The shape of a 21st century I don’t want to see
antipope.org
antipope.org
So it's almost illusory. Am I paranoid, or is the world really walking down a dark path towards....what?
Another thesis which basically supports Charlie's is: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/25/13-cri...
Our existing dominant forms of escapism, video games & TV, have accomplished this fairly well already.
It is just change. It was hard for the world to adapt to the idea of nuclear weapons, and before that the awesome power of mechanized war.
These are interesting examples because in both cases society only adapted to the new technology after it had been deployed to catastrophic or near-catastrophic effect. What is going to be the panopticon equivalent of WWI? I fear we're in for some interesting times.
It's very much a "people in charge" vs "people not in charge" rather than "this political ideology" vs "that political ideology"
Did you imagine in 2006 when you first joined Facebook that some day it would impact your immigration status? Likely not.
So going back to what you said yes there are lots of good people with good intentions, but along the way to creating our problems have been good people with good intentions.
What I do think is unlikely/hyperbolic is the global "soft genocide" and organized "culling" that he describes in the post.
I'm not much for Utopians or Dystopians, they're always trying to sell me something.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/white-supremacist-rallies-i...
(it's a sad sign of the times that "Nazis must be and should be stopped by force" is somehow seen as a controversial statement. Sometime, ask a WWII vet if they had any second thoughts about killing Nazis, let alone just giving one a black eye.)
What Antifa does may be illegal, but it's also morally correct. A lot of people have problems with confusing those two concepts.
Keeping torch-wielding supremacists from terrorizing innocents is not morally equivalent with those doing the terrorizing, even if both use violence.
It's not like Antifa is going into people's houses and beating up 50% of the country. If you're marching under torches and hate symbols you don't get much sympathy from me when someone gives you a black eye for it.
Antifa doesn't make you march around with torches and swastikas, you chose to march under the symbols that have been used for centuries for symbolizing intent to murder, lynch, and exterminate "lesser" human beings. Hopefully at that point most people would have a think about "Hans... are we the baddies? We're marching around with torches..."
There are a lot of people who are susceptible to fascist/"alt-right" slogans and thought, even if they're not the ones currently going out in the streets and attacking people. Some of them can be convinced to go a bit farther. "Hey guys, bring tiki torches to the rally tonight!" and so on. It's an active phenomenon with the alt-right to radicalize and recruit additional members - they call it "red-pilling" (after the MRA thing, although many right-wing groups use the term).
It's not dissimilar to the radicalization tactics that Muslim extremists use, which shouldn't be surprising - providing a home and an ideology for the disaffected is a highly effective radicalization tactic.
http://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/red-pill/
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nnk3bm/how-to-tell-if-you...
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/05/the-online-radicalization...
Remember, the actual Nazis were a minority in Germany too, and that took decades to build up.
Out of sight for the first world (or parts of it in good neighborhoods) -- very much in sight for those dying....
EDIT: main point being, I think it's a very biased article with little evidence of their claims. Sure, I think there are some bad things going on, and that we should take care of those, and that society should be less complacent, but forecasting doom and a certain group of people as being ruthless is a bit far out.
They forget this because it is trivially, obviously, crashingly false
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists...
https://www.indy100.com/article/nazi-socialist-right-wing-wh...
"Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism."
-- Adolf Hitler, August 15 1920
"The common good before the individual good. (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz)"
-- Adolf Hitler, February 1920
"Since we are socialists, we must necessarily also be antisemites because we want to fight against the very opposite: materialism and mammonism… How can you not be an antisemite, being a socialist!"
-- Adolf Hitler, August 15 1920
"Because it seems inseparable from the social idea and we do not believe that there could ever exist a state with lasting inner health if it is not built on internal social justice, and so we have joined forces with this knowledge. "
-- Adolf Hitler, August 15 1920
"There are no such things as classes: they cannot be. Class means caste and caste means race."
-- Adolf Hitler, April 12 1922
"To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil. "
-- Adolf Hitler, 1931
"There is a difference between the theoretical knowledge of socialism and the practical life of socialism. People are not born socialists, but must first be taught how to become them."
-- Adolf Hitler, October 5 1937
"We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
-- Adolf Hitler, May 1 1927
Sources, so you can read these actual quotes yourself:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Adolf.Hitler.Quote....
As an added bonus I also would like to point out that Mr. Hitler hated "the Left" (as in Marxist Socialism, but mainly because he didn't believe in "their kind of Socialism") as much as "the Right" (Liberalism/Libertarianism). He saw both as enemies of the German people. So why both classical liberals and libertarians alike are branded as "fascists" or "national socialists" these days is beyond me, because it is historically false.
Secondly, I would like to point out that I am not at all a fan of Hitler and Nazi Germany but I do like to spend a lot of time studying history as it happened, and I still very much hope others will find the time to do the same aswell. If only to avert the biggest disaster Western civilization has ever faced in the near future (or let me put it otherwise: I agree with Charlie that a devastating event will happen in the near future. I disagree however that the Alt-Right, and solely the Alt-Right, will be the cause of this event. Because entoxicating extremism is literally anywhere and everywhere on the political spectrum these days).
No, it's not, though (especially early on) the mixed salad of policy proposals from different sources they adopted as a platform did include some originating in socialist movements.
Nazism was an right-wing authoritarian populist movement much like Trumpism, and much like Trumpism some of its early appeal to the working class came from some superficially left-wing prescriptions decontextualized from their ideological roots.
> is entirely left-wing to modern standards
Even less true.
> I have actual textual evidence from the man himself to proof it:
No, you have quotes from Hitler that demonstrate that he tried to use appeal to association with socialism as a sales technique. It's not all uncommon for leaders of authoritarian movements to use the rhetorical association with different ideologies than their own as a promotional technique, as hinted at in the “Democratic” in the name of the former German Democratic Republic and the current Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
> Hitler hated "the Left" (as in Marxist Socialism, but mainly because he didn't believe in "their kind of Socialism") as much as "the Right" (Liberalism/Libertarianism).
Classical liberalism is not the right, though it overlaps the part of the right that Hitler opposed in that some portion of it (basically, the part sometimes distinguished now as neoliberalism plus that labelled right-libertarianism) is part of the 20th-21st Century center-right. The Nazis, Fascists, and similar movements were novel far right groups with some similarities to classical conservatism (but incorporating modernist elements from classical liberalism, and corporatist elements various sources across the spectrum, peppered with populist rhetoric.)
And both are based on a form of Socialism. The DDR was a satellite state of the Soviet Union and the DPRK is based around Juche, which also is a form of Socialism. Another example would be "The People's Republic of China" which makes it sound like China is a democracy (demos = people) while it is absolutely not.
Also the economic engine of Nazi Germany was centered around a planned economy for the common good (or at least, "the common good" according to the Party); an economic system which can only be found in Socialist countries.
> Nazism was an right-wing authoritarian populist movement much like Trumpism
False, because "Trumpism" doesn't want to end capitalism as Trump is a businessman himself who loves capitalism. Hitler hated capitalism and wanted to get rid of it. Also authoritarian? Since when did Trump dissolve nearly all civil liberties in the US, and made all political parties except the GOP illegal? Because Hitler did exactly that, right after the Reichtstag fire and the Enabling Act. Trump sometimes does some pretty awkward shit, but until now he didn't do ANYTHING closely resembling to what those people and freedom hating assholes in Nazi Germany did.
(I say this as a sympathizer and voter of left-wing movements and parties.)
"First they came for the Socialists, Then they came for the Trade Unionists" sounds to me more like eliminating the left. When in that sequence did they come for the factory owners? Oh right, they didn't. Unless the owner was Jewish.