“You were flirting with Nazism six years ago.”
Jokes vs. Flirting as The Beginning of Thinking
“You were flirting with Nazism six years ago.” Says the online accuser.
“But I was not flirting. It was joking with a friend in private messages.” Says the woman who had, for the last ten years, been ritually harassed for her positions on free speech and sex/gender.1
“Well, I couldn't detect any joking!” says the super online antifa activist whose sense of humor amounts to smirking about obscure shared references within a niche online community that has fostered a completely reductive and totalizing worldview.
…
Recently there was some controversy around a fellow traveler and collaborator of Theory Underground. Nothing that follows is the opinion of anyone at TU, necessarily, except for its founder, me, David McKerracher. I am writing this and only I am responsible for what comes next.
Personally, I am uninterested in running “a leftist org.” People often associate TU with supposedly similar orgs that are, first of all, not lecture-course platforms, and second of all primarily focused on arguing that the left can still win if only X, Y, or Z things… or arguing that the Left really is a, b, or c conception of ideas. I just couldn’t care less about any of that.
There are some great people doing work in theory, and sometimes they also happen to be leftists, but that is not why I associate with them. I associate with people despite their ideology, not because of it.
Well, some of the leftist™ people with whom I’ve tried to work in the last few years have felt uncomfortable about TU being open to non-leftists, ex-leftists, and post-leftists. As though a teaching platform by and for people who have burnt out on partying, politics, and academia should at the same time fold itself right back into toeing a political line, much less the H.R. DEI style agenda forced down throats of all inquisitive minds who are unfortunate enough to end up hostage to the intellectual apparatus of capture known as the contemporary university.
Nina Power has, all along, been the most controversial figure with whom TU associates. Most of the backlash we received when an early draft of the Underground Theory book was leaked to Twitter (I won’t call it X, fuck off!) was related to Nina. Why? Because she believes that sex is real, matters, and cannot be changed. The horror!
Just think, an academic holding the most common sense position in human history has the audacity to say the quiet part out loud. She must be stopped! How do they try to stop her? By calling her a fascist, of course.
If you disagree with her position, then fantastic. Flesh out your position theoretically, like an adult. Or you can be like her haters and build a harassment cult, stalking and defaming her as a Nazi. That’s basically what Luke Turner did, until Nina and her friend Daniel Miller decided to sue for defamation.
For anyone unaware, “slander” and “libel” both fall under defamation. The former is spoken whereas the latter is written, but both have to do with trying to ruin someone’s public image by spreading lies or malicious accusations. At some point Nina and Miller realized what most people who look into defamation cases do: Such trials are costly and extremely hard to win if you are already a public figure.
You can read Miller’s account of the whole situation here (and if you genuinely care about the particulars of this case, as opposed to what I am going to do in this piece, then you should definitely read that).
Ok, so what does all of this have to do with being accused of flirting with Nazism? Well, in the agonizing and expensive court case that resulted in being counter-sued by Turner, both cases by the way got dismissed, chat logs between Nina and Miller were released. They were found to have been, at a couple of points out of hundreds of pages of documents, joking about how “Oh no, I think I’m becoming a Nazi now!!!” and “Guess we better move to Argentina.”
The main thrust of this piece will not argue that this was, in fact, a joke, and that we must absolutely see it as such, but will instead ask the question all of this has really brought to light for me as a philosophy professor: What if someone really did seriously flirt with Nazism six years ago? But first, let’s put to rest the question about jokes.
Is there any point trying to explain a joke to a person who doesn't understand humor? The humor in question is not edgy for the sake of being edgy. No, this kind of humor develops between friends who are constantly under fire for being something they are, in fact, not. When that happens, it becomes cathartic to joke about how it is becoming true.
But as Nina said in her article that came out today (her piece clearing the air around some of the accusations)
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but it’s a bewildering experience to be called something you’re not over and over again. After a while you start to think well, am I? I mean, hundreds of people are saying it and we all know that hundreds of people can’t be wrong all at once […] I suppose I should check. I mean, I think of myself as a pacifist, into dialogue and diplomacy, mediation, forgiveness, a defender of ambiguity, humour and ambivalence, and not at all interested in genociding anyone, or militarism, industrialism, book burning or corporatism…but maybe I’m secretly a Nazi? In all seriousness, everyone probably should ask themselves if they would have been a Nazi. Most people would have been because most people are conformists to whatever regime they live under. The point is to understand how deranged political systems and individuals emerge. In order to do this we have to study these things, and understand how people were seduced by violent and insane ideas and people.2
Two friends joking in private about becoming interested in the ideas of Adolph Hitler, after being defamed as being something they are not, i.e. Nazis, is all the context one should need to read Nina Power's direct messages with Daniel Miller.
