Numb at the Lodge is proud to publish this roundtable discussion from the Centre for Historical Analogies for the Present (That Aren’t Hitler). Ever since it was established in 1946, CHAP(TAH) has played a vital role in public discourse. During the 1957 Suez Crisis, when Anthony Eden described Nasser as a ‘Mussolini on the Nile,’ CHAP(TAH) bravely suggested that the president of Egypt was actually more like the renegade Mamluk Ali Bey al-Kabir, or Ahmose I, who expelled the Hyskos and nationalised the pyramids. Over the course of the Cold War, CHAP(TAH) observed a worrying tendency to bracket Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union together as ‘twin totalitarianisms,’ fundamentally similar in their rejection of the liberal-democratic project. Guided by its founding principles of Nilf and Finlap—that Nothing Is Like Fascism, and Fascism Is Not Like Anything in Particular—CHAP(TAH) proposed that behind its ideological mask, the Soviet Union was actually a continuation of the Golden Horde, a cruel Mongolic steppe-power piling up peasants’ skulls just as it had done ever since 1237. When the Symbionese Liberation Army screamed ‘Death to the fascist insect,’ CHAP(TAH) suggested that maybe it was just an ordinary bourgeois insect after all. And after 9/11, when the term ‘Islamofascism’ entered mainstream popular usage, CHAP(TAH) issued a flurry of white papers pointing out that there’s a much better word for a small cadre of fanatics trying to enact major social change through spectacular acts of criminal violence, and begged the Bush administration to declare war on Islamoblanquism.
Today, CHAP(TAH)’s interventions are more crucial than ever. The second Trump administration has been in place for slightly over two months, and a lot has happened in that time. The President of the United States is hawking cars from the White House lawn. A gang of brainrotted teenagers, named after a lame internet meme, has been permitted to shut down a programme that prevents babies from dying of AIDS. They’ve done this for no obvious reason. The US has imposed stringent tariffs on its largest trading partners, again for no obvious reason. Trump keeps threatening to annex Canada; meanwhile a campaign of cultural terror against any form of moral or sexual degeneracy is already underway. Students who have the wrong opinions about a conflict on another continent are taken away in chains; government cronies keep performing straight-arm salutes. These are chaotic times, but while the future is uncertain, the past is reassuringly set in stone. No wonder, then, that people are increasingly seeking the comfort and certainty of historical analogy. It’s good to know that we are not lost in the world, plunging into empty time; it’s good to know that everything that happens is the same as something that already happened a long time ago. Unfortunately, the only thing everyone can reliably remember having happened is the Third Reich.
The following roundtable discussion is an attempt to seek out alternatives to the Nazi metaphor. It takes place in a hot air balloon floating high above Washington, DC. Seven frothing maniacs from both sides of the political aisle have been invited to make their case for why the present year is actually just an echo of another age, with the proviso that the other age can’t be any time between 1923 and 1945. The panellists are as follows:
Aculina Splaj, Moldova’s second least miserable essayist, argues that we’re in 1991
Michael Leaks, who’s changed his political ideology so often it now sometimes happens midway through a sentence, argues that we’re in 1961
Koventreigh DiFino, who has a hole the exact shape of her phone screen burned into the front of her brain, argues that we’re in 1799
Blurtis Bongo, a leather jacket that claims to have achieved sentience, argues that we’re in 1530
Lugubrious Wen, who lives in the swamps, argues that we’re in 1436
Eric Schlob, who knows all the swearwords, argues that we’re in like 50 or something
A mysterious, hooded stranger argues that we’re in 20,000
The rules of the discussion are simple. Each participant has five minutes to make their case. They can do so however they want, but if any speaker violates the principles of Nilf or Finlap, or any of the other ancient rites of CHAP(TAH), they must immediately be thrown from the hot air balloon to their death.