What’s in a label? That question has been on my mind since Audie Wood’s most recent column first landed in my email in-box. “We have to call it what it is,” Wood wrote. We have to recognize that the reactionary right-wing movement that is driving the Republican Party and leading the war on women, LGBTQ people, and anyone who isn’t a white, Christian bigot just like them, is pretty indistinguishable from Nazis.
“I thought that I might just be paranoid about the rise of white nationalism and fascism in America, but the coming repeal of Roe v. Wade put that fear to rest,” Wood writes. “It isn’t paranoia; it’s reality.”
I stopped reading at that moment and considered deeply. Words have power, and some words have the power of a hydrogen bomb by virtue of their historical genealogy. Nazi is one of those words. That is why it packs such a rhetorical punch. And one needn’t even use the word “Nazi” to deploy its full effect. You don’t have to say “Nazi” to say Nazi. It is just as effective as a sotto voce allusion to brownshirts, goose-stepping battalions, or yellow stars – everyone knows you mean Nazis.
The historical reference is so provocative, so culturally immanent, that it hits with extraordinary force. Nazis are bad – we all know this, and anyone who doesn’t is, axiomatically, also a Nazi – and not only that, they were (and are) the most abominable evil our species has ever produced. So, when Wood avers that reactionary, Christian nationalist, white nationalist American conservatives are Nazis, he is not pulling his punches.
Of course, neither was Gigi Gaskins when she started selling yellow stars at her Nashville hat shop last year to protest government mask and vaccine mandates. Gaskins wanted everyone to know that the government – or at least Democrats and liberals in government who advocated for the mandates – were the equivalent of Nazis, and poor Gigi, and anyone else expected to bear the inconvenience of covering their faces in the interest of public safety, were being loaded into cattle cars to die by the millions in the death camps.
So yeah… Wood’s column made me uneasy. And, to be honest, it still does. His deployment of “Nazi” to describe a politics he finds loathsome seems, at least superficially, to legitimize the antimaskers’ appropriation of Holocaust victimhood. “Nazi” has become such an all-purpose label for evil that even Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator who aspires to totalitarian power, and who personally employs actual Nazi-wannabes, can call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, a Nazi. Between Putin and Gaskin, it is worth wondering if “Nazi” means anything at all, anymore.
Moreover, when we deploy the labels of evil from our collective history there is a danger of eliding the specific evils that they name. That might actually be the point in the classic example of this, the myth of Irish enslavement in the Americas. The arrogation of the term “slavery,” with its historical associations with the brutal history of racialized chattel servitude in America has long been a favorite play of white national liberation movements.[1] Irish nationalist firebrands as far back as the 19th century claimed that they were treated as slaves by the British.
It might be worth noting that their problem was not with slavery, per se – Daniel O’Connell said that American slavery was “a high crime against Heaven, and its annihilation ought not to be postponed,” but many other nationalist leaders approved of the enslavement of Africans – but with white people being treated as if they were not white.
That much is obvious in the recent “the Irish were slaves, too!” myth promoted by people like Michael Hoffman III in books like They Were White and They Were Slaves. The Irish were not slaves, of course. Many did come to the Americas as transported convicts and indentured servants in the 17th and 18th centuries and, although this was a system of coerced labor, it was far different than slavery. Penal terms and indentures came to an end, usually after four-to-seven years, and unlike enslaved Africans, white servants – who enjoyed most common law rights and protections – did not pass their servitude onto their children.
But, by deploying the historically-loaded term “slavery,” people like Hoffman can simultaneously claim victimhood for white people while minimizing one of the most egregious racist crimes in American history. “Look at the Irish,” the memes said during the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020, “we were slaves, too, and we aren’t whining.” It is perhaps no surprise that Hoffman, an antisemite, Holocaust denier, and all-around bigot, is a white nationalist darling.
Words matter, and those words that are palimpsests of evil, like slavery, Inquisition, apartheid, lynching, witch-hunt, and Nazi have power and depth of meaning far beyond a mere assemblage of letters; they signify enormities that cannot be contained by a flat, historical image. When now-Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas described Anita Hill’s sexual harassment accusations against him in his confirmation hearings in 1991 as a “high-tech lynching,” he knew what he was doing. He was deploying the horror of the whole history of terrorist violence against Black men to silence a Black woman. The word mattered.
And it is for that reason that these words must be used with great care, and with a full understanding of their context and meaning. But that does not mean that they should never be used. After all, what can we call the seemingly routine police executions of unarmed African American except “lynchings?” What are the overcrowded, fetid detention centers that still hold Latin American migrants and undocumented immigrants in the United States if not “concentration camps?” What word is there for racist attacks like the ones in Pittsburgh in 2018, in El Paso in 2019, in Winthrop, MA last June, and in Buffalo yesterday other than “pogrom?”
To his credit, Wood never actually came out and called the Christian white nationalists who are rallying around Former President Donald Trump, Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson, and Republican putschists like Matt Gaetz, Majorie Taylor-Greene, Paul Gosar, and all the others, Nazis. Indeed, he went to great lengths to document the uncanny parallels between the rise of the redhats today and the rise of the brownshirts in the 1920s and 1930s. His point was that “history rhymes” and maybe Nazi “might be the right word for the moment,” no matter how uncomfortable it makes us.
It makes me uncomfortable. I think of the killing fields of Aktion Reinhard, of the lime-pits piled with emaciated bodies, and the pall of greasy black smoke over the crematoria at Auschwitz, and I feel my skin crawl. But I also think of the years in which a mass movement of hate moved from the political lunatic fringe, one election after the next, moving into the political mainstream until it was in a position to effect a legislative coup d’état and implement a reign of terror. And looking at Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, former President Trump’s redhat goons in Congress, and the would-be Torquemadas on the Supreme Court, I feel a discomfort beyond description.
Some words have extraordinary power that we must handle with the greatest of care; but, as Wood notes, sometimes it might be the right word for the moment.
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[1] This is not only an Irish nationalist thing. In cuddly-liberal Canada in 1968 a Quebec nationalist ideologue named Pierre Vallières published a book claiming that the Québécois were les Nègres blancs d’Amérique – the white N*****s of America. It’s a thing.