BRENDAN O’NEILL: Now we know just how dehumanizing the ‘Nazi’ slur can be.
As for the masses who voted for Trump, or for Brexit, clearly they had been brainwashed by neo-fascistic propaganda. The vote for Brexit was ‘in the fascist tradition’, said the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then there were self-styled ‘anti-fascists’ like Paul Mason, who said Trump had tapped into a ‘plebeian mass base for American fascism’. Those fascist-leaning masses. Mason also argues that in modern-day Britain ‘the psychological traits’ that made Nazism possible in the 1930s are now most commonly found among ‘working-class people and the urban poor’. This is surely only a more polite way of saying ‘Nazified masses’, of suggesting that the throng, the mob, is susceptible to fascist-style brain invasion. Pro-war Russian thinkers claim the people of Ukraine have been corrupted by Nazi thought; our own chattering classes claim the people of Britain and the US, especially the poorer ones, posses the ‘psychological traits’ that are amenable to far-right ideology.
No, our elites are not agitating for violence against the ‘Nazified masses’. And yet they share something deeply disturbing in common with the Putin regime and its extremist supporters – an addiction to writing off vast swathes of people as fascists, or at least ‘fascist-adjacent’; a compulsion to dehumanise certain politicians and their voters through the language of the 1930s. The tragedy of Ukraine has shown just how toxic the Nazi slur can be. Those Russian soldiers who appear to have murdered citizens in Bucha will have been fed the lie that these people, like all Ukrainians, are a Nazi menace to civilised society. They will have been told, essentially, that they’re subhuman, for that is the role the Nazi accusation plays today – to depict certain people as morally inferior, as lesser, as lacking the intellectual and moral resources required to function as a decent member of society. It seems to be a terrifyingly small step from believing that somebody is a Nazi to believing that they deserve to be shot like a dog in the street.
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