Be Very Frightened: Krystallnacht is Coming to AmeriKKKa!

Ironic, isn't it, how just at the same time we are being threatened by god-intoxicated theological fascists from around the globe, we are facing the identical threat here at home, in the figure of George Bush?

Awhile ago on dailykos, there was a piece entitled Slouching Toward Kristallnacht, outlining all of the eery parallels between pre-nazi Germany and contemporary America. For the hundreds of frightened posters that commented on the article, it is not a matter of if, but when Bush suspends the charade of democracy and imposes a fascist state on us. As the fevered author, Maryscott O'Connor, ominously intoned, "It won't come in the same form. It never does. But it's coming. The lure of fascism is too powerful for men like the ones currently pissing all over our Constitution." (Of course, it better come soon. Bush has only two years to get the ball rolling.)

By the phrase "pissing all over our constitution," I believe O'Connor is referring to Bush's inexplicable interest in listening to telephone conversations of his fellow fascists who wish to impose a different theology than he does. Whatever. They're both motivated by the "lure of fascism."

Since the Jews are in on it this time, O’Connor concedes that Bush's targets for genocide "Probably won't be the Jews." Instead, "Maybe Arabs. Maybe gays. Maybe 'libruls.' Who the fuck knows?"

Indeed, who the fuck knows? That's the whole point of harboring a paranoid delusion. The delusion is necessarily vague at the edges, lest it be easily contradicted by reality. So she doesn't have a krystallnacht ball. What do you want, names and addresses? As another wag put it a couple thousand years ago, "Of that day and hour no one knows, no, not even the angels of heaven."

O'Connor knows only this: "It almost certainly won't be recognisable to most people until it's far too late."

Actually, it's the other way around. Once you start harboring persecutory delusions, it's too late. There's not much that psychology or even psychopharmacology can do for you. First of all, such individuals rarely seek treatment for their paranoia, because they don't know they are paranoid. Nor is there any medication for a fixed Delusional Disorder, especially a collectively held one that is reinforced by all of the members of the paranoid group. Here are just a few of some 500+ comments I harvested off the top, so this only scratches the surface of the depth of their shallowness:

"Yes, we saw a documentary last week on the Holocast and how it began -- its all true and its all happening again."

"Us non-heterosexuals have been the canary in the coal mine... and we have been singing for DECADES about what is coming down the road for us all.... Just as the communists, the socialists, the jews were all picked off one by one, we all get in the cross hairs eventually unless we stand together when the first are in that spot."

"We are not at the beginning. We have walked well down the fascist road. In my case, I woke with this rhetorical question: what is a Holocaust Denier? To my mind, the most dangerous of Holocaust Deniers are those who embrace the uniqueness of Auschwitz, who privilege the particularities of the past and all the shopworn realities of 1930s Germany and who wilfully deny its resonance to what is happening now."

"The capacity for evil must exist before the evil is done. Before there are gulags and death camps, the apparatus that sustains them must exist. We are worried because the apparatus is forming: a government that considers itself beyond the rule of law. This is not about the evils already committed, it is about the evils that may be committed in the future if the apparatus is allowed to grow unchecked. We won't know until it happens that Bush is planning a 'final solution' of his own..."

"The Patriot Act is intentionally destined to fail so that when the Globalists carry out a terror attack they can blame 'civil liberties advocates' for preventing them from keeping the general public safe and then reject out of hand criticism of all future police state legislation that they pass."

"Who else thinks September 11, 2001, was our Burning of the Reichstag? The historical parallels are obvious."

"This is where we're heading, folks. If the legislative or judicial branch does nothing, we are, for all intents and purposes living in a nightmarish version of Nazi America. And given the bullshitstorm that place has become, I think I'll be looking up the location of local gun ranges and trainers in the next two weeks along with going out to shop for a gun. I can't believe America has gotten to this point and my reaction to this new reality can be summed up in one word: Fuck."

"I'm extremely alarmed by the hate coming from FOX News. The whole 'war on Christmas' is coded anti-semitism. There is a history in this country of tying the 'war on Christmas' to the 'international Jew threat.'"

"Many conservatives will indeed start making physical threats when arguing with someone who disagrees with them, and many are happy to act on those urges. They treat their spouses and kids the same way and are too immature to see other adult strangers as any different."

*******

Isn't it odd that these lost souls are deathly frightened of you and me and President Bush, whereas I am afraid of their thoughts. Specifically, it is very unsettling that a large segmemt of the population believes things about conservatives that are not only untrue, but cannot possibly be true. They are terrified of a wholly fantasized version of reality, while I am afraid of their seemingly boundless capacity to fantasize and to inhabit their malicious fantasies.

The purpose of language is to communicate about reality. But what if it is not communicating reality, but fantasy? Somehow, these people are "successful" in communicating to one another (they all know exactly what the others are talking about, while you or I would say, "wwwhhhhaaaat?), and are even perversely emotionally "nourished" by the communication. It is a relief to them that others share the same fantasy--it satisfies them, fills some kind of need. But it is not a need for truth. It's like an anxious group of primitives who invent a spurious cure for a disease they don't understand.

Without historical perspective, anthropological knowledge, and psychological insight and maturity, one's present being will simply rush in to fill the gaps of existential ignorance. This is how primitives remain primitive--they are trapped in the now, with no accurate knowledge or history. Their cultures are simply a collective neurosis, just as a neurosis is a private culture. Now, with the rise of the internet, perhaps more than ever before we have micro-cultures or "psychoclasses" that can become echo chambers for their anxious, frightened, paranoid, and even borderline psychotic members. They are support groups which support the disease, not the cure.

We must always remember, that culture is man's adaptation to his humanity, to the frequently distressing reality of having a mind. The reason why cultures can appear so strange and dysfunctional is that, more often than not, they are an adaptation to the inner world of fears, anxieties, and emotional pain, not to objective reality. The sort of primitive tribalism of dailykos consists of omnipotent and deified knowledge that only spuriously succeeds in blotting out ignorance.

But like any mental patient, only by "unknowing" their delusional knowledge can they begin to know reality and become healthy. This is notoriously difficult to achieve in groups immersed in a paranoid world view. For they are not the victims of mere ignorance, but a motivated stupidity. In this way the paranoid left is comparable to Islamists and nazis, in the sense that they are drowning in an invincibly dysfunctional worldview. The Islamists act on their delusions. Let’s hope our reality-based community limits itself to impotent kvetching.