Politics

While You Gather 'Round Yuletide Logs, Please Burn The Fascist Ones

Oh the weather outside is frightful, but have you seen their voting history?

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Fascist Log

(Image From Wikimedia)

I don’t want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need. I need you to think about three things. The first is “It Can’t Happen Here.” The second is “Where were the lawyers?” And the third is a simple poem that haunts me. As a high schooler who attended as many UrbanTrekker trips as I could, I’ve visited the Holocaust Museum in D.C. around Christmas more than most people have. I saw the shoes. I saw the paperclips. But the thing that struck me the hardest was this poem:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. – Martin Niemöller

It stuck out because it made me think about complicity differently. Before I read that poem, I don’t recall any memories of thinking of complicity as silence. But after I did, everything else in the museum was imbued with a strange vitality that answered all the questions I had throughout the exhibits. Like how in the hell did the SS get away with killing people in the street? But then it clicked that SS members were just cops. There was no moral outrage because it just looked like they were upholding the rule of law. And I saw that in my lifetime.  And I think about Niemöller’s poem when I think about how police teargassed Black Lives Matter protestors and so many people did nothing.

Somewhere in the process of getting my JD, the stain of that poem led me to ask what the lawyers were doing during the Holocaust. And it led me on a search that paid attention to how the “rule of law” was weaponized against us as the world stood on standby. Maybe we lawyers were too preoccupied. After billing hours at IBM or some neutral Swiss bank, who really has the time to talk politics with family? I’d like to think that I’m wrong. I’d like to think that informed lawyers would have played their part. They would have had difficult conversations with their uncles and grandparents over Christmas dinner, because they knew that they had a duty to zealously defend the rule of law in a way that did not slide into a strong police state capable of giving fascism teeth. It can’t happen here, right?

Maybe not so much.

Despite its radical start, the Nazi party dramatically increased its popularity over many years in part by strategically masking its explicit antisemitic agenda to attract moderate voters, who could convince themselves that the racism at the core of Nazi ideology was something the party had outgrown.

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Like the differentiation that we’re all not bad people. Like there being very good people on both sides. Which was written before this, but the point remains clear. The former needs to be taken for what it is, the polite and respectable solidarity with racist rhetoric and policy to come. All I want for Christmas is for you to have those hard conversations with you uncles, your older sisters, and yourself. A wave of people are coming. And they have guns. This should be appalling in a climate where we’ve already seen racial deputization.

In closing, please remember the words of an Honors Political Scientist Grad from Harvard — “some of them that join forces are the same that burn crosses.” The words of some folks from the Middle East — “They’re trying to build a prison for you and me.” And some words from a Black dude in Camden, NJ — the way we talk about people matters. It is a matter of life and death. I realize that this isn’t the most festive post. Maybe you can go down Umberto Eco’s 14 features of Fascism after you sing “The 12 days of Christmas.”  Happy holidays.

America Is Now In Fascism’s Legal Phase [The Guardian]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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