Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Eternal Fascist

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone.' Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's Katie and Makodes? Robert Evans here with Cody Johnston and Katie Stolp, and this is a special seven-part episode behind the bastards. Hello, how are y'all doing? Good. I'm ready. We're here, we're ready, we're back from vacation.

We watched the debates last night. We did, we're all a little bit strung out. We're all a little strung out. So, let me tell you, let me explain what's going on today. This is a podcast where every week I talk about the worst people in all of history in exhaustive detail, and a couple of months ago, we talked about a particularly shitty person named George Lincoln Rockwell. Yes, we did.

And that three-part episode was to act as a booster for a GoFundMe campaign I had to raise money for conflict journalism. And in exchange for getting funded, I promised to write an audiobook called The War on Everyone, which I have written and which I have read, and by the time this airs, will be available on the website if you go to thewaroneveryone.com. Look at you following through on your promises.

Look at me following through on my promises. So, I also went to Syria with the money made for that and just now got back. Now, one of the caveats of doing things like going to Syria for two weeks is that it would cause me to fall behind and collapse in on myself like a dying star if I tried to keep up with my workload. Oh, sure, sure. So, in addition to running just me reading the audiobook on the website

for free, ad-free as I promised forever, you know. No cost, no ads, you can just listen to the audiobook. I'm also going to read the audiobook to y'all and have it as a special two weeks section of the show because that allows me to both do the trip and not die from overwork. I think it's a wonderful plan. That's a good idea. So, thank you both for helping me make this possible and listening to.

I just want you to hear how loud this script is. It's hefty. Yeah. It made the whole table shake. 33,000 words. We got a lot to get through. It's like, what, 70 pages? Yeah, like 60 something pages.

Great, great, great, great, great. Now, to accompany us, I have, of course, my traditional Sarah Lee throwing bagels, but I also have some new throwing equipment. I have some Mott's brand apple juice in a plastic container. I have a metal Starbucks refreshers and I also have a metal can of LaCroix. I have this mayonnaise in a squeeze tube.

I'm very excited to see what happens with that. And I have a partially open sack of oranges. Call those Clementines. The full drinks make me nervous. Yeah, we should all be nervous. A little bit, yeah. It's going to explode on all this electrical gear. They might, I threw a can of coffee earlier off the air

and it didn't burst. You also threw a knife at Sophie. I threw a knife towards Sophie so she could open something with it. What happened, though? Well, she ran out of the way. And also what happened? What happened to the knife? Well, it opened when it hit the ground.

Do you think maybe it could have opened when it hit her hand if she tried to catch it? No, that's never happened with a knife before. You people, we're not here to shame you. This is your day. We're people. This is your audio book. I could throw the knife, too.

That is a good point, Cody. Thank you. I am so sorry. What's fun about that is it's going to bounce off these sound boards. I don't know what will happen there. It's going to be interesting. Everyone, protect your eyes. Is that mayonnaise open yet?

Has it been opened? No, it's got the foil on it. Let's see if it has the foil on it. Yes. Okay, great. That's what I wanted to know. So should I take the foil off? That's not what I brought it up.

And I shouldn't have said anything. Cody hates mayonnaise. I do hate mayonnaise. Why? I mean, look at it. I have inappropriate nicknames for it. The devil's cum. Okay, yeah.

See? I told you. Well, at some point in this episode, I'm going to lick the bottom of this mayonnaise in a way that will be calculated to make you feel uncomfortable. Thank you. Not me, though. I'm fine with it. Not you?

No. Kind of apple juice we're done? Maybe. Devils cum, angels cum. Okay. That's a distinctly non-zero chance. Whipped cream, that's it. We will all have some of this apple juice when I throw it.

Well, the apple juice sounds delicious. Thank you. Yeah, I want the apple juice and then maybe one of those refreshers. Yeah, there's more in the fridge. These are for throwing. Okay. What do you do with them post-throw, though? I never think about what happens to things after I throw them.

So I could scavenge for those? Theoretically. Potentially. Yeah, theoretically. Okay. But I'm going to wait to throw them until we get a little bit further into the show today. Pace yourself, Cody. You mean after we've started?

