The Defeat of Nazism Was A Fairy Tale

This week Britain’s Labour Party announced plans to inject unemployed overweight people with slimming drugs to get them into work.

The following day they went one further and announced that job coaches would be employed to visit patients in mental health hospitals to ‘coach’ them back to work.

All incredibly sinister stuff from Britain’s lesser evil.

There is no evidence that being overweight is a significant cause of unemployment, and it is almost always a consequence of underlying disease, not a lifestyle choice that can be cured with a jab. By contrast, 9.3 million people in the UK go hungry every day. There are no plans for this.

And the idea that someone who has been admitted to hospital or another mental healthcare facility just needs encouragement and motivation to get a job is totally disconnected from reality. Even disconnected from basic humanity. These are the most serious cases, people with complex needs who cannot work. That’s why they are in a hospital.

This, like a lot that has happened over the last few years, got me thinking about the type of societies we actually live in. It got me thinking about their core, foundational elements. It got me thinking about progress. It got me thinking about the Nazis.

In popular mythology, the last 80 years or so goes something like the following.

An epic battle between good and evil took place in the mid-20th century. The good guys (us) won, and we established western zones of morality, humanity and decency, overseen by human rights laws. At the international level, through the power sharing structures of the UN, we spoke of human rights and dignity for all and vowed: never again.

But that’s a just-so story. A fairy-tale to absolve us of past sins.

World war two was not a battle between good and evil. It was a battle to decide which flavour of colonial capitalism could continue to dominate the world. The Nazi party and its allies may have lost, but in many very concrete ways, Nazi ideology won.

A look at the news on any given day makes this increasingly clear. Take slimming jabs, job coaches for the mentally ill or the other Labour policy of forcing the long-term sick to look for work. The motivation for all of this is to boost productivity - defined by how many people are in jobs - in service of the nation. They say so themselves. Sick people are a drag on the economy. By extension then, disabled people are a drag on the country.

Precisely the same logic and language was deployed by the Nazis as justification for their programme to systematically murder disabled people and the chronically ill. The Nazis didn’t start the holocaust with Jews. The started with the disabled. They literally tested gas chambers as a weapon of mass murder on the long-term sick first.

Which is why whenever I hear a politician today talk about the need to boost productivity I hear a descendant of the same ideological lineage as the Nazi party. The edges might be smoothed off, the language less obviously fascist, but the underlying core belief remains the same.

A less disguised example of state-sanctioned disposal of the disabled is in Canada, where the Maid euthanasia programme is being used to kill people whose only ‘illness’ is poverty. Originally designed to relieve the pain of the genuinely terminally ill, it has been extended via the application of vague rules to those who simply don’t have enough money to live. More than half of Canadians say they agree poor and homeless people should be allowed to kill themselves.

Tell me what this is if not Nazi ideology alive and well in the ‘enlightened’ west?

In the US, Trump and Harris both bang on about economic productivity of course, because both are cut from the same fascist cloth. The cloth that means a genocide will continue uninterrupted whoever wins. The cloth that means a military budget for weapons that should exist only in nightmarish dystopias will keep ballooning to comical levels. The cloth that means there will be no affordable healthcare. The cloth that means there will be no universal healthcare. The cloth that means the US will remain the world’s largest producer of planet killing oil and gas.

Because really, who are we kidding? We’re not Nazis?

For fucks sake, there is a genocide happening RIGHT NOW. An actual genocide committed by a western ally and outpost, supplied by the US and the west with all the weapons and political cover necessary to commit genocide. A significant number of people pulling the trigger on genocide have western passports! They are Americans, Brits, Australians, Canadians. One in ten Israelis has dual citizenship. In some of the videos of Israeli soldiers doing war crimes you can hear British, American and Australian accents. Israel has destroyed every university in Gaza, almost every mosque. People are literally trapped by a wall on one side and an ocean on the other in a killing zone. Thousands have starved to death. 300,000 are likely dead. By November last year more than 60 entire family lineages had been wiped out, every person from every generation, sometimes up to 25 family members. That will be hundreds if not thousands of bloodlines by now. A clearer attempt to exterminate a people you would work hard to find. So when they say there are no signs of a genocide, as the US has said, as Britain has said, as Germany’s Scholz said this week, they are demanding we disbelieve our eyes and ignore our basic humanity.

They are demanding we accede to that most fascist principle: that gruesome, awful military power can and should decide the fate of an entire people.