But if you're a leftist influencer like Daniel Tutt you will say you are appalled by what Nina and Miller said six years ago in private.
If you are like Tony of 1Dime, all this will confirm your preconceived notion that the person in question was insufficiently Marxist enough to critique wokeness in a properly materialist fashion, which naturally leads to neoreaction. When I pointed out that it was obviously jokes, Tony’s response was that this was, in fact, not obvious. Another of my few remaining leftist friends, Swol, said something of the same variety.
If you’re like them you will, at this point, look like the meme from Pulp Fiction where John Travolta is looking around: Where is it? Where’s the joke?
And you'll keep looking, because you lack the (direct or empathetic) background conditions necessary to render intelligible the humor. What I mean is you haven't spent a decade under fire being slandered as something you are not, known someone who has, or empathized with people who are in that lovely situation.
The problem goes beyond being called “something” you are not, but slandered as the worst thing you can possibly be in today’s society: A Nazi. What could possibly be worse to have others say of you? To have your family, friends, immediate co-workers, colleagues in the broader field, and everyone else put on high alert that you are a literal Nazi.
Maybe a pedophile or wife-beater would be as bad or worse, but that’s about it; when the mob is really coming for you they will try to call you all three. If you’re a woman, the wife-beater and pedo labels have a little less feasibility, which is probably very frustrating and leads to the disproportionate hatred and harassment women face when they don’t toe the ideological line.3
When it comes to overly zealous antifascists online doing their keyboard warrior thing and sending DMs to everyone in your life, there are concrete and real world repercussions. Targets of such campaigns quickly realize they cannot address everything everyone says about them all of the time or it just welcomes people to make your personal life their business.
When a victim of harassment, people will say you should either deal with it legally or just remain silent. If you respond, then people will say this makes you more guilty at best, or at worst the attention-starved and desperate dregs from the sewers of social media will seize the opportunity or pseudo recognition, whether it be positive or negative it’s better than how miserable they feel when no one is engaging.
If you start responding to the lowest common denominator, or validating every urban myth and slanderous lie by signal boosting it to everyone, then people start to think you deserve whatever you have coming because, look, you should have just paid it no mind. If you do, instead, seek legal recourse, you are almost guaranteed to lose because defamation cases are extremely hard to win for anyone whose work exists in the so-called public sphere. So if you are a public intellectual or politician, you’re fucked. You either know this, or you find out the hard way, as Nina and Miller did.
What most people do is keep their mouths shut and watch as their social networks thin. You can’t reach out to most people personally because you don’t know them that well and it would seem weirder to DM everyone. Simultaneously, you realize you have to wait for people to come to you. So you stop reaching out to people and see who reaches out to you — try that sometime and see how it feels.
I am, of course, speaking from some degree of personal experience. Nothing compared to Nina Power (or
, for that matter), but I have my own stalkers who like to DM work colleagues with wild and malicious accusations about my character, about my marriage, about my secret politics, etc. There’s nothing one can do but joke about it. Laughing sure beats crying.I've been called a Nazi, reactionary, and neoreactionary. So has my wife, and several of my closest collaborators. Not because we are antisemitic, and not because we believe in the militaristic all-or-nothing glorification of a national ethno-state at everyone else's expense, either. No, we get called these things because, unlike so many kids in the theory scene, we don't put antifa flags in our bios.
I mean this literally and figuratively. Take “flags in bios” as a metonym* for any behavior that tries to ensure everyone knows up front that one is for sure, in no way at all, one of THEM. Most of the time this comes down to public displays of disgust at scapegoated figures who are being made an example of in the moment, saying “I couldn’t imagine…” or “I am appalled.”
*
Performative pearl-clutching and H.R.-style statements of support for marginalized groups, or denunciations of whatever abstract forces are harming them, are the usual ways to make sure people know for sure you are not evil (the most common metonym for which being “Nazi”) and are, in fact, very good.
Is there nothing more precious than watching a person proclaim that they are, in fact, not evil, and moreover, are one of the good ones? All the while a handful of their online friends cheer them on: “You’re so good you just couldn’t imagine joking about such things! Same with us, we’re also good, we swear we are!”
Whereas normal people assume that only fringe lunatics are Nazis, a certain kind of extremely online paranoiac assumes that there must be one hiding beneath the persona of any person who doesn't constantly denounce evil. Whereas normal people will, when accused of being one, laugh and be like, “Oh yeah, that’s me LOL sieg heil!”
