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Well, That Was a Scary Surprise [1]

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Date: 2024-03-20  

I listen to a lot of historically significant songs on YouTube: songs from the American Civil War, the French Revolution, World War II, the Boer War, the Eighty Years War… and a lot of songs in Russian, a language I studied in high school and have managed to keep up all these years.

One of the songs I’ve encountered is “Die Fahne hoch”, also known as the Horst Wessellied after its author, a Nazi SA man (“storm trooper”) who was killed in a brawl with German Communists in 1930. It was the official anthem of the Nazi party, and both its tune and lyrics are banned in Germany today.

So, last night a song was recommended to me that was described as “an American nationalist song”. To my surprise, it turned out to be an English-language version of the Nazi anthem, with words that closely followed those of the German original. They were clearly written by someone who understood the German lyrics and saw in himself and his movement a continuation of the Nazi movement. Instead of the original song’s “Red Front and reactionaries”, this song’s Nazi martyrs are gunned down by “leftist heathens”. The accompanying video showed demonstrators marching with upside-down American flags and a blue logo featuring a white eagle on a background of red and white stripes.

Frankly, this song scared me. This wasn’t the usual angry idiots waving swastika flags as a way to attract attention; this was someone who had clearly studied the Nazi movement and wanted to recreate it in America, even knowing where it had led Germany and Europe.

This wasn’t Donald Trump pseudo-fascism. This was the real thing. And I found that frightening.

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