Author of “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” publishes defense of public Nazi salutes
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I wrote yesterday a brief note where I said I didn’t have time for the discourse around the Nazi salute. But now that I’ve seen the discourse I think I have to say something. In the Free Press, Bari Weiss’s endeavor, they’ve published a piece by Richard Hanania entitled “I Can Explain Why the Nazi Salute Is Back.” The combination of author, subject matter, and outlet ought to combine to create a major scandal, but it will likely pass with some outraged tweets and newsletters, like this one.
First of all, to reiterate, there can be no ambiguity, irony, or equivocation about the Nazi salute. It has one simple meaning: It expresses lust for mass murder. Any attempt to mitigate or excuse this simple fact, no matter how couched in qualifications, denunciations or mea culpas, is to assist in the spread and normalization of Nazism: It offers cover.
A week ago, the same outlet published Weiss’s speech at the “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,” a stentorian invocation of Churchill and denunciation of the fascist far-right. Weiss sees in college campus protesters the faces of hardcore Hamas supporters, but apparently is willing to countenance the idea that grown men doing Nazi salutes are just playing around. And most laughably, Weiss is the author of a book entitled “How to Fight Antisemitism.” One would be forgiven for thinking Weiss, of all people, might have some kind of hair trigger, a zero-tolerance attitude to manifestations of antisemitism, no matter how trivial–let alone major figures of the contemporary right just going right about there and doing that.
But should we really expect any different? This two-step from denunciation of the racist extreme to qualified embrace or timid excusal is merely a miniature recapitulation of the history of the conservative movement for the past 70 years. It told the legend about itself that it had created responsible guardrails—purged the loonies—while fostering Pat Buchanans, Joe Sobrans, and Ann Coulters in its midst. One would think that the rise of Trump, an open authoritarian who has curried favor with the extreme right—who has dined with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes—would usher in a new era of moral seriousness on the right, but no, of course not. They are still unwilling or unable to see what’s directly in front of their noses.
Ganz goes on to go give the Hanania — yes, that Richard Hanania — piece more attention that it deserves per se, but the journey is worth taking because it’s representative of the relationship that the “respectable” right has long had with the extremist one. The story of William Buckley allegedly sanitizing conservatism with some (late and ineffectual) criticism of John Birchers while he was, inter many alia, defending apartheid at home and abroad keeps recurring, while the lines become ever more porous.
There’s tons of good stuff here, but I wanted in particular to emphasize the irritating “maybe there are some bad elements on the right nowadays, but WOKENESS made us do it” move that is the bratwurst and sauerkraut of people who write for the Bari Press:
Ohhhh, I see. So, it’s wokeness’s fault you became an online Nazi. Again, her e is the erasure of history: Nazis existed long before wokeness, this can’t be put on that. What you are saying, Richard, is, “Nazi propaganda took advantage of the prevailing cultural conditions and I was taken in by it and I also helped to create my own.” This idea that Nazis are “imitating the identitarian left” and “[forming] a movement that put race at the center of its worldview” is an insulting deflection. Once again, the racial nationalism of the Nazis is not some kind of regrettable clone of the woke leftism: it’s its own “tradition” that dates back over a century now. Blaming the left for your own part in becoming a Nazi is definitionally bad faith: refusing to take full responsibility for one’s own actions.
And let’s just stop and reflect now on the absolute clownishness of this piece of writing. This what we are reading: “I can tell you all about Nazis, trust me, I used to be one.” Excuse me one moment, please? You said, what now? Why should we expect this person to be sincere in any way?
It’s worth reading the whole etc.
Rick Perlstein’s four books do a very good job of telling this story among many others, and Ganz’s excellent recent book picks up this story for the 90s.