Reviewed: Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) The Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977) Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) Occupied City (Steve McQueen, 2023) The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023) The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, 2008) Sight (God or the Devil, 600,000,000 BC)
I guess enough time has passed that I can now talk about the Substack Nazis. If you don’t get out much, you might remember them. Late last year, a few of this platform’s users started loudly complaining about the existence on Substack of a small but active ecosystem of actual, outright neo-Nazis. People who post pictures of swastikas and give updates on the nefarious activities of the Jew. The decent folks wanted something done about this: for the site’s management to clarify that you are not allowed to be a Nazi. The management refused, which seemed to upset a lot of people. Weeks of public anger. Open letters. Duelling takes. Ultimatums. A few high-profile names announced that they would be leaving the platform, and taking their newsletters—which all seemed to consist of collections of other people’s tweets—with them. For a while, the line was that everyone still using Substack was, whether consciously or not, aligning themselves with the forces of fascism. And then, eventually, without anything really happening, it all died down. These things always die down in the end.
As you might have noticed, I’m still here. This is not because I have any particular fondness for Nazis. Shortly after the whole slapfight broke out, though, Substack’s recommendation algorithm kept insisting that I’d want to read one particular post about it, which consisted of a bunch of swastikas, photos of Adolf Hitler, and links to Amazon searches for history books about the Third Reich. In between all of these, the author would write something along the lines of ‘What’s that, woke commies? You don’t like this picture of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague? Does it offend you? Does it hurt your wickle feelings? Do you want to cry? Well guess what, losers, I don’t care!’ The piece appears to have been very popular. I must have read it a dozen times, experiencing a feeling of deep discontent that I couldn’t quite identify. Eventually, I realised that I was, in fact, offended. Not by the swastikas and the photos of Hitler, but by the author’s smugly cretinous insistence that I would be horribly offended by them. This person was so dim that he thought the anti-Nazi brigade would recoil, like a vampire from garlic, at a standard academic history of twentieth-century Germany. His attempt to offend was so cackhanded that it actually ended up being very effective.
So: I’m offended. Does that mean I want this person to be censored? Well, actually, yes! Intellectually, I don’t agree with the censorship campaigners. I have a general aversion to busybodies of all stripes, and I think there’s something unpleasant about the urge to scrub everything that displeases you off the face of the planet. Overcoming that urge is, I think, a crucial part of growing up. But when you’re genuinely offended, none of that matters. I felt the urge very keenly. Whatever my opinions on free speech, in the surging spring of my being I wanted this dogshit gone. I wanted its author to be forbidden from spreading his tedious crap in public. If necessary, they should break his fingers.
I think the real difference between me and the anti-Nazi campaigners is that I wouldn’t stop there. They want to censor people because of their political opinions, but why limit ourselves? Consider that this platform is absolutely riddled with a type of person I’ve been calling the Feeble-Minded Business Maniac, or FMBM. The FMBM composes lists of books with titles like Slurp: The Science of How Hotter Soup Leads to Smarter Insights or Cow Goes Moo: Eight Basic Barnyard Lessons for Life and Work. The FMBM issues terrible stock tips or hawks crypto: the Nazis might want to hurt people, but the FMBM is actively harming his readers every single day. Isn’t there a good case for getting rid of them all? Or there’s the Frothing Political Dullard, or FPD, who is equally endemic to this site. The FPD spends every waking moment in a state of total panic over vaccines, or trans people—or Nazis. She posts what is essentially the same giddy screed about her chosen issue every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Reading an FPD is deadly. You start out with some vague unease about the subject, and end up pickling your brain in her obsessive fixation until all its other functions wither and you’re literally incapable of talking about anything else. Some FPDs are also Nazis, but because Nazism is inherently offputting, the most dangerous ones are not. In fact, the most dangerous ones usually have incredibly normal, mainstream, obvious opinions, just at a psychotic pitch. They produce literally nothing of value, and they are a threat to the sanity of all our parents. There is absolutely no reason why any of them should be allowed to write.
But because I am ruthlessly honest with myself, eventually I have to admit that my objection to all this stuff isn’t really as principled as I want it to be. Actually, it might just be ordinary narcissism. When I write for you here, I’m usually trying to produce something weird and interesting and good. Making nice sentences is the only job I have, and I care about my craft. The presence of all those swastikas on Substack is intolerable because it reminds me that actually, I’m not really doing anything qualitatively different to the people I hate. We’re all inputting text strings into the same box. Just like everyone else, I’m desperately trying to turn those text strings into money, and money makes everything formally equivalent. All words are just code for dollar values. As far as the machine is concerned, my sincere attempts at producing something worthwhile in prose and your third rant of the week against the woke left are utterly interchangeable.
In other words, what I ultimately despise in the other is his resemblance to myself. And I think maybe the ability to recognise this about your own hatred is what distinguishes the good, upstanding bitter shrivelled toad from the potential Nazi.
Anyway, I’ve been learning a lot from the Nazis lately. The upshot of this whole brief episode is that Substack’s algorithm noticed me reading a post full of swastikas over and over again, and it’s now absolutely certain that what I must really want is loads and loads more writing from the outer reaches of the American right. Maybe I deserve this. In 2020, as many of my comrades decided to abandon thought and critique for various forms of slogan-chanting, I started noticing something new on the other side. The right used to be profoundly anti-intellectual, but now the left had taken its own anti-intellectual turn, and there seemed to be a few people on the right willing to think: to read old books and generate new ideas and consider principles other than the senseless churning of the market. People who were interested in the world and its workings. I didn’t think much of their politics, but I was hopeful that there might at least be something here worth disagreeing with. And I do think there are a few people on the new right worth disagreeing with—but only a few. The vast majority of them are on the same intellectual level as the swastika guy. People incapable of writing the word ‘beauty’ without a capital B. People who think that referring to the people they disagree with as ‘the regime’ constitutes a political analysis. This isn’t a movement, it’s a dress-up game. Greasy young men who live in a drywall suburb in Arizona and write sentences like ‘nay, take heart, gentle reader, for as long as but one of our number breathes, that hallowed Tradition is not perished yet.’ If you start freaking out about how dangerous and scary these Nazis are, all you’re really doing is playing dress-up with them. One of them begins every missive with the words ‘Salutations, Aryan Man!’ These people are not serious. What they are is tremendously, tremendously thick.
And lately, they’ve all been very thick about Starship Troopers.