Yes, after we finally started. Vamping for 20 minutes at the top. Yeah, well, we had a lot to get through. We did. Yeah, we had to talk about devils cum, angels cum, all of it. What would it be, angels cum, Cody? No, no, no. I was just saying that I like all kinds of cum, devils cum, angels cum.

Yes, do I regret it? Absolutely. Yeah, you said it. Because now it's on the internet forever. And there's no way it can be edited out. No, you can't edit audio. So, without further ado, the war on everyone. Thank you.

Thank you for that reaction. Chapter one, The Eternal Fascist. On November 9th and 10th, 1938, Nazi stormtroopers and party members took to the streets of cities throughout Germany. They burned synagogues, shattered the windows of Jewish-owned buildings, beaten, murdered hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish people in the streets. This bloody pogrom is known to history as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. It's one of those moments in history so shocking and brutal that it's become stained in our

collective consciousness, a single moment of horror forever printed on the human psyche. Adolf Hitler and the other members of the Nazi High Command considered Kristallnacht to have been a failure. Rather than being enthused by the violence, the German people were horrified by this outpouring of brutality. World media harshly condemned Hitler's regime. And from their plush offices in Berlin, the Fuhrer and his inner circle began to revise their plans on how to sell anti-Semitic brutality to their people.

Joseph Goebbels decided that film was the right medium to help crack this nut. His efforts culminated in the 1940 production The Eternal Jew. The essential throughline of this particularly vile piece of propaganda was the idea that Jewish people were an age-old parasitic force leaching off their host nations and almost habitually working to undermine and destabilize them. As with most pieces of racist propaganda, The Eternal Jew reveals more about the men who made it than it does about Judaism. There is no eternal Jew.

But there might be an eternal fascist. Umberto Eco was probably the first person to really grasp this idea and try to define it. His 1995 essay, Ur Fascism, is still one of the single best pieces of writing on the subject. Now, Eco was an Italian novelist, a literary critic and a professor. He was born into Fascist Italy. In 1942, at the age of 10, he won an award in a provincial competition for young fascists where he gave an elaborate, positive answer to the question, should we die for the glory of Mussolini in the immortal destiny of Italy?

I mean, that is a good question. I ask myself that every day. This is a good question for a 10-year-old. Yeah. Should we die for the glory of Mussolini? Um... No. You're not going to get an award.

Oh. It's succinct. Yeah. No is succinct. No. Now, Eco came to hate fascism slightly later in life. And he came to also love the partisans and rebels who fought back against Benito Mussolini's regime. As he grew older and began to analyze his world and the history behind the war that had torn apart his childhood,

Eco found himself drawn again and again to a single question. What is a fascist? Now, that's not an easy question to answer. Most dictionary definitions you will find for the word fascism leave rather a lot to be desired. Here's Merriam-Webster's definition. A political philosophy, movement or regime such as that of the fascisti that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and a forcible suppression of opposition.

Now, like, that works for the Nazis, but it does for like Mao too. Yeah. Like every dictatorship. Works for a lot of people. It's a very frustrating definition. Yeah. It requires like the end to be what is happening. Yeah.

Like I kind of that so frustratingly much on the internet. Yeah. They're not doing this. Yeah. So, well, that's not how it works. Yeah. So does that mean that like the Nazi brown shirts weren't fascists because there wasn't a regime? Yeah.

Yeah. In point the different stages. Yeah. Where the fascism, yeah, Germany in the 20s or like not, what do you, yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's like picking an end point and it also, it's just like you could apply that to Stalin. Like if the same definition applies, a fascism applies to Stalin and Hitler. I don't think it's a good definition of fascism.

All the people just generally just sort of, they switch the word fascist with authoritarian. Yeah. And that's what they think it is. Yeah. And no, it's fascism is authoritarian, but authoritarianism isn't fascism. It's a square rhombus kind of deal. It's very frustrating. Yeah.

