I’m not sure what these pundits think a fascist assault on liberty looks like, but this is it: the occasional slow trickle, occasional bombardment blast, of outrageous proposals and policies meant to utterly shock a populace into submission. This is the calculation made by Trump’s team, but especially Steve Bannon: If they heave enough batshit concepts at us, eventually we’ll become numb to the horror. Any watered-down version of said policies will begin to look rational by comparison, and we will consent. Part of that paralysis looks like pundits saying, ‘Don’t focus on this one! This one is the distraction.’
No, it isn’t. Each monstrous statement is part of the same puzzle
Allison Kilkenny, Confronting fascist assaults, like Trump lying that millions of people illegally voter for Clinton, is not a “distraction”
(via fuckyeahcitizenradio)
One of the problems is that people expect fascism to happen all at once. In reality, it’s a very slow process that can be ongoing during your life time.
Hitler starting building political influence in the 1910s, first tried to take power in 1923 and was succesful in 1933. The height of the Holocaust was 1943. There were 20 years between 1923 and 1943, during which everyone slowly became more used to more horrible things. During which everyone slowly became more used to standing by when a bad thing happened that didn’t affect you, or affected you but not that badly, or you didn’t have the energy to fight it right now because you were still recovering from that other thing.
In the meantime, the world didn’t go from good to evil in one place. It went from ‘things are pretty fucked up and we have a lot of horrible things happening to minorities’ to ‘things are even worse now’ slowly in a lot of places every year.
And that doesn’t mean 20 years is how long it takes to go from the first attempt at grabbing power to full-blown genocide. It could take 10 years this time or 50 years. But it sure as hell happens faster and with less chances of a different outcome if we stop fighting it.
QueerAnarchism 