You know, you could read all this on Metafilter, but I don’t want to run the chance that you won’t visit the link, because this is a truly interesting tale.
From Metafilter user Brian Boyko:
I’ll admit to a certain amount of guilt. Now, in order for me to make the personal point, you’re going to have to accept the fact that I’m equating Neoconservatism with Nazism.
If you don’t agree with that assessment, and many don’t, then just consider it from the viewpoint as a guy who went along with a very conservative social movement even though it’s since been found to be detrimental to self, friends, family, neighbors, strangers, and country.
Wen I was young, I was a neoconservative. I would have been a Nazi, no doubt about it, though you’d never convince me that that was possible. This was during the Clinton 1990s, and I was anywhere from age 13 to age 19.
When you’re young, you tend to form your political opinions based on those of your parents. My mother was a conservative Catholic; my father, an afficionado of Rush Limbaugh and his even more overtly racist follow-on talk radio host Bob Grant. Hindsight is 20/20, and I first got into politics partially because it was something that Dad and I could talk about.
Dad and I never really had much in common - even to this day. I don’t say that we’re not close - we are. It’s just that hobby wise, he was into cars, guns, target-shooting (though not hunting,) fishing, and war movies. His life was hard and he made something from it - he was dyslexic back in the 50s and 60s so he didn’t get much out of public school and hung out with the wrong crowd. Lacking options, he joined the Army in the early 1960s, where he was stationed first in Germany and then later was posted in Vietnam as a “lifer.” He completed his GED in the army and went to college on the GI bill where he met my mother. Mom helped him a hell of alot in college, no doubt. He eventually earned a B.A. in special education, and now he sits on a M.A. in education (plus 60 credits.)
It would be unfair to describe him as brilliant because though he’s very, very smart and has achieved very much… but I can’t really use that word to describe him. Though he’s smart, he doesn’t like learning for learning’s sake, he doesn’t like discussing ideas. He has his 2.5 kids, his lovely wife, his picket fence, and there’s no real… intellectual strain in him, at least not that I know of.
Me, I’ve always been an intellectual - that is, I’ve always loved learning for it’s own sake even when I hated schooling. My hobbies tend towards computers, graphic design, videography, writing, and studying history.
Conservative - or neoconservative, rather - politics were something we could talk about with each other, you know?
Plus, neoconservatism allowed me to blame others for my own misfortunes and bad decisions. Of course I had been picked on mercilessly in schools - it was the liberal, permissive teachers that let the other children run loose, and the liberal society that meant that their parents didn’t teach them well. Liberalism was why Mom sometimes cried at night and why Dad was unhappy at his job.
Make no mistake. I would have been a Nazi during that time in my life. Probably head boy of the Hitler Jugend.
Entering college, I continued this. Nazi? Hell - I was one of those “apologetic intellectuals” who argued in class that the solution to the third world’s problems was neocolonialism. It seemed an easy solution, and I had no doubt that it would work, and that it hadn’t been tried.
The only defenses that I can offer seem like a weak excuse. “I was young and stupid.” “I was misled.” Maybe I should have known better. Maybe I had no choice considering my environment. Maybe I was just aping my dad. Who knows. The point is that I look back on that part of my life with more than a certain measure of shame.
I had mellowed out by the time I was 21. I owe no small measure of this to Professor Lowi and her class on modern thought. This was the first time I was exposed to the great thinkers - Freud, Darwin, and yes, Marx. I initially rebelled, but the weird thing was that… hmm, how to explain this eloquently without oversimplifying…
Listening to Limbaugh and Dad and reading neoconservative books - if that’s all you’re exposed to, then, well, of course you accept those as the answer to problems. You take the analysis down, even if it strains credibility, because you haven’t heard anything more credible. When I took Lowi’s class and heard Freud’s thoughts on psychology, Marx’s thoughts on labor and capital, and all these other ideas, well, while I never agreed completely with their analysis, and still don’t, I was able to tell that they had a much better grasp of the problem than anything I was reading at the time - it was eye-opening. These guys, who I had been told were wrong all of my life, turned out to have explainations that were better than the ones that I had held.
That was an election year - 1999/2000. And by the end of it, I was not a liberal per-se, nor even all that aware, but I was questioning…
Would I have been a Nazi then? I don’t know. I will have no idea what would have happened if I had continued on that path, but then 9/11 happened.
