Hello, Weather Vane readership! Boy, the political landscape of the United States sure is great, eh? Stock market, more like crock market, hah! But hey, don’t worry too much about unimportant stuff like your finances or retirement–the president is deporting student protestors! And saving women’s sports! THAT’S the stuff that matters! As the old Talking Heads song goes, “Don’t Worry About the Government!”
Last issue, I promised we’d take a little rhetorical trip to Germany–however, we won’t be talking about the “Germany” you’re probably thinking of.
No, instead, we’re going back even further–forty years prior to the rise of Nazi Germany, to the first genocide of the 20th century: The Namibian genocide.
The year is 1884 in the German colony of German South West Africa (GSWA), which is located in current day Namibia. At this point, much of Africa’s territory had already been sliced up by the newly-emerging industrial colonial powers, with the extraction of raw materials and slave labor already commonplace. Germany, late to both the industrial revolution and, subsequently, Africa, due to its then-recent unification, was feeling the social and economic pressure to emerge as a global power on the world stage. And though they were “late to the colonialist party,” so to speak, their African holdings tended to take the form that many other European powers did–that is, horrifically exploitative and violent, but featuring SOME semblance of cooperation from the African people they did their dirty business with. However, this was not the case in GSWA; no, GSWA was not to be purely a colony designed for the extraction of natural resources, but instead, a new living space for natural-born, white Germans.
Of course, the Germans didn’t just happen upon a slice of Africa that was completely uninhabited. The native peoples of Namibia, at this time, were the Herero and Nama people (among others). Though the Germans originally planned that the natives would be carried off to reservations (or slavers) while the white citizens claimed a “new Germany,” this quickly changed when the native peoples staged numerous retaliatory attacks against their new colonial overlords, with one such attack culminating in the beginning of the modern-era of genocide.
It’s now 1904, and the Herero (after having staged many retaliatory attacks against the Germans) have just lost the battle of Waterberg. After facing a gruelling escape into the Omaheke desert, the top German colonial-military authority began to have discussions regarding what to do with the natives. Some mused on the mass-killing of the natives, others claimed this would be economically unviable. Eventually, a consensus was reached: concentration camps, where labor exploitation and starvation would run rampant. The worst of both worlds.
I’ll spare you the even-worse details, and bring us back to our initial question: what is fascism? What does any of this have to do with us, in our current socio political moment? Well, if you look at historic accounts of the Namibian genocide, you’ll likely see some eerie parallels to the tactics used by Hitler’s third reich during the lead up and realization of the Holocaust–which isn’t just coincidence. Many holocaust scholars believe that the precedence set by the colonial violence in Namibia would become the cultural template for the eventual genocide of Jewish people in the German homeland–which leaves us with this definition of fascism: fascism is colonial violence turned inwards.
Where does that leave us then? Are we, The United States, a fascist nation? Well, maybe we need only look to our colonies (both formal and otherwise…), and set our clocks to 40 years or so. Then we’ll know for certain.
But of course, by then it’ll be too late.