On Authoritarianism
Or: What Year 600 of the Reich Taught Me About Project 2025
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This week is something of a book report 🤓 📚 mashed up with some of the tough stuff we have to see. Because we can only win if we face, and tell, the truth. You'll get to the end of the piece and you'll understand what I mean. We can only win if we face, and tell, the truth.
Next week focuses more on "So what can we do?"
About this, about all the suffering and pain around us now, about the emergencies we face on all fronts.
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This post talks about terrible governments and policies that harm innocent people. It mentions, eg, Nazis, domestic violence, but there are not graphic descriptions. Images are of Jan 6 and include Confederate symbols and flags.
I wrote today's piece before the shooting at the Trump rally on Saturday evening. Before said event was being blamed, variously, on the media, the Biden administration, the Jews, and I'm sure many other sources as well. I do not think that this event changes anything in the piece below, nor do I believe that it makes the below less relevant or, frankly, urgent. As such, we proceed as planned.
In December, I read one of the earliest dystopian novels out there.
It is a remarkable accomplishment, a terrifying act of prescience.
Swastika Night was published by an Englishwoman– Katharine Burdekin– under a male pseudonym in 1937. Which means that it was likely conceived and written in 1936, perhaps even earlier.
Before the annexation of Austria. Before Kristallnacht. Before World War II was declared. Twelve years before Orwell would pen 1984. Long, long before most of the world had any concept about what was happening, Burdekin already saw, with breathtaking clarity, what they were dealing with.
Swastika Night is set 600 years in the future of the Reich. Germany and Japan won everything, and split the world in two. Memories of a time pre-Reich have been, by and large, wiped out, and Hitler is worshipped as a seven-foot-tall blond, blue-eyed, bearded deity who was born from the forehead of ‘God the Thunderer.’ (1)
Not from a woman, of course. Nothing as disgusting as that.
They had a “hatred of the beauty of women and a horror of the sexual power beautiful women with the right of choice and rejection [had] over men.”
How dare a woman be allowed to choose or even reject a man? Such a thing could not be permitted. As such, women in this society are barely tolerated; they have been dehumanized and degraded to the point where they are treated only barely above the lowliest of animals, and used only for breeding purposes.
Their liturgy begins with the couplet,
‘As a woman is above a worm,
So is a man above a woman
...and it only gets worse from there.
By now, most people know about Project 2025, the roadmap created by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation for the next administration. (2)
Among other things, they demand that the government
“should remove all ... language ...in agency publications and policies...that include terms including “gender and gender equality.”
Gender equality– and gender as a concept! – just gone, 💨poof 💨 with a keystroke of find+replace.
Their Christian Nationalist game plan includes misapplying the Comstock Act– a Victorian-era obscenity law– to ban mail access to medication abortion (creating a backdoor federal abortion ban) as well as to contraception. So many more forced pregnancies, and as such willful deaths, people forced into (or trapped forever in) poverty, abusive relationships, and an uptick in homicide. For starters.
The Heritage Foundation declared on social media in May, 2023,
“Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”
No more "recreational sex." Of course, the availability of contraception was what enabled the expansion of women into the workforce and much of their social liberation more generally, so its removal would be a drastic turning back of the clock.
And there is a running list of GOP politicians– including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump's new running mate, JD Vance–talking about making divorce harder to obtain by ending no-fault divorce and the like. Vance even said that even people in "violent" marriages shouldn't get divorced.
So: trapping women in a myriad of ways, from a myriad of angles.
Trans men and the nonbinary people who need abortion access and contraception access and anybody of any other gender besides cis don't "count" in this scenario, except insofar as they can be shoved (back) into some binary model. Of course, Project 2025 also removes protections and health care access for LGBTQIA people, that goes without saying.
This part isn't fiction.
Reagan implemented 60% of his Heritage Foundation roadmap in his first year.
Anyway, back to our book.
The world of Swastika Night is an uber-masculine racist colonizer patriarchy on steroids. Germans, of course, have a higher status than non-Germans, because they are of Holy Blood. And so forth.
The story kicks off when Alfred, an Englishman in the German Empire, comes on pilgrimage to see the holy sites of Hitlerism, like sacred airplane in Munich. He comes to the town where Hermann– an old friend– lives, and he meets the Knight (sort of a cross between a medieval knight, a civic official and a priest) on whose land Hermann works. Hermann is a good little Nazi farmer. Alfred, on the other hand, comes dangerously close to being a free thinker.
Things happen that lead to the Nazi Knight, von Hess, giving both Alfred and Hermann a peek behind the proverbial curtain of how things really work, at which point Events Begin to Unfold.
