NAZISM DOESN’T HAVE TO REPLICATE 1930s GERMANY EXACTLY TO BE NAZISM.
I remember my Year Eleven History Teacher saying that Nazism was fascism with anti-Semitism. In Germany, between the formation of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, that was true, but it doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic to be Nazi.
Hitler needed a scapegoat to be able to gain traction, and anti-Semitism had been rife in Europe for centuries. And even the Nazis did not start out as violently as they were. And not just Jews, but socialists, communists, disabled people and others were vilified.
On Saturday, in Melbourne, Australia, a group of black shirted thugs stood on the streets of the city and the steps of Parliament performing the Nazi salute. The target was not Jewish people but transwomen.
Anti-trans activists are scapegoating in the same way as Hitler and the Nazis did Jews. They are telling lies about trans people and conflating listening to people with grooming them. A groomer identifies a target and aims to make them feel special and gain their trust. In the case of a trans person, they don’t go to schools and say to kids, “You can change your gender,” and have cisgender kids going home to tell their parents that they can change! What is happening is, kids who are unhappy in their assigned sex, as I was, are talking to people and being told, “Oh, you’re confused,” or, “Oh, it’s a phase,” but are finding someone who is paid or volunteers, who’ll listen to and validate them.
In NSW, there is a horrible state politician, who used to be a Labor Leader, who is all about parental rights, without understanding something. I went to school with a kid who told me that he had to take Japanese, even though he hated it, because his parents told him he had to, and that his father wouldn’t let him do woodwork. The kid rebelled. Other than living their lives through their kids, parents are subjecting their kids to misery, and this kid could have been doing woodwork or metalwork, which he wanted to do, and could have done well, rather than fooling around in a subject he hated. That is nothing compared to forcing a kid to go to gay or trans conversion therapy in the guise of parental rights! The latter is abuse.
It doesn’t matter which minority group is falsely targeted for scapegoating or abuse, Nazism is still Nazism. It is a failure of the education system or a blindness to reality that people cannot recognise it or worse still support it.