One of the reasons that that definition is so frustrating to me is that it equates fascism to like every other system that ends with like dictators and stuff like you said with authoritarianism. And I think one of the things that it leaves out that's most important about fascism is that fascism isn't just a system that involves dictators. It's a system that arises out of and murders democracies. Right. Like that's where fascism tends to come from is it kills republics. It's a frustration with democracy.

Yeah. It's frustrating with a lot of things. It's a reaction to a lot of things. It's a reaction to a lot of things, but specifically it like most other dictatorships come from another kind of dictatorship. Like, you know, we got the USSR out of the czars and like neither government was good. Like as opposed to like we got the Nazis out of. Right.

It's a republic. The VMR Republic. Yeah. That's why like a lot of what Robert Paxson writes too. Yeah. Because he goes through the fascism scholar Robert Paxson. Yeah. He goes through what it is that you go through.

It's like, well, no, it starts here and then you go to this phase and then it's this sort of thing. Right. And it's an evolution of a movement. Yeah. Less than it is like, here's what I want the government to be. Yeah. And what I like about Umberto Eco is that he understood that fascism was a singular and

specific thing accepted from the rest of authoritarianism and deserved to be studied separately because of its ability to kill vibrant, healthy democratic societies. And I like that Echo, when he tried to define fascism in that or fascism essay, he wasn't just sort of looking back into the past. He was trying to analyze kind of the things that are timeless about the mental impulses behind fascism so that he could provide a definition that would be useful to recognizing it again when it came about in the future rather than just like being like, is this what the Germans were doing in 1920?

No, then it's not fascism. Right. Yeah. It feels like a good start to the conversation about what is fascism. Yeah. Right. So in that essay, he wrote, quote, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call or fascism or eternal fascism.

These features cannot be organized into a system. Many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism, but it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it. I like that idea that it's like, there's a couple of different things that fascism, like it's magnetic that it pulls these things in and it becomes fascism, but it's not guaranteed to do so because each of these things can follow other things too. Right.

Yeah. And they can fall apart. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it can start and then just doesn't work. Like it did. We talked about Oswald Mosley together. Yeah.

Like it started to in England, but then fell apart. Yeah. It doesn't always continue to that in point. Right. Mirian Webster was defining. Right. But it's still, that was fascism. Yeah.

It's just not the final, it's not the final form. Right. It didn't win. Yeah. Yeah. So Echo's concept of eternal fascism starts with a cult of tradition, the belief that truth has been already spelled out once and for all and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

Whether you're looking at like the Nazis and their concept of like the Aryan civilization or you're looking at say modern American fascism and this idea that there was a point in which America was great and perfect that we need to get back to. Like that seems like a really, yeah, that seems like a key aspect of fascism. Now you could kind of translate this to conservatism, which doesn't mean that conservatives are all fascists, but it does mean that fascism always gestates inside a conservative movement. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Usually like a reaction to like liberal movements, liberal developments. Yeah. Yeah. And if that's another frustrating thing where like you don't want to say like you're all fascist, but it is, there is no end of like a lot of these beliefs and a lot of these things you're holding onto can co, like coagulate around it and then you're not fascist. I just need to say I hate the word coagulate.

I love the word coagulate. Makes my tummy sick. I think a good way to look at fascism is like conservatives are the crew of the Nostromo in the first Alien movie. Okay. And fascism is the chestburster that comes out of that guy's chest. And he's suggesting. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like he's not an alien, but he gives birth to one. Yeah. In the same way that conservatism can give birth to fascism. And then yeah, then they help and then they can, many can slowly turn into them. Yeah. And some of them fight it with flamethrowers, but fail because they wind up getting into

the vents and stuff. And like you shouldn't fight an alien in the vents, nor should you fight fascism on its own terms. There's a lot of political lessons to be gleaned from Ridley Scott's Alien. And that's your next audio book. What Ridley Scott's Alien has a teacher about the nature of fascism. So the next thing that Echo stated as sort of like a key to fascism or as like a piece of earth fascism is a rejection of modernism, particularly a rejection of modern depravity.

