This Is Why You Fight Nazis

On the 80th Holocaust Memorial Day, Today

Morning Comrades.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, 80 years ago the Soviet Union and its armies liberated the German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps and here we are. Most hegemonic institutions around the Western World have turned the genocidal massacre by Germans and the brutal cost of liberation by the Soviet Union into a weapon of preserving their power by hollowing out the term of anti-semitism and the fight against the root cause of fascism and thus negating the historical importance of this.

Truth be told, I had no real intention to write about this today. For one, the actual remembrance as held by the institutions that claim ownership over this act of remembrance have aligned themselves with the pro-zionist narrative of the ruling class and thus, as far as I am concerned have failed and betrayed those that were murdered. Specifically to my geographic and social context, the idea of then anti-fascism has become such a hollowed out idea as the majority of structures I worked in and once belonged to have for the past 15 months openly shown their true face of cultural infancy, deep rooted racism and submission to their capitalist power structures they publicly claimed to be against. It’s personal and for a moment I didn’t want to write about this because of my cultural context here.

But fuck that.

The majority of my ancestry was murdered by Germans specifically my Dutch Jewish family and the older I get the more I don’t understand how my grandmother and her sister survived Bergen-Belsen. My grandfather in England arrived in France a day after D-Day to find himself in Bergen-Belsen almost a year later, at age 19 and again, the older I get I don’t understand how he survived all of that, let alone both living as long as they did. All self manufactured grand concepts of being who I am aside, at the very least I owe it to them to remember and then not allowing these pricks, all of them guilty ancestrally, to sully and weaponise this remembrance for their own right to comfort and quiet.

So we remember and we learn.

That brings me to the next point, the learning, that, which if taken seriously, leads to action. The West, and this is a very specific cultural fact to Central and Western Europe and North America, has always been a deeply racist, white supremacist, imperial entity throughout its history and WW2 as well as the material defeat of the German Third Reich didn’t change this fact. The Nazi’s deployed this entities base of existence against itself, and the reasons for that are long, in the sense that it attacked the Empire from which it came and thus the Allied Western Powers came together not to defeat the ideology but the material threat to their empires. On a side note, it’s incredible that it has taken me well over 20 years of academic work and commitment to arrive at this reality and be able express it in this simplicity. The ideology of the Third Reich perfectly aligns historically with the majority of Western Powers until this day.

What has changed lately is that it no longer hides this reality from the predominately white bourgeoisie here at home. Any and all marginalised groups have never had that privilege even when it fully submitted to the Capitalist Hegemonic demands. AGain, the list of examples are endless here. Now, we have the reality where you have the most public proponents of said system openly showing their beliefs, their roots, openly declaring their intentions and they’re in power.

It would amiss to not mention Elon Musk and his public Nazi salute. It would even more amiss to not mention the decade long financing of extreme far right political parties, entities and structures with his enormous wealth to continuously move the Overton Window to where he and the class from which he comes wants it to be. It would be amiss, especially on this day not mention his speech at the German Modern Day Nazi Parties Conference during which he spewed full blown Nazi Apologist narratives and now we have the outrage.

Outrage from a class that up until this day fully supported all of their demands, for as long as they were done by the respectable parties, in the quiet with the right decorum.

What the current crop of public ruling neo-nazis, the Ford’s of our day, threaten is the bourgeois right to comfort, the right of rule as long as its done with the right tone. As to our generations this is a fact, the entire post WW2 Western power structure is a continuation of the Third Reich, a capitalist wet dream, but with a few crumbs of wealth thrown at a few of us peasants for one or two generations we happily looked away.

Which then begs the question, do want reality or do we want their Truman Show?

Of course I am enraged that modern day Neo-Nazis are so safe that they can publicly throw around their salutes but not because it offends me, if anything, it holds up a mirror to our own failings in eradicating this deeply destructive reality. Anti-Fascism is Anti-Capitalism. Anti-Racism is Anti-Capitalism. Any and all liberatory movements have to be anti-capitalist at their core and that means an unrelenting assault on the fabric of our reality. What thread you decide to pull is of your choosing as long as you pull. The past liberal anti-fascist strategies too often relied on appeals to civility, moral condemnation, or legal measures, such as de-platforming or censorship. While these tactics may disrupt fascist organising in the short term, they fail to confront the systemic roots of fascism: economic inequality, alienation, and the collapse of social solidarity under capitalism.

Moreover, liberal anti-fascism often operates within the framework of capitalist norms, prioritising the comfort of privileged classes over the dismantling of oppressive systems. By focusing on individual behaviour rather than structural change, liberal anti-fascism risks reinforcing the very conditions that give rise to fascism. For example, de-platforming a fascist speaker may silence their rhetoric, but it does nothing to address the economic precarity or ideological alienation that makes their message appealing to certain segments of the population.

With that, on this Holocaust Memorial Day, let’s remember and learn, and with that knowledge act upon the reality explained above. The material conditions that allowed for the Third Reich never went away for they are the basis of Capitalism. Our enemies have shown themselves for whom they are and what they believe in. Furthermore, they have shown and told us how they are going to implement their wishes.

Once again, we will defeat their empty and horrendous ideology, of that I am certain.

Never again means just that, and for everyone.

Never Forget, Never forgive.

Yours,

V.