For the record I have witnessed people flying this flag in my city. There is no denying they were hate filled racists.
The debate could only occur as something like "at what point does this become serious". For example does it take newspapers to say so, or your social circle , or is it independent of external influence. Could all jokes be offensive in that way?
Do you think I'm a hate filled racist?
Regardless, you might not be a hate filled racist. But, a whole lot of hate filled racists use the Kekistan flag as a thinly-veiled symbol of hate filled racism. So, be aware: that's the message conveyed to the world at large when it is shown. Not Egyptian mythology.
I'm disappointed as hell that a secularist wanker like Carl Benjamin successfully co-opted the movement for crass political purposes. But I'm also annoyed that if I tried to re-appropriate the same symbology for the optimistic, metaphysics-exploring group of pranksters that meme'd it to relevance, I'd get called a bigot for associating with the wrong people.
Any group is defined by its lowest common denominators, which is why I and so many people I respect try to seek out smaller subcultures. The trouble I'm seeing is that when a large group like the nationalist right wants to co-opt a smaller but more effective movement, the larger group's rivals refuse to acknowledge any distinction between the different subcomponents, even if those subcomponents disagree on everything that's objectionable about the larger group to begin with. It's bad for the interesting subcultures and it's bad tactics for the larger ones to unite rather than divide their opposition.
Now I'd best go take my own advice and send happy thoughts to those members of the globalist left who like to garden.
Now it's fascinating to see the alt-right and fascist-lite communities, fundametally authority-based philosophies, try to co-opt ideas like chaos and "meme magick".
On one hand, it seems what started as a joke/critique of fascist ideology steeped i heavy irony, has moved on while being picked up unironically. On the other hand, it's getting ever harder to tell the difference between genuine beliefs and those parodying them, once obvious satire has gotten boring, and the only way to get a rise is to make a more convincing charicature of the target.
This has gotten completely insane.
If anyone has followed the Tesla/TESLAQ saga, at one point people on Twitter were decorating their avatars with clowns, mocking Elon. Well it turns out, according to the crazy left, that clowns are symbols for Nazism. Did you know that? I didn't. Tesla fans were literally accusing Tesla doubters of being White Supremacists, because clowns.
Here's your problem. You're following immature overexcited crazies on twitter and trying to extrapolate to "the world at large".
>Well it turns out, according to the crazy left, that clowns are symbols for Nazism.
Context matters. Is the "ok hand" gesture a symbol of white supremacy? Plainly not. But when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in court to the cameras, was it then a symbol of white supremacy? Of course it was. Such nuance is lost on some people (or rather it is not lost, and they know full well what they're meaning but fall back on that lame excuse as a cowardly cover).
>Tesla fans
>Tesla doubters
What is this immature, playground-level shit?
The same arguments appear on these very forums. Of course, you're probably above it.
>Such nuance is lost on some people
Once again, the enlightened ones explaining it to us deplorables. I think the nuance is lost on you: the symbol has become an ironic joke for these people.
>What is this immature, playground-level shit?
Calling people fans and skeptics of a business is "playground-level shit"? Boy, life must be tough when you're intellectually superior to everyone around you.
I don't even know how to reply to you... You didn't address any of my points, and tried to paint my reply as claiming I'm superior to you.
>> Tesla doubters
> What is this immature, playground-level shit?
Twitter.
Note that the person doesn't even have to agree with the politics of National-Socialist Germany or anything close it.
Cause now the one attacked has the burden of proof, otherwise s/he'll forever be known as Nazi.
In a nutshell, that's it.
...Being fascinated in the Kek phenomenon is very different from going to the trouble of obtaining a physical version of the flag of Kekistan and flying it in public. Do you do this?
If extremists start using a symbol, non-extremists have to accept that they might be associated with those extremists by continuing to use it.
>Wouldn't it be preferable to ignore the extremists so they don't get the symbol, and the symbol isn't ruined?
That's not how it works. They're using the symbol anyway, so it gets ruined anyway. Ignoring the Nazis would not have had prevented them from owning the meaning of the swastika in the Western world, to use the obvious example.
