Who does the future belong to?

An earnest letter on the rise of Fascism. Including 'The Zone of Interest', 'Babylon Berlin', and a Nazi.

A charming and talented German man has been on my mind as of late. His name is Christian Freidel, and he is a talented actor perhaps best known for his part in The Zone of Interest, where he plays Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz. He is also wonderful in the German television show Babylon Berlin, where he plays a queer cop in Weimar Germany. Both roles are beautiful, and fantastically terrifying. I cannot stop thinking about them.

The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss and his family as they live in Poland during the Second World War. The Höss’s home life is full of flowers, strudel, and everything that could seem to be beautiful. Except that the house is only a few meters away from the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, separated by a lone wall. The Höss children swim in the backyard pool as the smoke of arriving trains billows above the wall. Hedwig Höss admires her dahlias as gunshots puncture the birdsong. Women and children scream in the camp, but we never see them. It is all domestic bliss, except for the bad sleep that the family endures because of the roaring fires of the crematoria at night.

There is one scene in particular I cannot forget. Rudolf and his sons are waist-deep in the Soła river, casting their line and fishing. It is the perfect mirage of male bliss, and boyhood innocence. But then something hits Höss’s leg. He reaches down into the water and pulls out a bone – perhaps the jawbone of a Jewish woman, or the pelvis of a Roma child dumped into the river. The camera pans out to show a wide pool of greyish brown water approaching the family. He drags the children out of the water, rushes them home. After they are done washing themselves in the bathtub, with the ash of perhaps hundreds or thousands of people staining the basin, Rudolf storms into his office and picks up the telephone. He repeats a stern, ambiguous message to the person on the other line:

“The SS members who pick from the lilac tree, in an almost incomprehensible and radical manner so that the tree bleeds, will be punished. I expect the SS members, if they want to take some, to do it in a modest form and cut them off the tree sensitively… I hope you understand those flowers are to decorate our entire camp…”

Höss is of course not talking about literal flowers, but rather speaking in code. He is telling the other Germans not to dump the bodies of the exterminated into his precious river, or to not assault and defile the prisoners in their barracks. Whatever he is referring to, he cannot say it directly. Even at the height of their power, with most of continental Europe in their control, the Nazis cannot risk sharing the full extent of their atrocities. They cannot be honest about what they are committing, because to do so would only tie themselves to the gallows should they lose the war, and possibly lead to resistance that could threaten the fascist project entirely.

This is a useful way of thinking about Nazism, fascism, and all of the different ideologies that dabble in the far-right sandbox. Their beliefs are generally so reprehensible, and cruel, that they cannot be publicly honest about what they want to do. Nazis cannot come out and say that certain races are biologically inferior, queers are inhuman, or that people of certain backgrounds should be euthanized. At least not initially. Instead they seize on the fears and anxieties of people and sharpen them into dangerous ressentiments, waiting for the moment to strike. The Nazis did this skillfully during the 1920s and 30s, when they took the pain caused by hyper-inflation and post-war malaise and magically pinned all ailments on ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘Marxism’. What these words really meant, no one truly knew -- but still Hitler blamed all of society’s woes on them. Whether it was a simple liberal newspaper, a Thomas Mann novel, or the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin — the world’s first research center for queer love and transgender studies — Marxism was to blame. And behind every instance of ‘cultural Marxism’ was their favorite boogeyman, the Jew. Once the ressentiments were adequately fueled, the Nazis turned that energy into the Nuremberg race laws and Kristallnacht. When the war came, it led to men like Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz, with their rivers of the dead.

One of the few good takeaways from the Second World War was that Nazism, and whatever fuels it, could not be allowed to happen again. A person could do many vile and evil things, but they could not say Sieg Heil and do the silly little salute. The world collectively said, ‘sorry fellas, you had your chance,’ and nobody but the world’s stupidest people tried to argue differently. But supposedly not everyone agrees with this anymore! Which might explain why yesterday I received an email promoting the work of a Nazi.

Yesterday, Substack, (which is the newsletter platform I write on), sent a mass email to tens of thousands of readers promoting, among other people, the work of Richard Hanania. Before he was the ‘enlightened centrist’ that he is described as now, he wrote anonymously for a list of far-right and neo-Nazi blogs and forums, as was unearthed by HuffPost in a devastating piece from 2023. Here is a brief highlight of his work:

• In 2011, Hanania wrote; “The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit… There is no rational reason why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.” He later wrote: “Letting the unintelligent breed is as surely damaging to society as letting schizophrenics run loose.”

• In 2009; “large-scale female involvement in politics” is a “bad thing.” “Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society… women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.”

• On Richard Spencer’s website AlternativeRight; “If the races are equal, why do whites always end up near the top and blacks at the bottom, everywhere and always?”

• On his opposition to miscegenation: “For the white gene pool to be created millions had to die… Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or piece of art. It’s shameful.”

• During a segment of the docuseries about Black American kids visiting South Africa: “If they had decency, blacks would thank the white race for everything that they have.”

