Gotta tell you something that bugs the bejeebers out of me.
Governor Walz’s campaign motto in both elections has been “One Minnesota”.
Now, if you’ve studied History *and* German, that slogan sounds all too close to “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” – “One People, One Empire, One Leader”. It was the motto of…uh, a regime 80 years ago that left behind some apocalyptic historical, social and political baggage.
In 2018, the slogan was merely annoying – one of those things the kids today refer to as “Microagressions”, which is another way of saying “something that people normally suck it up and chalk up to the cognitive dissonance of human communication”.
But after four years featuring the most incredible peacetime seizure of government power in history, and a long spate of politicized violence, not to mention a campaign of “othering” dissenters from the current ruling party as “Fascists” – the same, morally and personally, as the Godwins Law convicts in the second paragraph up above – it’s not hard to wonder if “One Minnesota” is a warm, fuzzy inclusive thing, or a warning that you’re either *with* “One Minnesota” or you’re against it; an invitation, as Elvis Costello put it, “shut up or get cut up”.
The President’s speech in September, referring to half the country as “Facists”, is exactly what regimes do when they want to draw a wide, exclusive “with us or against us” line through society.
I thought about that while reading this blood-curdling story about the Russian war crimes in Bucha – where they “cleansed” the city of Ukrainians accused by their regime of being “Nazis” and “Fascists”.
Today it’s Ukraine – but it’s the same dynamic that happened in Iraq in the 2000s, and Rwanda in the ’90s, Northern Ireland in the ’70s, China in the ’60s, Greece in the ’40s and ’50s, Finland (ffs?) in the 1920’s, even Kansas before the CIvil War; if you were on the wrong side of the “Us vs. Them” line when “Them” came through town, you and your family…died. Horribly. Then and there, bodies dumped in the street as a warning that we’re now living in One Iraq/Rwanda/Ulster/Greece/Finland/Kansas.
Given the rhetoric we are seeing today – I’ll charitable and say “on both sides”, but my heart’s not really in it – a slogan like “One Minnesota” is just too…redolent. That’s a good word.
You indiscriminately refer to your opposition – political, social, whatever – as “Fascists”, “Nazis” or whatever mortal enemy, against whom your society fought a life or death battle in living memory, that your culture recognizes.
Something causes the gloves to come off. Angry tweets – aimed at people who’ve had that label from that mortal enemy piled onto them – turn to angry words, to angry actions…
…and eventually, to mass murder.
But after the rhetoric of the past few years, escalated over the past few months, it’s not hard to see it happening in a place like