There has been a certain amount of dispute as to whether or not the people going to "healthcare townhalls" and yelling a lot of crap are behaving as they do as part of a coordinated "astroturf" campaign, or because they are Ordinary Citizens Genuinely Angry and Afraid. The answer, of course, is that they are both -- they are angry and terrified ordinary citizens who are gleefully participating in an organized, coordinated propaganda campaign. There is no contradiction here. If propaganda attracts fanatical ideological adherents, that hardly makes it not propaganda. Rather, it makes it effective propaganda.
Why this obvious reality should cause bafflement to anyone is something we'll leave for another time. Right now let's instead skull-fuck Godwin's Law.
To wit. For rather obvious, if ludicrous, reasons many precincts of Greater Wingnuttia the other day were hootin' n' hollerin' over the alleged "whoop-ass" delivered by this self-identifed Marine at a healthcare townhall held by Washington's Brian Baird.
Maha's take on this person's performance is correct, of course; the speaker, David, may not be stupid, but still, he's talking a lot of nonsense. He's being sincere -- that's not the issue. The issue is that what he has to say is loony, though it's clearly lunacy of a sort that favors powerful political and financial interests.
But to narrow things down, and since he himself brought it up -- he's acting kind of, well, Brownshirty. No, seriously. Which is why his otherwise boring remarks are perhaps worth examining, because from an actual historical perspective they are rather alarming. No shit!
Hmmm. That's basically the transcript, apart from the part where he accuses Baird of "indoctrinating" young people in regards to public education, and advises him to "stay the hell away from my kids." Which is not insignificant, but for right now, let's talk Nazis. (I'm not much interested in arguing with this fellow, mind, which is, essentially, not possible -- this is more in the line of a diagnosis.)
To address the stuff about the Nazi "takeover" of Finance & Industry. The leaders of German industry and finance at the time of the Nazi seizure of power were perhaps somewhat skeptical of these crude upstarts, but were nevertheless happy to see a government willing to ruthlessly crush unions and left-wing worker activism generally. German capitalists did not like the communists nor the Social Democrats, who were hardly insignificant forces during the Weimar years. Besides, the Nazis ruthlessly forced out Jews from all top (and bottom) industrial posts, and thoroughly looted (or, "Aryanized") Jewish firms -- there was a lot of money there, and German tycoons were hardly averse to taking it. Besides, these men were patriots, and broadly approved of Hitler's manly resuscitation of German strength after the humiliations of WWI. What the German capitalists did not realize was the extent of Hitler's mania for war, and his mad determination to bend every aspect of German society towards military conquest, particularly in the East. They were by and large fine with Hitler's aims, until it became clear that Hitler cared nothing for their profits, only for their ability to prepare for and then make war. But by then it was too late.
As for healthcare, the Nazis did indeed "take it over," as they did everything else, and for the same general reason -- they had the aim of producing a healthier populace with which to wage war.
And that's a little history lesson. The upshot is, if Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama are obsessed with a desire to invade Poland as a crucial step towards supplying lebensraum for East Coast latte-gulping elites, further evidence of such a desire will need to be supplied.
Which is not to say that I have no problems with Obama or his policies. I do! And I have not refrained from saying so. But there is a key point here; what annoys me about Obama is his tendency to act along the lines of how American politicians generally act. Ward-heeling, I get. Triangulation, I get. Trimming and spinning, I get. Even arrant self-serving bullshit -- I get. Obama is a supremely gifted American politician, and is behaving as such given the shit level of political discourse now prevailing; which is of course not an excuse, world without end, Amen. It pisses me off-- but I don't think he's irrational. Or, more to the point, Obama is obviously not someone willing to blow up the ballpark in order to win the game forever. And why should he? The game's been as good for him as it's been for anyone else. In history, even.
(One might also point out that every other industrialized nation has a different healthcare system than we do, and this state of affairs did not come about because Hitler beat all the world except us. But that's just an aside.)
What I'm driving at is that there was an astounding lunacy about the Nazis. It's always problematic to read history backwards, but nevertheless, if there was ever a regime hell-bent from the get-go on destroying itself and as much of everyone else around it as it could touch, it was the Third Reich. Because they were crazy. German fascists inhabited a weird, self-contained universe that had a great deal of internal cohesion if you accepted its basic premises and ignored everything else, but this cohesion required an awful lot of effort to maintain. Because they fed themselves on fantasy, and the heart grew brutal from the fare. And eventually it all blew up with lots of evil and corpses. Maintaining the illusion not just in the face of failure, but of almost destroying the world? Wow.
But let's back up a bit. What enabled the Nazi rise to power in the first place? What put these supreme anti-democrats in charge of a democratic nation? It's a hell of a puzzle, a pancake, a snorter.
Theories abound. But by all accounts one of the factors was the rise of the SA, the Brownshirts. Who were, to a large degree, "old fighters," WW1 veterans who never adjusted to civilian life, or who could never find satisfying work, or what have you. A lot of them were just angry, for any number of reasons: but whatever, SA members in the 20s and early 30s sure are up the lies and fantasies and propaganda of the Nazis, who offered them what they craved the most: an explanation, a grotesquely oversimplified narrative of how the world works where you know who's Good and who's Bad. And what's more, it was gratifyingly predicted that, as certain as Dawn in the East, one day the Bad were going to get the everliving shit kicked out of them. An exaltation of hyper-nationalism in terms almost exclusively of symbols, an equation of the only positive good of the state with the military, a refusal to acknowledge any other truth beyond that most gratifying to a selfish sense of grievance -- that's our ideal Brownshirt recruit!
Whose most important job it was, in those early days, to go to the political meetings of other parties and raise pure hell.
Which doesn't mean that all the Teabaggers are fascists. Oh heavens no. Few of them have the gumption, for one thing, and for another, to paraphrase a sublime insult line from Joe Lee, even fewer of them display the capacity for intellectual rigor that made the Brownshirts famous.
But what you can conclude, quite soberly, from looking at videos like this one that the wingnuts are all cheering, is that we are potentially facing an even worse debacle than the Bush years. The GOP, and Fox News, and talk radio, have lost all the brakes: remember how when Kerry lost, and the Democrats were solemnly advised to not be so strident about stuff like gay rights? Is there any Media Voice at all right now telling the GOP to stop catering to its crazy base? Do Limbaugh and Hannity have any financial or cultural incentive to tone it down a bit? Will Roger Ailes abandon his business plan?
If the Obama administration, and the House and Senate Democratic majorities, royally fuck up healthcare, they may just deliver the nation into the hands of people who have no good reason to pursue anything but their most cherished personal crack-addled white whales. Because, like, can the GOP in its current state actually govern?
Look at this video of our friend the crazy Marine again. We may be about to enter the era of the Beige-golfshirts. Worn by zombies. Huzzah.
21st century "conservatives" may not use all the methods of the Brownshirts. And they may not be Nazis. But they are not much more fit to govern, either, because they are not much closer to a demonstrated ability to value reality over self-serving horseshit and moronic catchphrases, death panels 4-eva, bay-bee.