Online 'Nazis' Aren't That Big A Threat
Quick, clutch the pearls, Underdog speaks controversies!
I’ve laid in bed the last few days recovering from what I can only describe oxymoronically as the most superficially worst headcold imaginable. Superficial, because physically I was fine. Even my nostril was only mildly blocked.
Worst, because for the first 24 hours I became hypersensitive to all light (even the dim LED lights on a headset) and noise sources triggering a sharp agonising headache; the next 24 hours my back felt like it was being stabbed any time I tried to get up.
It rescinded to an ache with extreme watering sinus eyes making it difficult to see. My dreams were incoherent: one was just this 8 hour, non-stop dry explainer on oil and gas leases.
Even after being awake for 4 hours and going back to sleep, the oil and gas leases returned. Another was just a sea of metallic grey with fractal patterns, and another (after I quipped it didn’t give any useful health advice) said ‘capsicum[sic] kills viruses’, showing the bell pepper plant. Capsicum is the plant genus, capsaicin is the spice, and apparently it does indeed kill viruses.
The Disease Is The Perfect Analogy
Whilst laying in bed staring at the ceiling, bored for hours on end, I kept myself entertained by making comparisons to how superficially shallow and simultaneously painful my illness was compared to political groups, as I juggled ideas for a new article.
My first comparison was Conservatives, who often write how ‘any day now, those traitors will hang from lampposts’. Rhetoric they’ve been writing for 6 years with nothing happening. An annoying headache that doesn’t do anything and goes away after you wait it out and ignore all sources of input.
My next comparison was Liberals, who screamed dull platitudes about injustice, rectifying the system, but ultimately make things worse if you tried to do anything - everything you’re doing is wrong! Like backpain, it got worse if you tried to stretch or ease the muscles, and it was more effective to just do nothing.
Both are obvious, almost trite cliches. Then I realised a good insight, not known to most people, was within the online Nazi communities themselves. The disease was the perfect analogy.
Recoil In Horror
When you hear the term ‘Nazi’, you likely think of one of two categories - either a jackbooted skinhead in military gear with Nazi Swastika flags adorning every wall (the version likely to cause people to recoil in horror at this article title), or the one where a normal, everyday person has done something someone doesn’t like and has been called a Nazi. Parents are domestic terrorists according to the FBI, don’t you know?
I wish to introduce a third category. Like a discount, off-brand version, like a ‘cheap Chinese knockoff’ as the saying goes.
This will confuse some people: They identify as Nazis, they pander images of Nazism… but they’re not Nazis. No, they’re not pretending to be Nazis to fool people or as a prank. They genuinely believe they are Nazis. But ultimately they aren’t.
Have you seen a child, where you ask them what job they’d like to do in the future, and they’d always proposition unrealistic choices? Like ‘astronaut’ (don’t tell them about the gruelling selection process or military service), ‘superhero’ or, uh… ‘penguin’?
And you know how they behave is what they think the jobs entail, such as astronauts fighting space terrorists with guns (onboard a pressurised space vessel, no less), superheroes punching literally everyone they meet, or honking the noise ‘penguin’ at everyone to indicate they’re a penguin?
Well, it is a bit like that. Except, for teens and young adults who think they’re Nazis.
Why Aren’t They Nazis?
See, to better grasp and understand problems, I’d often just lurk and watch communities. “Modern” journalists will likely only sit to read long enough to find a cheap clickbait title extrapolated from a single post (which in some dubious circles they may have even posted themselves), just enough to make a shallow article. I like to study until I understand what the problem is.
Now, places like StormFront do seem like the real deal, so I’m not referring to those here, however I’m talking about the more commonly mentioned online communities, who are part of subcommunities in 4chan, 8kun (replacement to 8chan) and formerly consumeproduct.win (now part of the communities.win group, a sort of reddit free speech off-shoot that has all sorts of groups), which seem to be largely comprised of young adults.
A lot of media outlets have confused words with actions. Like the neighbour down the road who is always screaming ‘I’ll shoot your dog’ but never actually does, and doesn’t even own a gun… the experience feels like that, but, if it was written by what some would colloquially call a ‘basement dwelling neckbeard’.