On the other hand, the terminally online leftist, or the influencers who pander to them, feel the need to roll out official statements of their position — a position that can be defined as today’s doxa, but with heartfelt conviction!
To the online lifestyle antifa, if you don't denounce evil, then you might just be evil. But for regular working people, the person who spends a lot of time denouncing things everyone already agrees are bad starts to wonder what's up. “Why's he trying so hard to appear good?” Big. Red. Flag.
Ultimately, it makes sense. Those who spend their life trying to root out Nazis eventually find them, or at least find the targets of their harassment using the words that have been used against them. “Oh no, they’re going to discover my POWER LEVEL!!!”
Gay people making “fag” and “queer” into terms of endearment is an obvious example. Except, whereas gay people have, more or less, become part of the status quo, Nazis have not. Therefore, you don’t find vitriolic homophobes saying, “Oh my god see, look, he really IS gay — he referred to himself as a fag in these private messages!!!” You WILL, on the other hand, find people who have been the targets of overzealous and terminally online antifa harassment making jokes about being Nazis, if not publicly, then privately, or at least anonymously.
Being misrecognized and lied about is frustrating, especially when it is being used to hijack your career or wreck your social networks. Where do leftists who “don’t see the joke” like Tony and Swol think that frustrated energy goes? Pressure release valves that work for one person won’t necessarily for the next, and joking is probably the best way to blow off some steam.
This comes down to a conflict of fields and the forms of habitus that those fields instill in anyone who inhabits them for long. The field of super online antifas, the ones who do paranoic dog-whistle spotting as a way of life, is one that is utterly removed from diverse contexts between different kinds of workplaces and family or friend spaces.
To go deep into the different forms of habitus, not to mention jouissance, that inform the sense of humor and operating assumptions between fields, would take this piece too far from where I want to go. It already has gone way too far into the joke side of things when that’s not even the most controversial aspect of this case I want to argue.
For now, suffice it to say that the best further reading I can recommend on this is Mikey's Wage Labor and Jouissance, paying close attention to the way a humor-habitus forms between his barcade and warehouse jobs. The generational gaps and kinds of labor expected constitute the fields, thus the habitus that forms between the workers has its own kind of jouissance (as Bourdieu says, every field has its own habitus and every habitus has its own libido!) This lecture has me unpacking that and many other quotes, as well as a fire ass lecture from my wife on the phenomenon that IS David Goggins:
But joking aside, I want to take things in the opposite direction.
I'm not the kind of person who has a lot of totally definitive takes on things, especially when it comes to the character of others. I simply don't trust like that.
Epistemic humility means keeping in mind that one might be wrong. It is generally a big red flag when a person's whole mode has thrown such caution to the wind and is quick to come down hard, publicly, in judgement of another. Which is why I was so put off by what seemed to be an opportunistic move by
to jump aboard the bandwagon of Nina's recent cancellation and do his own little ritualistic hand-washing. Good riddance, right? His gut senses and previous pandering to her haters now confirmed, nothing more to see here folks. Just the other day he dropped a tweet claiming people think he is too soft on Nina!
lol you can’t make this shit up guys. Not only did he jump on the bandwagon that threw epistemic humility to the wind, he didn’t jump on it hard enough! Just wait for him to get cancelled for not cancelling people enough — it’s only a matter of time that something so ridiculous occurs when you spend too much time pandering to the worst elements of that fantastical thing calling itself Left.
Except my assessment that Tutt has lost touch with intellectual integrity or radical responsibility due to too much time spent pandering to the worst elements of the online Left is not definitive. I wouldn't say something like that about him publicly, especially if he was at that very moment in the crosshairs of the mob, and certainly not in a way where washing my hands of him sets me up for some convenient and quick social and cultural capital.
I wouldn’t do that because 1. I believe it is intellectually and morally bankrupt, and 2. It would embolden the worst elements of my audience while alienating everyone else who is genuinely critical, i.e. those who practice epistemic caution and radical responsibility. I only wish Tutt was as careful in his treatment of Nina.
Definitive assessments of character that are made in the least charitable way are big red flags. So, what does it mean to say that Daniel’s (as well as Tony and the rest of the bandwagon’s) assessment is uncharitable?
