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Christian nationalists, in fascist rallies and propaganda, enact the ritual sacrifice of enemies [1]
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Date: 2022-07-06
Katherine Stewart recently penned an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “Christian Nationalists Are Excited for What Comes Next.” While this piece received extensive treatment by Dan K yesterday, there was something in the article not mentioned by him that I wanted to bring out, because I think it goes to a parallel that otherwise might go unnoticed, something I think is key.
Stewart makes note of a passage that Donald Trump made as keynote speaker to the Road to Majority Policy Conference:
The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be. The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.
(My emphasis.) This is an easy enough passage to gloss over, as it appears pretty innocuous. But Theodor Adorno, social scientist and prominent figure of the Frankfort School, analyzed the speech patterns of totalitarians. In his “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” written in 1946, he informs us of the following (again, bolding mine):
One of the intrinsic characteristics of the fascist ritual is innuendo, sometimes followed by the actual revelation of the factshinted at, but more often not. … It seems likely, however,that innuendo is employed, and enjoyed, as a gratification per se. For example, the agitator says “those dark forces, you know whom I mean,” and the audience at once understands that his remarks are directed against the Jews. The listeners are thus treated as an in-group who already know everything the orator wishes to tell them and who agree with him before any explanation is given. Concord of feeling and opinion between speaker and listener, which was mentioned before, is established by innuendo. It serves as a confirmation of the basic identity between leader and followers.
A couple of weeks ago, I highlighted this amazing essay by Adorno in my diary “This IS the movement.” Therein, I argue that fascism’s signature symptom is the fever, the enthusiasm that accompanies the movement. The diary as a whole serves as a treatment of the Adorno essay (which I encourage everyone to read in total). Another passage that I brought attention to is the following, where Adorno furthers his elucidation of how gratification affects the audience:
[T]his type of propaganda functions as a gratification. We may compare it with the social phenomenon of the soap opera. Just as the housewife, who has enjoyed the sufferings and the good deeds of her favorite heroine for a quarter of an hour over the air, feels impelled to buy the soap sold by the sponsor, so the listener to the fascist propaganda act, after getting pleasure from it, accepts the ideology represented by the speaker out of gratitude for the show. [...] This ceremony, however, is merely a symbolic revelation of the identity that he [the leader] verbalizes, an identity the listeners feel and think, but cannot express. This is what they actually want him to do, neither being convinced nor, essentially, being whipped into a frenzy, but having their own minds expressed to them. The gratification they get out of propaganda consists most likely in the demonstration of this identity[….]
Just to make clear: to gratify someone is to please them. In many ways, propaganda of this type can lend literal, physical (not merely psychological) gratification.
So this reinforcement of this identity is what is being shared between leader and audience, a reciprocal strengthening. This back and forth heightens the sense of the in-crowd, in this case the MAGAness of it all. The innuendo is key here to this sense of being on the inside and having access to this special knowledge.
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Most importantly, Adorno reveals just what the fascist rally means, what it does.
The performance of the ritual as such functions to a very large extent as the ultimate content of fascist propaganda. Psychoanalysis has shown the relatedness of ritual behavior to compulsion neurosis; and it is obvious that the typical fascist ritual of revelation is a substitute for sexual gratification. Beyond this, however, some speculation may be allowed with regard to the specific symbolic meaning of the fascist ritual. It is not wide off the mark to interpret it as the offering of a sacrifice. If the assumption is correct that the overwhelming majority of accusations and atrocity stories with which the fascist propaganda speeches abound, are projections of the wishes of the orators and their followers, the whole symbolic act of revelation celebrated in each propaganda speech expresses, however much concealed, the sacramental killing of the chosen foe. At the hub of the fascist, anti-Semitic propaganda ritual is the desire for ritual murder.
(My emphasis.) As I mentioned in my previous diary, this goes to explain what ultimately is being squeezed out of such material as Eric Greitens’s RINO-hunt “advertisement”, or pastor Aaron Thompson’s “sermons.” These are meant to symbolize the actual destruction of perceived enemies, the same enemies referred to by the type of innuendo Trump used in his keynote speech.
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