Non-White Neo-Nazis

This is a fascinating essay that raises points worth discussing.

A few quotes:

It used to be possible for progressives to claim that there was some kind of clear ethno-political line running through the world. On one side, the politics of whiteness, which are regressive, exclusionary, resentful, the cold withered hand of a dying order, based in fear of the other and the desire to chop the world into neat little parcels surrounded by white picket fences. On the other side, the politics of the global majority, which are warm and joyful, open to everyone, and based on principles like community and laughter and using lots of interesting seasonings in your food. The reality has turned out to be much weirder than that. The 2024 election really did seem to go down along racial lines: the places where Kamala Harris improved on Biden’s vote share tended to be leafy, affluent, and overwhelmingly white. Meanwhile, in immigrant communities, and Latino border towns, and multicultural metropolises, the voters shifted decisively towards Trump. Here in Britain, the most fiercely anti-migration Home Secretary in recent history is called Shabhana Mahmood. One of the leaders of our insurgent right-wing party has promised to protect Britain’s Christian heritage; one of his proposals is a law to prevent churches being converted into mosques. He’s a Muslim named Zia Yusuf. One of the party’s shadowier ideologues is called Raheem Kassam. Whatever psychological swamp is out there, producing these politics, it isn’t quite fear of the other.

Quick: what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about former Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler? If you answered something other than “blue jeans, reasonably priced polo shirts, and a wide selection of international footwear brands,” it’s likely that you’re not from the city of Nagpur in India’s Maharashtra State. Nagpur is home to three outlets of a menswear store called Hitler The Brand Fashion, plus another called The Hitler Point. Or Haldwani in Uttarakhand, where you can get a wide selection of leisure and athletic clothes at Hitler Reloaded. Or Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh, where you can pick up something wavy at either Hitler & Planet or Hitler Denim. Or Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which might be India’s capital of Hitler, featuring a Hitler Men’s Wear, a Hitler Menz Wear, and a Hitler Shoes. For India’s most intriguingly-named menswear store named after Hitler, though, you need to go to Hyderabad, where you can drop into a modern mall near Kacheguda station and explore the premium brands at Hitler The Symbol of Passion.

Occasionally an Israeli tourist will run into one of these exciting emporiums of Hitler and throw a fit, and then the Anti-Defamation League or some other group will helicopter in a bunch of tactical lawyers and PR representatives, to engage in a comprehensive campaign of hectoring until every shopkeeper on every dusty back-street in Uttar Pradesh understands and acknowledges the suffering of the Jews of Europe. And maybe they’ll even pretend to, for a while, but it’s a losing battle.

Say someone who happens to not be Indian runs into… let’s say it’s an ice cream stand named after Aurangzeb. You can explain what he did to Guru Tegh Bahadur and Sambhaji and half his own family, but they won’t really get it. That’s just history; that’s just the past, which is where all the dead people are kept. For every menswear store called Hitler Delicious that gets shut down in Telangana, there’s a bookshop somewhere else that’s just started promoting Mein Kampf as a guide to getting ahead in business. In India, comparing someone to Hitler doesn’t mean that they’ve failed the great moral test of their lives. Hitler means someone who’s a bit bossy. Someone basically decent but who seems to get an inordinate kick out of telling other people what to do. The people who think differently are less and less significant every year. The more Europe recedes from the international stage, the more the great demon of Europe’s own history is loosed on the world.

This kind of cheerful ignorance is probably not why there’s now a universal global youth monoculture consisting of games, anime, sped up pop music, AI-generated videos of Charlie Kirk hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, using the word “bro” as a pronoun (“Bro thought bro was cooking”), Adolf Hitler, murder, and dying. There’s something much more sinister at work. But hopefully it should demonstrate the deep insufficiency of the standard progressive explanation for this kind of thing, which is that when non-white people start identifying with Nazism, it’s because they’re trying to make space for themselves in a deeply racist world by establishing some kind of “proximity to whiteness.” Which is, in fact, deeply provincial—by and for white people who still think they’re the center of the moral universe. If an ugly rhetorical instrument like “whiteness” is useful at all here, it’s because it names the normative project that used to prevent large numbers of people from idolizing Adolf Hitler, and which is now faltering.