This quickly becomes insane, like with the 'OK' handsign, including the decades old 'circle game', neither of which has any connection to racism other than what desperate mainstream media portrays in search of clicks.
4chan trolling never had it so easy.
Those are also all minor blips on the cultural radar no one will care about in a few months time. What matters are the symbols with any cultural weight or staying power.
Because it will have been replaced with another symbol that is now suddenly being portrayed as racist due to click-bait fueled hysteria. Enough already.
This is exactly what these people want. There are campaigns to make the pride rainbow a hate symbol, the communist flag a hate symbol and no doubt numerous others.
You have fallen for it and they are laughing at you for that.
They? You are the one asserting other HN posters making a reasonable observation have 'fallen for it'.
What have I fallen for, exactly? What's the trick?
Some people already consider the pride rainbow and communist flags to be hate symbols. White supremacists do use coded language and shibboleths online. My comment was simply a statement of fact - the meaning of symbols can be affected by cultural and political influence and can change over time.
That some fools have tried to turn that fact into a meme, or that the media can easily be baited into a moral panic, doesn't make it any less true.
If you did understand it, you'd realize trying to stomp out or prevent what is going on is a fool's errand. You can't extinguish the idea; because on each success on your part, a metamorphosis will happen elsewhere, utilizing some other innocuous symbol.
You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.
Which is a rather ugly state of affairs, as it means society as a whole has already lost. It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.
There's a name for ascribing responsibility for one's own emotional states to other people. NEETs aren't inherently right wing, and if this were really a phenomenon involving an oppressed minority, where is the prosocial behavior aiming to evoke solidarity from other minorities? Deciding that the Nazis were right after all and the last 80 years of western history (or 160 for Confederacy LARPers) constitute an elaborate plot to make one group of people worse off is getting into delusional territory.
Undercurrents existed at one point, yet the flames were fanned by the increasing utilization of online media to increase visibility. One will absolutely not stop that.
Furthermore, the phenomena of placing blame on others for current emotional states isn't necessarily that far off. Mental/memetic contagion is a well known phenomena; it seems to be fundamental to how information transfer works.
The issue regarding contagion though, is that there is a model which currently exists with regard to thought and behavior that largely downplays the pliability of individuals and vulnerability to external influences on their reasoning. We see this philosophy in our justice system espoused time after time. X is a bad apple. X can never change. X should be removed from society. Preaching of this model weakens our most vulnerable populations. They end up never developing any sort of memetic immune system, or framework to guard against entirely rhetorical or emotional form of attack or influence.
Of course, that all assumes that there was a solid foothold gained in the first place development wise.
I personally didn't, though. I'm neither naive, nor am I a knee-jerk reactionary. But the underlying context is that idiots on the net pretending to be Nazis want Symbol A to be associated with hate, they're just doing so as a joke.
So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.
And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.
And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.
It's not 2008 anymore.
>You need to get to the root of the matter; which is apparently a marginalized segment of your population being squeezed to the point violence and hate seems the only way forward.
If by "get to the root of," you mean "sympathize with and concede to the agenda of," then no. They are not marginalized, nor is their violence and hate justified.
>It is infrequent that a population pushed to the brink of violence becomes anything more than a bloody footnote in the history books in need of some form of whitewashing for the future.
They haven't been pushed to the brink of violence. That narrative sprung, fully formed and fully clothed, as propaganda from the populist movements of the US and Europe, and in particular from the viral efforts around Trump's campaign, but they've always been around, and always been violent, and always been hateful.
You're sure acting like one. Albeit one who actually bothers to try to elucidate their case; which I do appreciate.
>So, yes, while some people are reacting like that, they're not entirely foolish for doing so, or entirely wrong, because hate groups will probably embrace Symbol A unironically, because they're part of the same community, and they're taking the piss at the trolls the way the trolls are taking the piss at everyone else, and it being a meme gives them plausible deniability.
Given. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with the dynamic aside from the fact you're still falling into the ideological trap I mentioned previously.
>And then someone shoots up a synagogue and burns down a mosque.
