While I'm on the subject of Nazism

I chose my dissertation topic because I get an actual visceral reaction to stories about the Holocaust and Hitler. I'm not Jewish--not that I'd have to be, but it bears saying. It's just that somebody who so embodies evil and brutality makes me, I don't know, want to shoot him in the kneecaps. The reaction is entirely a result of revulsion mixed with fury. My guess is that human's have this capacity in them, probably because the crazy idea in the middle of a neolithic Winter could kill an entire village (a liberal would have killed the Pilgrims in a Massachusetts Winter). I am not entirely lost to the fact that it is probably this particular reaction that is responsible for the worst exesses of human kind. Madness can cause a lot of violence, but righteous fury has defined entire epochs of mass murder.

In any case, I think having worked through my dissertation, I can kind of understand why neo-Nazis become neo-Nazis. I don't agree with them at all, but I do understand just what it is that they think they've lost, what they think they need to fight to recover.

I think what's complicated about it is that the neo-Nazi's desire is actually fairly philisophical but it doesn't really sell itself that way. They sell themselves on losing out to opportunities which the rest of the world can't understand because the loss of opportunity seems well...either unlikely, too infrequent to matter, or the result of some other factor (like the neo-Nazi's crap attitude). We non-neo-Nazis simply don't see this massive race struggle, and even those who do, don't really think that minorities have any chance at all of winning this struggle in America. The richest people are still white and male and the prisons are filled with African and Latino Americans. So...why go through the trouble of getting the hair cut, the tattoos, and making an ass of yourself. Essentially, most non-neo-Nazi racists figure they're in a superior position to the races they abhor and see no reason to make a big stink about it. They may even detest neo-Nazis for being either too stupid to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded them in America due to their skin color, or simply too delusional to understand how things really work.

Having done my dissertation, however, I think I may understand neo-Nazis from another angle. It seems to me that what the neo-Nazi really can't stand is the loss of stable value of which race is only the most obvious visible symbol--like a gateway hate. It goes back to Plato really and the question of what makes the best society. If someone says efficiency, as I think we'd all agree is a pretty good answer to that question, then the simple answer is that if we could all agree on universal values that remained constant no matter what the situation in which they are used, society would have those values to use always. The removal of discrepency in that situation would cause fewer arguments and debates--thus, the society would become more efficient. In this sense, efficiency is the opposite of diversity because efficiency streamlines society--diversity creates more opportunities.

The average neo-Nazi can, then, can be thought of as a person whose main belief about improving society is directly related to efficiency...and efficiency taken to its most extreme is fascism. The point is though that the concentration is always on race, but I think it's fair to say that in these stiuations, racism is just a symptom of some other outrage and in this case, I think the neo-Nazi's outrage is tied to a lack of values that remain constant throughout American culture.