Their Policy Advocacy Does Not Actually Align With Nazism
The first and most crucial thing to note is despite what appear to be older teens and young adults proclaiming they’re Nazis, they advocate policies that Nazism never used.
One example is ‘deportation’, which is a basic border security process you’d see in any country, and is more Conservative than Nazi. This tends to be a main policy for the online communities. Nazism was about exterminating genetics (hence things like ‘Aktion T4’), but apparently that is a bridge too far for self-professed, self-styled online ‘Nazis’ who prefer the softer deport policy and seem quite adverse to advocating killing or sterilising.
They also get very sensitive to being called ‘Nazi’, and prefer to be called ‘NatSocs’, emotional weakness is something else I’m sure the Nazi party would not have tolerated.
Whenever someone within their group suggests violence, they nearly always call that person a ‘FedOp’, which is more reminiscent of conspiracy and Conservative circles, than hardened thugs or violent groups.
A violent gang, in contrast, would require the proposer go through a ‘loyalty test’ - usually murdering an innocent - to prove their loyalty to the group first. It is the main reason why MI5 in the UK are permitted to commit murder and torture when undercover.
The online communities claim to be Nazis, but they’re adverse to the idea of killing. They’re more concerned people will, bizarrely, see them as killers, despite identifying themselves as ‘Nazis’. No, it doesn’t make much sense to me either, but it has to be pointed out.
Outliers Get The Focus
From time to time you will get members who make more cliched and radical calls, screaming ‘gas the kikes’ or ‘kill the Jews’, but they seem to be a minority, and although people seem to upvote it in secret, few verbally express support.
This is supposed to be their own territory, remember, and yet they’re scared to advocate their own views, or the actual views of the Nazi party, in their own territory. I don’t feel sorry for them, but you can’t exactly call them threatening when even anonymous they’re too afraid to say anything besides spamming the N-word across multiple posts.
Other, even rarer outliers will express support for specific mass shooters, in a weirdly religious veneration, but it doesn’t seem to hold much traction, and comes off more mental illness than anything. Mutterings of optics and it being ineffective, some quiet suggestions of FedOp, others muttering still that all they’ve done is hurt ‘everyday Jews’ who ‘don’t hold power’ as if a subtle remark of regret with signs of being able to distinguish people. Odd incongruencies.
Are They Meaningfully Threatening? No.
Verbally, perhaps, but meaningfully, action wise, no. Their ‘grand’ schemes we should all be terrified of? And I kid you not, these were real action proposals I read during my time there, and there were very few:
Modifying GTA (Grand Theft Auto) boxart to show Nazi imagery
Printing stickers
Bulk buying and then mass printing propaganda on USB pendrives
Bravely doing nothing and letting Conservatives and Liberals devour themselves (yes, they consider it an ‘action’)
That’s… it. No discussions to secretly kill people. No grand plots. No political intrigue. No ‘Beer Hall Putsch’. Not even a book publication. Just some lame-ass stickers and trying to use a game about prostitutes and criminals to try make Nazis look better, when they literally used prostitutes and criminals. Ironically, the Communists - who engaged in mass rape in Germany - reportedly banned brothels in East Berlin. They hate Communists.
Now, if this idea of boxart and stickers terrifies you, then I’d have to remark you’re probably a coward. What they’re proposing is probably the lamest s**t I’ve ever heard from people who claim to follow the most evil party on the planet. America did not go to war with Nazi Germany over stickers and boxart.
I only have to point to terrorist groups like the IRA who bombed pubs and shops at random for a stark comparison of how an actual terror group operates. Do you think they’d put out stickers and boxart? They graffiti’d entire walls, in broad daylight.
The Online ‘Nazis’ Have No Understanding Of What Nazism Actually Is (Nor Do Media, Apparently)
I don’t know if this is a failure of the education system, or, some ‘mission failed successfully’ type stuff, but these teens and young adults seem to be entirely oblivious to what Nazi policies actually entailed - or more specifically, what they actually want.
For example, one posted black and white 1960s Americana imagery of diners and classic vehicles, espousing this is what Nazi Germany would somehow bring. Imagery of a country that defeated Nazi Germany, 15 years after the war.