>And somehow it's still everyone's fault but those crazy kids on the chans with their wacky hijinks.
So everyone on the Chan's are psychopaths looking to shoot up mosques? Now who is starting to sound extremist?
>It's not 2008 anymore.
It most certainly isn't. In 2008, no one in their right mind would endorse outright suppressing discourse to the level people do today. I don't see that being the fault of "those crazy kids on the Chans". I see it as a result of an increasingly technologically savvy oppressive majority starting to tighten the noose around populations they consider problematic and not worth trying to rehabilitate/understand/integrate.. But hey, what do I know?
I've just been observing the phenomena in action for the last decade or so, and how whenever the Chan's are brought up by the mainstream media, it's as some sort of internet based cesspool of evil instead of as just what it is; a glorified bulletin board.
And is the letter 'x' really ruined? The swastika wasn't ruined for many Eastern cultures as its original meaning was widely known.
Also, a symbol can be ruined locally and not ruined globally. The swastika wasn't ruined for Eastern cultures, but it was definitely ruined for everyone but Nazis everywhere else. If Buddhists decided to get together to try to "reclaim" the swastika for its original peaceful intent, they would fail utterly, even though they have a perfectly rational and defensible case.
http://images.amcnetworks.com/ifccenter.com/wp-content/uploa...
It didn't work well, both because it was such an obviously forced meme and because they got so carried away that they burned a large number of sockpuppet accounts.
Tptacek's "It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists." made my brain spin in my skull and had me reading sewage-filled Wikipedia pages on a Saturday (of Souls, no less).
Not a bad thing at all, I've just not run into them in so long.
I don't know whether they're hiding or gone, it doesn't seem like a movement that would be big on recruiting so who knows?..
I figured someone just off-by-one'd 'lel' and thought it sounded funny. top kek
In the original Starcraft, the Korean version of "Hahaha" is "ㅋㅋㅋ". Owing to the fact that the English version of the game didn't support Korean text, the represented text of a Korean player saying "ㅋㅋㅋ" was "kekeke."
This became an early meme of sorts and caught on. Blizzard honored that in WoW by adding the kek/lol translation.
Context matters. Are you interested in the flag for those reasons? Then probably not. Are you flying it at a protest, in a faux innocent schoolboy sense of "noo, it's not a nazi flag, see, it's a kek flag, teehee'? Then probably yes.
It's hard to have too much sympathy for people who casually evoke "Kek" and then are shocked to learn people believe them to be white supremacists.
Having been away from the blatant flag waving for so long, it really jumps out at me now when I visit America occasionally. It’s not just that flags are a pride thing, it’s that they’re trying to draw attention to the pride a person has. But why should I care about their pride? Why force me to notice it?
The flag in USA appears to be used for 'brainwashing' (compliance training). "I swear allegiance to the flag" and all that, then they use the flag as the backdrop when politicians talk to you, and use it as a symbol wherever compliance without opposition is required?!
Union Flag flyers in the UK seem to be royalist or fascists; or possibly just sportsmen.
It is slightly evocative of a kind of gentle conservatism which has mild undercurrents of racism/xenophobia for some people because rural England is overwhelmingly white and slightly old fashioned. (People call this "Jam and Jerusalem")
Basically it reminds people of the village council from Hot Fuzz.
(Source: grew up in Dorset)
Completely separately to this is has a recent history (80s) where it can be seen almost like a Confederate Flag in some contexts. It was aggressively adopted by fascists and also the subject of a tabloid conspiracy where they suggested immigrants hated it so people started flying it as an anti immigrant "this is our land" type thing.
This isn't the context you saw it in, but it's impossible to completely disentangle this new meaning, everyone is aware of it.
The people of an area are mostly white and that makes them racist? Do you think black people in mostly-black areas are racist too or is it only racist to be white?
There is no way to get from my comment to your comment without bringing a mountain of your own pet grievances and preconceptions to the table.
As proper flag-based protests in the UK go, it'd be difficult to beat the bizarre sight of Cornish fishing boats and villages being covered with Canadian maple leaves back in the mid 90s when Cornish fishermen backed the Canadian side of a fishing dispute...
