Pretext

In late February of 1933, not more than a month after Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, an arsonist set the German Reichstag building ablaze. Located in the heart of Berlin, the venerable Reichstag was where the German Parliament met, so the crime attracted the nation’s focus. 

It is important to note that the police services in charge of investigating the fire were now fully under Nazi control. A few hours after the incident they confidently declared Communists were responsible.  Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, was arrested at the site, and the Nazis promptly accused the Communist Party of seeking to overthrow the government. 

Within a day The Reichstag Fire Decree was enacted and  civil rights in Germany were abolished. A little more than a year later came The Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler and his inner circle murdered most everyone seen as an obstacle to his total dominance of German rule. The totalitarian control of Nazi edicts pervaded German life from that moment forward. 

When a nation gives way to fascism it quite literally falls apart, the logical result of accepting daily routines clouded by lies and deceit from the institutions meant to solve the governing challenges truth reflects. When facts are systematically repressed personal relationships, community ties, and  national unity become hostage to who can accept the emerging upside down status quo and who can’t. 

Many, maybe most, will sacrifice the civic duty and personal esteem democracy left unmolested to adjust in favor of continuing to pursue routines without interruption. Fewer won’t.  The tension between those unwilling to challenge a new fabrication based on the divisive intrigue despotism requires and those who refuse to accept it and feel disappointment, even betrayal, in friends and family who do will simmer and eventually boil over. The degree to which authoritarian control succeeds is easy to quantify; the first group steadily increases as the latter group is purged, or its members flee the country, or they just surrender and keep their mouths shut. 

Ironically, while a system falls to political extremism, those who move most ardently to confront its collapse are very often branded as at least equal part of the problem. Those desperately seeking to avoid conflict and hold on to normalcy lose interest in distinguishing who they resent for making waves. Many of those who give up the fight do so because of the toll taken on their close relationships.

Becoming a pariah is not pleasant, even if you believe in the lines you are drawing, the reasonable demands you are making. And the battle between criminals willing to lie and hurt for power and those who just want to put bread on the table, perhaps enjoy their famous chicken wings and the NFL every Sunday, is never any contest at all. Democracy dies in the shadows of avoiding drama. 

This last week has been particularly disheartening. One can detest a man’s murder and still be sickened by the MAGA crusade to make Charlie Kirk, not just a martyr, but a towering intellect and courageous communicator. The elevation of Kirk is the deification of Fox/AM, the enshrinement of its long crusade against liberal democracy. 

It’s not essential to go over Charlie Kirk’s well established record as a rightist provocateur. A two-minute Google session will provide all the education one needs as to whether or not his worldview reflected the values and traditions the American brand has stood for. It would be gratuitous to recite it here… and perhaps, now, dangerous. But it is clear that by the time of his shocking murder Kirk had become a ubiquitous symbol of the immense power Fox/AM’s platform provided those with the willingness and energy to both target the various audience blocs  it coveted and recite the relentless talk track it demanded. 

He deployed his youth and vigor, along with a willingness to confront critics directly, to beguile a younger generation of reactionaries the same way Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck had entranced their elders. Like his predecessors, who learned at the feet of OGs Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh, Kirk understood that the name of the game is validation, rendering otherwise bygone tropes of racial bias and societal intolerance we thought had been vanquished as destructive elements of our national conversation, not just acceptable but valuable, not merely understandable, but actually commendable. More importantly, critics of such thinking weren’t only wrong, they were sinister and dangerous. That perilous illogic is his legacy. 

But whatever Charlie Kirk may have wanted to achieve, whatever he hoped his legacy would be, at the end of the day in this sick nation he did more than his fair share to addle, his killing is being processed as nothing more than a pretext, no different from Berlin arson almost a century ago. Charlie Kirk’s abominable slaying has been ingested as a watershed justification for the MAGA menace to eliminate the remaining strictures on its ability to hurt who it pleases, destroy who it wants. 

Whatever “thoughts and prayers” were being offered to Kirk’s widow and children, they were surely drowned out by a line of the MAGA-Fox/AM political and media class that stretched around the block, each inciting violent retribution against “the radical left for Charlie”. Of course, the rot starts at the top, and these days our diseased POTUS is incapable of anything other than rank sedition and authoritarian tropes. His promise is to go after “each and every one of those responsible… for radical left political violence.” 

The MAGA (formerly Republican) Party leadership is seizing on the notion that Kirk’s slaying cleanses it pure, and calling attention to the fascism  it now actively embraces is a hate crime because “leftist hatred” is primarily responsible for US disunity. Meanwhile, in Huntington Beach, California a frightening crowd of unabashed Caucasian testosterone screamed in unison “White Men Fight Back!”  Few doubted their affiliation. 

What we are left with is fascism on the move, ready to get busy on a societal clampdown MAGA totalitarianism was always going to clammer for at some point. How we resist it requires what has always been demanded… courage, unity, but most of all a collective recognition of the crisis and what is at stake, which is everything. It is disheartening to see friends one loves and needs shrink from this basic set of responsibilities. It is more painful still to be ostracized for sounding the clarion call of what one knows is right. Yet and still, there are no other options now. The White Walkers are at the gate! BC