I wish people knew more history
Every year I teach about Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia. I teach about Slavery in the USA and the evils of segregation. I teach about the long impact of colonisation and the resulting inequities in society. I teach about the biological determinism, capitalism, eugenics of the 19th century.
Over the last year, I feel like I’ve been screaming into an abyss about the same patterns, the same warning signs happening around the world and in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Here are some key ones. See if you can spot the resonances with the rhetoric and actions of governments today. Spoiler alert—if you are being encouraged to hate and fear people that form tiny percents of the population and that fear is used to justify restricting people’s rights, then the people encouraging you are not the good guys.
In the 1800s, they used biological determinism to say that women’s biology meant that they should not engage in work or politics or vote or engage in higher learning – they argued that, if they did, their ovaries (what ‘made them women’), would dry up and they would become ‘non-women’. They spread ideals of ‘True Womanhood’ which centred around motherhood and a woman’s biology being built for obedience and subordinacy. Oddly enough, they didn’t use biological determinism to restrict men’s roles. Unless, of course, they were men in the working class, because this same determinism and eugenics allowed them to argue that working class people, poor people, were in that social position not because of capitalism or feudalism or oppression, but because their biology was inferior, and was designed for hard labour and menial tasks. Important clue here – oppression of one group always ends up being oppression of more.
The USA had over 300 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation. Enslavers argued that God wanted Black people to be slaves. That Black people were not included when they said ‘god made man in his image’. Some modern day US textbooks still refer to enslaved people as ‘agricultural migrants’. In the 1960s, single Black mothers were sterilised without consent after giving birth and their child taken away from them because they were seen as degenerate. ‘True Womanhood’ in the USA has always been reserved for White Womanhood of a certain social class.
On another note – remember that women have always worked, unless they have belonged to the wealthy classes they have *had* to work. Framing working women as a ‘recent’ phenomenon is not only classist but simply wrong.
Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin – all gave prolific mothers medals and banned or tried to ban contraception. Women, who had a brief shift towards liberation in the 1920s, were sent back to the home. Eugenics for the Nazis involved seeing women as breeding stock and on developing an ideal physicality which would in turn make a strong country (much like today’s return to hyperfeminine roles and appearance nestling within a focus on ‘thinness’ and ‘wellness’.)
The Nazis created an ‘other’ to help them consolidate control through fear. Lots of ‘others’. They othered Jewish people for no other reason than to create a scapegoat, someone to fear, someone to blame, a ‘parasite’ to be destroyed. This was not unique to the Nazis – there had been antisemitism in Europe for centuries. They targeted early trans clinics and put gay people in camps. They murdered disabled people for the ‘strength’ of the country. They made registers and lists of the ‘subhuman’ members of society. They dehumanised the people who they othered so successfully that neighbours would actively turn on people they had known for years and genocide progressed incrementally until discrimination and hatred turned into mass murder.
In the 1920s there was mass anti immigration movements and policies in the US, in Australia, and in New Zealand. Immigrants were blamed for social problems, for disease, and cast as morally corrupt. Dangers to society. Media used words like ‘swarm’, ‘flood’, ‘criminal element’, ‘vandals’ to characterise migrants. Political cartoons of the time show the same rhetoric as we see today.
All authoritarian regimes start by turning on the academics and the teachers. Only one kind of knowledge is accepted. Books are banned. And burned.
Political opponents were ridiculed, cast as enemies of the state, eventually imprisoned or executed.
Ordinary people too, if they spoke out against the regime or resisted.
Diversity is eliminated.
I hope you can see the danger signs. When we try to legislate what a woman is, or looks like, or can be, based on ‘biology’ for no reason but to punish a small number of people just trying to live their truth, what it really does is outlaw non hyper feminine behaviours. It restricts women’s appearances, and actions, and behaviours to a narrow accepted type. When we try to argue that what a woman is depends entirely on the biology of giving birth, we not only strip womanhood from so many women who cannot or do not wish to give birth, but also restrict women back to a breeding role in society.
When we allow them to persecute one group, they will turn and persecute the next. As they have done already. LGBTQ books of all aspects are banned in many schools in the US. As are those from people from migrant backgrounds or that deal with issues of race. There are already moved in the US to overturn gay marriage rights and other legal rights, and they are using the same rhetoric they used to target trans people.
They do not care about you. They care about making you afraid, making you conform, making you angry, making you complicit in their hateful agendas.
They want to distract you from real issues like economic inequality, cost of living crisis, environmental collapse, by creating a boogieman to be afraid of instead. They want to get you to let them pave the way for controlling society and benefiting themselves and those they deem worthy.
If you think they genuinely care about women, as one example, look at their policies, *all* their policies about women. Are they fighting for equal pay? For equal status for women’s sports and interests and activities? Are they fighting for childcare and maternity leave and education and community support? Or are they just whipping up fear about less than 1% of the population so they can slowly erode everyone’s rights?
When we allow them to strip migrants of dignity and rights and rationalise deportations to prison camps, we allow them to do this to whomever displeases them.
It isn’t alarmist when it follows the same playbook we see throughout history. It happened before, it can happen again.
Working class people in the west have had rights for about 170-200 years, out of millenia of history. Women have had rights for even less time, and non-white and gay people for even less less time. We have to protect the gains we have made and protect the rights of EVERYBODY, because as soon as we allow the removal of rights of one, we lose the security of our own.
Clementine Fraser - Author 