Who Goes Nazi? (1941) | Hacker News Reader

Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

harpers.org

120 pointsd_e_solomon122 comments

Written by Dorothy Thompson, first journalist kicked out of Nazi Germany.

She also said:

"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"

>> No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship.

She obviously never imagined the state of American politics today. A good chunk of them now openly want a "strongman" in the high office. The degree to which they want to be bullied by those they elect boarders on socio-political masochism.

So I disagree with Thompson. To say that people don't see the dictator coming is too easy. The people must be held to account for the leaders they create, else the cycle repeat.

Totally agree. The current congress welcomes Obama's use of (likely illegal) executive orders to accomplish things, because it means they can avoid responsibility and accountability. They don't fight to retain their constitutionally granted powers, because all they really want it somebody else to do the dirty work -- end result is they allow unprecedented levels of executive control to go basically unchecked ... and whether or not you agree with what's being done with it now, it's a slippery slope, because each president is different, but they'll all have this precedent to point back to as justification.

And, there is a cap on the maximum number of voters who could possibly give a damn at any given moment. Most of the people who would raise concerns about these executive orders will not be too concerned about overreach by the executive once the next Republican President is in office, nor is it likely they spoke up when the last one was in. And so it goes.

That's the true danger in divisive politics - when seeing that 'your team' scores points while they can becomes more important than good policy and governance.

I know it's fashionable to have a defeatist view of current american politics, but I honestly don't see how the current political climate in the United States is any more dysfunctional than the American political machinations of the early 1900's that led to the election of Teddy Roosevelt, a notorious "strongman" in high office, who after being "disappointed" by his chosen successor, and then friend, Taft decided to run for a third-term in high office. And to suggest Dorothy Thompson would be ignorant of, then recent, political history seems misguided.

My personal touchstone for American political dysfunction is the election of 1860. No matter how this election ends, I don't think the result is likely to be a civil war.

To be a little less speculatively brazen, consider Putin, who got elected (well, if he didn't totally cheat) on a campaign of resorting the Soviet dictatorship.

Elected? Technically I suppose so, but he was groomed as Yeltsin's successor.

American probably not. The US Constitution has provisions that make a dictator unlikely, though not impossible, as compared to the Weimar Constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Constitution

One hopes the primary convention delegates, elector college electors, Congress, Courts, State governments and free press would offset the election and reign of a dictatorially inclined President.

At the same time Lincoln did successfully suspend habeas corpus, Roosevelt did intern Japanese Americans.

er no Hitlers position was that Germany needed a dictator and the NAZIs ran on that platform.

The exact program:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program#The...

I imagine you're talking about point 25:

"For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general. The forming of state and profession chambers for the execution of the laws made by the Reich within the various states of the confederation. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration."

Given what happened in Germany's Weimar republic, decades-long destruction (mass firings) of workers and the resulting impact on the middle class as the direct result of foreign-imposed costs "for reparations for the war".

Given all this it is easy to see why this program would have the success it did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Peierls

When I was a postgrad at Birmingham University, around 1982/3 ish we had a talk by Peierls. He discussed his feelings about Heisenberg joining the Nazi party (you had to join the Party to continue to be a University lecturer in the late 1930s - that was when Einsten resolved to leave Berlin).

My recollection (reaching back 30+ years here folks) is that Peierls did not blame Heisenberg- it was how it was. Peierls recollected Heisenberg talking about 'white waistcoats' and people leaving who didn't have to leave, thus reducing the number of overseas jobs available to people who did have to leave (i.e. German Jewish academics).

What I'm thinking here is; How do you see the end of the wedge when it is very thin?

I think to better understand why people are attracted to Fascism it is better to read about the rise of Mussolini than about the rise of Nazism.

Mussolini essentially was going to make Italy "great again". He was a former socialist but not an internationalist. While communists promised economic justice, fascists promised a better prouder more powerful nation.

Today you expect wealthy people to be economically liberal but in those days many were attracted by the premises of fascism.

There also this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICng-KRxXJ8

A teacher creates a fascist movement to show his students how they can be duped into one.

> Today you expect wealthy people to be economically liberal but in those days many were attracted by the premises of fascism.

Oh, fascism can be great for the wealthy. Your company becomes an instrument of the state, turning your economic power into political power, and you don't need to worry about nonsense like Competition anymore.

I've seen the term 'inverted totalitarianism' to describe how the US is in a similar, but different place to pre-WWII fascism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

This article is especially interesting, given it was written before the the US entered the war and before the full extent of Nazi atrocities was known.

I'm reminded of C.S Lewis's speech about the Inner Ring (1944): http://www.mit.edu/~hooman/ideas/the_inner_ring.htm

I wonder what would have happened if Hitler (who apparently didn't give the matter much thought) hadn't declared war on the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...

The US would have been spared the embarrassment of not having declared war on the Nazi's, when they did eventually enter the war a few months later. The US was ramping up to enter WW2 long before the end of 1941.

Didn't matter. Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war.

If Hitler hadn't attacked Russia, things could have been very different. Hitler thought Russia would be a fast, easy conquest. It wasn't, and Germany found itself in a two-front war. It cost the USSR 20 million dead to beat Germany, and cost Germany 5 million dead, 80% of German casualties. Germany was an ally of Russia until 45 minutes before the attack. Much of Russian paranoia comes from this.

If Germany had consolidated its gains on the continent of Europe without trying to expand beyond that, we might today have a Greater Germany covering much of what's now the European Union. Britain would be on the outside, in the position Taiwan is now with respect to China. Russia would be the big power next door, just as it is to China now. Germany could have cut a peace deal with the US and Britain in that situation.

> Germany was an ally of Russia until 45 minutes before the attack. Much of Russian paranoia comes from this.

Germany was an ally of RUssia, and learned from Soviets much of how to run an extermination camp, and Russian provided Germany with space to practice armor warfare.