The principle of charity
Charitability means seriously considering alternative interpretations of a situation that are more sympathetic to the target of the harassment. For instance, when people assume J.K. Rowling is a vile transphobe who literally hates trans people, as opposed to TRAs (trans rights activists), the principle of charitability would consider the fact that she genuinely believes women are a class that have been historically oppressed by men, and that men who identify as women are now not only stealing valor from women in sports, putting women at risk in prisons, and undermining the ability for women to organize in spaces apart from those who are biologically male. Is that really so hard to imagine that Rowling cares about women and the truth?
Even if you disagree with her on any one of those points, is it really so hard to get where she is coming from? Considering the fact that she takes so much heat for holding a position that has been held by 99.9% of humanity for all time (i.e. that men and women are defined, in large and essential ways, by differences based in biology, regardless of how those differences get interpreted culturally or legally).
I think things are a lot more complicated than just calling gender unimportant and sticking to biological terms. I’ve read too much theory to stop at that point. But this is not about me. This is about the principle of charitability and whether we see TRAs or the influencers who pander to them putting this into practice when it concerns the most beloved children’s story author of my generation.
Most “leftists” will just act appalled that Rowling has the audacity to say such a thing, and then they use the fact that she is successful and “white” to throw in additional accusations of privilege, which thus legitimate any and all forms of harassment because, after all, she’s rich so it’s ok — as though this “making an example” of her doesn’t send a message to people who lack the resources for therapy or financial independence from a job where a worker might get fired if being harassed by the mob.
Because Rowling is on the receiving side of leftist vitriol and harassment, best not to show compassion, sympathy, or ever consider charitable alternatives. Instead, all charitability must be one-sidedly placed with those who claim they are the most marginalized and “at risk.” H.R. style harm reduction ideology kicks into effect and there’s nothing more to see here. Just join in with the mob or remain silent, those are your two options if you don’t want to get it too.
“Leftists” thus lose all credibility with 99.5% of humanity, and especially the overwhelming majority of working class parents for whom these issues are not so abstract.4 This is where radical responsibility comes in the most: When dealing with the common sense of the masses, even if it turns out to be incorrect, there is a way to handle it that shows compassion and charitability, and then there is a way to handle it that is radically irresponsible.
Those who want to change society radically are the most responsible for being epistemically cautious, especially when it comes to judging the character of others in public forums. Those who shrug off all concerns regarding cancel culture as a boogeyman, and then proceed to leap into uncharitable assessments of figures being publicly “made an example of” online cannot be taken seriously as would-be change makers or activists, especially when they call themselves words that already have as much stigma as “socialist,” “communist,” or “Marxist.”
If I cannot trust your assessment of someone’s character, or your ability to consider the possible nuances of a text message exchange, then why the fuck would I trust you, or people like you, with something as complicated and life-world totalizing as the economy?
You want to run society, to dictate how all time and energy and effort functions in a system of production and distribution, but you cannot be trusted with maintaining critical caution when passing judgement?
Personally, after seeing Tutt and Tony’s responses, I can confidently say I would never trust them at the levers of society — not that they actually have a shot at seriously directing (much less dictating) policy or the direction society goes; they don’t have a serious shot at that because they hitched their wagons to a failed project that already has strong connotations of terror, disappearing political rivals, suppressing disagreement, and telling people where to work under threat of direct punishment, not to mention show trials and bureaucratic chaos. Not only do they know that and do nothing to dispel that reputation, but they supercharge it with this behavior.
Ok, easy enough to say such things. Right wing grifters and opportunists online would say as much too. What would it look like to assess the Nina and Miller situation from a position of epistemic humility? For me, it means assuming that the mob is wrong and considering under what conditions one might say the things that people are reacting to. I’ve already shown what it looks like to consider the conditions that make such message exchanges intelligible as jokes in the first place. Now let’s do the critical thing and go a step further.
Only a simp would uncritically assume Nina must have been joking — that there is no way she could possibly have been serious about wanting to read Mein Kampf and being a little worried that she might become convinced by it, “What if we agree with it!?”
Before publicly saying it was obviously a joke I also considered the alternative: What if she really did flirt with Nazism six years ago? To me, the fact that people think this would be career-ending for a philosopher could not be more revealing. Revealing of the rot that is today’s academia.
Revealing of the rot that is today’s activism.
Revealing of the fact that we, the genuinely critical few, are, in fact, surrounded by people who are constitutionally incapable of thinking.
Whoa, that’s pretty harsh Dave. Yep, well, fuck it man. I didn’t make my bed here in the underground so as to refuse to lie in it from time to time. Against the better judgement of the Human Resources division of the underground scene (the self-elected wannabe administrators of the dark underbelly of intellectual life) I’m going to just fucking say it: If you haven’t ever seriously entertained counter theses to the mainstream interpretation of World War II, Nazi Germany, The Holocaust, and the literal devil incarnate, Adolph Hitler, then are you even thinking in the 21st Century?