It used to mean (80s/90s) that you are on the right of politics and not keen on immigration.
However, because the UK does not have one Soccer team (England/Wales/Scotland/N.Ireland) If there is a major soccer tournament on the red cross is used to represent England team and support for that team - from a wider diverse proportion of the population.
It fluctuates between the two meanings, as things like Brexit ("We will rise up!" and Sport tournaments ("You are currently in England") happen.
People being unified within a nation is a very good thing. And being unified does not mean believing the same thing. There have always been extremely divisive politics in the US. You only need look at our money - the man on the $10 bill was killed by the vice president of the man on the nickel in a duel. But when people start to become mutually exclusive, or when a nation itself goes too far in one direction, or the other, it results in a sharp counter movement in the opposite direction. It's important that people ultimately view themselves as part of a whole, even if they might strongly disagree with one another. A flag is the most fundamental representation of that whole. The alternative tends to trend towards widescale conflict which rarely has a happy ending for anybody.
The Afd came in fourth in the last election (European Parliament, just about a month ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect...) with 11%. That's a far cry from taking over the nation, and they seem to be past their peak.
I also don't get the logic how strongly condemning the Holocaust is supposedly a reason for their success. How is your neighbours not loving the flag any justification for hating foreigners, women, and the free press?
Anyway, there are many other countries without Germany's specific history, a long tradition of jingoistic patriotism, and still they have far stronger far-right parties today, i. e. France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, the UK, Finland, Greece etc. etc.
It started with swastikas, but there are other, way more recent examples: Pepe started as a meme, "kek" started as a meme. They didn't stop there, of course, they have a bunch of failed examples: they've tried to own rainbow flags ("each race in its own space"), OK emoji ("it's okay to be white"), the term antifa (appropriated to some imaginary paramilitary group instead of an actual definition of anti-fascists), and even the fucking # (this one is especially dumb).
An OK emoji on its own doesn't mean anything. NZ shooter showing the OK sign in court does: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14142992.ece/AL...
So, when you look at the example of someone using these signs, you need to search through their history to see the context. They know their views are unacceptable by the general public, their entire deal is to be on the brick of plausible deniability and then laugh at people who call them out. That's why "everyone's a nazi" is a meme. They want the term "nazi" gone. It's not difficult to see why, since "nazi" was always an insult to fascists. Their attempt at appropriation of the term "antifa" is them trying to do the same for the complete opposite. It's also why they tend to have more profiles: one pretty obviously fascist, and multiple profiles in which they pretend that they're someone else (women, people of color, LGBT+ etc.) while spewing fascist talking points and retaining plausible deniability.
Outright banning just the symbols goes in their favor. In their recent crackdown, YouTube decided to remove almost every video showing swastikas. Of course, you'll rarely see a fascist openly using swastikas. It's those debunking them, laughing at them, and looking at their history that had their videos removed, while they go on and on with "YouTube is leftist and no leftist content ever gets removed".
No, the "fashtag" is a great example. The trolls are trying to exploit paranoia about dogwhistles. Their goal is not to make fascists use the hashtag, but to laugh at (hypothetical) people who avoid hashtags because of internet hearsay that it might be a secret nazi symbol.
It takes two to tango - this particular kind of trolling doesn't work (and didn't work in the case of the fashtag) when we relax a little about dogwhistles. I won't let them take away my feelsbadman.jpg.
No, that's exactly when it works. They aren't doing it to laugh at reactions as an end goal, the mockery exists entirely to delegitimize attention paid to racist/fascist dogwhistles, whose whole purpose is to get paid attention to by the target audience but ignored by the wider audience, which doesn't work when the wider audience is sensitized to and vigilant against them.
I think this is the same mechanism as in the euphemism treadmill[1], where it's not clear if it's better to avoid a word or to double down on it (but in a proud/positive way). There doesn't seem to be a consensus about how to deal with the euphemism treadmill either.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
This guy initially tried to play dumb and play it off as maybe-Buddhist but didn't scrub his social media of holocaust memes.
