Who Goes Nazi? Brooklyn Edition
If you’re anything like me, a twenty-something Twitter leftist with an advanced degree in the humanities, you hate absolutely everyone around you and badly want to kill them. You live in a brownstone playground of Timorese food and adult coloring books, and you want to suicide bomb the L train but leave a note blaming it on manspreading or whatever, so people don’t think you’re one of “those” random mass murderers (the bad kind). You hate having to tell people at parties that you “work in content,” and you hate the fact that they all also work in content. You hate that they all make content for outlets that are slightly cooler and more prestigious than the outlets you make content for. You hate that none of them have even fucked you for like thirteen months. You hate that you can’t even hate them for the ways in which they’re different to you, because there aren’t any. But fear not! There’s one thing you’ve got that nobody else does: you know that you’re definitely, 100% Not A Nazi.
But what about them? Imagine if the Nazis took over America and it was suddenly cool and prestigious to be a Nazi, and there were trendy Nazis on the TV the whole time, and they once again sold soap with slogans like “Dove: The White Pride Soap for Hating QTBIPOC and Not Amplifying Their Voices.” But also don’t imagine, because that’s exactly what’s happening.
This game was invented by Dorothy Thompson in her classic 1941 Harpers essay Who Goes Nazi?, in which she presciently pointed out that intellectuals are definitely more Nazi than aristocrats, but not nearly as Nazi as union leaders. But she set her essay at some dinner party in the Hamptons or wherever, and last time I went out there I went swimming in the sea and a wave hit me and I lost my bikini top and a bunch of bros in boat shoes started laughing and pointing at me in a way that despite my white privilege I still feel was somehow like imbued with racism, and then afterwards I just stayed inside for three weeks writing content and ordering groceries online, so the setting needs to be updated. Let’s look at your group DM. Which of these Twitter creatives who live in Brooklyn would go along with it and become a Nazi? (All of them.) And who never, ever would? (Me.)
Mr A isn’t actually in your group DM, and you’ve never encountered anyone like him irl, but you literally can’t stop talking about him, so he gets included anyway. Mr A is a short ugly loser, and he’s already a Nazi. He doesn’t even live in Brooklyn, he lives in his mother’s basement, and eats chicken tenders, and he doesn’t get laid, but in a different way to the way you don’t get laid, which has to do with patriarchy. Mr A is a Pizzagate. Mr A is a Gamergate. Mr A is a segregationist. Mr A opposes the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Mr A won’t shut up about the superiority of a “free silver” bimetallic monetary system over gold specie, and keeps on talking about the “gold shills” in a way that doesn’t really make sense until you realize that your own name is Goldschmidt, and yeah, he doesn’t really care about expansionary monetary policy at all, he’s talking about the Jews, and specifically you. Mr A is basically a pathetic worm whose life sucks and nobody likes him, but also he represents the whole of the repressive forces of society and he’s at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone you’ve ever met is actually Mr A, wearing various masks. He is the source of all your problems. He must be killed, and once we kill him, we need to find more people like him to be the source of any problems we have left over.
Mr B is in your group DM, but you also have a separate group DM with everyone else except Mr B in it. He keeps trying so hard to be nice, and says stuff like “so how is everyone’s day today” with a smiley emoji, and when you’re talking to him you get this airless feeling like you’re about to suffocate in his treacly good-natured presence. Every time you see Mr B at a party you’re afraid that he’s going to blurt out that he loves you, but you can’t keep your distance too much because he’s so clearly autistic, and you don’t want to be ableist. Anyway once in the group DM he said that while he obviously thought divining for water with Y-shaped copper rods was good and important and valid, he didn’t understand what it had to do with socialism. That made everything better, because clearly he’s a Nazi. The whole group DM expended hours of emotional labor educating him about how dowsing is part of LGBTQ+ culture and how his dismissive bro-y attitude was reactionary and gross, and eventually he posted a video of himself crying and begging for forgiveness and promising to do better, because you guys were the only friends he had. This was classic white fragility, but in the end you let him stay. You just have the other DM now, where you make fun of him and it’s ok, because if the Nazis came and he had license to start being cruel and sadistic to other people, he’d definitely do it.
