Last night I saw photos
of swastikas that had been spray painted onto Wilbur Cross High School’s
athletic complex, accompanied by the (misspelled) word “Trump.” This happened
in the same town where I went to high school and college. It wasn’t surprising,
but unnerving to see so close to home. No one knows who did it. This could be
the work of committed Neo Nazis, and an unsettling indication that they’re
operating in Connecticut. However, I have a strong inkling that it was the work
of wannabe-edgy kids who thought it would be a funny prank.
The latter would not, in any way, be excusable. But here
on the left, some of us have a tendency to say that everyone drawing swastikas
is the same. While not justifying the behavior, I think it’s helpful to examine
the different motives so we can dismantle its foundation, wherever it comes
from.
I believe there are two groups of people defacing public
property with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti. One group consists of adult Neo
Nazis who are dedicated, zealous, and possibly physically violent. The other
group consists of a distinct subset of nihilistic young people who want to be
rebels. The second demographic can easily grow into the first.
I was one of those teenagers. I personally didn't do all of the following things, but this was our general demeanor: We were the kids who called
others “sheeple.” Our attitude was, “Caring about stuff isn’t cool.
Nothing really matters, and committing yourself to ideals is lame” (not
acknowledging that spray painting graffiti or spending hours trolling online
forums is commitment). We generally
saw efforts to be culturally sensitive as self-righteous “political
correctness,” and thought it was disingenuous. That being said, we didn’t
consider ourselves the traditionally conservative right. We disliked
patriotism, Christianity, police, and the military, but our reasons differed
from why many liberals may distrust those institutions. Our objections were
based on resentment of authority and disdain for anything impassioned. Back in
the early 2000s, we hated Bush just as much as we liked Eric Cartman. We didn’t
think homosexuality was immoral, but we thought it was funny to call straight people "fags" as a general term for "annoying person." And we saw this mentality as unique and independent, despite the fact
that popular TV shows and entire lines of merchandize catered to us.
An ironic aspect was that while many of us tried to echo
Nietzsche, we fundamentally misunderstood what he was about. Nietzsche may have
believed life to be meaningless, but not worthless. He thought we could ascribe
our own meanings. He may have stared into the abyss, but he didn’t romanticize
it.
Although these kids scoff at enthusiastic ideals, they
can be recruited into the Alt-Right if convinced that it’s countercultural and
will offend the perceived rigid morality of the left. It appeals to their
bitterness, as they see themselves as dispassionate but deny that bitterness is
emotional. It appeals to their hatred of the more authoritarian branches of the
left. In order to make any headway with this young crowd, we have to
acknowledge that such a type of authoritarianism exists. It’s not the majority
of liberals, but it does manifest in those who promote heavy censorship and
want people arrested for expressing regressive beliefs. It exists in those who
defend Communist dictators (whether or not they view them as true Communists),
and those who think it’s useless to be liberal unless you’re radicalized. The
Alt-Right reaches out to people with resentments of those things, and molds them
from cynics to ardent zealots.
While I was never a KKK or Neo Nazi sympathizer, I was
certainly a cynic. I thought being offended was worse than being offensive. I
thought it made me look tough to flippantly joke about suicide, self-mutilation,
and rape, namely because those things had impacted my life. At the same time, this demeanor was something I aspired to more than
something I actually was. In my eyes, it was armor more so than a weapon,
although in practice it was both. It was a defense against trauma and severe depression,
but the “nothing matters” stance made my depression a lot worse.
At that point in life I would occasionally see swastikas
drawn on walls, usually accompanied by pentagrams and a hastily scrawled “Hail
Satan.” I never did this myself, but I didn’t take it seriously. It seemed like
a parody. I regarded Nazis as equally alien and mythical as Satan. Some of the
offenders who defaced walls with these symbols probably saw it the same way.
One person who didn’t see this as a parody was my
grandmother, Kiki, a child of Russian immigrants who came to the US to escape
pogroms. She was not a Holocaust survivor, but she was a survivor of the Holocaust era. This happened in her most
formative years. Kiki remembered that when news of the Holocaust first broke
out, many Americans disbelieved it. They thought it was a paranoid conspiracy
theory or a grand-scale tasteless joke. Then the photos and the interviews came
out. Then the survivors started talking.
My grandpa, Harold, recalled that many of the WWII
servicemen didn’t consider their fight a noble defense of the Jews. A great
deal were anti-Semitic themselves. When he first joined the Air Force at seventeen, an interviewer asked if he would defend the United States no matter
what. He responded with “Not if it becomes fascist,” and was given two weeks of
extra training for that answer. As a Depression-era Jew, he couldn’t afford the
naïve jingoism that the government and media were selling.
When I was very small, Kiki told me, “If somebody ever
asks you what your religion is, never say that you’re Jewish. They will hate
you for it, and they can put you on a list.” At the time, I thought that
sounded crazy. Growing up, I was sometimes called a Jew as an insult. It used
to just confuse me because it seemed so outdated, and because I didn’t even observe
the religion. But to an anti-Semite, simply having Jewish heritage is enough to
label you an enemy. I was largely ignorant about oppression because although I
was recognized as Jewish, I was also white and upper middle class.
Back in high school, Kiki and I had discussed affirmative
action. I thought it was unnecessary, believing that systemic racism no longer
existed. Kiki told me it was a way to level the playing field. She had
witnessed so much discrimination toward other races during her youth that it
was impossible for her to think that would disappear over one lifetime. She
relayed stories of competition and hierarchies. Some of the Jewish people she’d
known had ostracized other races because they wanted a group to socially
one-up. They saw it in terms like, “We’re Jewish, but at least we’re not black.”
Others were afraid to socially engage with other targeted groups because they
didn’t want to be further persecuted by proxy. Kiki always hated this, and said
that pitting marginalized groups against one another was one of the worst
crimes of the elite. She believed all disenfranchised people should support
each other. I didn’t know the concept at the time, but she was talking about
intersectionality.
Kiki and Harold influenced me more than they knew. I
disagreed throughout my childhood and adolescence, but came around to their way
of thinking in later years. I decided to make an effort to listen to the experiences
of marginalized people, rather than dismiss their concerns as paranoia. I took
classes on the intersections of gender, race, and class. My beliefs are not
perfect, but I’m learning and unlearning. The things my grandparents said have
been confirmed time and time again. In the wake of a Trump presidency, their
words continue to resonate.
After moving to Milford in 2008, I noticed anti-Semitic
graffiti in the train station bathroom. Someone had written “Fuck Jews.” I took
out a Sharpie and added, “Consensually.” Another time I was in a local diner
and overheard a slew of teenagers making loud, bigoted jokes. One of them
shouted out, “Yo, let’s get a bunch of Jews and throw them in a gas chamber and
make them fuck each other in the ass!” I called out, “You’d like that,
motherfuhrers.” They didn’t get the joke. Sometimes it works to deflect the
situation with humor, to show how absurd the bigotry is. Other times, different
approaches are in order.
The kids in the diner seemed a lot farther gone than nihilistic. But kids who are nihilistic can change. Essentially, they are at a crossroad. They can be steered in the direction of passion; either the
kind that’s progressive or that leaves a legacy of damage. To grow, they need
to learn that opposing bigotry is
subversive. They have to see that oppression is real and not an expression of
tongue-in-cheek irony. They need to know people of the groups that are
affected. They can grow by reading history and knowing it’s not restricted to
the past. And they need to know that even if they believe ignorant things now,
they’re not a hopeless case.
Life,
after all, isn’t pointless. Even Nietzsche didn’t think so.
