Mastodawn

Lewis Luminos Sep 10, 2023

Project 2025 is a "get out if you can" kind of moment. If you're a queer person in the US and you have the means, you should leave the country. It can happen here, it *is* happening here in fits and starts in various states, and it will only get more difficult to escape if any of this happens on a federal level which there are reasonable odds of.

In every genocide that has happened, the majority of victims were arrested in peaceful, orderly manners, even long after the genocide began. They were arrested in their homes more often than in hiding, arrested while trying to live their lives as normally as possible more often than they were caught being involved in underground resistance. Part of what makes fascist genocides so horribly successful is that people can scarcely comprehend the danger, it's nearly impossible to actually hold in your mind that things will get that bad, not in the abstract but in a direct, personal, immediate sense. People do not believe in gas chambers even when they can smell the crematoria, because the human mind buckles under the weight of that horror.

It *can* happen here. It has begun happening here. Powerful electoral political institutions that draft successful legislation have published public plans for it to happen here, in an orderly, legal, formal, dreadfully complete manner.

It can happen here. You, the person reading this, need to repeat that until you believe it. It needs to exist in your mind with the same sharp danger as walking into your living room and finding your curtains on fire, it needs to be real like a gun being pointed at you while your wallet is demanded. It can happen here.

PallasRiot Sep 9, 2023

Fascist dictatorships are highly legalistic entities, they require frameworks of legitimacy to survive and they require legal systems to carry out their goals. The Nazis eventually eschewed the stochastic terror of encouraging random pogroms because pogroms invited public displeasure, and public resistance. Even virulent German antisemites often did not approve of their neighbors being firebombed, shop windows broken, and random beatings in the street; the more widespread that terror got, the more the public felt the Nazis were illegitimate thugs causing chaos. So the Nazis pursued formal, systematized means of destroying the livelihoods and eventually lives of Jewish people, they interpreted German law and built legal theories that let them arrest and concentrate their targets using law enforcement, they used doctors and lawyers and police in place of street fighters and firebrand terrorists.

The genocide carried out by the Nazis was legal, and it wasn't just legal because Nazi Germany was a dictatorship, but rather because the Nazis built from prior existing laws and expanded the power and authority already available. They took pains to act in ways that preserved that legitimacy.

Project 2025 is that.

PallasRiot Sep 9, 2023

As a coda to the previous thoughts, I want to ask you to read Blessed is the Flame by Serafinski, and to read at least one memoire of a victim or survivor of the Holocaust. Blessed is the Flame is available as an audiobook for free, as are many Holocaust memoires.

Blessed is the Flame is about what it means to resist even without hope of things getting better, and about resistance in the Nazi concentration camps. I think it's necessary reading for our time. I also think we owe it to those subjected to the worst depredations of the Nazis to learn their stories in their voices, to kindle them in ourselves as the human beings they were. Those who were interned in the concentration camps often had nightmares of being voiceless or mouthless, of crying out unheard, of begging to deaf ears. They feared their fates being unknown. We owe them not allowing that to happen, and we need to know these things for our own sake too.

steev hise Sep 9, 2023

@PallasRiot Victor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” is a great one in this category as well.

Niedliche Nacktschnecke ☑️Sep 10, 2023

@PallasRiot @cstross i've read a few memoirs or other texts by jewish resistance fighters and i think serafanski misrepresents them. While many certainly had no hope for themselves, they certainly saw a future - zionist, socialist ...

THE hymn of jewish resistance is literally never say your going the last way

This is different from the nihilism serafanski projects onto these fighters.

Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Sep 10, 2023

@PallasRiot One situation where "never forget" actually works.

Piggleston Pecanpants Sep 11, 2023

@PallasRiot I went to Dachau for that reason. I needed to see it first hand to be able to tell people, "It really happened. I saw the evidence of what happened with my own eyes and it is abhorrent. "

mauvedeity Nov 18, 2024

@PallasRiot I agree. I read a lot by Primo Levi, and it brought a lot of things home to me.

Doug Baker - Elbows Up! 🇨🇦Sep 9, 2023

@PallasRiot All correct: it's a very interesting study, from the judicial perspective, of how the German courts were suborned in the '30s.

GHaiku Sep 10, 2023

@SonofaGeorge @PallasRiot
Nuremberg Trials had many beans spilt in testimony, about as telling as the Spanish Civil war. Whomever signed the treaty at Westphalia obviously was an innumerate crackhead trouble maker fraud.

Mark vW Sep 10, 2023

@PallasRiot All dictatorships have limitations. The Nazis learned that when they pushed their eugenic murder program. And at moments they perceive as crucial, they don't give fuck all about legalism. The Night of the Long Knives is a perfect example. It was plain obvious extra-legal murder. It was only papered over with legalism afterward.

perfect comparison!