Who are we kidding? This century practically began with a show of overwhelming murderous force by the US and its western allies. The Iraq War, which was based on a sneaky, duplicitous lie, has estimated to have killed 600,000 to 1 million Iraqis, the vast majority innocent civilians. Huge numbers of women and children extinguished for the crime of living in a place the empire wanted to blow up. Guantanamo Bay was a literal torture camp. Rape-murder by US forces occurred on many occasions we know of, and many we’ll never know about. This fascist brutality by the good guys is recent history, but how quickly we forget.

Who are we kidding? A system of capitalism so brutal and so rapacious is in the process of eviscerating life on planet Earth. A system that has its roots firmly in Europe before it snaked around the world. A system utterly distinct from ancient systems of reciprocal trade. A system of total planetary domination and control. A report out this week updated the death toll, finding a 73% decline in wildlife populations in 50 years, reconfirming, as we do every few years, that life is being snuffed out everywhere due to the industrial capitalist model. 2024 will be the hottest year in modern history as the only hospitable planet in the universe we know of burns up for cash money.

Who are we kidding? A new virus, a virus more dangerous than any other in general circulation, embedded itself in our world and there is zero effort to make anywhere safer for higher risk people. No effort to clean the air in schools, no effort by administrators to change the rules even in hospitals or healthcare buildings, no effort to reduce, let alone eliminate, the risk to vulnerable people. No effort to warn people of the dangers. No effort to save lives beyond a vaccine which isn’t even universally available under most healthcare systems any longer and doesn’t stop you contacting the disease. All just totally normalised in service of capitalism as usual.

It’s eugenics all the way down.

None of this should be a surprise for those of us who can see beyond fairy-tales. The history of western fascism is long and shameful. From Britain’s concentration camps in Kenya to King Leopold’s rabid slaughter in the Congo to the evisceration of indigenous Americans by colonialists. In the face of this atrocious history, it’s always tempting to fall back on the old ‘but this is just a human problem, it’s not about beliefs or ideologies.’

That’s wrong, for two reasons.

Firstly because it’s factually just wrong.

The indigenous of the Americas, both north and south, did not sail to Europe, enslave and murder tens of millions of white people. The people of Africa did not take millions of white Europeans as slaves. Indians did not move to Britain and embark on systemic killing campaigns. Of course some of these cultures had periodic wars, but they are simply not responsible for anything like the same number of deaths and suffering as white Europeans and their descendants.

The British empire killed 100 million Indians in 40 years! Churchill’s racist views were very clear. In 1937, in arguing for the settlement of Palestine by the Jews, he said: “I do not admit that a wrong has been done to native peoples by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

12.5 million slaves were traded by Europeans and 1.8 million died on the journey across the Atlantic alone. European colonialists killed 56 million in central and south America after their arrival, a full 90% of the indigenous population. Ninety fucking percent! These numbers are so large, the suffering and devastation they imply so total, it’s hard to sit with it in any kind of calm, rational way. White Europeans didn’t just end lives, families and cultures, they ended entire worlds.

Secondly because the argument is indulgent and nihilistic. ‘Humans are crap, always have been, nothing is going to change.’ I’m not saying this framework to understand human behaviour doesn’t tempt me too sometimes, but it can’t get us anyway. It can’t get us anyway at all. And it’s also not true. We know not all humans are bad all of the time. We know this. We just have to empower the good ones and defeat the bad ones. Or try, at least.

But to do that we have to recognise what we support, the system we live under. What behaviours implicate us, those that free us. We have to recognise the clear fascist threads that run from the 1930s to today. That the defeat of the Nazis did not defeat the ideology. We have to recognise the thread of colonialism that continues to support economies of the global north. That a neo-colonial system of control, a system of creditor and debtor relationships, is designed to ensure western countries still profit from their former colonies. A system that ensures raw materials, metals, oil and cheap labour still flow to the north, in a distilled and purer, financialised version of what came before.

And we have to recognise the interconnectedness of all these issues. It is not intellectually consistent to speak up about one and not the other. Part of the work of activists, of anyone who cares about change, must be to build a case against the whole system so we can preserve as much life, now and in the future, as possible.

And, in light of the US election in 3 weeks, we have to recognise that we can’t vote this away.

I know, it’s rough. That would be easy, wouldn’t it?

But it’s going to take a lot more work than that.