As traditionally marginalized in a press group stand up for human rights in modern societies, fascists will inevitably seek to reverse these trends. The first books the Nazis burned were Magnus Hirschfeld's Library of Research on Transgender Individuals. Hatred of trans men and women is still a central unifying tenet of modern fascism. And then there's the cult of action for action's sake, expressed as a worship of the soldier, of the man with a gun in his hand, willing to do violence at a moment's notice. For fascists, according to Echo, thinking is a form of emasculation.

Great line. Yeah. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Yeah. Yeah. Thinking too long about something is like it's unmanly. You just gotta do it. You just gotta take action.

Now Echo also recognized a rejection of criticism and disagreement as central to fascism. Quote, the critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. Now I find this interesting, because in our modern era, 8chan's poleboard is one of the largest gathering places for neo-Nazis on the internet. It's the community that spawned both the Christchurch Massacre and the Pauway Synagogue shooting. It was formed as a direct result of Gamergate. And Gamergate was of course a reactionary movement inspired by rage at video game critics

and reviewers. And women. Yeah. Yeah. Primarily female video game critics and reviewers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I find it interesting that back in like the 1990s, Echo looking back at the past determines that like it's a rejection of criticism. And then where do we see this modern movement first really start to bubble up in a meaningful way? It's 2014 in Gamergate. Yeah. That's the precursor to the Trump campaign in a lot of ways. Yeah.

It definitely has a lot of the same shades. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting to me. The analysis is so good because you can look forward from the analysis and see that he really nailed some things. Yeah. Yeah.

Most everything he says in that is like, oh, yep. Yeah. Fuck. Fuck. Yeah. So racism and hatred of diversity, exploitation of the natural fear of differences. These are the other characteristics of Urfashism. Echo recognized Urfashism as derived from social frustration generally rising out of

an appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. You could translate that in America as fear of white people and the disappearing white middle class of, you know, what is reality just like growing a quality of lower other colored social groups, but looks like losing ground. This sort of self victimization kind of viewing yourself as a victim when that's not actually not quite. Seems like everywhere all the time would be ripe for fascism because to, you know, hit

on those. Every complex society, I think is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Diversity and democracy and things like that. And just like, you know, a manipulation of these innate human based fears. Yeah.

A complex free society is never more than about four years away from fascism. Yeah. I think, yeah. I think America is especially unique too just because of our, our claimed drive for like multiculturalism and, and, you know, in our country of immigrants, all that kind of talk. It's easy to exploit and blame. Yeah. And it's like part of the appeal of fascism is that in times of growing inequality, it

promises all of its members a type of equality, which is like we're all members of this nation. Right. Yeah. That's like great. Even though like we may occupy very different places within this nation, like we can all feel superior to everyone else because this is the best nation. Right. The best people.

I'm a winner. I'm one of the winners in this world. Because you're here. You're a winner too. Yeah. It's more like class collaboration. Yeah. Than class conflict.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great key. Now, fascism, of course, requires an absolute rejection of pacifism since life is lived for struggle. War is permanent under fascism. We see this translated in our modern fascist movements in an obsession with the tools and aesthetics of war, black and camo and tactical, everything.

Earlier on the day I wrote this, I was browsing Twitter and I came across a photo of someone's bug out bag. He wrote in the Twitter post, how's this for a bug out Boogaloo setup? Now, if you aren't aware, Boogaloo is a far right term for the civil war that they believe is coming as in Civil War II, electric Boogaloo. Now, this fellow's emergency preparedness kit for Boogaloo contained no food, no water, no medical supplies. His gas mask did not have actual filters with it, but he did have an AR-15 rifle, a 12-gauge

shotgun, a Glock sidearm with a 30-round magazine and a 44-magnum revolver, along with a Tomahawk axe, a throwing knife, stylish green body armor, the same shade as his tactical backpack and helmet. Just his artillery. 30 pounds of weapons and no food. He's just hyper machismo like gamer dorks. He's going to be able to shoot his food, you guys. Yeah, there were a lot of veterans being like, so you brought four different calibers of