However, there is considerable debate speculating that Germany's initial success in Barbarossa was simply because the Soviet army was planning to attack Germany on July 6, and therefore its formation was totally arranged for offense, and failed miserably when attacked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controv...

Anyway, the Russian paranoia didn't really need a German betrayal to develop. The Russian military had been internally wiped out in the paranoid purges of 1930's.

Hitler admired the US. One of the reasons to attack Russia was to colonize Eastern Europe the way America was colonized to stand a chance in the future with more agricultural land.

With the support of facist governments against communisim around the world after WWII - especially in South America - indeed one could wonder how the US would have reacted without the Pearl and the German War declaration, or a much later German attack on Russia. Not sure it would have taken the communist side some years later.

It wasn't only Germany with plans for colonization. Take the history of Königsberg resettled into Kaliningrad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliningrad_Oblast), which remains Russia's western-most territory.

I always thought that the answer to this question is less important than that it prompts to reader to question themselves on why or why not they would join the Nazis. It's easy to look back through the lens of time and assume that we, good wholesome people, would not become Nazis, but if you're in the moment, what happens?

"Dorothy Thompson (9 July 1893 – 30 January 1961) was an American journalist and radio broadcaster, who in 1939 was recognized by Time magazine as the second most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and as one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. She is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism."

- Wikipedia

Dorothy Thompson is a fascinating and important historical figure, hugely famous in her prime, but much diminished when she died and largely forgotten now. She is due to be rehabilitated. I'd be surprised if it didn't happen in the next few years.

I've been told that http://www.amazon.com/American-Cassandra-Life-Dorothy-Thomps... is a good bio.

Thompson, like many (if not most) American journalists of her time, was a Stalin apologist in the Duranty circle:

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAthompsonD.htm

I'm not sure any intellectual who collaborated with Hitler should get points for warning the world about Stalin. Or vice versa.

If Harper's had written an article called "Who Goes Bolshevik" in 1941, it could have been much shorter: "pretty much everyone." Or at least, everyone who mattered. If you wanted the truth about Stalin in 1941, you'd do much better with the Voelkischer Beobachter than the New York Times.

I don't know the details but that link doesn't come close to establishing that she was a Stalin apologist.

It doesn't seem like it at all. Things she apparently wrote in 1946:

The West experienced moments of doubt, Thompson wrote, in which the outcome of communist belief and behavior was questioned: "Can communist cultism, organized like a medieval secret order, with a priesthood, a police and an inquisition, reform itself into a modem, liberal, democratic movement?" Why, during the war, did communist propagandists throughout the world demand an immediate "second front", an attack on heavily fortified Western Europe by the United States and Great Britain? "Did these obedient claques care nothing for the lives of American boys? Were they listening to any voices but the voice of Stalin?" "Yet, we said: No", Thompson continued. "We shall prove our confidence, trust and trustworthiness. We shall hold faith that it will not be betrayed. Loyalty, we said, begets loyalty." But as Germany collapsed, the Soviet Union began "reversing every wartime pledge and policy. And not only was the quarter of a century of communist despotism to be fastened again upon the necks of the long suffering, heroically,enduring, eternally,hoping, eternally,serving Russian people -but naked and unashamed it was seeking new people to subject. "

Ah, but that was 1946. The (American) party line had changed -- most American liberals were anti-Stalinist in 1946.

A quick google search turns up this from 1943:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11332745

"Dorothy Thompson, the well-known columnist, writes: 'Russia does not want to make an isolationist policy. Russia wants a friendly Europe in a friendly world, with a system of collective security. There are signs of such hostility in both Europe and America to Russia that it gives Russian leadership some reason for suspicion. As things look at present, it is by no means certain that defeat of Germany will assure a non-Fascist Europe or one prepared to adopt a good-neighbor policy toward Russia."

Her views in 1946 are standard 1946 post-FDR New Dealism (after the Anglo-Soviet split); her views in 1943 are standard 1943 New Dealism. You're just hearing the party line; God only knows what she actually thought, and when.

It would be much easier to fight the memory hole if we didn't have these ridiculous copyright laws, but a lot of original WWII propaganda (not cherry-picked by modern hagiographers) remains on line. It's often pretty appalling reading.

That's extremely thin gruel. You seem to want to paint any whiff of Russia/Soviet sympathy as the equivalent of 'Stalin apologist' and reaching even further, an equivalent to being a Nazi sympathizer. I don't think that's a view that can easily be factually rather than ideologically supported.

I recommend Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography for a compelling look at the circle of Western journalists in Moscow in the '20s and '30s, of which Muggeridge was a part. Scott Alexander has a good review:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...

You either stayed in that circle or dropped out; there was no in-between. Of the reporters listed in the link, W.H. Chamberlin is the only other one who defected. Duranty (whose Pulitzer the NYT still refuses to return) was the norm, not the exception.

Also note that Thompson was part of the most bloodthirsty wing of New Dealists (eg, Rex Stout, also seen in the link) who supported prewar and postwar anti-German atrocities. It was certainly Nazi policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Jews as physically possible, but it was also Allied policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Germans as physically possible -- and that policy by no means stopped on a dime in May 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

A real and complete moral reckoning for the period has yet to come, and will be more interested in our crimes than those of our defeated enemies.

Very thought provoking.

In spirit, it reminds me of The True Believer [1], published about a decade later. Take Nazism and replace it with any other movement of discontent (just or unjust), and you have a general critique of mass movements a la Hoffer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

Interesting, thanks for the link. This part strikes me as particularly relevant to the current state of things in the US, especially for blue collar/middle class:

The "New Poor" are the most likely source of converts for mass movements/for they recall their former wealth with resentment and blame others for their current misfortune. Examples include the mass evictions of relatively prosperous tenants during the English Civil War of the 1600s or the middle- and working-classes in Germany who passionately supported Hitler in the 1930s after suffering years of economic hardship. In contrast, the "abjectly poor" on the verge of starvation make unlikely true believers as their daily struggle for existence takes pre-eminence over any other concern.[5]

History is always the upper and (part of) the middle classes trading placdes.

