Sometimes Things Just Are

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. -Orwell, 1984

Santa Claus and God are much the same entity. They both give people the benefit of the doubt. They both are fantastical in some capacity, with rich lore and stories that go back much further than paper. They both are used to keep some semblance of order when morality and human decency fail to come through on their own. They both are incredibly hard to believe in, mostly because we see so little of them as we grow older.

Some people go a lifetime deliberating whether magic (or faith) is something to keep with them. I believed in both at different points in my life, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time ruminating on them while I try to come to terms with the Schrödinger‘s cat of are they/aren’t they. I still won’t say I don’t believe in Santa Claus, and my relationship with God boils down to spirituality boils down to… I think there’s more to this but I’m not sure exactly what.

I probably will never come up with a coherent answer that everyone agrees on. There are things that feel like God sometimes, certainly. Poetic entities like sunsets and people coming together. Santa is in plates of Christmas cookies and laughter at parties as the snow falls, but neither are tangible realities. They exist somewhere between where we get to choose whether or not we believe in them because we live our lives regardless of them.

This is not true about Nazi’s. A hell of a transition, I know, but it’s been a hell of a first two weeks and I am admittedly exhausted. It’s one thing to wake up every day to some fresh news headline that sounds straight out of 1930’s Germany, it is entirely another to have to do that and face the reality that, as Elon Musk sieg heil’s in the nations capitol and launches a power grab that has taken several federal departments, there are still people who don’t believe in Nazi’s. If something can come into power and fundamentally change the way your life is lived, it is very real on a scale that isn’t contained by mere belief.

For the uninitiated, a sieg heil is a one -armed salute whose defining characteristics are the extension of the right arm from the shoulder with a flat hand. It was a common greeting amongst Nazi party members in Germany, and is often performed by modern neo -nazi groups. It’s a very obvious, recognizable gesture from any angle. It can’t be easily confused. It was not a product of some mythic autism that turned Musk into a Nazi for a second. It was a deliberate action performed by one of the most powerful men in the world on a stage that a lot of our country and others were watching. His distancing from it in post is something every power hungry regime does at one point or another, which is to tell you that something that you saw with your eyes was not real.

One of the most important things Hitler and the high ranking members of the SS did was develop coded language to use, even when speaking in their own party, to downplay or outright deny the killing of the Jews because they knew they didn’t have the support they needed to commit large scale atrocities. When rumors of the Holocaust started to leak, they allowed the Red Cross to come in to the Theresienstadt ghetto to see that their prisoners were being treated well. They deported some of the population to other camps to make it seem less crowded. They added theatres and instructed those left in the camp in how to act and what to say during the visit, and once it was concluded they continued the deportation of Jews to death camps like Auschwitz while the world deliberated whether what they were shown was true, or whether what they were hearing and seeing of their own volition was true.

In the instance with the Red Cross they let the world do the work for them. They let nations argue about reality while they steamed ahead in their goals to eradicate entire populations. Even now there are Holocaust deniers who say it was an elaborate lie. As Trump stands on stage and announces he’s opening a camp in Guantanamo Bay, reminiscent of the early camps in Nazi Germany schools and prisons, I am already hearing denial of the gravity of such an announcement. As I came dazedly away from watching Elon Musk Sieg Heil on Inauguration Day, I was immediately confronted with people who denied it as the action I knew it to be.

There is a saying circulating online right now: Don’t Comply In Advance. In its simplest form this means cause trouble for them. If you’re in a position of privilege, muddy the waters. Don’t listen to new laws until there is no other choice (you will have to make this distinction). Don’t turn on your friends and neighbors hoping for a pat on the head from the regime. Don’t leave them the passwords to your computers, burn everything on the way out.

Do not do the work for them.

It is pivotal now more than ever to trust your instincts. This country, for all of its war overseas, has enjoyed a long stretch of peace on our shores. We all want to believe tomorrow isn’t going to change. I want to put my head in the sand and say it wasn’t a salute. I, also, want to live some different life where I‘m not tracking bird flu and supply chains and Nazi’s. They count on our fatigue, and they are hoping you will shrug one shoulder and say, “I don’t know. It looked like he was throwing his heart to the crowd to me.” We must resist that urge and name the atrocities happening as what they are.

The world has been here before. Globally they see that we’ve been censored. Google searches are not entirely reliable, there are things missing from the history that we are allowed to see already. Government websites have gone dark. Things like ‘fascism’ and ‘Nazi’ come up with less results than they used to. What’s happening here isn’t happening in a bubble, but our boat has flipped and for a while we’re going to be absolutely drenched in executive orders stripping our rights as they test the boundaries of the power they’ve acquired.

I don’t know if I believe in God or Santa Claus, but I have to believe in Nazi’s. This is fascism, folks. That F word. Every day it evolves further to fit the times, and we don’t get to choose whether or not it’s real. I wish I could tell you definitively what comes next. I wish I could tell you that the next week or the next four years wont be so bad, but I am never going to use this platform to lie to you. I don’t know how far they’re willing to exercise their power. I don’t know what will work in opposing them. I don’t know if it’s only going to be four years. They’re already filing paperwork looking to extend his term, or at least let him run for another one. I can tell you that, if that happens, the next election will be less democratic than this one was.

Please don’t come away from this disheartened. Understanding what we’re up against is a path to fighting it. There are acts of resistance happening everywhere we look. Teachers and bus drivers are blocking ICE agents. Attorney generals in more than one state are suing to stop the federal funding freeze that affects school funding, loans, police, public services like Medicaid, and disaster relief funds. Governors like Tim Walz are coming forward to say No, this wont happen here. Not on my watch. Companies like Costco and Meijer are refusing to comply with the repeal of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act and the dismantling of the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) hiring practices. Federal workers are forcing them to drag them from their posts. People are organizing in the ways they can, and there are absolutely protests in the streets that you aren’t being shown on the news.

Believing in Nazi’s, recognizing that they do exist, does not mean that we have to let them win. People are incredibly resilient and I have no doubt there is an other side for us to get to. It’s the getting to it that’s going to be the hard part. It’s going to take all of us.

As always, feel free to engage or reach out. I’ll be around.

Thank you for reading.

AF

*Housekeeping notes: The new platform is my new website that I have mostly put together (afwriter.ghost.io). If you haven’t visited it yet, you can find all of my newsletter articles, poetry (political and otherwise), and an about me that tells you how to contact me if you don’t want to leave a comment. You can also leave a tip if you feel so inclined, but please don’t feel obligated. Information should always be free. Thanks again~