Overthinking History

or: parallels are just parallels

I just want to thank everyone for supporting the Kickstarter for my recent book. I was blown away by the response we got, and the campaign supports not just me and that book, but the anarchist press I work with—book publishing relies on a few books selling well to publish all of the important books that don’t break even. So thank you.

If you missed the Kickstarter, don’t worry, you can preorder The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice and still get a signed bookplate.

And I’ll go back to doing paid-subscriber-only personal posts soon, I promise, but there’s a lot on my mind about the present moment.

Overthinking History

It’s a bad moment to be someone who reads history books for a living. It’s a bad moment to have an eye for pattern recognition. It’s a bad moment to remember that the first big famous Nazi book burning started on May 6^th, 1933, when the German Student Union marched on the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, perhaps the first trans-inclusive research institute in the world. Accompanied by a brass band, the fascists trashed and looted the place. Four days later, Nazis returned and burned twelve or twenty-five thousand books from the research library.

It’s a bad time to remember that fascism has always been anti-intellectual and anti-queer.

It’s also, though, a particularly bad time to mistakenly believe that history repeats itself. It doesn’t. Certain patterns and themes and codas and choruses re-emerge time and time again, but the song of history sounds different out of every throat. What has happened before is not fated to happen again.

In fact, nothing is fated, not ever.

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Haruspicy is the practice of reading omens in entrails, and my friend Laurie once told me that anthropologists believe that the reason the practice (or comparable acts of divination) was used for so long across so many cultures is that sometimes acting on random information is more effective than acting on either intuition or study. The example I heard (and did not look deeper into… I might be repeating myth) was that folks in Scandinavia, planning their reindeer hunts, did better when they counted on chance alone than when they tried to anticipate the chaotic movement of their prey.

If haruspicy provided a greater success rate than overthinking the problem, then of course people kept using it.

Sometimes we spend so much of our time reading into historical parallels that we cease paying attention to the facts on the ground. People often quote the slogan “those with no knowledge of history are condemned to repeat it,” but people generally forget the corollary, “those with no knowledge of history aren’t compelled to repeat it.”

When I lie awake at night thinking “what the fuck is going to happen?” (an experience I doubt is unique to me), I generally think about historical parallels. I think “alright, if the US is Nazi Germany, what does World War Three look like? Is it the US and Russia versus the EU and the global south? Whose side does China join, since Trump is allied with Russia and Russia and China get along, but the US and China don’t get along?” Who are the Axis, who are the Allies?

Then I remember that modern wars are not recreations of older wars.

I have a bias, like a lot of people, to immediately think of Nazi Germany when I’m looking for comparisons for the modern rise of fascism. But even if we’re thinking about Fascism proper, rather than just authoritarianism and dictatorship, we’ve got Italy too. Trump behaves more like a Mussolini than a Hitler (but he behaves, above everything else, more like a Trump than any other dictator). The resistance to fascism in Italy had an entirely different character and there are different lessons we can draw.

Maybe the better parallel is Francoist Spain, where fascism was Catholic-flavored. Sure, Christian Nationalism in the US is far more protestant than Catholic (though a rising number of far right figures have converted to Catholicism in the past few years), but the religious flavor of American fascism might make Spain the better comparison. If so, then there are different lessons still that we should draw.

But maybe I’m being blinded by the word “fascism” and losing sight of historical parallels to authoritarian regimes that didn’t use that word. Frankly, both the USSR and Putin’s Russia are standout comparisons—a nuclear power that is socially conservative and authoritarian.

What about Pinochet? Perón? The western hemisphere has its own dictatorships to draw from. The apartheid regime of South Africa certainly strikes close to home since it’s the crucible that forged Elon Musk, as does of course the US’s favorite genocidal ally, Israel.

It’s worth, of course, systematically looking at what sorts of resistance did and didn’t work under every authoritarian government we can find in history. It’s probably not worth how much time I spend lying awake trying to slot the current coup into some neat little box.

Trump is like Trump, Musk is like Musk. (Another thing you can lie awake overthinking is just how on the nose their names are. I once wrote a character named Prince Meddlemore and thought “well, that’s heavy-handed,” but it’s got nothing on having the coup led by a man named Trump. The modern world is some hackneyed fiction.)

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Perhaps the most important reason to draw historical parallels is to help break us out of normalcy bias. Any cursory glance at history leaves you incapable of falling back on dismissive arguments like “well, how bad can it get?” Because the answer to that question is: however bad you think it can get, it can always get worse. There’s no bottom.

There is no bottom to the well of human suffering, and it is only our collective actions that keep us from free-falling. The work of improving our lot, of taking care of each other, of building a loving and peaceful world, is incremental and cumulative, but it’s never permanent. It’s work we have to do every day.

We do that work by feeding each other, by clothing each other, by checking in on each other. We do it by making art and music. We do it by laughing and playing and dancing. We do it by building one another up instead of tearing each other down. We also do it by fighting against those who seek to cast the world into misery. We do it by fighting against Christian Nationalism, we do it by fighting against fascism, we do it by fighting against authoritarianism under any guise.

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As far as I can tell, every regime ends eventually (though more abstract ones, like colonization and capitalism, haven proven more durable than individual dictatorships). The regimes that end are ended by the cumulative action of people. It happens through mass movements and it happens through the actions of small groups. It happens most especially when those two things (mass movements and small groups) work in tandem with another, when they support one another.

Sometimes those mass movements are protest movements and popular revolt, and are more or less peaceful. Sometimes those movements are fundamentally military actions. Last time we had a major industrial power go outright fascist, it took three evil empires (the US, the UK, and the USSR) teaming up to defeat the greater evil of Nazi Germany. The US fought with segregated troops. The UK still had colonies (and the contributions of Indian soldiers towards defeating fascism are regularly ignored to this day). The USSR was a dictatorship that started off allied with Nazi Germany and only switched teams after being betrayed.

The people of those countries deserve the honor here, not their governments. My grandfather was a hobo from Iowa who became a submariner and survived the war only by raw luck (and divine intervention, in his own interpretation of events). Russian communist after Russian communist threw themselves against the Nazi war machine, choking it with their own crushed bones.

People, not governments, ended the Nazi regime. When the government of France capitulated, plenty of the people of France kept going. In Italy, the country that invented fascism, it was partisan units (with allied support) who eventually liberated their own country, shot Mussolni, and hung him upside down from a girder.

When I lose myself at night, thinking of every possible parallel, the thing that I land on, that keeps despair at bay, is remembering that it’s people who bring down tyrants, again and again. And I look around, and lo and behold, me and my friends? People. You, reading this? You’re people too.

Individually, we might not get through this. The thing I come back to again and again though, is that individually, none of us were going to get through any of this. Life kills you. A perfect happy utopian world will kill you slower than a dystopian world might, but it’ll kill you nonetheless.

Individually, we might not get through this. We might though. And soon enough, whether by their own hands in a bunker somewhere, or shot by a communist partisan, or in a car blown sky-high by anarchist urban guerrillas, or even just by losing elections after an upswell of social movements, the fascists won’t get through this either.

At least, that’s what history tells me.