I won't get too deep into the plot, but I'll share some excerpts to to give you a sense of what Burdekin was doing:
First, a snippet of dialogue about Alfred's pilgrimage-in-progress, with Alfred speaking first and Hermann telling us what real manliness is about.
"Well, like one of the oaks in the Holy Forest, the German Forest, the nameless one.”
"Have you been there yet? ”
“ As far as I was allowed to go in, being only an Englishman. It’s a lovely place. So hushed and silent. A man could think there.”
“ A man is supposed not to think, but to feel there."
Hermann, our good Nazi, prefers feeling to thinking.
It's not about logic, using your brain, but rather the emotional, the affective.
Getting whipped up into a frenzy rather than checking facts, say.
Friends: Keep an eye on our media today and see where the emotional language is happening, which politicians and journalists are deploying which tactics, and how.
Later, Alfred, our Brit, has begun his Deconstructing Hitlerism journey and is entertaining scandalous thoughts while listening to Classical music:
Bach was great in a way no man of action was great. “If they’d said he was God,” Alfred thought, “ maybe I’d be a believer yet.” A sudden pleasing notion struck him. Perhaps he [Bach] was not German!
Perhaps he was long pre-Hitler and belonged to some other lost civilisation. Perhaps he was English! But then he shook his head. There was no particular reason to suppose that the great composers were not German, when the Germans were so obviously an intensely musical nation. “Wagner,” thought he, “is as German as the Sacred Aeroplane. But Bach— well, no, but he is above being anything really. He must be, he probably is, a kind of peak civilisation in general. The Nazis themselves are inclined to get much more excited over Wagner. …An expression of panic somehow, hysteria, all that violence and brutality and holy virtues....
Once again: Like "feeling" as a peak masculinity, we have violence, brutality, and panic as holy virtues.
In one of the primary debates for the 2016 elections, Jake Tapper asked then-candidate Trump about his rallygoers attacking protesters– usually people from the Global Majority, generally with Trump egging them on to do so (3) – and here's what Trump said about the people deploying mob violence on peaceful rally attendees:
when they see what’s going on in this country, they have anger that’s unbelievable. They have anger. They love this country... [And then he comes in with a blatant, easily-factchecked lie:] We have some protesters who are bad dudes, they have done bad things. ...And if they’ve got to be taken out, to be honest, I mean, we have to run something.
Anger as an expression of love. One simply has no choice! Panic, hysteria, violence– the holiest of virtues. So much more than care of other, or benefit of the doubt, or restraint, or curiosity. Jump first, ask later.
What happens when they institutionalize this?
Project 2025 aims to give ICE the power to
“civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”
Trump told Time magazine that he would use the US military, illegally, against im/migrants (even willfully misinterpreting the military's clear restrictions under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act when presented with them.)
Project 2025 advises the National Security Council to
“rigorously review all general and flag officer [admiral] promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory,”
and more.
So, yeah: an ideological test for military leadership. Only True Believers may apply.
As genuinely terrifying and serious a novel as Swastika Night is,
Burdekin's sense of humor does pop out. Part of the Hitlerian religion's liturgy reads:
"... ringed round by devils, by Lenin, by Stalin, by Roehm, by Karl Barth, the four arch-fiends, whose necks He set under His Holy Heel, grinding them into the dust."
Elsewhere in the book, our protagonists puzzle on this:
“ Karl Barth ought to be in the Hitler Bible. The other three are mentioned in the Hero-Fights.'’
“ Karl Barth is a mystery,” said the Knight, sighing.
(Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian and primary author of the 1934 Barmen Declaration, a theological statement that rejected Nazi Christianity and stated explicitly, "The church should not be ruled by a leader ('Führer')")
The passage is woven humorously, but it's a reminder of the importance of clergy voices of dissent in times of political danger. Of every voice of dissent, even at personal risk. Barth is remembered, 600 years later, for his bravery, as a devil who continues to plague their leader. (I know he's not left in the most flattering of company, but I believe that the point stands nonetheless.)
More seriously, though, our Englishman Alfred shows us the inevitable consequence of fascism on the spirit. For, all these hundreds of years into Naziism,
No one can write anything now, not even a new march. No one has written anything for hundreds of years, except the most flagrant hash-ups and plagiarisms. We can't cut all culture off at the root and expect it to go on flowering at the top. Lots of us, most of us, love music. Many of us are excellent instrumentalists and quite a number of us can sing in tune and with feeling. But we can't make music. We have nothing to make it out of.
All the things that enriched, that nourished, that fed that wild, essential part of a person's humanity:
They've all been stripped away.
Project 2025 vows
“to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce...”
This is a wholesale takeover of the Federal government. Basically, the plan is to fire everyone they can get away with, and using the Deputy Director appointment as the place to start implementing their agenda on day one. Director-level positions need Senate confirmation, and that can take some time. Well, who'll be running things in the meantime? Gosh.
