The American Extreme Right Finally Has Its Own Horst Wessel
Among the fatalities in Trump's failed January 6 Beer Belly Putsch was a 35-year old woman named Ashli Babbitt. Richly deserving of obscurity, she became an overnight martyr for the far-right with the flash of the bullet which ended her life. Radical right bloggers and chat room denizens wasted no time in hailing Babbitt as "the first victim of the second Civil War" and promising "Your blood will not be in vain. We will avenge you."
Babbitt made the journey from Obama supporter to Trump Magahead in a few short years. As her pool supply business was failing, the 14-year military vet descended along with millions of others into the vortex of Trump-stoked hellfire of lies and conspiracy theories. In a short online selfie-video, she spews brain vessel-popping hate and vitriol against the "libs," Congress and the Deep State. For her and millions of others, yes, Satan-worshipping Democrats are feasting on trafficked white babies as they spare no effort in purloining election victory from their Valhalla-hero Donald J. Trump.
In her last tweet, Babbitt declared, "Nothing will stop us….they can try and try and try but the storm is here and it is descending upon DC in less than 24 hours….dark to light!” The "storm," of course, refers to the QAnon tenet of a violent final reckoning that will bring Trump's enemies to heel.
Like a stormer of the Bastille, Babbit, decked out in heavy boots and rough gear, was first on the ramparts to spring into the House Speaker's suite. "Go, Go!" she shouted as she prepared to leap. That's when a Capitol policeman cut her down with a fatal neck wound.
All autocratic movements need martyrs to help boost their official mythology. These dead heroes often fall in a key battle in the "struggle" to bring about ultimate victory. Assault on the Moncada Barracks, the Beer Hall Putsch, the Petrograd revolt, the siege of Chongqing. Götterdämmerungs to final triumph.
The martyrs are almost always society's unknowns, often youth. Like Babbit, they are average Joe's and Jane's who got swept up in the revolution out of outrage over injustice and corruption among the elites. Italian Fascists heralded obscure 27-year old Giovanni Berta to "Martyr of the Fascist Revolution" after communists stabbed him to death. The Bolsheviks hailed Nikolay Bauman, a veterinary student, as a "Martyr of the Revolution" after he was bludgeoned to death by a czarist. And "Sister" Jiang Zhuyun, tortured to death in a KMT jail at 29, is venerated as a fallen hero of the Chinese Communist Party. A biographical movie, "Eternity in Flames," was made in her honor.
An exemplar for a MAGA-mob hero would be a fellow right-wing radical, Nazi Germany's martyr-in-chief, Horst Wessel. A Sturmführer street fighter, part-time pimp and promising youth leader in the party's stormtrooper apparatus, Wessel was shot dead in 1930 at his apartment by communists. He was 22. As one of thousands, Wessel should have sunk into the annals of forgotten nobodies of the cause. "Thank you for your service, Horst," and now we move on.
But propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, with a sharp eye for messaging, decided to make Wessel a sacrificial champion of National Socialism. He was hailed as a "hero of the Brown(shirt) revolution." Goebbels staged an elaborate funeral with a cast of thousands and had built a large, Nazi-festooned gravesite. At Wessel's memorial service, Hitler extolled him as among those who are "not only the martyrs of their struggle but also the seed from which the subsequent harvest would come." The "Horst Wessel Lied" became the Nazi anthem.
Historian Alan Wykes wrote that Horst Wessel "did a great deal more for the Nazi image as a dead pimp than he had ever done as a live Party member."
So, will Ashli Babbitt ascend to a pantheon of Trumpist martyrs, virtuous warrior-gods who died in the struggle to rid the world of satanic Democrat pedo-cannibals?
Bear in mind that autocrats' hero-martyrs often are seamy characters. Wessel was a pimp. After getting the wife of a comrade pregnant, Bauman viciously mocked her in public, leading her to commit suicide. Babbitt was in an "open marriage" with her second husband and another woman.
So long as the MAGA mob remains a mob and does not coalesce into a structured movement, those who die for Trump, while praised in turbo-charged, hate-filled chat rooms as "martyrs," will be perceived by the world of the sane as mere losers, individuals so deluded by lies and medieval myth-mongering that they sacrificed their lives for nothing. And their uber-hero, Trump, couldn't care less about them.