Why Nazi iconography? I ask. You might regard that as an idle and fatuous remark, but I think it's an odd business, the inability of fascism to coalesce around different symbols. They have struggled mightily to come up with new ones, new idols, for they know that NSDAP symbols are now hazardous. - ThreadSky

monophylos.bsky.social • 1 day ago

Why Nazi iconography? I ask.

You might regard that as an idle and fatuous remark, but I think it's an odd business, the inability of fascism to coalesce around different symbols. They have struggled mightily to come up with new ones, new idols, for they know that NSDAP symbols are now hazardous.

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monophylos.bsky.social•1 day ago

The U.S. Christofascists are clearly still enamoured of the Third Reich but they have to be sneaky about it, for there's a social convention to be honored: the United States is still officially the world's greatest hero for defeating the Nazis, and that convention must be honored even by neo-Nazis.

monophylos.bsky.social•1 day ago

It's the rare fascist who has dared to turn openly against this principle of U.S. civic religion, and every fascist who has a significant career in U.S. #politics (e.g. GOP politicians or conservative media idols) sticks to the official story that the Third Reich was Very Bad, the absolute worst.

monophylos.bsky.social•1 day ago

And let us begin there: elevating the Third Reich into the *worst ever* is effectively declaring them off-limits to thought and intellectual discourse. That's long been a goal of U.S. conservative diatribe, establishing the Nazis as a taboo subject, discouraging analytical examination of them.

🦄

mockwooloo.bsky.social•1 day ago

This is what was actually going on when the gamerbros of the American right all started freaking out about the newer Wolfenstein games being "too political", even though the franchise has been all about shooting Nazis since 1981.

mockwooloo.bsky.social•1 day ago

But the games from 2016 on have been a little more thoughtful about what the Nazis actually *did*, and *why*, rather than just typical generic Cartoon Bad Guys

Like it's not exactly a profound examination of evil, it's still a shooty action game, but the fact it did it at all was too much for them

monophylos.bsky.social•1 day ago

U.S. exceptionalism is the converse: if the Third Reich was uniquely evil, then the United States is uniquely good for having defeated them. The U.K. gets the consolation prize for having single-handedly endured them, and everyone pretends that there weren't any other combatants in Europe.

~Mono 🦄

monophylos.bsky.social•1 day ago

But embracing the Nazis as Pure Evil has allowed them to be mythologized--with their own propaganda!

The Third Reich was a triumph not of the will so much as #marketing: fascism and #branding go hand in hand, for in a sense fascism is the intersection of marketing with right-wing politics.

~Mono

monophylos.bsky.social•1 day ago

And therein lies the rub, I think: #marketing tricks, once played, do not improve over time. Marketers know this, so when they build a complex ad campaign they find ways of trying to keep enthusiasm going as long as possible, but they're fighting entropy. The NSDAP's bag of tricks is now stale.

🦄

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