• In 2023, tweeting in support of a Substack post of his; “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way. It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”

• Also in 2023, referring to Jordan Neely, a Black man who was homeless and murdered while riding the New York subway: “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”

These are, of course, the beliefs of a Nazi. When his pseudonym was outed in 2023 by HuffPost, Hanania posted a half-apology where he still defiantly argued that he was being canceled because “left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races”. Good apology, man! But some dear friends parachuted in to help Hanania. As Jack Crosbie highlighted in discourse blog back in 2023, Substack’s CEO Chris Best even praised Hanania’s apology! Why these tech guys can’t just run a boring business and not cuddle up with a Nazi is beyond me. But despite all this focus on Hanania, I don’t think he is that unique or interesting of a person. He is a provocateur, wannabe intellectual, a knock-off-brand Nazi for the modern screen-addicted age. What is interesting is the world that surrounds him, and what his success says about where cultural power has shifted.

Ten years ago, someone like Hanania would have been (rightfully) cancelled. Twenty years ago, nobody would have known him. It is only because of rapid cultural and political decay that a figure like Hanania is not completely isolated from the world of letters. Not only is he not isolated: he is thriving! He has a large readership of 40,000+ subscribers on Substack, thousands of which are paid! He has written in The Washington Post and The New York Times. In 2023, he even published his book with one of the big five publishers! And to top it all off; yesterday he wrote a piece in The Free Press, a publication famously founded by a certain Bari Weiss who wrote a whole book titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism. Apparently, Bari Weiss thinks the way of doing that is by paying a Nazi to write for her blog? Hmm, good luck with that Bari!

Hanania, and others like him, are showing that there is a new and successful lane for being a Nazi; just share the Nazi shit, and then say that they were actually just jokes, or silly attempts at edginess, you stupid liberal idiot. He says as much in the beginning of his Free Press piece, writing about his years when he was an anonymous Nazi troll.

“Back then, online rightists reacted to the Great Awokening by leaning into performative racism, sexism, and homophobia through edgy memes and jokes. I would know. I was one of them.”

There are jokes, and then there are creating multiple anonymous accounts to post screeds about race science and the potential of euthanizing people with IQs below 90. Those aren’t jokes, just the pathetic ramblings of a Nazi loser. But what is really interesting about this essay is that he’s writing about Nazi symbology, specifically the famous salute that seems to be popping up once again all over the place.

See, Hanania is a Nazi, but he is not the most braindead Nazi imaginable: he recognizes that a bunch of people doing the Nazi salute in public creates a sort of branding problem for the far-right. You can’t do the slow drip-drip percolation of Hanania’s Nazism when others on the far-right are jumping on stage and doing the Deutschland über Alles schtick but for Trump or whatever brand of crypto-fascism is next.

In his piece Hanania argues, “what we are observing is, in most cases, not sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.” He is lying, of course; it is a sincere Nazism, and he loves it. But he is absolutely correct on the last point; his darling Nazis are not really in the opposition like they used to be.

It is only fitting that Elon Musk has read Hanania’s work and enjoyed it. But supposedly Musk did not read it closely enough, because he keeps on doing the full fascism thing without any subtlety. He did the Nazi salute, back on January 20^th. But perhaps more alarmingly, Musk afterwards attempted to sway Germany’s federal elections and drastically reframe the country’s Nazi past. On January 25^th Musk spoke remotely at a rally for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Germany’s growing and rapidly expanding far-right party that has been roundly portrayed in Germany as a neo-Nazi adjacent movement. Alluding to Germany’s Nazi past, Musk said:

“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents… It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.”

Even though it is branded as a modern and glossy party, the AfD has seized on many of the same opportunities that a certain German far-right party did in the past. The AfD has been able to reframe the conversation in Germany away from economic angst and potential war in Europe into fearmongering over migrants and predominantly Muslim immigrants. Everything for the AfD is about reclaiming German identity, and ‘remigration’ – which means forcibly displacing migrants. Even the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, has a handy scapegoat for Hitler and the Nazis. When she was asked by Elon Musk whether AfD was related at all to the Nazis, she said they were “exactly the opposite”, and called Hitler a “communist socialist guy.” Once again, Bolshevism and Marxism. She might as well blame Hitler on the Jews!

In the German federal elections on February 23^rd, Alternative für Deutschland rose to 20.8% of the vote share. Even though that puts them in second place, that is the largest vote total a far-right party has received in Germany since the Nazis. It is a catastrophic result. One of the few unbreakable beliefs in German politics has been that of Die Brandmauer, or ‘The Firewall’, which is the belief that no matter what the outcome of a particular election, all parties must refuse to collaborate with the far-right. Currently the leading conservative party in Germany, the CDU/CSU, has reiterated that they refuse to work with the AfD. But already in January they collaborated with the far-right, on a measure calling for Germany to turn back migrants that only passed because of AfD support. It is very possible that the firewall will not hold. So many other things are currently not holding. Why should this? Why should anything hold?