It’s ok to be a normie, but if you aren’t going to entertain counter-theses to today’s common sense, then you cannot consider yourself a critic of ideology, much less a philosopher.
I mean, hell, how many times have I second-guessed 2 + 2 = 4? Not because it is incorrect, but because it is used as the model of truth by anti-intellectuals everywhere and, surprise surprise, something being correct does not mean we have the sufficient condition for absolute truth.
I’m not saying you should be heterodox for its own sake, as though the mainstream is always wrong or anything like that. I’m saying that to be critical one must interrogate common sense and methodologically suspend the operating assumptions of one’s culture.
If your culture is, therefore, liberal, then that would mean looking into the two big boogeymen of liberalism: Communism and Fascism. This is why I, as some kind of a burnt out liberal, am all about my Marx and Heidegger. Not because they solved all the problems, but because they see things that a liberal worldview cannot.
Most people are never going to do this, and honestly, why should they? But most people aren’t trying to be philosophers, either. Philosophers have always, especially since Descartes, had to practice radical doubt — what Husserl calls the phenomenological epoché.
“To turn off previous habits of thinking in their entirety, to recognize and tear down the mind’s barriers in which those habits envelop the horizon of our thinking, and then to apprehend, with complete freedom of thinking, the genuine problems, the philosophical problems that need to be posed in a completely new way, problems that only the horizon freed of barriers on all sides makes accessible to us–these are hard, exacting demands. Yet nothing less is required… all of this requires a new kind of attitude, one that is completely changed from the natural attitudes of experience and thinking… moving freely within the new attitude, without falling back into the old attitudes, learning to see, to distinguish, and to describe what is standing right before one’s eyes, all this requires studies of a unique and arduous sort.” (Edmund Husserl, Ideas, Volume One)
Phenomenology took the radical doubt of Descartes and attempted to radicalize it into a method. The goal, for both Husserl and Heidegger, was that phenomenology could return philosophy to its proper place as the mother of all sciences, but this would not be possible without a method for countering the two most undermining tendencies in philosophical thought: scholasticism and scientism.
This is why Jean-Paul Sartre, someone who obviously took a great deal of inspiration from the aspirations of both Husserl and Heidegger, spent a good deal of time considering if fascism might be correct. In case the significance of this is lost on anyone, Sartre was the most famous communist of the late 20th Century and simultaneously a staunch defender of human freedom.5
A couple quick downloads of some PDFs and control-F functioning through their bodies did not find me the quote that is jogging my memory6 — so take this with a grain of salt, but I remember pretty clearly that in a letter to one of his lovers (I think her name was Simone, but this Simone in question was not de Beauvoir… that dog Sartre!!) Sartre told the story of his philosophical journey.
In that letter, Sartre talks about how philosophical thinking must take the risks of public disapproval, and must interrogate common sense, which means subjecting the most seemingly obvious to rigorous questioning. In doing so, he did what, I claim, all critical and rigorous minds must do.
Godwin's law exists for a reason
The equation “Hitler equals the absolute worst form of evil” is such a core aspect of 21st Century common sense that it has become a meme in the form of Godwin’s Law, which Wikipedia defines this way:
Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule), short for Godwin's law of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." (Accessed from Wikipedia on July 5th, 2024)
If you have not been in discussions where a comparison to Nazis or Hitler came up, then you have not been in in discussions with Americans in the 21st Century. In my upbringing, Hitler was not just synonymous with evil, but he was supposed to be the literal antichrist.
The belief of many evangelicals then, and probably still today, is that Satan does not know when the End Times begin, so he just keeps trying over and over again, returning in various forms as evil charismatic leaders. Hitler was just one of many failed attempts — Genghis Khan being a much older version and Barak Obama the most recent (haha).
Even if you did not grow up in a family that did not believe in the antichrist, you nevertheless grew up believing that Hitler was the most useful example of extreme evil. So why does this matter for the philosophical mind?
Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, is suspicious of the seemingly obvious. If everyone would jump off a cliff, would you? Oh you wouldn’t? Why not?
Just because everyone believes something is wrong doesn’t mean it is; and in fact, the more everyone believes something to be true, the more you have to ask yourself if you, as an individual taking radical responsibility for your convictions, can find a sturdy basis that goes beyond the hearsay or fears of others.
