A HELPFUL GUIDE FOR INTERPRETING THE LANGUAGE OF FASCISTS

Via Elliot Lusztig in this Twitter essay:

Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism provides a helpful guide for interpreting the language of fascists.

She noted how decent liberals of 1930s Germany would “fact check” the Nazis’ bizarre claims about Jews like they were meant to be factual.

What they failed to understand, Arendt suggests, is that the Nazi Jew hating was not a statement of fact but a declaration of intent.

So when someone would blame the Jews for Germany’s defeat in WW1, naive people would counter by saying there’s no evidence of that.

What the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but what would have to be true to justify what they planned to do next.

This is how we need to treat accusations and threats from Trump and his deeply immoral team.