Inoculation
We must immunize against the viruses of hate and predation, else we invite them to do their worst against us.
Not all trends are fashion
Born at the tail end of the baby boom, I’m oblivious to trends adopted by those a couple generations younger. Fortunately, I feel no pressure to have an opinion about most of it. My being out of touch amuses my daughter, endlessly. I’ve spent a lifetime not caring to be in cultural lockstep, but now I can attribute my indifference to age. TikTok, Taylor Swift, women wearing cartoonishly wide trousers. I don’t get it and don’t intend to. Something else will replace it tomorrow, and I’ll care just as much about that.
The Nazification of young men, however, isn’t just a trend that can be eye-rolled away.
The Not-So-Young Republicans
Last month, Politico published leaked chat logs of men affiliated with (and leaders of) the Young Republican political association.
“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr,” said Bobby Walker in the chat, who was recently made chair of the New York State Young Republicans.
But the Young Republicans kept typing away, sharing offensive messages and racist comments.
As Politico reports, members in the chat referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people”. They joked about killing political opponents by putting them in gas chambers. “I love hitler,” one chat member quipped, who also made antisemitic comments. Another participant called the mass rape of Indigenous people “epic”. One member expressed his support for Republicans he believed supported slavery. And a participant talked about driving a competing Young Republican opponent to suicide.
When I was in college, the Young Republicans were frat boys wearing monogrammed button-downs or knit shirts embroidered with a crocodile logo. The rest of us, the other 99% on campus, largely ignored them while they sat at their recruiting table on the central mall outside the student union. They were racist, misogynistic, and proudly elitist, but those of us born in lower tax brackets dismissed them without fear of violence. Their only ammunition was using their financial resources to amass political power. They did, and they thrived during the so-called Reagan Revolution, which ushered in the beginning of a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. That effort continues to this day, although now it requires little effort and even less sleight of hand.
Once known for their passion for ‘free trade’ and deregulation, Young Republicans are today known for their passion for all things Nazi. This is a massive shift. It is not a cultural fashion that is here today and gone tomorrow. It’s not a matter of style to adopt the language and costumes of an SS Oberst-Gruppenführer. This manifestation cannot be dismissed as ‘boys will be boys,’ never mind that these ‘Young’ Republicans are many years past the age of majority. We ignore it at our peril.
My Inoculation
I was in maybe the third grade when the nuns ushered the entire elementary school into our school’s auditorium. This wasn’t usual. The only scheduled gathering of the school was for daily mass, in the adjoining church. We were given no explanation for this break in the schedule. A film projector started up, and we settled into our seats to watch a movie.
It was a film unlike any I’d seen. It contained raw footage of atrocities captured during the Holocaust. A steady-voiced narrator explained the context for what we were watching. We saw babies held by terrified mothers, while the voice told of German soldiers holding infants by their heels as they swung their small bodies against a wall. That shocking mental image didn’t require explicit footage; I can recall it in vivid detail decades later nonetheless. We witnessed newly liberated survivors of camps, skin tightly stretched across skeletal bones that poked through ragged, striped cloth. Allied soldiers walked amongst them wearing overcoats.
The narrator’s voice was the only sound filling the auditorium. We were terrified into silence.
An older girl sat in front of me. She’d pushed herself back into her seat during the film, wedging her arm in the gap between her seat and her neighbor’s. After the lights came up, she discovered she was caught and was unable to move. The nuns called the school handyman to cut the wooden back of the auditorium seat so that she could be released. That sawn-off seatback confronted me for the remainder of the year, reminding me of the horrors I’d witnessed that day.
The nuns never explained why we were shown the movie, and although the priest had given a few remarks in the auditorium after the reel ended, we never talked about it in class. I can only surmise why he’d made the bold, some might say rash, decision to show small children a true horror film.1
The Church hierarchy considered our little parish, stuck in a predominantly Protestant town in East Texas, so far removed from relevance that they sent us the problem priests. Some had dementia, some were deviants whom altar boys had to avoid best they could—we had no idea in that day how rampant this practice was. We also received one progressive priest, who eventually left the priesthood and married an ex-nun.
The Catholic Church’s role leading up to the war had been ignoble and weak. It betrayed its founding principles in attempting to appease the apostate Adolph Hitler before the war. It couldn’t be bothered to wield its power when the Nazi regime targeted Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other marginalized people.2 In this, the Church wasn’t breaking with tradition but rather following it. Centuries of popes had more energetically pursued wealth than charity.
While the Church’s response to Hitler may have been unsurprising, it nonetheless distressed some within the Church. As evidence of the Holocaust became unavoidable, the right side of history clarified for all. Our parish priest may have been persuaded by a moral imperative when he decided to show us the movie.
