I’m writing this on January 18, 2018. On January 21st, 4chan’s /pol/ and a bunch of miscellaneous alt righters and Neo-Nazis will be conducting this “campaign”. Here’s @pennsylvanian-patriot (a known Nazi) jumping the gun early here on Tumblr with a post that already has a thousand notes.
They’ve put a lot of work into it, both graphic design and organization-wise. To the average person who doesn’t hate immigrants, it might not make sense. How is this ugly, weirdly juvenile graphic supposed to convince anyone of anything? Yet they believe it’s political genius. They believe it will piss off feminists while simultaneously persuading “normies” to hate immigrants.
So let’s turn the focus 180 degrees and talk about exactly why they think it’s such smart and clever culture-jamming, because it’s part of the fascist mindset, and as such really important to understand in order to combat.
Fascism is above all an anti-human worldview. We all have tendencies to want to dehumanize groups of people we don’t like, but fascism takes it to the next level and absolutely requires that widescale dehumanization. Jewish people, people of color, disabled, and on and on. The flip side of this constant drive to dehumanize is that they’re also always turning things human that aren’t human. In this case, nation-states.
As someone broadly on the left, I have a clear understanding of what nation states are, a basic foundational pedestal on which more complicated political and economic systems get layered: a nation state is a collection of people. A corporation is also a collection of people. Nation states are not people. Corporations are not people. People are people.
Fascists either don’t understand this, or have made themselves willfully forget due to creepy psychosexual reasons. The nation state is always viewed as a highly sexualized allegory. The nation state is ideally ruled by a stern father figure, but if it allows entry of dehumanized people (immigrants of color), that entry converts the masculine authority into a female receiving things into her body. This is also why they’re so obsessed with the word “cuck,” by the way: it combines misogyny and the fear of having something female that you “own” penetrated by the “other” (a masculine Black body).
If you don’t believe me, do your own research. People have been studying the fascist rape/racism/sexual-paranoia complex on a popular and academic level since at least the 1930s.
When I talk about immigration, I start off with the foundation that people are people. Indigenous people are people. Settlers are people. Immigrants are people. Borders are not organic, like human skin: they’re a cold legal fiction erected to allow some people to exert power over other people. For example, if a US corporation wants to take advantage of cheaper Mexican labor, the border facilitates the flow of their capital investment and the extraction of cheaper goods, but if a Mexican laborer wants to cross the same border to take advantage of higher US wages, the border attempts to destroy her.
The “My Borders My Choice” campaign doesn’t want people to think in those terms. They don’t want you to think at all. They want you to experience emotions: FEAR and RAGE and LOATHING and FUCK and RAPE and RAGE and FEAR. They want to mash down a button to your lizard brain, short-circuiting both rationality and empathy.
Hopefully it’ll only make more people turn against them.
tl;dr: A new grassroots international anti-immigrant campaign tells us a lot about the fascist mindset and how it’s absolutely obsessed with racist rape metaphors.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 