Hearsay, in the form of mainstream historical narratives, is one thing. The fears of others is another. People have good reason to fear being called “a Nazi” or, what I discovered recently as a new one when someone called me this, an “esoteric Hitlerist” (Christ lol).
They fear being called it, or associated with someone being slandered as such, because it can result in getting fired, gang stalked, and violently assaulted. At least, this used to be the case… I think the reason we see people using “Hiterlist” these days is because Nazi has already been so over-used that it has lost its initial sting.
What these geniuses are doing is inflating the value of such terms, rendering them useless. Even if a person is blissfully unaware of how far that kind of thing can go, most people have some kind of sense that it is not going to work out well for you if others think you might be literally supporting the worst man or movement to ever exist.
But philosophy, the kind I care about, does not just care about epistemic humility and rigor when making statements about what is fundamentally real (metaphysics) and how one knows (epistemology). Existentially informed ethics is my point of departure, meaning that the fundamental question that metaphysics and epistemology must serve is What is the Good Life? And any answers to this presuppose the Good. The thing about the Good is that it assumes its opposite, i.e. Evil.
Does Evil exist? If so, how do we know? Can evil, in some cases, be justified? Is Evil something that is an actually existing metaphysical force, or is it simply the absence of the Good? Is it a product of corruption, or is it what causes something to corrupt?
Was Hitler born evil, or did he become evil? That’s a pretty important question to consider before too hastily answering that question that so often comes up in ethics classes: If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it? and if someone did do this, would it be immoral? Is this a question of utilitarianism vs. deontology, or something else?
These are all fantastic questions to consider. But not everyone has the luxury of philosophical thought, so most of the time people will, in their timenergy fragile7 ways, blow it all off as pure speculation and not worth the time. But if “it’s bad because we know it’s bad” is not going to cut it, critical thinkers have to go there.
And that would only be the first step. It’s not enough to ask if Hitler was evil or if you would kill him, but you’re going to have to also ask two extremely difficult questions: 1. Whether the mainstream narrative is correct and how one could know, and 2. Even if everything they say is true, what if he was still correct?
Regarding the first, the fear is in being labeled a holocaust denier or a crypto fascist who is “just asking questions.” Oh wow, privileged philosopher person thinks dangerous thoughts — obvious backlash ensues. But questions like this are not a waste of time, and saying you met an actual Holocaust survivor who came to speak at your school is not going to absolve tarrying with the epistemological questions opened by the fact that history is not objective or easily verifiable from the individual standpoint.
I’ve been to and toured the Auschwitz-Birkenau site in Poland, but how hard would it be for a government to build such a thing as a part of its mission to bolster a false narrative? How hard would it be to train actors and agents to testify to the truth value of the narrative being spread? (the real question, how many readers just exited this article because we’ve officially taken thought itself one step too far!)
I’ve had to consider such things.
Because I have obviously pondered such questions, I have answers, but I’m going to save those til later. Let’s finish strong with the hardest question of them all:
IF everything that is attributed to Hitler is true, i.e. the scapegoating, mass internment, and attempted genocide of Jews, resulting in the horrific slaughter of over six million men, women, and children, then the truly dangerous question rears its ugly head: What if he was right?
Coincidentally, you can now, thanks to AI reconstructions, hear old speeches back in English but it sounds just like the real voice and cadence of the historical speaker. This one was recommended to me by YouTube recently — probably because the algorithms know what I’ve been writing about!
Without revisiting Mein Kampf, what I mean by “what if he was right” is basically:
What if there are natural laws and races fit into some cosmic or evolutionary plan wherein losing touch with one’s homeland leads to degeneracy, misery, and ultimately being invaded and wrecked by neighboring nations? What if “uprooted” people really do live upon nations in a parasitic way? What if the only way to cleanse a nation really is to root out the Other and export them to some other place or, if need be, commit the Final Solution of genocidal extinction?
If those things were true, then such decisions would be incumbent on all hard-nosed realists who care about the ultimate survival of their people. Personally, I do not think those things are true — but I don’t grasp at pearls and act appalled. No, I think the matters through for myself and then continue to research. Without taking such things seriously you will fall for some stupid idea like “racism is just so powerful a force” or “the antichrist is trying to force the End Times again”!
The idea that we cannot ask the questions bolded above makes sense. Just writing those words will be called, by some, a supreme violence. Now, those who desperately want to believe it, have the quote to clip out of context and confirm their conspiracy theory about me being an “esoteric Hitlerist.”
Facts though: I don’t think races are “real” in the sense of “organic ethno-geographical totalities,” and even if I did, that wouldn’t justify wholesale extermination of any people, because I don’t believe in the superstitious “sins of the father” logic that justifies the kinds of genocides committed by Nazis, or, if the “Old Testament” (Torah) is to be believed, by ancient Hebrews.
