QOTD -- Parallels

 

Returning to Suzy Hansen's essay ($$) in the New York Review of Books on several scratchings from "Whiskey Pete" Hegseth, some parallels are seen that are worth noting once again:

Reading World War II-era authors such as Arendt and Russell today, it’s difficult to avoid being struck by how many top Nazis and Trumpists share the same basic social profile, which is to say they were and are lifelong catastrophic failures, who failed upwards under conditions that turned out to be ripe for such people to ascend to positions for which they were farcically unqualified.  This description fits people like Eichmann, Himmler, and many other Nazis to a tee, with the very best example being, of course, Adolf Hitler himself.

On the Trumpist side the examples are equally plentiful, from Hegseth, to Robert F. Kennedy the Lesser to, most crucially, Trump himself:  a man who spent decades managing to be a human disaster of astonishing proportions, despite inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars, and all the immense privilege that goes with such good fortune in our society.

This is what national suicide looks like.  It was true in Germany in the 1930's/40's, and it is true today, thanks to the triumph of the will stupidity.

QOTD -- "A Jockish, Puerile White Man"

 

"...Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like 'You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.' As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting 'No means yes!' and 'Kill all Muslims!' He is what the world thinks some Americans are, the bleakest caricature. But like the violence in the administration’s videos, Hegseth is real, and he is American, which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves.

"This is a person produced by a culture, a society, and a history. He speaks with a deliberate viciousness, a desecration of humanity that recalls centuries of slavery and the American Indian Wars. He is heir to a tradition handed down from the Founders—not the noble, revolutionary ones in the history books but the ruthless, ragged genocidaires who went west. He practices that nasty Christianity. 'Break the teeth of the ungodly,' he said at the Pentagon prayer service; Bull Connor comes to mind. So many of Trump’s men—Gregory Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, Tom Homan—resemble the primeval thugs of the heartland, who openly desire the submission of the most vulnerable..." -- Suzy Hansen, writing in the New York Review of Books on several books presumably written by the dangerous sot "Whiskey Pete" Hegseth, the ludicrous Secretary of Defense (War!) and future (if there is justice in the world) war crimes defendant.  Fresh off a racist commencement address at West Point that was less-than-enthusiastically received, Hegseth continues to live down to the image Hansen sketches in her review, pleasing his only audience -- another "primeval thug," the Malignant Fascist.