It's weird how this mirrors what you see with terrorists. Terrorists are middle-class or upper-middle-class with very, very few poor among them.

I don't think that the "daily struggle for survival" is it. Rather I think that the fact that poor are constantly forced to confront themselves with reality and living with others that makes them less likely to join movements like this.

Also, as a worker you'd have direct contact with members of this party (because you don't get to choose the people you hang out with). It is much, much harder to tell yourself a fictional story about what drives them. About what they'd do if given power. By contrast you regularly find insane positions among the upper classes. How hard is it to find an upper-middle-class or higher Marxist on a university campus ? Not very hard, despite the fact that he wouldn't be there in the system they advocate. Hell, there's Malthusians among them too, whereas I've yet to meet the first poor worker defending the virtues of killing of "enough" of the human race for a "sustainable population of Earth" to me.

Having illusions about "grandeur" of race, of inherent virtues of one group versus another, about the "good of the human race", ... is far easier when you're not confronted with the underbelly of any city on a daily basis ... when you're only confronted with who you choose to be confronted with.

I love the idea of reading articles from this time period on this topic. This article though, with Mr A/B/C/... was bit much to handle though. Just felt much too speculative.

I thought the fictional/thought-experiment setting was a very good device for this kind of article.

I would bet a barrel of reichmarks that these were real people. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that "Mr. C" is the "saturnine" Lawrence Dennis, a former State Department diplomat and Wall Street advisor considered the guiding intellect of 1930s American fascism.

Fascinatingly, Dennis didn't grow up "Southern white trash." No, he actually was a famous African-American child preacher, a background that he did hide successfully (though, reading between the lines of the article, not perhaps to everyone) as he disavowed his family, appeared at Exeter on scholarship, and traveled in the upper reaches of American society and eventually to the far fringes of American, Italian and German fascism. It is a surpassing irony that his hatred of Jim Crow segregation and contempt for the democracy that allowed it led him to be welcomed inside the sanctum of those men who would have imprisoned, shot or gassed him had they known the truth of his background.

Not entirely welcomed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Dennis#Sedition_trial

Yep; the other irony was that his prosecutor was O. John Rogge, one of the great liberal crusading attorneys of the day, who insisted on bringin charges in order to drag militant racism into the light of day. So Dennis, spurred by his hatred for American racism, made common cause with thuggish men who would have happily hanged him from a tree, and as a result was prosecuted by a man who otherwise would have been his natural political and moral ally. A complex man, Lawrence Dennis. (There is one biography available, The Color of Fascism, which is a little too clunky to be authoritative, but which is well worth reading. An equally unusual journey is that of Bayard Rustin, an openly gay African American civil rights activist who studied under Gandhi, introduced MLK to the theory of nonviolent activism, and ended up part of the neoconservative movement in the Reagan administration.)

It's been a while since the last big, successful, popular, dictatorial, charismatic movement like Nazism. Putin comes closest, but he came to power as an insider, with Yeltsin supporting him. ISIS is religion-based, (even though it was designed by a former Iraqi colonel who wasn't very religious [1]) and those work differently. There are warlords in sub-Saharan Africa, but they're usually not popular leaders. Remember, Hitler was elected Chancellor; he didn't lead a revolution.

Yes, Trump makes somewhat Nazi-like noises. Not sure what to think about that.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-saddams-former...

Just to nitpick John, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg. The nazi party never won an election in their entire history.

The Nazi party was certainly the winner or the election in July 1932, where it became the largest party in the parliament. In March 1933 elections it became even larger, with 44% more than twice the size of the second largest party, the SPD. It just never had an absolute majority - the parliamentary act which effectively gave the party dictatorial powers was supported by the conservative and center parties.

I guess we can argue over what it means for a political party to win, but the Nazi party were never able to gain the support of the majority of the German people.

Would you say that Angela Merkels CDU "never won an election"? That would be a misleading statement when talking about a multi-party system rather than a two-party system.

The Nazi party itself did not have an absolute majority at any point, but they gained power by getting support from a majority in parliament, representing a majority of the voters. The power was achieved legitimately, but then it was used to dismantle the democratic system.

Is it a "misuse" of democratic power to dismantle the democratic system ?

Also, can you provide a link to that act of parliament ? I wonder about what happened there.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

I actually think Angela and the CDU have never won an election (especially if you exclude the CSU) - she just managed to get more votes than the SPD. If she led a coalition before an election that then won then I would consider her the winner, but just putting together a coalition after the election rather undermines any majority support.

Having said all this Hitler did manage to work the Weimar system so he was able to grab total power - he always seemed to be proud that his rule was "legal".

The problem with "big, successful, popular, dictatorial, charismatic" is there's also an implied addition of being against us, which naturally (LOL) implies they're evil.

Otherwise your big five is just Obama, as a recent example. By the full seven criteria obviously Obama doesn't qualify of course.

Big, successful, popular, dictatorial, charismatic movement like Chavism, say? It really hasn't been that long since then. You could argue that it's "not like Nazism", I guess, in the details of interactions between the government and private industry, but in terms of taking and holding on to power it's quite the same.

And I'd quibble with your distinction between religion-based and non-religion-based movements. The whole point of movements like Nazism is that they act in much the way religion does. More like creating a new religion that co-opting an existing one, of course; maybe that's the difference you were getting at?

"Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t-whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi."

Could be a quote from the last psychiatrist.

What an incredibly well written article, and quite thought provoking.

