Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

How is he fearmongering? A white nationalist uprising is quite literally relatively recent European history, and resulted in the torture and slaughter of tens of millions.

Before Al Queda, the West's biggest fear was domestic white nationalist terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.

EDIT: It's very disturbing that so many people don't understand what the Nazi platform was all about. The supremacy of the "Aryan Race" was literally a platform of the Nazi party from the beginning. The subjugation of Jews was a part of the party platform from the beginning. The use of paramilitary squads to enforce ideological purity was a part of the party from the beginning. And it just got worse from there.

View on HN

The battleground was fascism vs. capitalism vs. communism. Fascism was, at it's core, reactionairy to the rise of communism and it's dishonest to describe it simply as "white nationalism".

Furthermore, for a "white nationalist" movement they spent a whole lot of time killing and oppressing other "whites".

Fascism was not "reactionary". It was, in many ways, a sibling ideology to 'communism', but with glorification of violence, a broadly "irrational" (i.e. explicitly anti-intellectual, and almost relishing in the use of blatant propaganda as a means of influence) attitude to mass politics and either nationalist or (in the more extreme Nazi version) racially-supremacist ideology as major selling points. "White nationalist" is somewhat inaccurate as you point out but "reactionary" is totally wrong, and Soviet propaganda is the only reason why some people today still think of fascism as "conservative" or "reactionary".

> Fascism was not "reactionary"

Fascists gained power in Italy, Germany, and Spain as a direct result of anti-communist sentiment (and in the case of Germany, a failed communist revolution). Mussolini's early writings were directly proposing nationalism as the answer to communism's failures. Everywhere fascism had success it was because it was pitted against the threat of communism. I don't know how the rise of Fascism was anything but reactionary.

I agree that facism's rise was tied to nationalism's rise.

But we're talking about the root causes of WWII. And one of the Nazi party's specific goals when invading Poland was to exterminate the Jews and Roma (Gypsy) populations of Europe.

> And one of the Nazi party's specific goals when invading Poland was to exterminate the Jews and Roma (Gypsy) populations of Europe.

Are you sure about that? Wasn't "the final solution" proposed significantly later?

It is absolutely reactionary, but it's a reaction against enlightenment thinking. This explains many of its key attributes: Use of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, and rejecting egalitarianism.

It's also why it's not easily dispatched by enlightenment thinking... it survived those battles back in the 20th century and ultimately had to be put down with exercises of power (often military, sometimes social, rarely diplomatic).

They didn't think of them as "white".

Well, they didn't think of anyone as "white" in a meaningful way. They were primarily concerned with Pan-Germanicism.

> They were primarily concerned with Pan-Germanicism.

If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities. What was it about those people that made them not fit the category of "German"?

The answer from clearly documented history is that the Nazis systematized the categorization of humans on their deeply flawed model of the Aryan "race", and singled out those who didn't fit for subjugation or extermination.

Conversely they also planned to further "purify" their own people by planning to subject Scandinavian populations to forced interbreeding programs upon conquering them, and kidnapping "Aryan" children from neighboring countries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn

https://allthatsinteresting.com/lebensborn

There is also historical conflicts between ethnic Germans and other ethnic groups. The Nazi's had a plan to exterminate most Slavs which includes Poles, Russians and Ukrainians after they won the war.

See Generalplan Ost.

Slavs were explicitly not German according to the Nazi's definition. However, they were interested in re-absorbing ethnic Germans from Slavic territories.

> If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities.

Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German. Re: disabilities, it's a mix of rabid utilitarianism (they were called "useless eaters") and a belief that disabilities stemmed from corrupted bloodlines (hence the term mongoloid -- it was a popular theory that retardation was the result of Europeans/Asian intermarriage).

> Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German.

What defined German ethnicity?

Clearly it wasn't the ability to speak the language, or being descended from many generations of ancestors living in Germany, otherwise the Jews and Roma both would have been considered German.

Clearly there was something else attributed to them that didn't fit the definition of "German". It was that they weren't considered racially German. Race is literally what the Nuremberg Laws were about:

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

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

Given the preponderance of clear historical evidence for the Third Reich's racially based rationale for its actions, one wonders why would anyone try to water it down to the more innocuous seeming rationale of "German ethnicity".

I'm not sure I understand your contention. Pan-Germanicism was about uniting ethnic Germans. Are you implying that there's no ethnic difference between a German and an Ashkenazi Jew or a Romani?

No, I'm saying that the way that the Nazis defined German identity was their biological model of "racial" classification, and not a cultural feature like ethnicity. The Nazis then (as today), have an explicitly biological notion of identity, not cultural.

I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.

Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?

How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".

The point I was making above was that Nazis were concerned about German-ness (well, Aryan-ness) not whiteness. Classifying them as white supremacists is generally incorrect.

The problem with that argument is that the Nazis considered the German "race" to be the paragon of "whiteness", and other less-German white peoples, like European Jews, to be degraded. They absolutely conflated "whiteness" with their idealized German identity.

Fascism started as a reaction to modernist political ideas that developed out of the enlightenment (like egalitarianism) and existential concerns like the perception of national decline (which fascism usually blames on decadence and libertine behaviors). It may have taken hold due to anti-communist sentiment, but that's separate from its philosophical underpinnings (which for fascism are a bit shaky)

Communism is problematic to them because it tries to eliminate social hierarchies deemphasizing national identity. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is problematic to them because of its (perceived) amoral decadence and its ability to empower "undesirable" "outsider" individuals to garner power inside a nation through wealth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com