weapon? Yeah, that's really unreal. Are you planning on losing a lot of them? And are you planning on carrying different ammo for all those different guns? Very dumb. Yeah, I'm ready. But seeing this post brought to mind what Echo wrote about the fascist Armageddon complex. Quote, since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which

the movement will have control of the world, but such a final solution implies a further era of peace, a golden age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament, because they all get murdered or kill themselves. Yeah, they all kind of doesn't work out very well. Because it's a death call. Interesting that the constant warfare is interesting too to me, just because of the United States being very unique to that, and just like maybe two years of its entire existence is not

been at war, maybe? I mean, we had the, we had the 90s. We didn't get involved in much war in the 90s. But there was still war. There was still a couple of little ones. Yeah, police actions. But it's like now this age where it's like, I mean, there are people that, I don't, maybe not yet, but within like a year or two, we'll be fighting in Afghanistan, but they will

not have been born. Born yet. When we got in there. In 9-11. Like, that's, I mean, you're, you're born and you grow up in this culture. Yeah, but at this point, Afghanistan's not a war, it's a tradition. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

It does, it's weird how it starts to not, I mean, it feels like a war, but it doesn't feel like a war, it's just been this lingering thing that's going on. We've got troops over there. It's a state of being now for us. We don't even see a lot of like what happens. We don't remove from it completely. Anywho. Yeah.

Speaking of permanent war in Afghanistan, it's time for an ad pivot for the products and services. I'm craving a little pivot. Don't profit from the war in Afghanistan. How do you know that? You'd hope on. You never know. Buy these products unless the product is the war in Afghanistan, which would be a weird

product to advertise on my podcast. Don't buy it. That sounds really expensive too. Oh, Cody. Yeah. It's not a good deal. It's not. It just isn't a good deal.

It costs all the money we would spend on healthcare if we were a sane country. Yeah, yeah, don't buy that. Anyway, ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French.

In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For a fascist movement to evolve, a number of these things must coalesce together. This man will, of course, never admit to desiring power. Instead he claims to speak for some broad mass of the population, a claimed majority that stands behind him and his movement. Echo called this qualitative populism and noted that in the modern era, quote, we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or internet populism in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the voice of the people.

1996. President. What year is it now? Not that. Some amount of years later. Some amount of years later. Yeah. Yeah.

The selective, the qualitative populism is the one where I'm always, it's just the most obvious thing and no one seems to, at least in the media, seem to care or like point at out that like, he's not actually speaking for America. Yeah. He says he is. I don't know. I just don't like it. Not a fan.

Not good. Don't know who I'm talking about. Just hypothetically. Hypothetically. If there were a fascist in America. Yeah. Yeah. Just a general he, it could have been her.

Could have been. She. So that's what I've got to say about Umberto Echo's er-fascism. I think it's a really good analysis. I think he gets a lot of things, but I also think he missed something. And since y'all are listening to my audio book, or in this case, helping me present my audio book, I hope you'll forgive my arrogance in adding one new element of fascism to Echo's list.

Comedy. Comedy. Irony might be a better way to phrase it. Fascism often wraps itself in humor as a way to disguise its true intentions as black comedy and test the waters for its most extreme goals. If you're someone who's paid attention to the rise of fascism on the internet, if you followed my work on 8chan or read about the alt-right, you understand what I'm getting at, but you probably view this as a new wrinkle in the history of fascism.

The truth is that it goes back all the way to the beginning. Okay. If you would a picture of the personality of the Führer, what he was like on a day-to-day basis to the people he liked and trusted, Hitler's table talk is about the best resource that exists. Starting in 1941, Martin Borman, Hitler's secretary, convinced his boss to allow a series of aides to transcribe his private conversations for posterity. Oh my gosh.