I found this interesting and prescient: "Hitler's Program", by Leon Trotsky (1934). “Hitler has been widely regarded as a demagogue, a hysterical person, and a comedian… It takes more than hysteria to seize power, and method there must be in the Nazi madness.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/xx/hitler.htm

Who goes Nazi? These guys.[1] The Republican establishment donors who used to think Trump was a nut, but now that he's leading, are coming around to supporting him. They're terrified that he might win and they'd be out of power, on the outside looking in.

Hitler had a lot of supporters like that.[2] Krupp (arms manufacturing), Thyssen (arms), Kridoff (coal), and others all contributed funds before Hitler took over. National Socialism wasn't anti-industry, it was "industry and the state working together".

[1] http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/266389-donors-changing-... [2] http://www.politicususa.com/2014/01/27/tom-perkins-wrong-ger...

I think that's not the kind of thing she was aiming for in the article. She's talking more about personal decisions about whether you as a person would join them, not these kinds of generic political deals. In other words, her point is that if you know someone on a personal level, that alone is enough to tell if they would make the personal decision to go Nazi. It's not even anything specifically to do with wealth or power, per se.

IIRC, the upper-middle class and the people who admire them. That seemed to be what the article is saying, until I got to the conclusion.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/logic-of-evil-the-social-orig...

I was surprised by the relatively clear description of a psychopath as being ideal Nazi material. I'm not sure if it was a widely known concept at the time or if they were just going by instinct.

Mr C?

"He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism."

I didn't read him as psychopath so much as someone nursing serious grudges about his perceived exclusion from the top rank of society. Enough that he'd delight in "setting things right" even Nazi style.

That was, for me, the most interesting character insight.

I meant Mr D:

"He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others."

Sounds like he may have affluenza.

I think of D as a sociopath who could be Nazi or "patriot" depending on which one would give him current advantage.

I wonder if there is any real limit to what positions such a person would take. In every company I've ever worked for there's several examples of this sort of person and ... I don't think I've ever even seen one with their own political opinion. Personal advancement, or the potential for it, determines their position in any argument, including political ones.

These days that usually makes them argue for "diversity" (taken to corporate insanity extremes, like every other position).

I would agree with the article that given the environment in the 1930's that would probably have made them nazis. But this has nothing to do with the content of these ideologies, only with their relative success.

But what I find myself at very strong odds with is the smart person who clawed his way up and finds himself beneath a glass ceiling, Mr. C. They usually have a relatively insane political opinion that indeed originates from some past humiliation. But that nearly always makes them some sort of extremist socialist or outright marxist if they were poor in their childhood, or extreme laissez-faire when not. And frankly, what is wrong with holding such an opinion due to having had to endure serious hardship or humiliation as a result (having been the rich kid in a poor school or a poor kid in a rich school would pretty much guarantee such a position, no ?). I would imagine that if indeed such a person became a nazi, one confrontation with a nazi "type D" would cure him of such an affliction, as he'd immediately recognize the ideology for what it is. Either such guys are nihilists or they have some insane party affiliation.

Given the thousands of political parties in the Weimar republic, I'd be much less surprised to find this Mr. C an avid supporter of one of the many "20 party members and only their mothers vote for them" ideologies that the Weimar republic boasted.

When I read about person C, I found it resembles well many people from certain 4chan boards.

This article seems relevant to Man in The High Castle.

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they can elevate themselves through commitment to the myth. This has the self-policing effect of keeping everyone in line.

So long as you can keep those resources coming to your ruling coalition of highly replaceable idiots, you are golden. Read Smith and DeMesquita's "Dictator's Handbook" for details of how this works.

It doesn't matter whether that myth is of a 3000 year reign, the supreme right of a proletariat, the divinity of leader, that my golf handicap includes 11 holes in one, the revolution, or even that my particular tribe or ethnic group is morally superior to your tribe or ethnic group. It's all the same shit.

What people don't talk about is how these assholes seize power. It's through charismatic promises of future rewards to people who think they have nothing. They appeal to the greed and impulsiveness of the poor, it's a straight short con.

The nuanced part is how you get current status quo supporters to switch sides and provide their support to the challenger. They do this with a second message that triggers the middling man's sense of loss aversion. This is just posing a credible prisoners dilemma in which if moderates and supporters defect now, they get to keep their social position, but if they hold out, they will lose everything.

Arguably, this model of political polarization shows how ISIS works, how feminism annexed academia, why Trump is popular, why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially.

Nazi's were repugnant, but history would show that being repugnant is likely more indicative of political success than failure.

What would the resource be in the case of BLM?

The myth is easier to identify: that there's campaign of murder by police officers targeting blacks. It's part of the broader myth that minorities in the US are being kept down by the powers that be.

When you see it as just part of the broader identity politics movement, it's easier to identify the resources: moral vindication and reassigned blame for their troubles, handouts from other people's pockets, and discrimination against the perceived oppressor group ("affirmative action").

You can apply this to literally every political belief someone fights for. As such the explanatory power of your theory seems to be quite poor.

If something is a political belief you do not share it is easy to call it a myth. If something is a political policy you think is wrongheaded or unfair you can always claim that someone benefits unfairly from that policy.

As such your theory really doesn’t tell you anything, or at least anything interesting. It’s just worthless. A nice story, nothing more.

The actual interesting thing happens when you engage with the content of political beliefs and policies.

It's not my theory, but it is an interesting framework to view politics through. Myth doesn't necessarily mean false. Even though that's the way the original poster used it, I think the framework is actually stronger with the more general definition of myth. Answering whether the handing out of resources is fair or not is also not necessary for this framework to be insightful.

And of course we should engage the content of political beliefs. But we should also seek to understand politics as a phenomenon in itself. Our understanding of the beliefs is otherwise hollow.

