The Nazi Examination Board has been accused of drastically lowering its standards, as qualifications to become a National Socialist are far too easy to obtain, says a study.
In 1939 the bar was set much higher for entry level Nazis. As a result, there were fewer of them but the description of totalitarianism must have really meant something. Now, thanks to over-application, being labelled a Nazi is almost meaningless. Indeed, it says more about the accuser’s lack of wit, imagination and historical perception than anything else.
Though historian William Shirer argued that Nazi-era German history was a logical progression from Martin Luther to Hitler, there seems little doubt that the qualifications for fascism were a lot tougher last century.
Candidates were forced to meet much more exacting standards of inhumanity. A minimum standard required Germanic mankind to offer blind obedience to temporal rulers and place a premium on servility. Before anyone could become a Nazi, there was a time-consuming programme of activities to complete, such as book burning and kristallnachting, with proto Nazis expected to learn disciplines such as identity politics, mob rule and censorship. (Those latter values seem a lot like modern socialism, however).
By contrast, these days practically anybody in Britain can classified as a Nazi for two main reasons. Firstly, the classification process has been liberalised so that everyone is an expert now, without needing any knowledge of the Third Reich. To paraphrase Maslow’s famous quote from the Psychology of Science: “when all you can spell is Nazi, everyone begins to look like Hitler”.
Recently, for example, 52 per cent of the voters in the referendum were classified as fascists, without any qualification at all. The BBC is happy to repeat this libel at every opportunity, usually with the deceptively passive-aggressive placement phrase: “no-one’s suggesting you’re a racist. But…”
(Which is a bit like saying: “I understand you work in light entertainment, but no-one here is suggesting you’re a coke-addled wife beater.”)
Secondly, a natural consequence of handing the Nazi certification process over to amateurs is that standards have fallen dramatically. Now practically everyone can be labelled a Nazi. Buying a tabloid newspaper is enough to get you labelled as ‘right-wing’. Few self-proclaimed liberals can get over the fact that three per cent of the population is allowed to buy the Daily Mail. Talk about demonising minorities!
Living in any unfashionable area, like South London, or outside of the M25, is now a sign of bigotry, according to Lily Allen’s Law. Even failing to put a toilet seat down after use is a sign of dormant patriarchal authoritarianism, if I’m interpreting one of Kathy Lette’s statements correctly. So you can literally catch fascism off a toilet seat.
Any type of non-conformism is now mis-diagnosed as a sign of fascism.
Voting for a more accountable system of government, as we learned from the referendum, is now counted as a form of both racism and fascism. As long as someone says you are a Nazi, the burden of proof the lies with you to prove you are not.
Is fascism on the rise? Well, let’s examine the symptoms. Are there people who attach labels to people. Yes, they all work at the BBC. Are there people who disdain intellectuals and the arts? Yes, if those artists are deemed to be the wrong type (i.e. not progressive). For example, Hitler didn’t actually ban comedy. It just had to be socialist comedy. Just like the BBC, which only ever employs left-wing conformists. Few of them actually tell jokes any more – they just rant about how much they hate certain sections of society).
Where, for example, can we see a controlled mass media, that has to be subscribed to, at the pain of imprisonment? Nobody can claim that religion and the government are intertwined, but that accusation could be levelled at the BBC, where belief in the divinity of Jeremy Corbyn is an important article of faith. Where is corporate power protected? The EU and the Goldman Sachs owned Clinton Foundation. We don’t have ‘Supremacy of the Military’ (another Nazi must-have) but we do have a sort of supremacy of the militants, with their complete contempt for civility and democracy.
In the 1930s, I’m guessing, no over-bearing authoritarian thought of themselves as a ‘Nazi’. Like the people who call themselves ‘progressives’ now, they probably sentimentalised about themselves as paragons of pure virtue. Lib Heil!
To be fair, I’m not sure the BBC-led mob rulers really are fascists. They’re probably quite nice if you can get isolate them from the herd and keep them off Twitter.
I don’t know why people can’t accept that this modern era isn’t an exact reproduction of the social conditions of 1930s Germany.
So really, who are the fascists? Well, everyone it seems. And, I like to think, nobody.
(Image: Garry Knight)