Ms C is one of those women who doesn’t like other women, and you know this about her because you can’t fucking stand the bitch. Plus she says stuff that’s really not ok, even though it costs nothing to have empathy and be kind. You’ve personally heard her use the D-word, the H-slur, and the L-pejorative, all while laughing and holding a glass of white wine by the stem, like she doesn’t need to consider the harm this does to others, just because she’s “funny” and “an artist.” She’s the Cool Chick. She makes nude self-portraits (the bad, skinny kind), and she’d throw you under the bus in a second for male attention and approval. She’d definitely go Nazi. But the worst thing about her is that she has the impudence to be bisexual and Asian, which makes it really hard to call her out. But then you realized that all Asian people are collectively responsible for the long history of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in their communities, and you’re thinking of holding her collectively responsible for the Rape of Nanking too, once you’re certain she’s a sushi Asian and not the dim sum kind.
Ms D’s boyfriend works in finance, or like accountancy or something, or I think I heard he was a musician? Maybe a drummer or possibly he used to bartend at a place where they had live music. Anyway they definitely have vanilla cishet sex in the missionary position and you can’t stop thinking about it, his body, her body, naked, moving, breathing, together, almost silent, tender, disgusting. She says she’s a socialist but doesn’t devote every minute of her waking life to getting mad about people online. This means she’s just vaguely following a trend, and if the trend were being a Nazi (which it is), she’d be a Nazi (which she therefore is). You can’t imagine yourself actually hitting her but it’d definitely be punching up to maybe poison her food?
Mr E used to be a comrade, but then he did a tweet that got 38.6k RT’s and now he’s moved to Los Angeles to spend his whole time in writers’ rooms. Last you heard he was pitching an animated show for adults about a snail with borderline personality disorder. It hasn’t even been greenlit yet, but you’re already thinking about all the ways in which it will be a missed opportunity and do harm and perpetuate tropes. Mr E will definitely turn out to have been a Nazi, and then you can start an anonymous petition to get the show cancelled so he has to move back to New York. Once he’s back you can send him a long email about how much it sucks his career burned out and how (even though you won’t say it in public) sometimes people do actually take the social-justice thing too far. That way he’ll be a comrade again, which is good, because we believe in rehabilitating people who have a genuine change of heart.
Mr F probably thinks he’s better than you. He’s a union organizer. So are you (you added “#Unionize” to your Twitter name), but his union stuff involves workers who aren’t in tech, content, or grad school, and he probably thinks that makes him more in touch with “the real workers,” who he probably thinks are just a bunch of cis white males in a factory, who are probably all racist and probably have thick, heavy dicks that intrude on your mind in a kinda #MeToo way a lot of the time. He talks about class, and you agree that class is important because you’re not a lib (you support Bernie, you just want him to Do Better). But from the way he says it you’re certain he doesn’t acknowledge all he/him lesbians as part of the working class. He’s trying to save a tiny sector of the workers from a necessary and important socio-economic shift that will impoverish them and make their lives worse, and that’s what being a Nazi is. This is why his union needs to stop dragging their heels, change all of their rules and priorities, and let you get him fired.
Ms G (me) will never go Nazi, because she is beautiful and kind and pure, and has all the good opinions instead of the bad ones. Because of this she’s allowed to do things that other people can’t do. She can totally fail to understand what having an authoritarian personality actually means, and construct a version of the Who Goes Nazi? essay in which the people who go Nazi are just people who are already right wing, having confused politics with personality, probably because she herself has no personality other than her politics. She can minimize, ignore, or even encourage the infliction of actual suffering when it happens to the wrong kind of people. She can write that “nothing that terrible has really happened” since the publication of Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, even though Mark Fisher himself is mysteriously not around to appreciate that fact. She can do some shit with threatening to leak an unedited draft that I don’t even want to go into. She knows that the Nazis don’t come promising hatred but promising to be your friend, but it’s ok because she doesn’t really have any friends, just mufos. She’s doing great. She’s building a better, kinder world. She will never, ever be the Nazis.
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