• PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    edit-2
    10 hours ago

    Not exactly.

    Two books that are absolutely essential to understanding what’s going on now and what can be done about it: On Tyranny and From Dictatorship to Democracy (edit: Freudian slip…). “On Tyranny” talks about a very specific progression of how fascism undoes the law. I’ll let Snyder explain:

    Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the
    government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the
    forms of politics that we take for granted become possible. It is impossible to carry
    out democratic elections, try cases at court, design and enforce laws, or indeed
    manage any of the other quiet business of government when agencies beyond the
    state also have access to violence. For just this reason, people and parties who wish
    to undermine democracy and the rule of law create and fund violent organizations
    that involve themselves in politics. Such groups can take the form of a paramilitary
    wing of a political party, the personal bodyguard of a particular politician—or
    apparently spontaneous citizens’ initiatives, which usually turn out to have been
    organized by a party or its leader.

    Armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it. Violent
    right-wing groups, such as the Iron Guard in interwar Romania or the Arrow Cross
    in interwar Hungary, intimidated their rivals. Nazi storm troopers began as a
    security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies. As
    paramilitaries known as the SA and the SS, they created a climate of fear that
    helped the Nazi Party in the parliamentary elections of 1932 and 1933. In Austria
    in 1938 it was the local SA that quickly took advantage of the absence of the usual
    local authority to loot, beat, and humiliate Jews, thereby changing the rules of
    politics and preparing the way for the Nazi takeover of the country. It was the SS
    that ran the German concentration camps—lawless zones where ordinary rules did
    not apply. During the Second World War, the SS extended the lawlessness it had
    pioneered in the camps to whole European countries under German occupation.
    The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that
    transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.

    For violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the
    emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the
    training of armed guards. These first challenge the police and military, then
    penetrate the police and military, and finally transform the police and military.

    Trump is a lot weaker than a lot of these “strongmen.” He doesn’t really have a loyal following; the Nazis had thousands of people looking to roam the streets brawling with Communists. Trump has to pay ICE people to do the same, and they have to hide their faces and cosplay as cops and people get to get up and scream in their faces and nothing happens. And, so far, there are little pockets of resistance from local law enforcement to that final intermingling stage, which is pretty unusual for this kind of thing. Definitely having people screaming at them or rescuing their victims and then getting away with it, or getting arrested for “assault” and then the grand juries refusing to indict, is very unusual. On the other hand, nothing’s really stopping it. No cops are actually arresting anyone from ICE, which means this all can continue and escalate.

    I would say that Proud Boys roaming around and trying to play the part of the brownshirts would be a great thing, because it would drive the wedge which is slightly inserted between ICE and local law enforcement in a little deeper. Because when ICE and the police really do knit together into a single law enforcement body (which would necessarily be obedient to Trump and not to the law), brother, watch the fuck out.

    • TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      10 hours ago

      I would say that Proud Boys roaming around and trying to play the part of the brownshirts would be a great thing,

      You had me up to there. It would not be a great thing. A great thing would be to see more of what we got in NYC today. Clog the streets immediately with people that ICE is trying brandish violence and kidnapping.

      Trotsky’s definition of revolution: revolution is an open measurement of the strength between social forces in a struggle for power.

      We want the numbers. We don’t want them to have more numbers.

      Ergo Proud Boys in the streets is bad.

      • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        9 hours ago

        Don’t you want an open measurement of the strength between New Yorkers and Proud Boys?

        I mean these two scenarios are not mutually exclusive. If you think bullying a squad of ICE people is easy, wait until it’s a little handful of Proud Boys with absolutely no legal protections getting chased out like Patriot Front in Philly.

        It’s complex. There are a bunch of ways it can play out. But I think the Trump forces losing the de-facto legal protections that ICE people have, and losing the pretense of legitimacy that’s so far kept them from getting arrested, would be the perfect tipping point for everyone to just get sick of Trump’s shit and start tackling them and getting away with it as far as the local authorities are concerned.

        There are other ways it could play out, it could be bad or real bad also. I’m just saying that Proud Boys coming out and fucking everything up for this whole operation could come in conjunction with bullying the ICE people away through sheer numbers.