Nazi Trolls and Alt-Right Trolls

Adam Serwer has a must-read think piece up at the Atlantic called "Nazis Have Always Been Trolls." Written after reading the Christchurch killer's "manifesto," Serwer manages to illuminate some really troubling (actually, disgusting) implications of the practices of the contemporary white nationalist, alt-right, Trumpian troll crowd. See if any of these excerpts from Serwer's piece sound familiar:

Although the manifesto itself was written in the distinctive vernacular of the far-right internet, there is nothing new about white supremacists trolling. The Nazis were dedicated trolls who weaponized their insincerity to take advantage of liberal societies ill-equipped to confront them. This was not done just for political advantage—rather, the insincerity itself was a moral act, an expression of contempt for the weak.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Nazi supporters were “satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.” A horrified reaction to such expressions of cruelty merely affirms the importance of being cruel. “Vulgarity, with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories, carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses, [both of] which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life,” she wrote.

. . .

The crimes of the Nazis have, for some, obscured the extent to which they relied on murderous insincerity and the unwillingness of liberal societies to see the Nazis plainly for what they were. In the 1930s, falling for this ploy might have been understandable; with the hindsight of history, it is incomprehensible that many continue to do so. But it is important to understand that weaponized insincerity was an essential element of fascism from the very beginning.