luc said:
Thanks so much for the fascinating session!
Regarding the new Nazis on the left, I don't know if it will come to this, but what would be the ultimate conclusion of radical lefty thinking? If you think about the
Eugenics movement and the
technocracy movement, the lefty Nazi narrative might go something like this: We have an overpopulated, polluted, patriarchy-controlled planet. But if we finally could carry out our hyper-progressive policy, forcing everyone to reduce CO2 and hire disabled trans women, then we can save humanity and create a just, fair and environment-friendly society. So who is it that constantly and annoyingly prevents this? It's the conservatives, those underdeveloped subhumans who believe in Jesus, deny climate change and hate gays. They can't even see how they are destroying the planet. So we might as well strip them of their rights, put them in camps or kill them - overpopulation problem solved, planet solved, and no more obstacles to a just, fair and offense-free society... Don't know, just something that came to mind.
First you have to convince them that there are Fascists lurking under every bed and bush, ready to spring forth and re-open the concentration camps. I thought this blog post (quoted below) summed up the nature of the progressive's hysteria about right-wing conspiracies pretty well. Basically it's an appeal to underdog status, and interpreting every rebellion of natural human nature from its agenda as part of a universal conspiracy because of how universal the reaction is.
[quote author=_https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare.html]
Brown Scare? Or dare I say... #BrownScare?...
It's actually not hard to explain the Brown Scare. Like all witch hunts, it's built on a conspiracy theory. The Red Scare was based on a conspiracy theory too, but at least it was a real conspiracy with real witches.... Moreover, the Red Scare was a largely demotic or peasant phenomenon to which America's governing intellectual classes were, for obvious reasons, immune. Because power works and culture is downstream from politics - real politics, at least - the Red Scare soon faded into a joke.
...
The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins' day.
The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters. By this test alone, we can see that the conspiracy is imaginary (Brown Scare) rather than real (Red Scare).
Think about it. Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn't waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They're getting burned right and left, for Christ's sake! Priorities! No, they'd turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters.
In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won't see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there's a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.
...
The primary technique is to present the natural order of human society, which the revolution has in fact totally overthrown - an order in which the young respect the old, the inexperienced follow the accomplished, and dogs obey their owners - as the existing order. The professional witch-hunter, who is in fact a petty bureaucrat, a tool of power and a bully for hire, appears to himself as a sort of daring rebel against the great conspiracy.
Moreover, because this natural order both used to exist, and is always striving to spring up against Horace's pitchfork, it can be portrayed as the ruling order with great fictional nuance and detail - even after a half-century plus of permanent revolution.
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