In November, Trump told a crowd in New Hampshire,
"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."
- Government purge ✅
- Dehumanizing language ✅
- Political targets ✅.
And recently Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said the quiet part out loud on Steve Bannon's radio show. (It really is like a horror montage of names so many of us would rather forget):
“[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”
Josh Doss is a political wonk who I generally find to be thoughtful and insightful. Here, he reflects on knowing one of the architects of Project 2025– DC is a small city– and says,
"If he was not so human, he would not be so guilty.
When I look at the authors of Project 2025 and their ideals for women in this country, their ideals for Black people in this country, their ideals for all of these disadvantaged communities, subtly putting them down. I do not see boogeymen. I just see men.
And in my opinion, that is what makes it so bad."
@appliedscience11 On sight
♬ original sound - Joshua Doss
Burdekin, in the end, calls us to the carpet and to the streets.
Von Hess, the Knight– who has interesting things, indeed, to say– is doing a little thought experiment with our friend Alfred. Von Hess asks:
"If England was free, would you promise blind obedience to any[one], always, even if [they] had been selected by Englishmen?”
“No. I should have to be the Leader myself.”
“Without knowing anything about democracy you have found the flaw in it. In a democracy no [one] of character is willing to give up [their] right of private judgment, and as [they] cannot trust [their] leader, knowing [them] to be of the same clay as [one]self, one must be the leader. So government becomes exceedingly difficult. ....
"So the end of democracy," Von Hess says, "is always the same: it breaks up into chaos, and out of chaos comes some kind of authoritarian government– a fuehrer, an oligarchy, government by the army, or something of the kind. Now I am not so contemptuous of democracy as he is because I have seen the ultimate natural decay of authoritarian government, which is complete stagnation. But I still do not see how democracy can be made to last long enough to develop character in a sufficient number of people. That will be the problem of your great-grandsons, Alfred, for once truth has come back to the world the authoritarian form of government must collapse.”
"Once truth has come back to the world the authoritarian form of government must collapse.”
So that's where we are left. With the truth.
That's where we always are.
We can only win if we face, and tell, the truth.
Now. Later. Always.
🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱
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FOOTNOTES
(1) Yes, I'm aware of The Man in the High Castle, but have not read it. I am significantly more interested in Swastika Night for many, many reasons, including the date that it was written. She did not know how things were going to turn out.
(2) They've been doing this since another upstart politician named Ronald Reagan came on the national scene in 1980; that over 3,000 page report was also called Mandate for Leadership; Reagan had implemented about 60% of its ideas within his first year in office. (They've produced a subsequent Mandate for every presidential election since then.)
Project 2025’s board of over 80 far-right orgs includes almost 40 that have been funded by dark money groups connected to Leonard Leo, a major right-wing donor who influenced the shaping of SCOTUS' extremist supermajority under Trump. So, yes, it's all connected. You can see the Heritage Foundation's receipts and such here. And don't believe the lie that they're not connected to Trump; over 140 people who worked for him are behind its creation, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. In fact, a CNN review found nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump.
(3) Remember all this? Of course. But how well can you remember the time before this? Oof.
(4) Obviously I don't mean that voting Blue (no matter how that shakes down, who's on the POTUS ticket in the end, etc) is the magical solution to all of our problems. Clearly. Look around. We have major, major electoral and profound systemic work to do no matter what. Much more on all that next week. I do, however, have a lot of questions about why the NYT has been flooding coverage on Biden dropping out (On July 6th, Rebecca Solnit noted that they'd run 50 op-eds and 142 news stories on the topic since the debate) rather than zeroing in on the fact that Trump is a literal criminal with multiple other cases still cooking, that his buddies are looking to turn this country into a (more*) terrifying place, and– well, and everything else after that. (Yes, I get and honor many of y'all's moral and practical concerns with regard to Biden. And I continue to note that those with media power are making choices that must also be urgently interrogated, here. Even the anger at a Trump rally is being described as "righteous"!)
As long as we're here, I can't not include Pussy Riot's ode to the stakes. This song was released in 2016, but is no less relevant now. Given that Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova and her co-member Maria Alyokhina both served time in penal colonies after their convictions for protesting Putin (and the Russian Orthodox church's support of him)– and that Tolokonnikova even went on hunger strike in protest of the human rights violations she experienced there– well, perhaps we can take their warnings seriously on the dangers of authoritarianism?
Please note the trigger warning below before clicking play.
TRIGGER WARNING: Examination of a woman's body, branding, implied but not graphic sexual assault, violence against women, staged murder, etc. Also: Clips of Trump saying horrible, violent, racist and misogynistic things. Whoo?