Whatever the priest’s motivations, the film made indelible impressions on an auditorium of young children. The war, more than two decades in the past, that day became part of our visual memories. We couldn’t doubt the film was photographic evidence of real people who shared the real world with us. This wasn’t a Hollywood production. It wasn’t made up. We might ask why or how people can be capable of atrocity, but we couldn’t question whether they are. For those of us in the auditorium, it was the equivalent of the “Never again” commitment uttered by Buchenwald survivors.
Born human, we must learn to be humane
We bear a responsibility to transmit knowledge to successive generations, if we are to avoid repeating the worst that humanity can summon. That knowledge can’t be theoretical; it must be learned with our senses. Behaviors that aren’t inbuilt must be taught. We’re born knowing how to suckle but we must learn how to ride a bike. We aren’t born hating groups of people; we learn how to group people and hate them.
Many of us who grew up with the afterimage of WWII embedded in our memories find today’s embrace of Nazism incomprehensible, so much so that many hand-wave away the evidence before their eyes. Surely the Charlottesville march lit by tiki torches borne by floral-shirted young men was simply an ill-considered stunt, or an aberration. The richest man in the world is odd by any account; who knows what he was thinking when he seemed to throw Nazi salutes toward a crowd of supporters. Dismissing these clear signs of a mass movement to install fascism in the US isn’t just wrong-headed. It enables the movement to grow and succeed.
Watching the evidence of the Holocaust at an impressionable age inoculated us against a virus of hate. We were injected with the traces of the virus, and it activated our immunity against it. Each time we’re exposed—the killing fields of Pol Pot, the disappearances in South America, the genocide in Gaza, ‘Alligator Alcatraz’—our immunity grows stronger. I’m unsurprised at the number of white-headed retirees protesting against authoritarianism in the US. Their immune systems are robust.
My great-grandfather immigrated to the US from Germany in the late 19th century. Perhaps I was more impressionable than some classmates that day, since the German people involved seemed so familiar in appearance. The Black people in my small town had first-hand knowledge, generationally, of systemic racism. They needed no reminders, even though the Main Street Post Office’s segregated water fountains fixed the town’s racism unambiguously. First Nations peoples live with the ever-present knowledge of children being ripped from families. I had to learn their stories, because their history isn’t mine. We each don’t carry the whole of human experience; we must be taught what lies beyond our own.
Subsequent generations moved on from WWII. Rachel Maddow reported in her podcast series Ultra that much of the detail concerning US’ homegrown (Nazi-financed) fascist movement in the first half of the 20th century was unknown to most modern academic historians. If history isn’t written and communicated, it’s lost.
What remains are the artifacts of a movement that attempted world domination: Nazi souvenirs, fascist iconography, propagandist photographs. Young men seeking identity, strength, and power adopt them as talismans. They turn them into memes. They share them unencumbered by their history. Once objects are disassociated from their historical context, ignorance allows their meanings to be refreshed anew.
We’re witnessing today the resurgence of what was known last century as Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth. Participation assured young men and boys of social dominance. The League of German Girls groomed young women to accept subservient house-bound roles as wives and mothers—what we call trad wives, today. Unlike the Hitlerjugend, which was structured and administered by the Nazi state, the movements today are diverse in origin. They share values and methods, while not being monolithic.
Today, violent masked men in fatigues assault and terrorize communities across the US. Video evidence is shared widely. The virus has become epidemic, and the country must fight it with every resource it possesses. Once the fever breaks, and it will when it is forced to, survivors will have boosted their immunization. They must commit to inoculating their young, generation after generation. Failure will be an invitation to reanimate the virus.
Ellie’s Corner
What was a traumatic start to life for Ellie turned into great fortune for all of us. She, I will never forget.
Thanks for reading,
That the decision was his alone was as clear to me then as it is now. The priests effectively ruled my Catholic school while the nuns did all the heavy lifting.
A new pope, and Germany’s overtaking countries that were home to many Catholic faithful, stiffened the Church’s resolve against Nazis. Unfortunately, that realization came too late.
I read enough about the intolerance of organized religions towards other religions, that I can’t be apart of any. For example is the Christian’s who turned Jews over to the Nazi s and now the Jews are killing others, I know that MAGA is not a religion yet they are using religion just like hitler did.
Trumps ice thugs should never be forgotten and should be hunted down for their crimes, just like the NAZI’s.
Excellent weaving together of lived experience and related scholarship. I do wonder though how we inoculate generations of people (there are women enabling this epidemic too) from adopting the hate and nihilism as a world view. There does, i think, need to be a reckoning if and when “this,” whatever it is, runs its course.