The GOP Is Building a Fascist America, One Step at a Time

Why the Furore Over Rewriting the History of Slavery Matters

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You might be, having taken it all in, struggling for words. Here’s what Fox News had to say about Ron DeSantis’s latest policy:

Slavery was beneficial to slaves. Like I said, you might be struggling for words. Let me help you find the appropriate ones.

When authoritarians reshape education systems to defend institutions like slavery — that’s textbook fascism.

And it’s the crossing of red, red line, too for a society whose democracy is already at profound peril — not to mention a sign of how serious the struggle for it to live on, in age where the world is turning to the far right, really is. It matters not just for America, but for the world.

Why? Let me offer you some context.

Do you know the words — the phrase — “Arbeit Macht Frei”? You should, if you don’t. A literal translation is: “Work makes you free.” But a more accurate one is: “Slavery is freedom.” If that sounds Orwellian to you, that’s because it is: Orwell’s inspiration for his famous three-phrases that 1984 was about — “Freedom is Slavery” — probably came from this.

“Arbeit Macht Frei” was the slogan that the Nazis placed at the gates of concentration camps. Why? Because before, and while, the Nazis annihilated the Jews (along with many other hated “subhumans”), they enslaved them.

Hard labour was compulsory in SS camps like Dachau from the start, even for many sick prisoners. Forced labour brought practical benefits for the SS, as prisoners had to build and maintain their own camps. Above all, the SS saw hard labour as a way to punish prisoners. Often there was pointless labour, designed only to torment inmates.

Countless prisoners were worked to death during the war. Work brought great pain, not freedom, as the cynical SS slogan (“Arbeit macht frei”) at the gates of Dachau, Auschwitz and other camps proclaimed.

But this was the culmination of a longer effort. 

Even before the war began, the Nazis imposed forced labor on Jewish civilians, both inside and outside concentration camps. As early as 1937, the Nazis increasingly exploited the forced labor of so-called “enemies of the state” for economic gain and to meet desperate labor shortages. By the end of that year, most Jewish males residing in Germany were required to perform forced labor for various government agencies.

How repellent, how disgusting, how inhuman was it? 

The Nazis also pursued a conscious policy of “annihilation through work,” under which certain categories of prisoners were literally worked to death; in this policy, camp prisoners were forced to work under conditions that would directly and deliberately lead to illness, injury, and death. For example, at the Mauthausen concentration camp, emaciated prisoners were forced to run up 186 steps out of a stone quarry while carrying heavy boulders.

That’s a lot of quotes. But I think this point isn’t understood well enough. After practically a decade of figures like you and me warning that fascism was arriving in America, only to be met with the predictable laughter and mockery of establishment, who called us “alarmists,” and only came around, too late, after Jan 6th, an attempted coup — by now, even the establishment uses the phrase “fascism” here and there, if not often enough. But I wonder if they really understand it. Certainly, they don’t teach it well — not nearly well enough.

The Nazis began by expropriating the Jews, and then enslaving them, and then proceeded into annihilation. Now, “slavery” here can be a bit of a contentious term — this wasn’t “chattel slavery,” like in colonial America, where Black people were bought and sold like commodities at markets. It was forced labour. But the general point should be understood: the Nazis enslaved the Jews, for labour, because especially as war broke out, shortages began to happen, and armaments were needed. Whether or not this forced labour slavery provided much in the way of arms and missiles and tanks and so forth is besides the point entirely. What is the point is that the Nazis, too, practiced slavery — with the cynical slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

They did so for a reason — not just the proximal reason that they needed manufacturing capacity. But for a deeper reason: they admired and studied the American south deeply. They investigated it, examined it, when they were studying how to build a Reich, a society of the pure and true, in which the rest, hated subhumans, weren’t to exist. They modeled many of their policies after Jim Crow America — like the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which expropriated Jews’ property, belongings, possession, and then segregated them into ghettos. It’s hardly a surprise, in this context, that the Nazis thought of forced labour, of slavery, as a…key social institution.

And that brings us back to today.

When we see figures like RDS defending slavery, we should be repelled and disgusted, morally, true — but we should be profoundly alarmed, for democracy and society. Because this isn’t just some kind of abstract intellectual debate we’re having. This is institutional reconstruction.