Oh yeah. It's quite a read, Katie. Oh my God. How did I not know about this? It's some hot fire. Do you know about this, Cody? Also sounds really stupid of him to allow, but yeah, I know it's great. So some of these were the traditional Hitler-eranting monologues you'd expect, others were just chats

between courses during dinners and the like. There's a lot of debate as to how truly off the cuff any of these were, but Hitler's table talk is generally regarded as an incredibly useful resource for understanding the minds of the top Nazis. In his 1998 book Explaining Hitler, journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum turned to the table talk record several times in his attempt to understand, in essence, how bouncing baby Adolf turned into the genocidal warlord we all know and hate. At one point, he focuses on a single passage in particular, quote, the passage in which

Hitler, Himmler, and Heidrich, Reinhard Heidrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, are ostensibly debunking the rumor, which they know to be true, that the Jews are being exterminated. It's silly that people should say such things, Hitler piously averse, when we're only parking the Jews in the marshy parts of Russia. Although he adds that if it were true, it would be no less than the Jews deserved. It seems to me a transparent charade in which the three architects of the final solution were becoming the first Holocaust deniers, the first revisionists, so to speak, and doing so in a particularly repulsive, winking and nodding way.

So Rosenbaum brought his theory to another scholar, a fellow named Lang, who agreed that this was probably evidence of Hitler and company concealing their crimes via humor, both to keep explicit discussion out of the historic record, and so that those in the know could laughingly revel in their crepulence. Lang said, The inventiveness seems to me in some ways to really come to the heart of the matter, even though it's subtler than the brutality. Primo Levi used the phrase needless violence, which is not quite what I'm saying.

It's the element of gratuitousness, but it's more than the gratuitousness. There seems to be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified in art forms in which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an artistic consciousness of an overall design. Now, this is interesting to me because one of the things that you find when you really browse through a lot of eight-chan conversations is a lot of talking, joking talk about how the CIA or the FBI carried out these false flag attacks, which if you just read it straight, you could see as people like legitimately thinking that there was a conspiracy to slander

their website. But I think the more I read, none of these people really believe in that. It's just, it's part of the joke. They're joking that, like, these massacres were carried out by, like, a state agency to slander a fascist website, as opposed to people that they agree with and are glad. Yeah, and are happy that they're doing it. Yeah, yeah. So for Nazis and their modern descendants, shittiness is a form of art.

It's never enough to gain power or even to hurt or kill your rivals. These people's ultimate goal is to shift the nature of reality itself to be further in line with their own narcissistic beliefs. And irony is a powerful tool for achieving that. Len goes on. Brutality is straightforward. It's not imaginative. This isn't just brute strength.

It seems to me that there is a sense of irony constantly. The sign over the entrance gate to Auschwitz, you know, Arbite mocked Frey. Work will make you free. It's like a joke. It is a joke. The orchestra playing as these people go out to work. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back! Now, Hitler's sense of humor is not something we talk about much, but perhaps we should. Ironic humor was used regularly by the early Fuhrer during his rise to power. In August of 1920, during one of his first speeches, Hitler told an audience that he supported, quote, removal of the Jews from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence. We congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company.

This line was met with widespread laughter. So funny. It's such a funny line. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lucy Davidowitz, the Holocaust scholar who brought that speech to Rosenbaum's attention, believed that the joke and the thing Hitler's audience was laughing at was not the line, we congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company, but the earlier line, we do not begrudge them their existence.

I'm going to quote again from explaining Hitler. This Davidowitz suggests is an inside joke for party members who know the secret meeting. That in fact they do begrudge. They are dedicated to eradicating the Jews' existence. Now reading that quote brings to mind a post I found on 8 Chance poll board during one of my regular sessions browsing that image board in between the mass shootings carried out by its members. In one thread I found anons discussing the value of comedic memes about mass killing

as a way to camouflage their very real efforts to inspire more massacres. One user typed, the best thing about this is that they being the FBI and the CIA will never be able to discern an ironic tongue-in-cheek frog poster from a man of action like Terent or Bowers. We have all the plausible deniability in the world and unless they are going to start locking people up for shitposting, we have nothing to fear. Oh yeah. Yeah.

It's the okay. It's the okay sign. It's also an illustration of how bad their sense of humor is. Yeah. These aren't jokes. Yeah. What are you doing? Just do a bunch of okay signs.