Remember, it’s not just Zionists today who justify the mass killing of their racial Other as a form of collective punishment or ethnic cleansing. This kind of barbaric behavior that rationalizes itself as a commandment from God goes all the way back. Let’s turn to the King James Version of Deuteronomy:
7 When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou… 2 And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them… 16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: 17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee: 18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.
This is “holy scripture” for both practicing Jews and Christians alike. Christians will, inevitably, talk about how God sent Jesus to make it so this kind of totalitarian and genocidal blood-line guilt logic could come to an end—and they will argue, as William Lane Craig does here, that we wouldn’t even have a moral basis for anti-genocide sentiment if not for Christian ethics (oh thank you Jesus for your famous sermon against genocide, very memorable that one).
I love my Christian friends almost as much as my leftist ones, but it has to be said (and I’m sorry) they nevertheless believe that the creator of the universe who loves all people and feels bad when a sparrow dies would give “his chosen people” these kinds of commands: “utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.”
(Heads up to anyone reading this: If God really wants you to kill someone, just ask him to do it himself, ok?)
My issue with Nazism is my issue with the God of the popular monotheisms: I don’t believe in collective guilt, nor do I believe any race of human is more than a useful fiction — “useful” to who? Obviously serving the interests only of those who use ideology to shore up their power, i.e. the priests and politicians, the ruling elite, etc.
Race realism, the ideology of “good breeding,” and blood-lines that are favored by the divine as opposed to others that are antithetical to the possibility of the Good Life is the stuff of superstition, and the genocides that result from this ideology are not historically rare, they are, in fact, common. History is a meat grinder, if it is to be believed.
Do we have to go there? Maybe not. Maybe we can do philosophy just fine without entertaining the questions raised here. But whose business is that? Who gets to decide? Opportunistic assholes on the internet who think this kind of thing is clear cut and simplistic, the ones who think they can know a person’s true essence on the basis of their jokes or flirtatiously edgy lines of questioning?
Wouldn't radical doubt and overturning all presuppositions also lead one to trying every drug? How about suicide? After all, it's a big part of our doxa that this causes us to actually die as opposed to respawn in a video game. How am I to ever find out without trying?
This is where philosophy really does become scholasticism in its worst sense. “How many angels can…” Absolute certainty raises the bar perhaps too high for practical life, especially when concerning matters that have direct social consequences.
Hyperbolic doubt and Husserl’s phenomenological epoché are big inspirations, but I, like Lacan and Bourdieu, go in a totally different direction with it.
Lacan runs with the doubt caused by one's non-identity, i.e. the part of me that acts on my behalf against my best intentions or better judgment.
And Bourdieu takes on the presupposition that Husserl and Heidegger never challenged, i.e. the leisure time, freedom from necessary labor, that is the precondition for all scholarly activity. In other words, their pure and hyper skeptical philosophy is conditioned by an ignorance of the political, social, and economic field that informs their habitus.
Let's set doubt aside and say what we know for sure: We can never get to the bottom of most things and absolute knowledge of oneself is not a good goal, because it brackets out the unconscious, which is structured by history, language, and others; a history that is defined by most others expending themselves through labor, or made irrelevant by its violent standard of exchange value.
We know enough to know that timenergy is structurally impossible under these conditions, which means that families, friends, and communities everywhere are under the constant pressures of unraveling and dysfunction. We know that the political system in place, with its ideas of left vs right, are a part of today's deadlock that keeps us going nowhere.
To wrap it up
I don't think Nina was doing anything but joking. I think the day will come when we all look back on this era and shake our hearts in disbelief. I am already shaking my head. These days will pass. Our children will not believe us. Either that, or we lose the ability to be human, to think, to question, and to disagree. I admire Nina because without people like her, everyone will become spineless bureaucrats.
My point is just this, even if she wasn't joking, that was six years ago and no, she doesn't owe anyone an explanation for what was said in private. Everyone has the right to question things.
Worse, and now this is speaking on my own behalf, there is a part of us that questions things that we cannot control it. What if I cheated on my partner? What if I drove over the guardrail of this freeway overpass? What if I jump off this cliff?
If you don't feel seduced by questions that put you at risk of literal or symbolic suicide, then your death drive takes you elsewhere. Where? I don't think it's any of my business. I think that if we want to move into a future where our every word uttered in private is not subject to harsh and uncharitable scrutiny, then we will have to come to the terms with the fact that some people may, some of the time, drive off the figurative rails.