It’s so general as to be useless … basically what you are demonstrating here is one huge exercise in moving the goalposts, turning the theory into unrecognizable mush.

So “invent a necessarily preposterous myth” is out. It’s now just about some belief, doesn’t matter how it came to be or what it is. Can be true, can be false, can be anything.

If that’s the starting point then all the rest falls apart, really. It’s senseless.

You can talk about the role of signaling or whatever, but the connective tissue is missing and the entire interesting and potentially insightful part of the theory is missing.

You keep conflating me with this thread's OP and attributing to me quotes that are not mine.

The myth is easier to identify: that there's campaign of murder by police officers targeting blacks. It's part of the broader myth that minorities in the US are being kept down by the powers that be

There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address. And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantled?

> There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address.

You seem very sure about what I will and won't address. Why don't we find out? What is this evidence?

> And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantled?

I'd say yes. The right to vote is firmly protected (as for voter ID laws, I think they're very reasonable). Racial-based government policy making is prohibited. This prohibition is enforced except for in cases where the discrimination helps minorities. Private discrimination is a serious legal issue, sometimes pursued to the point of absurdity. The current shakedown of the car loan industry over racial discrimination is a good example, and many other cases pursued under the doctrine of "disparate impact". We don't hose down peaceful protesters anymore either, and even in the 60s that was appalling to people outside of the South. The contrast between Birmingham in 1963 and Ferguson in 2014 is instructive.

The War on Drugs is disproportionately hurting minorities, and I think it's a terrible policy on many counts, but I don't think you can frame it as the machinery of minority oppression.

The welfare state is definitely hurting minorities, but again, I think it's just bad policy-making, not intentional subjugation.

EDIT: Responding to fnovd here, because Hacker News is throttling me:

I happen to think that people should be free to put whatever they want into their bodies. This philosophical debate is not a racial issue. So let's assume that we decide to ban drugs, like we've banned stealing cars. If minorities are more likely to steal cars, and more likely to end up in jail because they were stealing cars, or more likely to be poor because their dad was in jail for stealing cars, or more likely to sucked into stealing cars because it's an easy source of profit in a poor neighborhood, that doesn't make banning stealing cars a racist policy.

> The War on Drugs is disproportionately hurting minorities

Agreed.

> I don't think you can frame it as the machinery of minority oppression.

Erm, what? So you're saying that, while the War on Drugs disproportionately hurts minorities, it's not a machine of minority oppression? I can't wrap my head around that.

Any discussion I hear about race always takes me back to the old Atwater quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Atwater_on_the_Sou...

The form of your argument seems to be that if a policy has a race/sex disparity in impact then it's inherently racist/sexist.

Let's go for the reductio ad absurdum.

We have a choice between two policies. The first says if you're accused of being a child's parent and you can prove with a genetic test that you aren't then you don't have to pay child support. The second says if you're accused of being a child's parent then you have to pay child support even if you can prove you're not.

Suppose we know that there is a sex disparity in impact for this policy. The people falsely accused of being a child's parent are disproportionately men and single parents with custody are disproportionately women. If we let the accused parent prove the facts then it will benefit men to the detriment of women.

Therefore, by your logic, it is a sexist policy to not force people who can prove they aren't a child's parent to pay child support anyway. Which is absurd.

> The form of your argument seems to be that if a policy has a race/sex disparity in impact then it's inherently racist/sexist.

No, the form of my argument is that a policy can be implicitly racist without being explicitly racist. A law banning rap music from the radio won't appear racist if your only criteria for a racist policy is explicitly mentioning race. This is why I included the Atwater quote.

> the form of my argument is that a policy can be implicitly racist without being explicitly racist.

An explicit policy like officially-segregated schools is objectively racist. "Implicitly racist" is completely subjective.

The Atwater quote kind of makes the point. Is lowering taxes a racist policy? Nothing about the policy is different just because you can find some racist who supports it specifically because they know it will have a disparate impact. So you are implying that any policy with a disparate impact is "implicitly" racist, because a racist might support it for only that reason.

But that makes the definition of "racist" so broad that it loses all meaning. It makes the law against marijuana racist but also the law against speeding and the law against felons possessing a handgun.

> "Implicitly racist" is completely subjective.

"Implicitly racist" is far from being completely subjective. A law banning US citizens whose ancestors lived in Africa 500 years ago from voting isn't explicitly racist: one could argue that it's based purely on geography and that ancestry and geography are only incidentally linked. It's implicitly racist given an understanding of the context in which it is applied.

Taken out of context, the War on Drugs can presented as race-neutral. You can describe the laws as they are written and stop there. This is not an honest discussion of the War on Drugs. We're not just talking about laws, we're talking about enforcement. Look at the data. Look at the statistics. I'm not just saying that.

http://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHresultsP... 2013 Drug usage rates, by race

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/... 2014 Drug abuse violation rates, by race

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/... 2014 Drug abuse violations, by category

http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf 2010 US Census, by race

This tells me that the ratio of Whites to Blacks in the U.S. is roughly ~6:1. The ratio of drug use between Whites and Blacks is ~1:1. The ratio of drug abuse violations between Whites and Blacks is ~2:1. Do you agree that these figures are correct? If so, how do you explain the discrepancy between usage vs violations between Whites and Blacks? Looking for an honest analysis. My conclusion was that the laws and policies which constitute the War on Drugs have disproportionately affected Blacks. CMV.

how feminism annexed academia ... why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially

No axes to grind here, hmm?

(Hint: there's a huge difference between civil rights movements -- those demanding equal respect -- and the fulminations of the privileged who think life's a zero-sum game and anyone else making up ground means that they're losing out. Alas, you don't seem to get it.)

Typically it's the critiques of liberalism and capitalism that treat life as zero-sum. The capitalist defense of inequality is that the world isn't zero-sum. Because people can do extraordinarily well for themselves by creating value for others, they do, and we are all better off.

