We are doing it again, and this country is slipping away from us while we lose the plot

The word "forest" is surrounded by the word "tree" dozens of times.

Published January 28, 2025

What’s that saying? Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it? (Don’t get bogged down in exact wording, lest you prove my point. It’s been said many times in many ways, and we all know what it means.)

And we’re doing it again while the country collapses around us.

What was that we all just saw? Was it this? Was it that? Who can say for sure?

This column in the Irish Examiner gets to the guts of it.

Many who, like me, had no doubt what Musk was doing mentioned Musk’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa, or the fact that his own father claims Musk’s grandparents were enthusiastic Nazis. Personally, I felt such deep historical cuts were unnecessary, since he’s spent much of the past month boosting far-right parties in the UK and Germany, and last year offered to pay the legal fees of hate groups in Ireland. Just 14 months ago, some guy tweeted that Jews were replacing the white race and Musk replied “you have said the actual truth”. These are not signs which those within the intelligence-gathering community would call “subtle”.

I have no interest in the inner workings of Musk’s soul. There is no evidence that probing his mind for motivation would turn up anything more interesting than if you used telepathy on that one guy in your office who wears keyboard ties and stands too close to new female employees. Musk and his ilk are not a mystery. The horror of them is how knowable they are. My best guess is he gave a fascist salute to impress the online edgelord politics dorks whose attention he craves, the type who want to own the libs at any opportunity and frequently co-opt fascist rhetoric and imagery for these purposes. This may seem like a “he didn’t really mean it” defence, but I assure you it is not. The only people who do this are those who have fascist tendencies to begin with. People who, like Musk, constantly post anti-immigrant bile or lobby for the release of far-right agitators like Tommy Robinson. Many may start from a position of hating the people who, say, called your favourite computer game racist, or put a black person in a ‘Star Wars’ movie, or “made their child come out as trans”, and from there self-radicalise into the sort of person who thinks goose stepping and gas chamber memes are funny.

Then there’s this:

It is a deliberate nudge and wink to the far-right ideas you actively hold, bathed in a self-defensive layer of irony from which you can always wriggle, on the grounds that it was just a hilarious joke. “I’m an edgelord, not a Nazi,” you continue to tell yourself even as your every viewpoint calcifies toward the politics of Genghis Khan.

You should read the whole thing. And this:

@iamragesparkle posted: I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out." And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, 1 noticed Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them." And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down. And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people." And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

Nazi bar

We are turning into a Nazi bar, and we are pretending it’s not happening by asking the same questions. Was that really a Nazi salute? How can we know what’s in a man’s heart? Pay attention to what Musk says, where he says it, and what groups perk up when he says it.

These questions about defining what we saw represent a lot of things, but they are also distractions designed to help steal our energy.

We can no longer see the forest for the trees, and that’s the point of the games they’ve been playing with us for years. Does what they did cross the line? We ask that while we slide inch by inch, yard by yard, into authoritarianism and fascism.

They keep moving the line.

Did we learn anything at all from the past? Do we remember it?

Image by Colored Lights via Shutterstock.

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