This seems extremely weak to me, tbh. Conflates a bunch of completely unrelated things and ends with a massive overreach on painting ‘youth culture’ as “just anime and antisemitism now”.

The idea that there has ever been a belief in a clear ‘ethno-political line running through the world’ is fundamentally silly. At what point was this supposed to have been the case? The clearest evidence for fascism in India isn’t a bunch of stupid meme shops, it’s the decades-long program of actual Fascism that has returned the BJP to power for five out the the last seven elections. Sections of immigrant communities wanting to pull up the ladder in the U.K. was true in the 1990s, if not earlier.

There is a set of genuinely interesting questions to ask about why people like Caleb Liam Vasquez (who fwiw identified as basically white) and Solomon Henderson gravitated towards far-right online spaces. Henderson’s parents were Black Israelites iirc, which might has played a part. These are deeply worrying, growing trends - and threats, but they’re also very online and still very niche. Tens of thousands of teenagers idolising school shooters and making Agartha meme edits is horrifying, as is the pipeline they seem to have into Young Republican politics, but its very obviously not representative of ‘youth culture’ in any meaningful sense.

Kriss got kicked out of the U.K. lit-pol scene for being a sex pest a few years ago and has been flirting with this kind of muddled US-audience left-bashing for a while so it doesn’t come as a surprise.

Always good to hear from sex pest Sam Kriss!

Never heard of him before reading this piece.

(The term "sex pest" is ridiculous, in a bad way. It sounds like something from a children's book. A "pest" is a little kid who won't stop kicking the back of your seat on a plane. I feel like that term was conjured up by British tabloids precisely to minimize the people in question's behavior.)

unperson you should stop posting for a long time

I think three key questions are ‘do non-white people (or people who perceive themselves as non-white) join far-right online movements for different reasons to white people?’ and , per the Kriss essay, ‘is the connecting tissue between the San Diego mosque shooting, Christchurch, Utoya, Columbine, Atomwaffen, 4chan, etc, fundamentally antisemitism above all other things?’. I don’t think the answer to either of them is straightforwardly ‘yes’.

Antisemitism is typically a factor but variable and obviously mixed with other hatreds - of Muslims, women, leftists, society in general, etc.

I don’t think anyone has really come up with a great answer for why people join these groups or even the extent to which the political element vs other dynamics is important. Spengler and Yockey might be memed but they’re rarely read. Again, the TrueAnon episodes with Ali Winston are a pretty decent primer.

There is a mixture of screen damage, grooming, isolation, hopelessness/ nihilism, filling a gap left by religion (particularly in the ‘esoteric Hitlerism’ elements), etc, etc. Much of that crosses racial lines.

Typing on phone, so errors, etc

"hatred of perceived mainstream direction" often seems to me to be fundamental here

little new about strange bedfellows against shared grudges

I feel like that term was conjured up by British tabloids precisely to minimize the people in question's behavior.)

I don’t think a single person needs a take from you on minimising misogynistic behaviour.

"Fascinating fascism" -- Sam Kriss

"many people are uneducated and confused about history and politics" does not seem like a great insight, especially when actual fascism is on the march around the world

Did you all know that fascism could be adopted by other non-white societies as a way of repressing progressive/communist politics?

Let me blow your mind.

there is a vast amount of effort put in to trying to convince people that all of the fascism around the world isn't real fascism because it doesn't come from the og nazi party and therefore is only sparkling alt-right or w/e, and that "never again" referred to hitler and the Jews and absolutely nothing else.

Did you all know that fascism could be adopted by other non-white societies as a way of repressing progressive/communist politics?

Let me blow your mind.

Unfortunately the crimes of Modi, Suharto, Marcos and all the rest remain unknown to unperson, who only recognises fascism as meaningful when it’s fed to him in a restricted format by a disgraced sex pest with a grudge to push against “non-white” people. But wait, some teenager in India is wearing a Hitler tshirt! Who cares about the Gujurat pogrom when there’s an oblique essay to shit out?

sam kriss is not smart and i resent that his work is still pored over by ppl as if it were

sam kriss more like swiss kriss

https://postimg.cc/F1kzjtx6