The 60s civil rights movement was a classically liberal movement. They were demanding equal treatment under the law. "Civil rights" movements today are usually asking for special treatment. (edit: Just to clarify, I'm referring specifically to the US for this last point)

> "Civil rights" movements today are usually asking for special treatment.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this opinion.

The civil rights movement of the day is always compared to some idealized civil rights movement of the past to disqualify it in the eyes of the anti-progressive. They focus on the wrong issues, they lack focus, they're too loud and annoying, they're not grateful enough for advances thus far, etc.

Seeing how he's idealized into an impossible standard for activists today, it's cool looking at the correspondence MLK Jr. got back in the day (http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/theme/4809). Here are some samples:

> Mr. Young criticizes Dr. King and the black community for their support of heavyweight champion Cassius Clay's refusal to be drafted into the military. He also expresses worry about the quality of black leadership and urges a move from a selfish focus on Negroes only to concern for all people.

> Calling Dr. King "The Trouble Maker of the United States," Mrs. Shaw criticizes Dr. King's methods in the Civil Rights Movement. She argues that a "campaign of love is in order" rather than demonstrations.

> Harl Douglass writes in disgust at the position Dr. King has taken on Vietnam War. As a once full supporter of the civil rights movement, he believes that Dr. King "is somewhat unstable and he has made millions of enemies for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference....." Douglass warns Dr. King and SCLC officials that if they continue to go down the same track they will lose support of white moderates.

More people than just the right believe things to be a zero-sum game, else you would not see the kinds of things expressed in the Github diversity slide-show you saw in this article [1]. This is the main slide [2]. And, one could argue it is, for every man hired, that's potentially one fewer woman hired and for every one white woman hired that's one fewer minority woman or man hired, if you look at things from an individual company PoV. If you look at it in a broad economic sense, it may not be zero sum, however.

The bullet points hint at the issue being interpreted as a zero sum game. Imagine this slide show from a different ethnic group or gender and how it might be interpreted.

[1]http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...

[2]http://imgur.com/QevylxY

I just cannot believe what's on some of those slides. Here are some snippets -- imagine if you were to swap the races around, and replace every 'white' with 'people of color', every 'asian' with 'white', and every 'people of color' with 'asian'. If you do these mental gymnastics, some of these slides will seem incredibly offensive -- so how is it that they're acceptable at all, regardless of what the races are. Here are some juicy quotes:

"This is not work for white folks to lead"

"We need solidarity with our asian friends and colleagues"

"Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"

(...)

Yes, if you change the words in a sentence, the sentence's meaning can change.

Because they describe asymmetric power relationships, so you can't meaningfully flip them.

"Workers can sack employers at will, and that causes employers financial hardship, so we need employer protection laws" is a less-charged example of why it doesn't work just to straight flip such types of statement.

Power asymmetry makes sense at higher top to bottom levels, but not at the individual being hired level. There is no power asymmetry between candidates. That is, another interviewee has no power over me, nor I over her. And here we're implying hiring one type displaces one of another type and we're saying that we prefer one type to be displaced rather than another type to be displaced.

Additionally, if we accept that white women are underrepresented then what it's doing is saying that some underrepresentations are better than others.

Anti-strike legislation exists though.

well in that case you would also have to change the action 'sack' because firing an employer is by definition impossible for an employee of that employer.

The correct text should probably be:

"Workers can quit employers at will, and that causes employers financial hardship, so we need employer protection laws"

Actually, I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense.

Not much of an effort apparently.

Reading what you wrote, and this comment seems to translate as:

> I make an effort to insult everyone therefore if anyone is insulted they must be a zealot. It's certainly not possible for reasonable people to take offence to an insult so long as I also insult the "other side" of the debate.

I'm not entirely sure that the "social math" you're attempting to use here actually works in real life.

But to digress further, even if this "social math" worked out, statements like "Trump is popular" are not necessarily contested even by people that disagree with Trump, while statement like "feminism annexed academia" is a much more inflammatory and contested statement.

Inflammatory, by that do you mean, problematic, citizen?

It's not my social math, it's from the book I mentioned in the original post. There is a political calculus to power, and there are some good game theory models of it. It would be hard to deny that academia has seen a sea change in political thinking in the last 20 years (unless we've always been at war with eurasia), just as against all reason and sense, Trump has managed to become a contender. Stuff changes. There are models to describe some of it. Sorry if I tipped a sacred cow. I thought this was hacker news not reddit.

My "social math" comment was directed at this comment that you made:

> I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense

not at attacking the contents of the book that you are discussing in your original post. I have not read that book, therefore I am not on sufficient ground to debate its contents.

On the other hand, your idea that you have been "sufficiently even handed" requires more explanation. From what I've read from you in this comment thread, that appears to mean, "I've made comments that people all over the political spectrum might not like, therefore somehow upsetting someone on the 'left' and someone on the 'right' balances out to upsetting no one. Therefore, only extremely committed zealots will be upset by my comments." This is the "social math" that does not work.

> Sorry if I tipped a sacred cow. I thought this was hacker news not reddit.

I could direct the same comment at you. Making comments like this is meant to put me on the defensive. You're claiming that I'm acting like an "irrational Redditor" rather than a "intelligent HN reader." Ending all of your comments with the equivalent of, "I'm just saying the truth that no one wants to hear" gives you more in common with Trump that you may like to admit.

Feminism has never demanded equal respect. Two Si olé examples,

1. Australian right for women to vote. It took another 60 years because they didn't care about aboriginal votes. That's not equality!!! 2. An education system that went from a majority of honors students being male to 80% women earning honors in 30 years - and you call that equality? Do you argue that boys have become stupid (as is the modern myth of feminism) for such a drastic swing at almost all levels of academia.