Certainly the culture in America and much of the world, and whatever influence liberals or the Left had on it, is beginning to slip. Did you hear that Woke is dead, that DEI is finished, and that caring about anything is cringe as hell? Here is a passage from The Financial Times, which I first found in BDM’s Notebook;

Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

Wow, the courage of Wall Street executives to boldly reclaim the language of eleven-year-old boys sitting in a dugout! It is amusing, first off, that the right always wants to return to a state of affairs where they can be cruel to the maximum number of people possible. But also, they are not victims. Like Alicia Kennedy points out in her piece on slurs and conservative attitudes towards meat-eating: “The right needs to pretend to be victimized while they victimize.” That is the far-right gameplan, because all the far-right knows is victimization and grievance. There is no positive vision in the far-right worldview. The far-right is a long, never-ending grievance machine, churning out the whiniest rants about how unfair the world is for them, even though political power has clearly shifted towards the far-right. And now that the culture is shifting rightwards, what is the far-right complaining about now? Oh, everything, like how there aren’t enough new novels by young straight men. Aw, so sad. Whine whine whine, like they always do.

Last night, while writing this piece, I read a phenomenal piece by Miri in her newsletter. She tackles the cultural context of these rapid changes far more eloquently than I can, noting the

“New brazenness” [in culture and media that] “came likely from the same place as everything else, an elite capture of the means of media production, the rapid consolidating and shuttering of news outlets, the tight control over ideological lines.”

What she does, crucially, is point to two recent essays written at Substack’s The Metropolitan Review, both published by liberal/ Left writers who break slightly from the mold of the publication’s generally ‘enlightened centrist’ or conservative framing. The one writer does a book review that is really a knock against wokeness (original!). But the second piece is a sharp but strange review of Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World Where Are You, which essentially argues that a key takeaway from Rooney’s novel should be that ‘actually, maybe the female character should have married her sweetheart in her early twenties’, as opposed to chasing ‘experiences’ and living as a single young woman for a while. Even as a man, the review made me wince. The Left is collapsing, the far-right is gaining power, reactionary traditionalism is on the rise, but this is what we’re getting from our liberal-Left writers? Reviews of nearly four-year-old novels that ask us to reconsider if we should slip back into the old ways of doing marriage?

But again, this is not about those two writers. I don’t know them, and maybe their pieces are actually playing twelve-dimensional chess in service of The Proletariat. Yet my suspicion is that the narrative of endless aggrievement, and angst spilled over Wokeism/DEI/etc., is really just the new zeitgeist that sells. There is good money in being a little reactionary. Once upon a time people were advised to use terms like ‘Folx’ and ‘Latinx’, and many people agreed that was cringe. Now, many women cannot get abortions, trans people are under attack, and an almost certain economic recession is headed for everyone but the ultra rich. Yes, I would rather have the Woke language return, please and thank you. I’m sorry that you had to sit through land acknowledgements – now eggs will end up being $16 a dozen.

Maybe they are not mutually exclusive – perhaps the language of ‘wokeism’ was lacking because it only provided lip service to historical injustices and oppression, and did not go far enough in improving people’s material lives. I agree! But also; attacking ‘Woke/DEI’ cannot be the biggest priority right now, and people must know this. But it also must feel so nice for some people to punch a little left and then nod knowingly to the right. ‘See, I’m one of the reasonable ones’, they are saying. Good luck, I say: a storm is coming. You are very likely somewhere on their long list of grievances.

And a storm is coming. Literally. Almost immediately after I finished Miri’s essay last night, a massive storm began here in Seattle. The wind whipped through the canyons of the streets and lifted a homeless man’s tent and flung it across the road. The rain fell torrentially, lightning cracked open the sky, and the man ran for his home as he cried out to absolutely no one. It was so horrifically Richard Wagner, with his Sturm und Drang that the Nazis loved so much: the world turned asunder, the weak flailing and desperate under the might of sheer power.

I feel caught in the storm now, just spinning and spinning, and I have been spinning since November, and I am sick of spinning. Just about everyone I know is losing their minds. Certainly people are being brave in choosing to smile and not constantly yell and scream, or to quietly focus on their art or their work. But maybe screaming is good. The art, as much as I want to just write and not think about everything, will not break the fascists on its own. It is 3:16 am now, and I want to scream into the pillow. I am angry and filled with indescribable rage. All the time. I will depart from polite society now and say: anger is good, actually. It is one of the essential feelings, and I would like it to be molded into some kind of instrument that I can wield. I am tired of the sad, yearning, droopy mentality that pervades so much of the language of ‘discourse’. I want reasonable people to reclaim the concepts of will, and power, and take them permanently away from the far-right and the fascists. I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it. We have to be messy. We have to break the fascists, and then rebuild the world. We need to be honest about the world we want, and we have to fight for it. And some small part of my better world is like a scene from Babylon Berlin, when Christian Friedel’s character — a queer man amid Germany’s descent into fascism — enters a crowded party in cramped Berlin and, while twirling in his sparkling dress, sings a love song, and dazzles all of the Germans with the revolutionary potential. It would be so wonderful. Such a moment will always erode the Nazis, because the Nazis cannot tolerate real art and beauty. They are wedded to their false art, their kitsch. They are powerless in the face of a person who earnestly telegraphs what they are. They melt in the fire of radical, erotic, liberatory aesthetics. Meine schöne Welt, wo bist du – My beautiful world, where are you? Here it is. There it is. Now we have to make it.