A. K. M. Skarpelis at Public Books:
Empires are strange creatures. Obsessed with their own end-time, they enlist the help of the katechon—a form of political sovereignty that “delays or maintains the end of time”—to postpone the inevitable, and stretch out time before the end. The obsessive fear of decline and an active engagement with trying to delay the end of empire is something that links contemporary right-wing movements to Himmler’s, Spengler’s, and Friedrich Ratzel’s temporal understandings of the basis for the National Socialist empire. The difference between then and now is that Hitler’s “solution” to the racial diversity he diagnosed as one of the core problems contributing to the cyclicity of empires and their inevitable decline was the murder of those the National Socialist regime deemed to be barbarians.
Still, “barbarians” continue to appear at the gates of American civilization in the guise of immigrants and refugees, and Bannon’s Aeneas is Abraham Lincoln, looming over a fireplace in the well-appointed Washington, DC, townhouse serving as headquarters for The Movement.
more here.