You Mean Vicious Authoritarians Want to Work for the Government?

In today's Reason 24/7 feed is the story of how the Army finds itself a little overly well-endowed with good little goose-steppers. It seems that Nazis have discovered that they can get paid to learn how to shoot and blow stuff up by joining the military. They get to wear uniforms, too, which must be a big plus.

From Business Insider:

After white supremacist and former Army sergeant Wade Michael Page opened fire on a Sikh temple near Milwaukee, the Pentagon began stepping up its efforts to expel neo-Nazis from its ranks.

But so far, it's not working too well.

"White supremacists, neo-Nazis and skinhead groups encourage followers to enlist in the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow what some call the ZOG—the Zionist Occupation Government," Reuters' Daniel Trotta reported Tuesday. "Get in, get trained and get out to brace for the coming race war."

This strikes me as a perfectly natural thing for deranged, murderous authoritarians to do. Why pay for training, ammunition and equipment to learn how to be a soldier, only to get denounced by politicians and scrutinized by the FBI, when the feds will do it all for you with no hassles?

I should add that the Army may have some competition for recruitment here (even if it doesn't want these recruits). The last real-life neo-Nazi I met was a Border Patrol agent working along the border between Arizona and Mexico, and that also makes a horrible kind of sense.

In fact, government, with its very roots in compulsion, is a natural magnet for those who think their neighbors are best dealt with through force rather than persuasion. I don't mean that all government employees are akin to National Socialists in terms of hatefulness or a taste for violence, but I do mean that a preference for authoritarianism has to make government employment rather more attractive than does a distaste for the same. That's true whether the authoritarians hope to achieve their goals through the government as it's constituted, or whether they hope to elevate some random fat loser in a brown, or black, or green, or red shirt to the position of Fuhrer/Commissar/Lord Protector.

In other words, good luck with that Nazi problem.