Another unironically decried media censorship and deceit, even though that’s what Nazi Germany had under Joseph Goebbels, a name synonymous with lying, propaganda and deceit.
They mainstay decry a certain fear of black crime. They’ll classically point to FBI statistics saying the majority of blacks commit crime, although they’ll classically neglect to mention who the biggest victims are.
Meanwhile their reaction to black artist Kanye West mentioning Jewish people, involved what could only be described as a heap of confused racist praise, where they clearly were struggling with the cognitive dissonance of agreeing with a black guy. For some reason this prompts a higher density of abusive language.
I think these viewpoints highlights just how painfully ignorant they are of Nazi policies. Nazism wasn’t born in response to a ‘sudden rise in black crime’ in Weimar Germany (Germany barely had any blacks living there). There are a variety of factors, but the biggest one, arguably, was hyperinflation resulting in a collapsed government and collapsed economy leading to social unrest.
Hence why Nazi Germany’s primary focus wasn’t on ‘black crime’, but on ‘Jewish bankers’, emphasis on the word ‘banker’. Economically related.
They’re Not Consistent On The Holocaust Either
One of the weirdest juxtapositions of how unfamiliar and uncomfortable they are with their policies is how inconsistent they are on the Holocaust.
Outliers will proudly declare that Jews were killed, just not to those numbers, citing what they declare are physical impossibilities in ovens (which relies on the assumption everybody was cremated and none were simply shot and buried en-mass).
Others express embarrassment at what is a key Nazi policy and insist such a massacre was an entire fabrication designed to ‘discredit Nazism’ as if that wasn’t what Nazism was somehow about, as though embarrassed at the idea of a mass genocidal killing, which is weird for someone backing a country’s political party infamous for aggressively invading other countries and killing people.
Others will occupy the fence and insist the camps did exist, but claim no killings happened and that being forcefully detained against your will is okay so long as the camp has swimming pools, dentists and hospitals. They suggest apparently gas isn’t toxic if doors are made of wood (okay… tell that to the British troops in open trenches and open fields in WW1 facing chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas).
All three will claim the evidence supporting their side is ‘overwhelming’ (with them often over-citing a single Red Cross report) but apparently not that overwhelming as they lack consensus even in their own circles. They avoid confronting these inconsistencies within their groups, whilst bragging how they resist social conformity. Uh huh.
They’re Adverse To Approaches Nazi Germany Actually Used
The mental gymnastics they use to try to approach what Nazism actually did is bizarre. I was invited to a text debate on a Discord group in a supposedly ‘free speech’ Nazi channel, which I decided to take them up on in the interests of fair debate. I was no BBC ‘gotcha’ journalist and I feel disingenious questions lowers a journalist's social standing.
After they struggled to answer my basic questions (EG what objective test to you use to determine if someone is ‘pure or not’?), they started threatening me with a ban, to which I pointed out it was ‘free speech’, was it not? Apparently not, because promptly after I asked that I got banned. I did not call them any names, I did not stoop to any trick questions, I just asked some foundational questions which they struggled to provide answers for, and upon being embarrassed, promptly and forcefully removed me.
A New Form Of Old Politics, Like A New Form Of Old Music
Synthwave is a genre of music that generates nostalgia for the 1980s, that did not, in itself, exist. Synthwave combines multiple disparate parts - like neon colours, purple and cyan, sports cars, Florida sunsets (of the ‘Miami Vice’ variety), lightning bolts, vector graphics, synthesiser music, chiptune from household consoles and more.
Individually, some components existed in the ‘80s, but did not collectively exist together. Different components were introduced in different years. Some components (like specific synth noises) not appearing until the 1990s. Synthwave is an artificial history. You think that is how the 1980s were, but it is not.
An example hour long soundtrack is below (it is the same genre of music used by Joseph Paul Watson):
Likewise, within this group identifying themselves as ‘Nazis’, it strikes there is a politically disparate group unhappy with status quo, taking disparate concepts (yes, some contradict) - White Americana, Animal Rights, Nationalism, 1960s Racism, Anti-War Isolationism, Strong Military, Strong Borders, Flip-Flop Free Speech, Pro-Strong Government, Pro-Independence and Pro-Internet stances - and, in doing so, have formed this weird, non-existent, ‘nostalgia Nazism’.