Feminism has nothing to do with equality. The poster you responded to was totally correct. Research falling performance of boys before commenting. While you're at it, check hiring rates and incomes of younger women in the states. I hear the word pendulum swing (which means double standard hypocrite) a lot these days.

> Feminism has never demanded equal respect.

Stating that Feminism has never been about equality is an absolute statement. Even if it's true that Feminism has had little to do with equality, all you're doing here of swinging to the opposite extreme in response to it, which doesn't seem like a healthy attitude.

> 1. Australian right for women to vote. It took another 60 years because they didn't care about aboriginal votes. That's not equality!!!

That was quite a long time ago when attitudes towards race were different. It seems unfair to take this attitudes and apply them with an absolute statement like "never." Would it make sense to state that the United States has never been about equal rights and point to slavery, "separate but equal," and the KKK as my proof?

> 2. An education system that went from a majority of honors students being male to 80% women earning honors in 30 years - and you call that equality? Do you argue that boys have become stupid (as is the modern myth of feminism) for such a drastic swing at almost all levels of academia.

Unless you can directly connect Feminism to this, then you need to explain what you feel the mechanisms are that Feminism uses to indirectly influence these results. Which education system (I assume Australia)? How has Feminism affected these results?

Way to shoehorn BLM and feminism (both movements seeking equal rights) into the same frame as ISIS and Trump.

Their objectives may differ but their recruitment methods are the same, disaffected people who believe they have nothing, and won't ever amount to anything because the world is against their group.

If you want to see how racist america is and how you can't succeed look at how poorly the Japanese have done after interment, if it wasn't for affirmative action ivies would be all Asian.

Skipping all of the maddening and difficult things to address in your statement, I assure you that not a single Japanese person (or any person really) has ever succeeded economically or otherwise after interment.

This description doesn't differ whether the myth is true or not, and whether it's a good or evil myth. The methods are still the same.

seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it.

Startups?

how these assholes seize power. It's through charismatic promises of future rewards

Startups.

Yes, but the difference is that a business's success requires continual voluntary mutually-beneficial exchanges (aka sales). And before they make a profit, they're only risking money that's theirs to risk. None of these things are true about politics, which is fundamentally about control of coercive power.

You both have good points. Seiji point though is very unusual and affects us all directly, as such it deserves setious consideration.

Calling attention the differences is not particularly insightful (Who in their right mind would compare startups to dictatorships to imply that they are one and the same).

But Seiji's calling attention to the similarities provides good insights.

Also the difference you list is not actually that much of a difference. Sure, politics is about control of coercive power, but so are businesses (especially the most succesful ones). Politics is also about negotiations, deals, showmanship, exchanges for mutual benefit(unless you are naive about how politics really works) - aka sales. Furthermore both radical movements and startups need to fund-raise and rally volunteers during their early days, and both do so on little more than the promise of dreams.

They are both equally unlikely to succeed. But when they do, their impact is profound (often one is profoundly good and the other is profoundly bad). I could think of more going down the tangent created by the parent.

To a point. Startups aren't about wielding totalitarian power. The crappy ones are more about the short con of trading lottery tickets (options) for labor, and using the myth of magical genius to sell stakes to bookies and rubes.

There are great businesses out there that respond to real market needs, but a lot of tech companies only seem to exist in the window of lag between collapsing marginal cost and eventual market saturation.

I heard a vivid example of one of those myths on the radio about 12 years ago. I was listening to shortwave radio in my car on the way to work and happened to tune in the news from the Voice of Korea, North Korea's English language service beamed to North America.

I remember the newsman's exact words to this day:

"Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim Jong-il, because the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of mental power beyond the ability of ordinary human beings."

This is why the founders of the US intentionally tried to design the country to severely restrict the power of the federal government / allow the states to handle many issues that aren't explicitly national matters. I'm not talking about things like education or marriage, which you might [i]think[/i] should be national issues, but rather things like interstate roads and national defense, which are interstate issues by their very nature.

The federal power creep that we've been experiencing for the last several decades has done a lot to create a system that is ripe for abuse.

Quite a few decades, in fact. From the article:

> [The German emigre] believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.

Maybe. I think they had to punt on it because of things like slavery in the south and feudal style Dutch patroons in NY.

The federal power creep is mostly about the difference between living in a place like say Pennsylvaia and South Carolina. The states refused to deal with key, important problems of the day.

I think you're reaching quite a bit with this comment.

The people who drafted the constitution actually pushed for a Federal government that was larger far more powerful than the previous Articles of Confederation did. And they continued set up precedents while they were in office for a larger and more unified government than many of the States likely expected. They also recognized that a modern Democracy was a bit of an experiment compared to the rest of the world and were unable/unwilling to make it too large too soon.

And most of U.S. history seems to agree with this approach and it shows that a large open government is less likely to be abused than a small government which can be captured and rigged by a few groups or even individuals. It's the separation of powers between branches of the government, more than the size and powers of the Feds vs. the States that helps to limit the chance for dictatorship.

I appreciated the dispassionate detachment of the comment. Like others, I'm a little suspicious of your "feminism annexed academia" bit (though not in the same kneejerky way). But what I really wonder is, could you expand on "why Occupy failed?" I've never really viewed it through that lens.

Here, I'll give it a go. Certainly the unifying mythos was there - the 1%/the 99% - and by the way this isn't preposterous. But since you say "necessarily preposterous," would you say it was in fact, not preposterous enough? Too easily subjected to rational verification/quantification?

Also there were no resources of any import seized, for redistributing. Promises of future rewards seem like they were in place however.

The "prisoner's dilemma" portion, was effectively impossible without becoming an armed mob. They wanted to convert fence-sitters through sympathy, but I guess we're saying, fear is what works? Therefore instead of sympathy for the guys & gals getting pepper-sprayed, Joe Middleclass fears being pepper-sprayed himself, and the STATE is the one triggering the loss aversion. Interesting.

