In the wake of atrocities like that visited upon the Muslims of Christchurch, New Zealand, attention inevitably returns to the ideas of the radical right. The discourse surrounding events such as these follows a predictable pattern: Various media personalities scour the manifestos and evidence looking for explanations, but especially for influences. After Christchurch, suspicion fell on Jordan Peterson, but this is an old pattern.
The question “who did the perpetrator read?” inevitably turns to speculation about which authors of contemporary importance on the right might deserve the most blame for inspiring the violence, followed shortly by calls to action against the tools used in the murder, if not also the broader ideas that the perpetrator used to justify their crimes.
Throughout these responses, one can detect the general anxiety that an authoritarian propensity to violence lurks just under the surface of all right-leaning movements. Given the sloppiness with which political activists use words like fascist, Nazi, or “alt-right,” we shouldn't be surprised at that. These labels have acquired a kind of floating signification much the same way as the word “socialist” enjoys in right-leaning circles.
Nazism carries a particularly difficult challenge for understanding, and not just for Godwin's Law-related reasons. Sometime after World War II, the very word “Nazi” became a synonym for generic political evil located on the Right rather than a word people used with any kind of precision.
Amidst this inattention, it shouldn't surprise us that large numbers of Americans and Europeans view nationalism and populism to be harbingers of Nazism's second coming. Americans have lived in fear of a resurgent Nazi ethos since the end of World War II. This anxiety has taken real but tiny movements of alt-right cosplayers and neo-pagan fascists, and inflated their importance beyond reason. There's little attempt to understand the actual sources or real currents of Nazi thought, let alone that of its fascist near-cousins. The end result is that almost no one pays close attention to what the Nazis actually believed. This context makes Johan Chapoutot's The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi a significant achievement, one that vividly grapples with the reality of why the Nazis acted as they did.
The Law of Blood aims to uncover “the mental universe in which Nazi crimes took place and held meaning,” a task that most historians have avoided in favor of either pseudo-explanations like mass insanity or German barbaric exceptionalism, or alternatively, in a kind of confusion and despair. According to Chapoutot, perhaps the most popular recent examination of Nazism in practice—Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men—suffers from similar failures: “His understanding of ‘ideology' is largely one of simple ‘inculcation,' or even ‘brainwashing'—something ineffectual and imposed from the outside.” By avoiding a deeper engagement with the substance of Nazi beliefs, we fail to notice that the concerns that actually animated the Nazis were far stranger and more peculiar to Germany than most people realize.
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