9/11… boy, that’s a mind bender.
I remember 9/11 - I didn’t have classes till around 11 or so so I slept in. I was woken up by my dad around 9:00 who told me matter of factly that two planes had hit the twin towers in a terrorist attack, and that I’d better get dressed and head to school because “there was bound to be traffic.”
I turned on the TV, checked the Internet… It was shocking so, I just did that. I got dressed, headed to school. Traffic was light. Very light, as in the early morning, everyone was trying to get the hell out of Newark because they didn’t know where the next plane woudl hit. Newark was right across the river from New York, and I mention this to both explain the traffic patterns, and also to explain that there’s this little stretch of highway heading into Newark perfectly aligned where you can see lower Manhattan up close, and the towers dominating your view.
They were gone. All I saw was a big, thick, black cloud.
The next couple of days were us comforting each other. I remember Jon Stewart coming out and asking me “Are you okay?” as we had been asking each other.
If I had to guess, I would have said it was about a week before I saw the first protest.
I still do not know how they managed the bravery, but it was very soon after 9/11 - I believe, still September. And these guys were talking about how several people were arrested and held without charge - the first de facto suspension of habeus corpus. These guys were on the ball way before I did.
And I won’t say that I could have become a defender of Nazi-like policies, I did become a defender of Nazi-like policies that day.
I remember the details vaguely because I didn’t think it that important at the time. The argument was that habeus corpus was suspended, and that even in a time of crisis - especially in a time of crisis, is when human rights should be preserved most vigorously. I didn’t disagree with the sentiment but talked of “practicality.” 9/11 was the biggest mass murder in history. Everything, I thought, was chaos at law enforcement agencies. While I wasn’t arguing for the suspension of habeus corpus, I told them something along the lines of: “Yes, this is a violation - they’re supposed to be released within 24 hours, but this was an extraordinary circumstance, and a week - or even two! does not sound that unreasonable considering the magnitude of the crime.”
“So how long is reasonable?” the protester asked, rhetorically. It was a good point, but I took it far too literally. “One month. If people are still being held without charge for more than a month, then I’ll agree with you that beyond a shadow of a doubt it’s completely unreasonable.”
I never saw that protestor again, but I remembered what my answer was. A month came and went, and I was forced to concede the point.
Around this time, I started reading the news more often - and because I was a 21st century digital boy even before I was a liberal, I got my news from the Internet. It was in the wake of the Sept. 11th coverage that I was able to see very clearly the difference between American and British reporting. I still consider British reporting to be some of the finest in the world. It was around this time that blogs went from being fringe tools for self-publishing diarists to people doling out information and analysis.
And I could see clearly that not only was the government up to no good, but I also started to see the parallels to the Reichstag Fire and 9/11. I started to see all the policies which I had espoused in my youth tried, and later failed. It was a complete repudiation of everything my youthful self had believed in.
I feel a great burden because of that. I feel that I should be called to account for the mistakes of my youth. I feel guilt that I was standing across from that protester rather than standing beside her.
Can I be forgiven? Can I forgive myself? Probably not, but forgiveness is not the important thing. What is important is what I choose to do with every day from now until the end of my life.
The scary thing about fascism, or those movements that are fascist in fact but not in name - is that it all sounds so reasonable until you find out the information which shows that it’s wrong. That’s why the Nazis burned books, ultimately, and why neocons to this day are told that the “liberal media” is not to be trusted.
I believe that some people are lucky enough to know to reject Nazism from day one. I believe that some people are unlucky enough that they will always find obedience to authority appealing. I believe for the rest of us, it’s a struggle, and not one that is always pretty, and not one that we always win. We can help each other out, or we can hold each other down.
I shudder to think what would have happened to my life if that protestor was afraid to come out and speak that day. There was only one of her then.
I’ve had dark moments since then. Days when I’ve been afraid to speak, days when I’ve been afraid to write the truth and instead just talk about something less pressing. And each one of those days is a failure, I think. It’s not easy. It’s hard. I could lose my job, I could lose my friends. I could even end up beaten. I could be in jail or worse, so it’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination, and some days - most days - I fail.
So, “who becomes a Nazi?”
I did. And I hope to never be again.
