasn’t so in 1942 but it is not 1942 anymore.

The point of this discussion is to stop being scared of Nazism and Fascism. It is dead, the people who came up with it as a justification for their power hung in Nuremberg or committed suicide after being thoroughly defeated and now its ghost is merely kept alive as a zombie spirit just as something to accuse the victors enemies of.

Ideology repeats itself twice in history, first as “See? This is why I deserve power.” And then second as “Those guys are just like my old, beaten enemy and I will kick their ass too.” In the second case, stop being afraid of “those guys”.

The French Revolution accused the Ancien Regime of being “feudal”. Of course feudalism was long dead by then, in fact, feudalism was a concept created by 16th century French historians when they tried understanding the 10th  century. This was simply a threat: beware guys, you get your ass kicked just as much and your regime will be just as ended as that old regime was. This is how these accusations are to be read.

This takes practice. Actually it requires a reversed perspective to a certain extent. As a practice, imagine someone calling the Gitmo waterboarding stuff “just like the Inquisition”. And try to get the power dynamic. The Inquisition was a power coalition supporting the Papacy and dealing with anyone who had ideas that would justify challenging the power of the Papacy. Their harshness varied,  pretty cruel in Spain vs. so relaxed in Naples that some criminals tried to get tried by the Inquisition because they would receive lighter sentences than from the secular authorities. But what they are famous of are the occasionally employed tortures. Now if in 2016 some guys tried to torture people who oppose the almost nonexistent power of the Papacy, just how high a danger would they represent? Very low. How likely it is that anyone trying that kind of stunt would quickly end up with a long prison sentence? Very high. Thus, if anyone is accused of being just like the Inquisition in 2016 is a lightly veiled threat: we’ll lock you up, just like we’d lock up actual torturer Inquisitors if we had any around. If you interpret it as the accused being a dangerous guy and you should shudder and be afraid of him, you are far too gullible.

The Alt-Right is playing a dangerous game. Essentially they are betting the era of the Allies, of the United Nations is dead in 2016. That that era of history is over, the power coalition that won WW2 is no longer in power, its threats are empty and can no longer rally support by portraying its opponents as one of the Old Enemy. So basically they ironically roleplay being Nazis and watch whether the ass-kicking is coming or not. Sort of calling an “the emperor is naked” on the Allied elite, betting that it doesn’t even exist anymore or no longer powerful.

It’s a bullshit call. When the French Revolution accused the Ancien Regime of being “feudal” it  was of course bullshit, but dead serious. It was a threat and they delivered on that threat pretty rough. But if in 1945 some guys would dress up in knightly attire and ride around in Paaris yelling “we are totally feudal!”of course all that would happen is a laughter. Being seen as feudal did not imply  getting the guillotine anymore. And this is why the Alt-Right is dressing up as Nazis today, figuratively speaking. It is that kind of bullshit call, testing if that era of history is over, testing of the powers that be no longer identify as Allied. They are checking if being seen as Nazis does not imply the Nuremberg necktie anymore. Well, it doesn’t, it didn’t imply anything like that in 1980 either, but it was still social suicide. And if it still is, I think that is being tested.

Of course no one gives a shit about Nazis anymore. Who cares about old contestants of power? Who cares who won the World Cup in 1958? What matters is who is going to win it next time.  The important thing is how current coalitions of power look like. If the Name Of The Enemy is no longer Hitler then something has changed in the ruling coalition. If the ideology changes it means the coalition of power itself has changed so now a new justification is being generated.  That is precisely what is being tested.

The way I personally see it is that it all boiled down to giving government jobs to intellectuals and bureaucrats, this was the essence of the Allied, United Nations, New Dealer power coalition (the Soviet version too, just with harsh repression instead of artful reeducation)  and basically keeping the Nazi ghost alive was a way to deal with the opposition to that by accusing them of being so. But now white males are getting shut out from this coalition. In fact at some level all males are getting shut out – it is true than the narrative itself is more anti-racist than feminist, on the immigration side it is clear, but still a white queer woman has a higher chance of becoming an Anti-Discrimination Officer than a black male. So now the machine is lacking balls, lacking the determination to crush its enemies. Besides, how long can the machine be financed?