History and fascist speak

Trump Compares Political Foes To ‘Vermin’ On Veterans Day—Echoing Nazi Propaganda by Sara Dorn (Forbes)

“Vermin”. He calls his enemies vermin.

A former president, who could be president again, holds entire swaths of Americans in this kind of contempt.

There’s a reason conservatives keep coming for our education and books: they don’t want people to remember history, to match their fascist language against literally Adolph Hitler’s. To remember what the Nazi’s “final solution” was. To learn that Hitler was inspired by the United States’ Jim Crow laws. To remember that we, too, incarcerated the innocent. That we stripped Japanese Americans of their citizenship.

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The Far Right’s Obsession with Modern Architecture by Joe Mathieson and Tim Verlaan (Failed Architecture)

“Modernism, multiculturalism and the European project”, [Baudet] says, “enforce an alienating living environment… A world without a home.” Racism pervades Baudet’s worldview, where “gargantuan tower blocks with satellite dishes directed towards Al Jazeera” become a poignant symbol of the sickening aversion to “our own” habits, the nation, and the beauty of traditional arts and architecture.

The aim of the architectural aspect of such a [culture] war is to herald a ‘return’ to aesthetic order. This can mean two things. On the more moderate edge, the ‘return’ signifies the aesthetic move to a bygone era that divorces a building from its social context… On the more extreme edge, however, the ‘return’ forms part of a white supremacist project which is attempting to redefine the meaning of citizenship and identity.

By divorcing architecture from its grounding in social life, such sites are able to portray Greek and Roman architectural forms, for instance, as representing a racially-pure European society. These architectural styles supposedly reflect the protection of a nativist social order that looks after its white citizens only. Aestheticised architecture becomes, for the New Right, a means of impulsively declaring things good or bad: if traditional architecture encourages virtuous behaviour, modernist architecture encourages degeneracy.

See also:

Trojan tweets

Mining the past for nuggets of wisdom

It also manifests in their lack of understanding of why the traditionalist style they favour took hold in the first place. During the nineteenth century, neoclassical, gothic and renaissance styles frequently masked the squalid living conditions and poor construction quality of newly-erected tenement houses in Europe’s industrial cities. Meanwhile, in places like Paris, the introduction of grand, classically-influenced architecture to the city’s centres was predicated on the displacement of millions of working-class people, and the destruction of centuries-old medieval buildings, much to the chagrin of contemporary conservationists.

Cool.

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November 20, 2023 by Heather Cox Richardson

While unity was imperative in the military, [President Eisenhower wrote to WWII veteran Robert J. Biggs], “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.”

Emphasis mine.

The irony when those who claim the mantle of free speech are those who would take it from others.