Remove the word "Nazi" and replace with "Trump", and you've reproduced the blueprint for "fascist takeover of a democratic country"

#StopProject25
#StopNazism
#StopFascism
#DisqualifyTrump
#Trump #Nazism #Fascism #Project25
#RepublicansAreTheProblem
#VoteBlue

Nihil Curits Sep 11, 2023

@PallasRiot I'm sure you're aware of this but they are using the phrase 'administrative state' which Carl Schmitt used in his work, and he was the principle jurist for the Third Reich.

Near North camp Mar 4, 2024

the increasing government violence towards unhoused people is also that

geographile Sep 9, 2023

@PallasRiot go ahead and leave the rest of us who can't get out behind?

דאיקייט Sep 10, 2023

@geographile while I don't agree with @PallasRiot that we're at "get a visa; flee the country" levels of oppression for queer people across-the-board, if we were it'd be pretty absurd for you to ask them to stay. I can name family members who, yes, they should have gone ahead and left "the rest of us" behind. What good is it that they died together? They can't have known this, and can't blame them, but I'd have told them: get out while the getting is good. Don't wait to leave; wait in safety.

דאיקייט Sep 10, 2023

@geographile @PallasRiot It's a very painful thing to be left behind, and it's a very painful thing to do the leaving, and it's not for me to judge those who stay and fight nor those who flee in terror. I only miss the dead.

geographile Sep 10, 2023

@doikayt I don't think I'm so much asking others to leave as asking people to recognize, out loud, but to do so is privilege, and that perhaps finding out who is in danger of being left behind and maybe focusing a little bit of energy on helping them out isn't such a bad thing to do.

דאיקייט Sep 10, 2023

@geographile Am I sensing fear, or despair? If things get as bad here as I know they can, we will have fear, despair, betrayal, and grief shooting out our ears, busting the meter! I want to comfort you, but I can't. I can only think how solidarity cracks under the grimmest, bleakest repressions.

Solidarity's chance is now. We may not have another hundred years' chance at solidarity.

MagentaMN Sep 10, 2023

@PallasRiot If you are queer, trans, otherwise in danger, leaving the country may not be an option. But leaving the state you are in often is. There are several states that have declared themselves havens, mine among them. From there, we can and will take back the rest of the country. There are more of us than there our of them, and growing as the proportion of Gen Z that can vote grows. Come to Minnesota, bring warm clothes.

sharpstick Sep 10, 2023

@PallasRiot Getting those around me to understand this has been very frustrating. Part of my masters thesis was around the desire by many groups to bring religious, Old Testament, laws into the US judiciary system. That includes a “biblical” argument for stoning people to death. Written out in black and white. Those who read it were shocked, but it seems to fantastical to ever be reality to them. Project 2025 is like that. It is spelled out in black and white and people still don’t think it could happen.

True Slicky Sep 10, 2023

@PallasRiot Makes me think of this book that Thom Hartmann mentions on his show quite often, "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, an excerpt, 2017 edition

An excerpt from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer. Also available on web site: online catalogs, secure online ordering, excerpts from new books. Sign up for email notification of new releases in your field.

Metafrastis Sep 11, 2023

@PallasRiot In 1933 the unimaginable had never happened before. That’s also a reason most Jews never resisted. The Warsaw ghetto uprising was an exception.
Today we are warned, we can learn from history. Queer persons and women should either leave their states or - if they can - go into organised resistance. Millions of Jews fighting like hell for their life would have broken the spell in Nazi Germany. This is possible in Conservative Jesusland too.

Elenna Sep 11, 2023

@PallasRiot things are getting worse elsewhere too. even for those that can get out, there's few viable countries that can promise relative safety. most countries will also not allow disabled people to immigrate under normal circumstances (which usually includes autistics).

B Archer Oct 5, 2023

@elexia @PallasRiot This bleak reality is why I'm telling older autistics (my age group and up, I'm 60) not to get a recorded diagnosis unless you need it to avoid a worse situation like a misdiagnosis. The community generally considers self-diagnosis valid, and all the supports that work for older adults are self-help or community help anyway.
We survived this long and beat the odds.
I'm on SSDI so my physical disabilities are very official, I can't go anywhere.
I am encouraged that many young people are well and truly fed up by the fash.

I've moved to [email protected]Mar 3, 2024

@elexia This is where my brain goes around and around like a hamster wheel. Where can we take our transgender and autistic daughter where she would be safe and allowed in?

Clayton Slaughter Sep 12, 2023

@PallasRiot
The chill from remembering “she brought me scarlet carlsons every day” and then the hooded abduction.

Alberto Cottica Nov 15, 2024

@PallasRiot this rings all too true. One thinks of those German Jews: "But I am a loyal German citizen ! I was born here! I am a decorated WW1 veteran! Surely I cannot be seen as the enemy."