Thread by @arthur_affect

Fascists are not competent and the belief that they are competent is itself part of fascist ideology

It is the nature of fascist ideology and how it defines "competence" that, in fact, *ensures* they cannot be competent

https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/1323379954613129217

The goal of trying to objectively measure competence and put truly competent people in charge of the things they're competent at is called "technocracy", and Nazis fucking despise it

Opposition to technocracy is central to populism and therefore fascism (populism's worst form)

The loose collection of shitty memes that make up this thing we call fascism orbit this gravitational center of "normal people" and "common sense"

The core of the fascist aesthetic is this idea of good, decent, ordinary Americans/Germans/whatever throwing out "elites"

Fascism is at its core *about being stupid*, *celebrating ignorance*

High school bully shit, given the veneer of ideology

This anger at the idea that there's anything "decent ordinary people like me" don't understand, that people like us need to learn, need to change or grow

When you look at fascism in full flower in Nazi Germany you see how ugly the intentional stupidity is, and you see all the stuff it was a backlash to

Germany having once led the world in Nobel Prize winners, who all started fleeing en masse once the fash started taking over

Weimar Germany having been the most progressive country in the world when it came to gay and trans rights, the place you booked a trip to if you wanted GRS

The greatest collection of queer literature in the world, which Hitler rose to power by promising to burn down

Hitler's whole "Make Germany Great Again" thing being rooted in this desire for Germany to be *stupid*, precisely because Germany had gotten too smart

Too progressive, too cosmopolitan, too elitist, too *different*, too *un-German*

Hence the sheer fucking basicness of every single damn thing the Nazis thought and said and did

Nazi art burning all the works of the Cubists and Surrealists as "degeneracy" and favoring chintzy picture-postcard landscapes and tacky heroic statuary

Nazi science just chasing out minds like Einstein and Bohr and Schroedinger, threatening to kill them for using too much math and too many big words

Spitting on relativity and quantum mechanics as "Jewish mumbo-jumbo"

Making up their own stupid Nazi cosmology about stars being made of big shiny shards of ice or whatever bullshit

Because they insisted on science that *made sense*, in the eyes of little minds that didn't give a shit about science

(Let's not mince words, either, when they talked about shit being "elitist" and "obscurantist" and "perversely alienating to everyday small-town values", the word they actually used was "Jewish", and when people say shit like this today they always quietly mean "Jewish")

They thought of the idea that you need to *know things* in order to be *good at things* as "Jewish elitism"

The idea of having an "elite" in any field was associated with what they saw as the conspiratorial idea of a Jewish "cabal"

It pervaded their entire thought process

Which is why they only succeeded at anything by taking over institutions that already existed that had been built by people smarter than they were, and ran them into the ground as they just got dumber and dumber

The way Nazis waged war reflected this most of all

They inherited a German military machine that was one of the finest in the world, and they redlined it until it predictably broke, because they didn't really understand how it worked

(Always remember the kind of brutal historical irony that the officer who recommended Hitler for an Iron Cross in WWI was Jewish)

When you think that wars are just naturally won by people who are a genetically stronger, fitter, more badass kind of human

And when you think therefore that any losses must only be the result of being stabbed in the back by Jewish infiltrators

You become fucking stupid

You start sending out all your best guys into hopeless situations and letting them get slaughtered for no reason because you think entertaining the possibility of defeat is quitter talk

Dumb Nazi fuckface political officers screaming at soldiers they weren't trying hard enough

We talk about the "Green Lantern theory of politics" and how destructive it is, but it's not just in politics

In sports, in business, in any human endeavor, the Bad Boss is the guy who doesn't understand how anything works and thinks success is just a matter of *wanting it*

And therefore after any failure just starts screaming and abusing his underlings and telling them that they must be failing because they don't actually want to win, they're not trying hard enough, maybe they're secretly on the side of the Jewish traitors

This never works

People like that *always* only even exist because they have the good fortune to inherit an organization much more competent than they are, and they *always* fucking destroy that organization and leave it in ruins

And still think of themselves as the wronged party

The director of Downfall said the point of making the movie was the much-memed-upon and inaccurately-subtitled scene of Hitler in the bunker

Trying to kill any sense that being a Nazi meant supporting competence and strength, or that it was at all "patriotic"

Old Adolf at the end going down screaming and ranting and cursing at the soldiers sworn to keep him safe, calling them a bunch of pussies and traitors

Lost in delusional fantasy about how he was going to abandon the German people, who were unworthy of him, and find a new, better country to lead, maybe in South America, someplace that didn't already have the Jewish taint, someplace *worthy* of being the Third Reich

Fascists are the ultimate Pointy-Haired Bosses, they have all the Pointy-Haired Boss traits in their worst form, of being completely disconnected from reality and determined to push the consequences of that disconnection on their underlings and go to their grave denying it

Nothing about Trumpism is somehow a unique result of Trump being a particularly stupid or narcissistic or delusional or senile fascist

Americans can at least rest easy about that, we're not all that much worse than the Germans

Trump isn't special, he's a perfect type specimen