So one of my complaints about Benjamin’s notion of fascism as rooted in the aestheticization of politics is that it’s compared to a politics based in what, morality?

But morality is the aesthetics of power

On the left, today in paraleninist tumblr.

On the right, today in parafascist tumblr.

Full modernity indeed.

I forget where I picked it up from, but a few months ago I read someone say, offhandedly, that neo-Nazism is a cargo cult, and the more I think about it the more sense that makes.

The thing being that eliminationist anti-Semitism actually functioned in terms of the NSDAP conquest of Germany and the German conquest of the Eurasian breadbasket.

Domestically, it allowed for the seizure and redistribution of resources and social position to build a party-loyal elite without directly confronting allies in the existing Junker/manufacturing/Army officer conservative elite.

Internationally, it rendered ideologically coherent an alliance of eastern european nationalisms in a way that could easily transition into anti-Sovietism.

Whereas now, those conditions don’t pertain, anywhere. And the subcultures that claim the Nazi mantle are just taking a memory of a powerful force (the Third Reich, which basically fought two continents to a draw and lost to four in a tough fight), imitating their outward manifestations (uniforms and swastikas, stiff-arm saluting, beating up minorities), and expecting power to follow in underwear-gnomic fashion.

So: cargo cult.