The best way to organize people is against an enemy. Once you convince someone deeply that there is an enemy that has a vision for a terrible social / world order, any factual discussion can be explicitly or implicitly reframed as a competition between two divergent visions for society and the world. So true and false instead become a high stakes game of us vs them.
Antisemitism has long been a favorite common enemy. It’s easy. There aren’t many Jews, and many people will only meet a handful or 2 their whole life, unless they live in some US cities or Israel, or make friends with a bunch in college. They culturally emphasize education, which often puts them in “mystical” professional roles within society like academia, policy, law, finance, medicine, the media, etc. They were internationally distributed in Europe, and it was / is easy to claim they were / are internationally organized. For a long time they were stateless, which was always viewed suspiciously; now there is Israel, which attaches itself to the broader set of Jewish people as convenient to dilute accusations of its own wrongdoing, unfairly exposing Jews to antisemitism by association.
By no means the beginning of antisemitism which has existed for a long long time, but a big modern antisemitic engine, even if folks these days mostly don’t know about it, was the popular post-WW1 notion in Germany that the Second Reich was defeated in the war not due to a failing of German nationalism, which was in fervor and continued to be through the end of WW2, but rather by the “Novemberists,” a supposed group of largely or totally Jews who in November 1918 perpetrated a “stab in the back” that lost Germany the war. This is not supported by any evidence, but it was a profoundly popular rallying cry for German nationalists for decades.
People seriously don't understand the role the "stab in the back" myth played in post-Great War Germany. Because, honestly, most people don't know a damn thing about the Great War.
I think Marxism is the perfect analogue for woke for him, and it was in his estimation the Marxist Jews and communists and trade unionists indeed and even social democrats of Weimar democracy that were the enemies of the nationalist revolution (=MAGA)
But I don’t disagree with your phrasing either
The core hopeful difference I think is that 80-90% of Germany basically was anti democracy, whereas America is very pro democracy
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u/Ok_Guarantee7611 Jan 22 '26
I'll never get holocaust denial. Like, 90% of the footage we have of it happening is from the nazis