Fascist moves by the Feds Catch All

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Sigh... We are all going to need to learn a lot more about esoteric Nazism. Unless you've been specifically studying this stuff, it's easy to miss. But if you've been paying attention then you can see how blatant this shit is getting.

gizmodo.com

DHS Posts Video Featuring Song Popular With Nazi Creators

The agency denied making "Nazi propaganda" in a statement that could be characterized as "very online."
gizmodo.com gizmodo.com

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted a bizarre new video to social media platforms on Thursday featuring footage of federal agents arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon. The video uses a song that became very popular among Nazis and white supremacists at the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first term, in what appears to be a dog whistle to far-right extremists.

DHS captioned the video, “End of the Dark Age, beginning of the Golden Age,” on sites like X and Instagram, along with a link to the ICE recruitment website. The video was also posted to Bluesky, the social media platform that many federal agencies joined one week ago to troll its more liberal userbase.

The song in the video, MGMT’s “Little Dark Age,” was released in 2018, though it’s been slowed down to an absurd degree. And while nothing in the song suggests sympathy with far-right ideology (quite the opposite, in fact), the song was adopted by far-right content creators in late 2020 to pair with Nazi and white supremacist imagery.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British think tank that tracks global extremism online, published a study in 2021 that noted how popular the song was with Nazis. One example used in the report shows how the song was paired on TikTok with a slideshow of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, who was killed in 1967.

But the report also explains how popular the song has been to promote esoteric Nazism, featuring memes and fictional characters with far-right symbols like the Sonnenrad or Black Sun. The fact that the song is also slowed down in a very exaggerated manner in the DHS video is another hallmark of the far-right videos that went viral in the early 2020s.

A good pimer to start to familiarize yourself with this bullshit is is the Conspirtuality podcast on Steve Bannon's origin story and Teitelbaum's article The rise of the traditionalists: how a mystical doctrine is reshaping the right.

www.conspirituality.net

82: Steve Bannon, Mystic (w/Benjamin Teitelbaum) — Conspirituality

Benjamin Teitelbaum, an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of the book, War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right, joins to talk about gaining access to leading right-wing figures
www.conspirituality.net www.conspirituality.net

www.newstatesman.com

The rise of the traditionalists: how a mystical doctrine is reshaping the right

Steve Bannon, Russia’s Alexander Dugin and Brazil’s Olavo de Carvalho are united by their affinity with a spiritual movement that fundamentally rejects modernity.
www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com
 
From the Teitelbaum article, here's the gist...

At its core, traditionalism rejects modernity and its ideals: faith in the ability of human ingenuity to advance living standards and justice; an emphasis on the management of the economy; the coveting of individual liberty; the existence of universal truths equally valid for, and thereby equalising of, all. Repudiating the Enlightenment, traditionalists instead celebrate what they regard as timeless values. They honour precedence rather than progress, emphasise the spiritual over the material, and advocate surrender to the fundamental disparities – as opposed to equality – between humans and human destinies.

Such a philosophy can sound rather abstract, hardly the sort of doctrine that would guide a policymaker. And indeed, until recently, traditionalism has had little to do with politics. Its original patriarch was a French occultist and philosopher named René Guénon (1886-1951), who wrote extensively about Hinduism, though he eventually converted to Islam (traditionalists regard various religions as offering authentic paths toward enlightenment, but tend to devote themselves to one).

Two of Guénon’s ideas gained an unintended legacy in right-wing politics. The first of these was a concept of time as cyclical, generalised from Hinduism: instead of advancing through history in linear fashion – progressing from a beginning toward an end, as Christians, secular humanists, Marxists and libertarians often implicitly believe – humanity is instead engulfed in a cycle, a pattern of eternal return. This cycle proceeds through four ages, moving from golden to silver to bronze to dark, and then – after a cataclysmic event – back to golden again. Thus, save for that moment of return, time is tantamount to decline. Indeed, decline is the only thing humanity can hope for, since the gradual worsening of the world’s situation indicates that the cycle is advancing, and that darkness will soon burst into gold, when decline will set in again, on and on.

The second concept that would migrate from Guénon’s philosophy into contemporary politics was the idea of social hierarchy. Traditionalists believe the Hindu and Indo-European caste hierarchy corresponds to the turning of the ages. During the golden age, they claim, priests and spiritual values reigned over a social order made up of warriors, merchants and, finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, slaves. As the ages turn, the boundaries between castes disintegrate, culminating in a sprawling slave society infatuated with materiality and hostile to spiritual pursuits. There is a political dimension to this social disintegration too: theocracy and the reign of a spiritual elite devolve into the reign of the masses, which is to say democracy or communism. Traditionalism thus deals in a series of oppositions: between the spiritual and material, quality and quantity, social stratification and mass homogenisation.

This illiberal school of thought was politicised not by Guénon, but by a rambunctious follower of his from Italy named Julius Evola (1898-1974). Evola crafted a more expressly reactionary traditionalism by introducing the gendered and racial dimensions of these oppositions. To Evola, the opposite poles of the social hierarchy were also Aryan and non-Aryan, masculine and feminine, such that an ideal society would not only be theocratic, unequal and hostile to change, but also dominated by Aryan men.

Evola regarded himself as being to the political right of fascism and Nazism, both of which he saw as merely promising starts. He thought fascism represented a step backwards, in a positive sense: a retreat from the brink of mass egalitarian society. If he could only introduce spirituality into Hitler’s and Mussolini’s militarism, perhaps the rewinding of time could be accomplished, and a golden age of theocratic virtue restored.
 
TLDR version: They believe "Hitler was on the right path, but failed to achieve the coming Golden age because Nazism wasn't spiritual enough, because of course the the golden age requires hierarchy of Priests --> Warriors --> Merchants all lording over an underclass of slaves".

This shit should be super fringe, but we are now at a place where it's being tweated out by the fucking official DHS twitter account.
 


He seems to be talking about the Insurrection Act as a free pass to presidential dictatorship - he could pass laws alone, the courts would have no say, etc.
 
ZenMode said:
According to CBS Chicago, she's 18 but there seems to be no confirmation of whether the arrest was made by ICE or local police.
Click to expand...
Makes no difference to me if she is 17 years and 364 days old or 18.

So you are saying people are getting snatched up off the street and we don’t know who is taking them? Does that make it better or worse?
 
nycfan said:


He seems to be talking about the Insurrection Act as a free pass to presidential dictatorship - he could pass laws alone, the courts would have no say, etc.
Click to expand...

Just another day in paradise ... some people are saying.
 
ChileG said:
Makes no difference to me if she is 17 years and 364 days old or 18.

So you are saying people are getting snatched up off the street and we don’t know who is taking them? Does that make it better or worse?
Click to expand...
We don't know what happened or why she was detained to know if there's something wrong with what happened. We do know that she was an adult.
 
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