…
Philosophy is forgiving, but politics is brutal. Philosophy is critical, but politics is dogmatic and ideological. Philosophy can go where one might prefer not to tread, but politics has to think in the interest of the broader whole. Right and left have become mutually exclusive, and everything to the right is called fascist. The New Right is in its time of gestation. It is a wild wild west with who knows what kinds of possibilities. The Left, on the other hand, has, in its haste to progress, lost touch with most people. If a person loses faith in the Left and therefore spends some serious time exploring the possibilities of the New Right, my hope is not that they come back, but that new possibilities emerge. Progress will only come at the speed of right, which means those explorers who go outside the established boundaries from time to time should not be “made an example of” or punished.
I guess I’ll close by taking Baudrillard’s formula on terrorism and giving it a little spin: (I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to track it down at this point)
The only thing worse than terrorism is a world where it's been made impossible —Baudrillard
I don’t want to live in a world with race realist purists, but I certainly don’t want to live in a world where people are stopped from even thinking through these issues for themselves. If that’s the world we’re already in, then I guess I’m fucked. Might as well move to Argentina!!!!
Thanks for reading.
Author bio:
David McKerracher (M.A.) is the organizer for, and founder of, Theory Underground, a teaching, research, and publishing platform by and for dropout workers with earbuds and burnt out post-grads who want to understand The Situation as a means towards figuring out the conditions of possibility for The Good Life. McKerracher’s background is in critical theory, political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology. All of McKerracher's work revolves around a single question: What is the Good Life? McKerracher's questioning into the conditions of possibility for living The Good Life led him to an M.A. thesis on “Timenergy, the existential basis of labor power.” This work drew heavily from Marx and Heidegger. McKerracher developed this concept further in his first book called Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Social Change, and his second book simply titled Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy.
Her positions on these things have nothing to do with Nazism and are, concerning the sex/gender issue, in agreement with 99.9% of humanity throughout all time, i.e. there are two sexes that cannot be changed even if your gender identity does not match your given sex… that’s a dangerous position to take up today, not because it will get you called a TERF, but because anti-TERF activists have normalized the assumption that all TERFs are literal fascists and that violence against them is therefore justified.
Women whose sense of honesty and integrity hinder their ability to fit the academic-activist progressive mold always get it way worse than the men - for this you need look no further than the reactions Angela Nagle and Slavoj Zizek have both received. For Nagle there was no coming back after Kill All Normies and her Jacobin article about The Left Case for Borders, whereas Slavoj’s position on borders, which is also Bernie’s, is no different; and Slavoj’s position on being pro-normie, in a sense, has always been there… perfect example being his recent point about how it is now a radical act to believe in basic human decency because the status quo itself is so degenerate (I will find the link to this later, but it was a talk he gave on his 75th birthday this year).
While it is obviously true that working class parents might be genuinely worried that their kid will turn out to be trans and therefore take their own life due to failing to fit into society or find acceptance (this was Tutt’s excuse in a personal phone call wherein he said “the trans thing is a social pathology but we cannot acknowledge it or the working class movement will be derailed!”), outside of hyper niche progressive spaces the much more obvious concern is that children will be confused about their gender and thus get taken advantage of by the exploitative social justice advocates, opportunistic or impressionable psychiatrists, or become lucrative guinea pigs of the pharmaceutical and surgical industries that have already repeatedly caused irreparable damage to autistic and gay children who were hastily mis-diagnosed as trans — you can say this is rare, but so is being trans itself, so appealing to the fact that misdiagnoses and lifelong irreparable damage is rare does little to allay the concerns of any rational or responsibly protective parents who are worried about gender ideology today.
Sartre’s project was, in short, to bring together individual freedom and collective responsibility, i.e. existentialism and communism, two tendencies that are arguably incompatible if judging by actually-existing communists who were, and still are, so quick to turn off their critical faculties and submit to the mores of groupthink.
I couldn’t find a PDF copy of Witness To My Life though, so I think it might be in there… especially considering that I do have a physical copy of that one… I’ll keep reading it and see if I can track this down eventually.
There is a section on “timenergy fragility” in Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, which argues against Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility with a much better explanation for what’s going on in her workshops.
The bit where Land tweets were introduced as evidence was classic
This is such an important to lesson to learn from this. Felt like a palate cleanser to come here from twitter.
I also wanted to point out Nina did a b-sides episode somewhat recently on The Lack on the topic of evil that I found very fitting here. Definitely recommend listening if you have access.