I Am Amazed, Astonished, Even Gobsmacked At How Important Nazis Have Become
With an uppercase N, ffs.
Having been under that rock over there, I only just became aware that a certain Jonathan M. Katz has planted a huge turd in the receptacle best suited to that purpose, the Atlantic Magazine. No links; any minimally woke search engine will do.
Yes, I am on about that boring-but-ongoing storm-in-a-crapper - nahzees.
Others, infinitely more patient and indomitable than I, have determined that the nahzee substackers are, let’s see, less than or equal to five in number. Collectively they command approximately bugger all Substack generated revenue.
In contrast, I was able to count, with negligible indomitable-ness, at least 50 authors reacting to the the katzenjammer1. They also seem to believe that “here be nahzees”. Now that’s ten to one, and I am not even trying. With odds like that in my favour I could be rich instead of posting here for nothing.
I’d say our nahzees are outnumbered by those who jammer for a living.
Even so, whence cometh these few, these happy few, this band of brothers’ who can attract so much attention for so little effort and even less intellectual content? How do they loom so ominously over us, according to our online watchkatz? Why were the rest of us so unaware that we remained oblivious until the katz started howling?
It must be, it can only be, that katzenjammerers possess an exquisite sense of imminent doom absent in mere mortals. One that enables them to detect almost invisible, barely articulate fringe nahzee creatures. Creatures who ape words and attitudes that have been on life support since the Germany of WW2 was rather brutally disabused of its love affair with National Socialism - how many decades ago was that? I forget.
Maybe I am wrong. Might our online watchkatz have noticed that Nazism was only a problem so long as it had the massive and enthusiastic support of most Germans. Perhaps our sleepless katz know that those five substackers are merely the tip of a huge beached iceberg, I don’t know where, maybe somewhere off the Sea of Azov, or in the eastern mediterranean?
Maybe they understand better than we do, that silencing the free expression of ideas, is a small price to pay for the suppression of evil. Did old Joe Stalin not show the way by suppressing gulags full of evil over being offended by, for example, the likes of one Osip Mandelshtam’s poetry?
Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938) was Jewish, of Latvian parents, and was brought up in St Petersburg. He visited the Crimea in 1921. His individualistic poetry with its responsiveness to classical Greece and Rome, and its lament for the direction the Russian Revolution had taken, provoked and offended Stalin and he was arrested and exiled to Voronezh (near the Don, south of Moscow) in 1934. He returned from exile but was re-arrested in 1938 and died on his way to a labour camp.
Did not the former Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili himself turn violently anti Nazi after he was done being pro Nazi?
Maybe our katzenjammer kid just knows more than we do?
Nah, I think he is a narcissist seeking attention by making a quick buck with the most popular logical fallacy of our day. It’s guaranteed to rile up the suckers every time:
I found a nahzee on some platform, therefore it is a nahzee platform - QED eh?
German: literally cats howling