Can you explain to me why the institute of applied physics is now looking for two research assistants in gender studies?

It's 19 hours and 55 minute of work every week with a 3 year contract to do gender studies in a physics department. Do you know that the Nazis had a field for facial recognition of Jewish features on faces?

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

My understanding is that there is a persistent gender imbalance in physics generally. Is seems obvious that the IOP would want to fund research into why this is happening and ways in which it can be solved. Is the Nazi comparison really necessary?

They won’t be doing physics. They will be doing (in the broadest sense) empirical social research with a focus on gender and physics, i.e. why are people with certain genders deciding to go into physics or not.

Are you really surprised that universities are looking for researchers researching all kinds of things? Someone I know just got a (post-doc) job researching social comparison theory and she can pretty much do whatever she wants in that field. That’s not even socially relevant, it’s merely interesting (nothing wrong with that).

Given how socially relevant this topic is (i.e. why do women decide against going into physics or even leave physics? How can we attract more women?) I’m really quite confused why you turn your nose at some poorly paid social research job looking into this for two days a week …

Social research is not luxurious. It’s badly paid, the methods at our disposal suck, the topic and subject (human brains and how they interact with each other) is fucking complex as hell, we don’t even know how to deal with it … it ain’t easy. Just so you know.

The point of a preposterous myth is that it is a wedge issue that allows the majority to identify "enemies" and dangerous dissidents, because intelligent people just can't help themselves. It creates a target rich environment for the truly contemptible who will inform on, denounce, and betray their neighbors for a few extra rations or a commendation from some apparatchik, maybe just a fellowship.

An absurd dogma causes trouble makers to self-select out. The "%1/%99" trope was cheap demagoguery, and to this day reliably identifies skeptics as discreditable "liberarians," or "tea baggers," and "probably racists."

Occupy had no resources to distribute, and no ultimatum for the upper middle classes, so as a revolution it was a dud. Post-modern feminism has been a successful revolution (unless it's counter-revolutionary to say the revolution has ended already, comrade)because its resource was essentially sex, whereby male academics and administrators were convinced that being a "sensitive new age guy" would get them laid, and that critical theory was something more than gibberish.

This ushered in a generation of cultural studies programs that exist primarily to legitimize the victimization claims of groups who incorporate an anti-capitalist mandate into their demands for public money. Governments are cool with it because 1. they are non-violent demands for more revenue, and 2. government defers to those academics as "expert" policy advisers. It's a bit of a circle squirt.

BLM has the chance to be a successful revolutionary movement, much moreso than the Oregon ranch guys or some of the militias, but they haven't got the formula down yet. I don't want to help because all these movements have totalitarian aims, as from their perspective it's ok if it's a dictatorship of "good" people.

Have fun storming the castle!

What about the Soviets? I guess they offered political power.

This is not very smart political thinking, but great for making an entertaining argument on the Internet. Other than ISIS, none of the movements you listed could be considered revolutionary in terms of actually changing forms of government.

1. Occupy Wall Street was about the financial crisis in '08. People were angry that the banks got bailed out and everyone else just got (arguably) left out. It went away when the economy finally improved, though there is still enough anger to fuel at least one Presidential campaign.

2. Feminism is about equal jobs and rights for women (including in politics). While I'm sure some of the men had ulterior motives, alot more of them probably just listened to what the women were actually saying and realized that they had a point. Why should half the population be treated worse than the other half? All of your other complaints about a "pro-victim" academic curriculum, or whatever you're trying to say here, are just nonsense. Academics have always been weird. The politics behind universities are also weird, but ultimately small stakes and hardly "revolutionary". People don't face down the police and the army because their college doesn't have the right sort of Women's studies program.

3. BLM is about one segment of the population being prosecuted, hurt, and killed by police more than any other group of people. "Stop shooting us" is a powerful message, especially when it's backed up by numbers and video, but it's not revolutionary. I would also add that the problem has been made worse by the Drug war and the prison-industrial complex so what's surprising is that it hasn't happened sooner and with more people backing it.

4. Trump just wants to be President. His supporters are basically the anti-Occupy Wall Street crowd. They're angry about job prospects (especially since 2008), but they blame immigrants and Democrats (+ NAFTA, GATT, etc.) rather than rich bankers. It's not something we've seen at this level since the 1900s or earlier, but it's not new and they don't really seem to want to change anything politically with the way government works.

TL;DR: your thesis doesn't seem to hold up once you examine why each movement exists and what it's trying to do. Other than ISIS, but basically they're just Saddam Hussein's old posse with some new faces.

Well you seem to have lost the dispassionate detachment.

That's an excellent comment. Very insightful. I saw a rebuttal of the feminisation of education, but here's a good link that talks about the modern disparity. It's quite prejudiced (eg. Ignores a huge shift away from boys performance - which any honest person knows is true),

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?p...

This article even gets offended when girls aren't totally dominating by an overwhelming majority at ALL institutions. That's feminism.

It's strange how the article you linked doesn't actually mention feminism at all.

It's almost as though you don't know what you're writing about.

This is the sort of generic ideological tangent that adds little value and reliably turns a discussion into a flamewar. The tell-tale signs are (a) that there's nothing specific, no engagement with the concrete material of the post, no sign of curiosity—just blaring a pre-existing position, and (b) the casual dropping of a match ("how ISIS works, how feminism annexed academia") on the ground that was just soaked with petrol.

It doesn't matter what one blares for or against; please don't do it in the first place. HN threads are for conversation, not ideological soapboxes.

Colorful and imaginative writing. 75 years on, did it ever show to have a kernel of truth? It reads like a Just So Story that lets anyone call anyone else a Nazi in spirit.

I'e bet there are plenty of As to Es on both side of the Nazi divide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com