History Doesn't Repeat Itself...

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

But it often rhymes, as Mark Twain said.

    I've tried playing nice. I've tried being respectful and not gloat over Charlie Kirk's murder yesterday. I've condemned the shooting and reiterate my stance again that there is no excuse for gun violence, which, ironically Kirk was addressing moments before he was shot. I've said his murder was a cowardly act and that there's no excuse whatsoever to permanently take a man away from his family.

     But there's no making the red hat crowd happy. It's impossible. They're never happy unless they're miserable about something, unless they have an enemy to hate. They're latter-day Nazis. They live for it. These people cannot exist without hatred, a common enemy they can loathe and revile. It's impossible for me to imagine the burden of living with so much hate but, bless their little black hearts, somehow they bravely shoulder that emotional burden.

     And appeasement doesn't work for these social and mental maladroits any more than Chamberlain's appeasement policy worked with Hitler. So, why not tell the truth about Kirk, a truth that's already long since been made self-evident with his idiotic pronouncements, writings and podcasts. Because being respectful doesn't work. They're going to be furious no matter what we say or do. So why not get our money's worth?

      So we should turn our attention to one Horst Wessel, a long-forgotten Nazi who was assassinated in 1930 at the tender age of 22. Horst was a misguided little boy who became a brownshirt, the SA that enforced the Nazi Party's doctrine. Eventually, with almost frightening rapidity, he rose to become a leader of several SA units. Goebbels got his attention and it was mutual.

     A law student, Wessel came to see the law, like Trump and his fascist goons, as an instrument of power and vengeance. In his two diaries, he gives the impression that he was a True Believer in the fascist agenda, even though one could say he was in it for the pussy. He was notorious for his procurement of women, which possibly led to his assassination.

     Lord only knows what evil this person would've committed had he lived long enough to see the Third Reich. But when he was shot and killed, Goebbels was looking for a martyr and poster boy for the Nazi Party and he found it in Wessel. And even though the Nazis weren't officially in power, they gave Wessel the equivalent of a state funeral and all the publicity that goes with one. Goebbels got his martyr. In fact, it could be said that Wessel's murder helped propel Hitler to victory in 1933.

     And then, the purge began.

 

 Enter George Conway

Even though Conway is a Republican, one has to give credit where it's due. And Conway bravely took a big ole size 13 to the right wing hornet's nest that began furiously buzzing the second the shot rang out at Utah Valley University yesterday. On Twitter today, Conway drew an accurate parallel between Charlie Kirk and Horst Wessel. It's obvious that Conway wasn't trying to establish a connection between Kirk and Wessel but the circumstances surrounding their deaths.

     George said it, I believe it, that settles it. 

     The martyring of Wessel in 1930 eerily parallels the rapidly growing hagiography now surrounding Kirk since the moment he died. MAGAts are now vowing vengeance and even bloodshed against liberals over Kirk's murder even though just one man was responsible for it and we don't even know who he is or why he did it, let alone whatever ideology he may have.

     But they're as desperate to pin this shooting  on liberals as Nazis were in pinning Wessel's murder on the Communists who really did shoot him. After they arrested Albrecht "Ali" Höhler, Wessel's assassin, he was given just six years in prison. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, with their infamously long memories, they pulled him out of his prison cell and illegally executed him and several of his confederates.

      When Conway made the comparison, MAGA World lost its collective shit. The ironic thing about that is that if Wessel had lived until the summer of 1934, he probably would have been a casualty of the Night of Long Lives that decimated the SA. And if today's MAGAts lived in Germany 100 years ago, they would've sung full-throated praises to Wessel and the people he worshiped.

     Instead, they're feigning outrage that Charlie Kirk would be compared to a Nazi. But, again, that's not what Conway did. He was merely drawing a connection between the Nazi outrage over Wessel's killing and MAGA's outrage over Kirk's killing. And, let's face it, it feeds into MAGA World's white grievance and perpetual sense of persecution. 

     And, like Wessel before him, it has to be said that Charlie Kirk was also a monster-in-waiting. He threw verbal brickbats at anyone who wasn't a straight, white, Christian Republican male. He said women should get married younger and have white babies. He said Black women weren't mentally equipped to do things done by white men. He questioned the qualifications of Black pilots of the planes he flew on.

     Just because Charlie Kirk is dead, it doesn't obligate any thinking person in the least to pretend that he was a great pillar of American society. There was nothing remotely special about him and one wonders what all the hoopla is about. The bilge he spewed on his podcast was absolutely indistinguishable from the other boilerplate bilge one can get on tap from any other right wing podcaster. And we need to stop pretending otherwise and acting as if he was a great head of state.