Trump administration officially using Nazi-sounding phrase that only sounds very much like something Nazis would say

Our story begins with a Facebook post three days ago that went viral:

“One of ours, all of yours” is a line from Nazi Germany. It was coined when an SS officer was killed in a Czech Village and the Nazis killed every single resident of that village in response. This very line appeared on a U.S federal government podium. Let that sink in.

This is a garbled reference to the infamous Lidice massacre of 1942, when the Nazis murdered all the men and teenaged boys in that Czech village, and deported all the women and children to concentration camps, in reprisal for the assassination of top Nazi official and chief architect of the Holocaust Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was not killed in the village, although apparently there was a false rumor that the assassins came from there. They were in fact Czech partisans who were part of a Czech-British operation to assassinate Heydrich.

In any event there’s no record of the Nazis using the German equivalent of the phrase on Noem’s podium to refer to the Lidice mass murder, or more generally.

After the Facebook post went viral, and the well actually crowd rushed in to point out that this wasn’t a phrase used by the Nazis, the claim was then made that this is actually a variation on the Spanish phrase “uno de los nuestros vale por todo los vuestros,” which means “one of ours is worth all of yours.” This, it was said all over the internet on Monday and Tuesday, was a slogan of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party, during the Spanish civil war. The problem with this is that there’s apparently also no evidence that the Falange used this purported fascist slogan.

So where does it come from? The good folks at Reddit have been burrowing away in their charmingly obsessive fashion, and apparently “one of ours, all of yours,” or some close variant on that phrase, comes from various pulp fiction novels in the mob drama/military fantasy/revenge porn genre. Examples:

Range new all about blood feuds. He’d come across the concept first in Afghanistan. It was pretty simple really. You killed one of my family: now, in revenge, I’m going to kill you and all of yours. In some tribes the feud lasted for generations, being handed down from father to son.

“Killing Range: Left For Dead: Back For Revenge (2013)

His decision about Koenig had shown a softer side he hadn’t known he had. Before that his code had been simple: you kill one of ours, we kill all of yours. There were no exception to this rule.

“Fearless” (2023)

Just then, Benny remembered Fr. Matt’s words, that the rumor going around was that his dad’s rival syndicate planned to wipe ou this entire family. That was how these guys of the underworld operated. ‘You kill one of mine, I kill all of yours.”

“The Fugitive’s Legacy” (2014)

There are several other examples at the linked Reddit thread.

So what does all this tell us, comrades? It tells us, I would hypothesize, that the person responsible for the slogan on Bitch-Murderer Noem’s podium is probably one of the twentysomething Groyper incels who infest the Trump administration’s Ministry of Truth, and who has spent years marinating his warped imagination in the revenge/violence porn world that has cranked out what is apparently a cliche of that genre — a cliche which just happens to sound exactly like something Nazis would say, when contemplating the slaughter of their political opponents, and other untermenschen.

So it turns out it’s not, historically speaking, a literal fascist slogan, But you know what? It is now.

. . . The response to all this should be to emphasize that this phrase as a political slogan is an original creation of the American fascist party, that is, the Trumpified Republican party, and that it echoes rather than copies the propaganda slogans of the Nazis and other fascists. There’s no point is asking the fascists for innocent explanations, since they will simply excrete various incoherent lies. Just call it what it is.

Going to the effort to create their own original Nazi-sounding slogan is notable in and of itself, on top of the whole “they’re saying fascist things” phenomenon.