Yeah. Sophie is signaling her membership in the far right. Delightedly might I add. Delightedly. In the decades since Adolf Hitler shot himself in that bunker, ironic racist humor has been one through line connecting every Nazi and fascist movement that's arisen around the world. Mr. Rockwell, the founding father of American Nazism, had his minions dress up in racist

guerrilla costumes to interrupt events and distract attention from civil rights activists. The main weakness of Rockwell's humor was that it was far too overt and hateful to be viewed as ironic by most Americans. But down through the years his descendants have gotten much better at straddling the fine line between dog whistling to people in the know and maintaining plausible deniability. One a good example would be Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate. I just thought like before you fucking said his name, oh my god. Yeah.

Yeah, they're vibing right now. We are vibing hard. Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate who first achieved notoriety for a video in which he trained his dog to sig hyal. When he was fined for this, he was able to frame himself as a free speech crusader and raised thousands of dollars while claiming to fight back against political correctness. There is tremendous power within humor. It's why satirists and comedians are some of the first people purged by an dictatorial

regime. Nothing is more important to fascists than to look cool and serious and powerful. Getting hit by a milkshake is worse for a Nazi than getting hit by a brick. Blood looks cool. Milkshakes look like milkshakes. But humor also has an incredible ability to act as a sort of ideological Trojan horse, allowing ideas to sneak into someone's mind cloaked as jokes. Actual fascists know this.

It's why the Nazis on 8th Chan spent so much time crafting memes to spread their ideas. But this process can take place even within the head of an individual fascist. We're back! In 2016, Joe Cox, a member of parliament for the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, was shot and stabbed to death by a fascist terrorist named Thomas Mayer. Mayer's chief-stated influence was an earlier British fascist terrorist, David Copeland. Back in the year 2000, Copeland killed three people and injured dozens more by setting off a series of nail bombs.

He picked the locations he bombed because they had high black and Asian populations. According to the Guardian, he came up with the idea when a bomb went off in Centennial Park during the Olympic Games in Atlanta four years ago. He told the police that the Notting Hill Carnival was on at about the same time, said Mr. Sweeney. He began to wish that someone would blow up the Notting Hill Carnival. To start off with, he treated the thought as a joke, but he could not get it out of his head. The thought became stronger.

He woke up one day and decided he was going to do it. Now last year I carried out a study for the journalistic collective Bellingcat. I combed through hundreds of online conversations between the fascist activists to plan the first Deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. My goal was to find out how these men had been red-pilled or converted to their extremist beliefs. Over and over again, these fascists mentioned the influence ironic jokes had had on their ideological evolution.

One conversation stands out in particular to me. In it, one fascist recalled how his first red pill came during an argument over an anti-Semitic joke he soft posted to Facebook. The joke spawned an argument and, quote, then I saw people negging Jews so I joined in as a meme first off. Then all of a sudden it stopped being a meme. Much of the war on everyone will discuss moments in the history of the American fascist movement that are much bloodier and a lot less silly than shit posters on the internet.

We will talk about hard-bitten militiamen, vicious acts of terror, and methodical plans of genocide that are anything but ironic. When we talk about the original Nazi party, or George Leacon Rockwell, the American militiamovement that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing, or today's meme-spouting, ironic fascists, it's easy to look at all these things as separate, discreet problems, spouting up at different times and inspired by different causes. But I think that's as wrong as looking at men like Timothy McVeigh or Brenton Tarrant as lone wolves.

Each swell and surge of fascism across the world and across time is more like the eruption of a cold sore. The underlying cause is a virus that is ever-present. During World War II, we bombed it into submission for a while. But like the herpes virus, it never quite goes away. It continued to lurk underneath the surface, hiding in off-color jokes at bars, hand-printed magazines, and eventually internet forums, until our nation's immune system grew weak enough for it to flare up once more.

It's anyone's guess. What happens next? Man, comparing fascism to herpes is very good. Yeah, that's really the one that I've considered like cancer and like a virus, but like... No, it's something that you can suppress that there really isn't a cure for, like you can... But it's gonna come back. Yeah. Cancer is closer to like capitalism.

