Yesterday, these two artifacts crossed my desk: https://mailchi.mp/richardledes.com/naza https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/82/how-monopoly-fascism-rose-again/
Here's a little essay drawing an analogy. This was mostly a test of my swarm (which they resoundingly failed, the little b@st@rds). But I think I finally got something I find reasonable. FWIW, I explicitly told them to use a high school reading level ... which means I deeply dislike the wording. >8^D -- 8647 ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
# The Laminar Flow of Authority In Claude Lanzmann's film *Shoah*, a historian points out that children rode to the death camps at a reduced fare. Richard C. Ledes remembered this detail while watching *NAZA*, a film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. The movie interviews Israeli soldiers and intelligence workers about the killing in Gaza. The fare rule is small and orderly. On the surface, it is just a boring detail about tickets. But underneath, it hides a death transport. Ledes sees the same trick at work in *NAZA*. "Rules are rules," he writes. In his view, the rules kept people from seeing their part in what can be fairly called a genocide. \[1\] More than once, the people interviewed compare their work to a factory. We can compare this to a fluid, which can move in two ways. In laminar flow, particles follow smooth paths and barely mix with each other. In turbulent flow, particles churn, swirl, and spin around. A system of rules guides human beings, like molecules, into laminar flow. A boss gives an order, or a standard procedure tells people what to do. Each person moves through a set list of actions in one smooth path. The system discourages people from straying off that path or thinking too hard along the way. Ledes notes that for a few of the people interviewed, this is starting to break down. That is like turbulence: a rule follower suddenly rediscovering that they can make their own choices. Ron Knox describes similar flows at the scale of a whole economy. He calls the current American administration fascist. \[2\] His historical example is IG Farben. By the time Hitler came to power, years of mergers had turned many German industries into outright monopolies. Farben made the gas used in the camps, along with the rubber, fuel, explosives, and aircraft metal for the war. In Knox's view, this made the regime's work laminar: Hitler needed to deal with only one company. Farben also built a plant at Auschwitz. The SS supplied slave labor, and workers who fell behind were sent back to the camp to die. At Nuremberg, the company's executives said they had only followed orders. An economy full of competing firms is turbulent. A regime that wants to use it must win over each firm one by one. Each firm is a place where someone might say no. A monopoly gives power one clear, smooth channel instead. Ledes says *Shoah* made him think of Primo Levi. Levi showed how an organized system and its technology ran Auschwitz. Today the technology is collecting and using data. Knox writes that Amazon Web Services supports much of ICE's infrastructure. He says the immigration crackdown would struggle to run as smoothly without Amazon's help. Abraham's own reporting, which set the stage for *NAZA*, found that Israel's army stored intelligence from mass surveillance of Gaza on Amazon's cloud. The data sometimes helped confirm airstrikes. His earlier reporting described an AI targeting system that a former officer called a "mass assassination factory." The factory image shows up again. The link between Farben and modern data should be easy to draw. Constrained turbulence can create pressure. Ledes describes criticism of the world order as loud but suppressed. He saw *Shoah* in a Paris cinema that had received bomb threats for showing it. He writes that the makers of *NAZA* face legal and extralegal punishment, and that universities have been kept from studying these connections. Knox tells a similar story. He shows how Wall Street figures inside the postwar occupation undercut the breakup of German cartels. He says the same lesson was later buried at home. In both accounts, the people who try to stir the flow are the ones who meet resistance. Ledes is careful about one point. He openly says that Gaza and the Holocaust are different events. He notes that the writers and filmmakers who studied the Holocaust teach lessons that apply to many situations, without claiming the two are equal. What carries over is the mechanism: rules and concentrated power that keep the layers apart. The two remedies follow from this. Knox wants to break up concentrated industries, since a would-be tyrant cannot conspire with a monopoly that does not exist. Ledes asks readers to see *NAZA* in a cinema, in a room with other people looking at what the rules were built to hide. Knox's remedy works on the structure, and Ledes's works on perception. Both aim to allow for more turbulence, more agency. 1. That charge is still before the International Court of Justice. The court has set a timetable that keeps the case in The Hague until at least 2029 and has yet to consider the merits. Israel rejects it. 2. Knox takes his definition of fascism from Franklin Roosevelt's 1938 message to Congress, which held that a democracy is in danger when private power grows stronger than the democratic state.
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