Newly-minted socialists would REALLY do well to acquaint themselves with the history of fascists using antisemitism with pseudo-socialist characteristics to peel people off left movements.
It's a pretty core trait of Euro/US fascism, and the popular left keeps falling for it.
Ford pioneered weaponizing antisemitism against left worker movements.
He funded the mass publication of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most notorious modern antisemitic text.
He mandated car dealerships carry his newspaper full of antisemitic propaganda.
It's not a coincidence that contemporary antisemitic narrative about "globalists" basically cribs socialist critiques of capitalism and subs out Jews for capitalists.
Wealthy capitalists like Ford made every effort to distract workers from their culpability by blaming Jews.
Hitler was a huge fan of Ford, and built on that tradition of scapegoating Jews for the sins of wealthy capitalists.
People on the far right love to point out that Nazis were "national socialists," and. They WERE trying to trick left workers into going fash.
Contemporary Nazis do this, too.
Remember Matt Heimbach, recently made famous again when the reactionary pseudo-leftists at m4m4a put his face on a poster billing him as a speaker at their rally?
His whole thing is building a Nazi "worker" movement.
Nazis and other reactionaries also exploit the fact that the liberatory left (rightly) opposes Israeli apartheid and genocide of Palestinians.
The thing to know about Nazis is, when THEY say "Israel," they don't mean the government there.
They mean the Jews.
So Nazis and antisemites very frequently exploit leftist sentiments about Israeli apartheid by seeding confusion about what exactly is getting talked about-- the government, or Jews.
And it isn't just an outside job.
Sometimes the call is coming from inside the house.
There are a LOT of calls coming from inside the house these days, and this has been happening for years.
Dore, Greenwald, the TrueAnon folks, Red Scare, just for starters.
And people hate it when I say it, but Chapo Trap House has been a portal to a lot of this bullshit.
When COVID struck, TrueAnon tweeted that people should deliberately infect Israelis, because they're "Newark landlords."
("New York landlord" is a popular Nazi dogwhistle that really means "Jews").
Then they shared literal blood libel.
This is one of the most poisonous aspects of class reductionist leftism.
When someone says we don't need to talk about or address non-class issues of marginalization "for unity," what they're really doing is laying groundwork for co-option by fash.
And I can't say this loudly enough: fascist co-option of left movement is not a hypothetical.
IT IS THEIR PLAYBOOK.
They co-opt our economic critiques, then use them as an entry point to blame the Jews and other marginalized peoples for the excesses of capitalism.
It's not a coincidence that there is so much overlap between Occupy alums and fascism/Nazism.
Speaking from personal experience, we saw this on the ground at Occupy: white cis dudes who just wanted to talk about their own sense of economic disenfranchisement, and would shout over everyone else to do so.
It's not a coincidence that a lot of those guys came to Occupy *from* 4chan. The Guy Fawkes mask dudes were reactionaries from the start.
They were a headache from Day 1, and a lot of the bad shit that went down at Occupy Philly went down because we tolerated them for too long.
We showed them more patience than we should have.
A big tent is a good thing, but some people need to be disinvited from the start.
Integrating liberatory and intersectional praxis and language into your work helps invite marginalized people in, and Nazis (and other reactionaries) out.
We've seen this happen too many times.
Read history.
Be vigilant.
We don't have the luxury of pretending this is the ancient past, anymore.
@gwensnyder
I'm from the tech/science world. There things keep moving forward. Stepping stones that don't hold up to scrutiny are replaced.
But our social and political worlds are cyclic. So history is a good teacher.
Thanks for the insight.
@markdo @JohnDongle they sent their fans after me to tweet Nazi memes and photoshop me going through a meatgrinder.
And then Christman did a video chat about it and made fun of me for complaining.
It wasn't just "stepped on toes."
@markdo @JohnDongle 2020. It was horrible.
I had fans of theirs doxxing me, telling me they were outside my home ready to jump me.
Christman actively stoked and encouraged it. He's fucking vile. Absolute garbage human.
@markdo @JohnDongle @gwensnyder
The #Chapo guys are truly awful and if you haven't seen it happen, it's likely because you have never been in any of the groups they've targeted.
That they are openly #ConspiracyTheorists, align against politicians backed by vulnerable populations, and bump shoulders with communities that spawned the #groypers ought to give at least some pause.
I'm not a #Leftist, so grain of salt. But that's because Leftists have convinced me they will never protect me.
@imstilljeremy @markdo @gwensnyder
Idc. Haven't heard anything yet from what I've listened to
@markdo @JohnDongle @gwensnyder
And if you think that is a bad reaction, I would encourage you to read all of the replies to @gwensnyder here, writing a long thread on being vigilant against #antisemitism in Leftist spaces.
Count how many people expressed concern for #Jews and how they can help. Then count how many expressed concern for literally anything else, including defenses of those called out specifically. Then check what separates those two groups.
Listen, man. I dunno what to tell you.
If your takeaway from that thread is that #Jews are bad and not to be trusted on #antisemitism, then either you didn't read it well or the hit dog is hollaring.
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
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