They’ve borrowed concepts from benign synthwave and invented ‘fashwave’ (short for ‘fascist wave’), a weird composite of 1980s filters on colourised historical images depicting either military or history, usually with some political message.
They’re pining for an orderly, crime-free, problem-free society that simply did not exist, in any era, under any government. They likely use the term ‘Nazi’ to represent these disparate policies, a combination of failures in education to expand understanding of historical politics, and due to media ignorance, poor research shoehorning unrelated groups together forming a weird political amalgam.
What strikes me most strongly about the groups is a sense of fear. They fear agents. They fear being mischaracterised by the media. They fear crime. They fear for their society going down the drain.
Their fear, like a lame, cheesy Star Wars reference, is being turned into hatred. They fear crime, so they hate the perceived source. Emphasis on the word perceived. They berate the black robber down the street, but forget the damages old white man Congress can inflict on society as a whole.
The Problem Is Caused By A Lack Of Caring
No-one is driving them to these conclusions, because they’re extrapolating it from limited datasets of which media do a really bad job of responding to, usually with cliches of screaming ‘but it is out of context!’. Isn’t the job of the media to provide the context to begin with? If it is out of context, it is because, you, the Media, failed to provide the context in the first place.
Education systems that harbour systemic anti-White policies make things worse. Of course White people are going to freak out if media bang wardrums saying ‘all Whites are bad’. If they’re going to get slandered simply for existing, what does it matter if they get slandered being called a ‘Nazi’? The penalty for switching sides has been made zero.
If these people were truly radicalised by actual Nazis, I’d expect them to have a much better understanding of their history. Often it boils down to simplified incorrect cliches like the ‘Tiger IV was the best tank’ or pointing to failed Nazi jets and trying to suggest Nazi Germany was technologically advanced… even though America used nuclear fission before Nazi Germany did.
In Closing
We have what appear to be young adults, who have been abandoned by education, become politically homeless individuals who don’t know how to identify their views - nor appropriately express them, being constantly told they must be Nazis, by ignorant media who have no historical qualifications, and so they’ve adopted the label for lack of a better term. A bit like a problem child always being told they’ll become the troublemaker so, they in turn, adopt the label and do.
It is difficult to take people who propose slapping stickers and redesigning video game boxart as the overhyped threat the media claim. Perhaps the media ought to reconsider? Perhaps they should consider the burning down of American businesses as a bigger issue.
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Feel I’ve mischaracterised something in my headcold delirium? Leave a comment.
I'm sorry you've been ill. The headache, weird dreams, sensitivity to light and back-pain all indicate you may have had an infection in your cerebrospinal fluid so it's a jolly good thing you recovered so quickly.
To me, this article and your article on incels speak to the sense of anomie among young men in particular, and perhaps especially young white men, although your incel article questioned that somewhat.
There is also a trend where young people (typically but not only men) choose to self-define online as paedophile. For some, this is a genuine (and often anguished) acknowledgment of their involuntary (and frequently unwanted) sexual attraction, but for others it isn't: it's chosen.
Thus one of the 'worst' terms a person can be called (similar to 'Nazi') is adopted deliberately as a self-assigned label, chosen as a way of the individual signalling their sense of separation from the larger group, a rejection, perhaps a self-loathing or a revelling in 'taboo'. Thank God, for some the self-identity may not manifest in actual behaviour other than forms of manga / anime.
It's an interesting multi-faceted phenomenon, and I see connections with both choosing to identify as 'despised' incels or 'hated' Nazis. So, to me, that's why your Nazis come across as politically very naive and ill-informed. It's because perhaps they're not actually particularly interested in politics or history per se but only in identifying with the stigmatised label. Hence they got cross and chucked you out when you pedantically expected them to know basic stuff!
When I think of NAZI, I think of a socialist dictatorship with some economics borrowed the National Fascist Party and the totalitarian nature of the USSR. The USSR excelled in mass murder.