Yeah. Just to keep growing and growing and growing and growing and growing and growing and growing and growing and growing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's chapter one. I feel like I should sign off by throwing one of these cans.

Do you want to have a preference as to what I throw first? Manays. Manays? Yeah! He did it! He did it. Almost hit Katie. Cody.

It almost hit Cody. Would have been bad. Well, it didn't explode. It didn't explode. It didn't explode. Cody says he hates Manays, but he was secretly hoping that Devil's Cumber would come for him. I despise it.

Katie's lying. That would have been like Satan ejaculating on the back of his head. I was hoping that too, that it would just burst. Yeah, I was really hoping. I guess that's like the best place for it to happen. Yeah. The back of my head. And that's like, it's acidic, start burning my scalp and then I die.

Cody, if you had a bunch of mayonnaise in the back of your head, you would be mad for days. I would be mad for days. It's true. I would leave. I would leave here right now. He would never stop obsessing about it. He'd be asking, do I smell like mayonnaise?

Is there still stuff? Is there still some mayonnaise in my head? It feels greasy. I just feel like it's greasy. I'm going to go wash my hands again, even though it didn't touch my hands anyway. We have a washing machine here. You could just do the next episode or two naked. Inside the washing machine?

Well, no. Of course not. He would just go take a bath. Your clothes would be in the washing machine. I feel like I would have to go in the washing machine to take care of it. My first cat died in the washing machine. Whoa. It's too real, didn't I?

Fuck fascism. I thought of that when in the episode that airs Tuesday, we do that cat segment and one of the cats survived in the washing machine. I was like, oh, okay, this cat didn't. It's heartbreaking. Yeah. Because they left the clothes. Yeah.

Actually, I'm misremembering it was the dryer. Still just as bad. Oh, way worse. Way worse? Okay. Yeah. You thought it was cozy. Sophie is horrified right now.

She did. Her name was Barbie. I wasn't creative. I was three or four. Anyway. I don't have damage. You're fine. Speaking of damage, you all want to plug your cat ears?

Oh, good. Oh, we're already there. Yeah, yeah. You know what, we got a Patreon. Some more news. Patreon.com. More news. Patreon.com.

Some more news. I'm not a practice. Yeah. We got a podcast called Even More News. We got a YouTube show called Some More News. Some more news. That's the name of the Twitter account also. Yeah.

And I'm Katie Stoll on Twitter. I'm Dr. Mr. Cody on Twitter. Can't change it now. No, we can't. But it's DRMISTERCODY. Basically, just used his AIM screen name, didn't you?

Yeah, pretty much. And that was my blogging name when I wrote for Cracked, it was in my column. It was Dr. Mr. Blog with Dr. Mr. Cody. I remember that.

Yeah. Back in the day. Well, I'm not going to plug anything at the end of this, and I'm going to stare at Sophie while I talk about my refusal to plug anything, because I think it's going to get old if I plug everything at the end of every one of these episodes. Sophie's walking over to me now. She's furious. I can see the rage.

She's more like she's shuffling. She's laughing. Like the printing of a book. Oh, nope, she's just here to pause it. So this episode's done. There's another fucking six ones to come, so strap in. What do I plug, Sophie? T-shirts?

Buy a T-shirt? Anyone's T-shirt? Oh, we got T-shirts, too. We've got a store now. We've got a store now, too. Oh, you guys want to plug your store? T-something. It's a T-public store.

Yeah, if you go to our Twitter, I believe that Pintweet has the link to our store. Great. Excellent. We have a T-public store. You know, go to our website, huntin'abassards.com for footnotes, and also to go to our merch store. We have shirts. We have...

No comment. Wow, you're fired. Well, this is the end of the podcast, but you know, follow AppBassardsPod on a twinstagram. Yeah, it's T-public. It's T-public. I was right. It's T-public. You were right.

So we've all, all of us, have been traveling and gone, and this is, we're easing back into it. We're easing back into it. We're making a machine by the end. Oh, a sleeping machine. It really is a sleeping machine. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.