I didn’t interpret it as a claim that all persons who have liked that flag are “hate filled racists”.
You are now aware that this is a copy of a nazi flag. If you decide to raise this flag today, I would have to say yes.
If I told you now there is a secret hand signal white supremacists are using then tomorrow you begin using it, then I would safely be able to assume the same.
> had no idea it was a palette swapped version of a nazi flag
It is not very difficult to see. If your love of this flag is "piss people off" then maybe you are willingly blind.
Genuine question.
And you know this how, exactly?
To the left, everyone with a different opinion is a racist or Nazi. It's losing all meaning.
I met them in person and spoke to them.
#thathappen
They did in fact claim the flag was a joke and that they were flying it out of "irony" and to "piss off liberals". They didn't overtly express racists views. But the language they used and their dress leaves no doubt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97FGbbTzJZ4 (subtitles, Interview from 3:54 onword)
Just assuming everyone with a Kekistanflag is a Nazi is making it to easy on yourself. Sure seeing something as black and white is easy, but if you work under an assumption that isnt correct your aimed result will also naturally be different then expected.
edit: And the reaction is telling. Not trying to understand your enemy is one of the stupid things anyone can do and a core reason why our society goes to shit hard. You assume what they want and they assume what you want. You can act as if they are all Nazis and guess what, after a while they will act that way. I doubt you could have made the far right a better present then the behavior of the past years.
OP described traits they carried and presented to the world, nothing more.
In my case, I wouldn’t consider that kind of person my enemy. I pity them, though. I think it’s sad, and it the traits come out of pain and a life not examined with honesty.
The alt right sells victimhood as a reason to be part of their in group. It’s constantly pushed that white males are under attack. They aren’t.
By now the list of things that can lead to expulsion shaming and isolation grew. And dont get me wrong, I dont think its necessary to discuss about the approach being justified or not. But If you are trying to exclude and shame large parts of the population, the effectiveness of that tactic decreases rapidly. What it does is it creates an ingroup effect among the people at risk of public shaming and it normalizes formerly untouchable topics. It reduced the effectiveness of the tactic massively. You can see it in Trumpvoters and recently the appointment of Kavanaugh as a supreme court judge. Wanna gues for how many being called a bigot, racist, sexist or a Nazi is nothing but a badge of honor? A common phrase is "If xyz means I am a racist, then maybe I am. They called yzx the same." We have large parts of society for which political corectness or social justice are derogatory terms. We have, not just in the US but also in Europe, a rapid rise of far right groups who utilize the approach of isolation and shaming to create ingroup effects. In Europe its manly bound to the refugee crisis a few years ago. Where the far right succeeded in mobilizing around "What you are no longer allowed to say". And what you can witness is people getting suckered in with critique on the lacking organization to deal with the refugee influx and once they are in they easily fall back to the groups far right rhetoric on other issues. Its especially obvious if you look at interviews with people in Pegida rallies in Germany. They answer with their opinion on broad questions why they are here and fall back to the groups rhetoric on topics they havent thought about yet. And once they articulated that stance in front of a camera or towards their friends and family most people feel rightfully committed.
Using the tactic of expulsion and shaming against large parts of society is incredibly dangerous. In Germany we are speaking about 15 to 20% voters for a new far right group, who will likely become the strongest party in many east German states. And I am sorry to remind you, but in the US the group is currently the majority party placing the president. To reiterate on the point, you cant exclude the majority in a country. What you are doing is normalizing racism, sexism and being a straight up Nazis.
The expulsion and shaming tactic was an absolute last resort against people where trying to argue with them was seen as an pointless endeavor. You dont talk to to Nazis, you show up in force on their every last rally and get them fired from their jobs. The oldschool Antifa approach. And its a tactic you have to be very careful in applying. Leaving aside aside a critique on this deeply authoritarian approach, what you are doing is giving up hope to convince these people, you are trying to rear/educate/train them instead by negative feedback. If that is your tactic, you better be sure that you are powerful enough to actually do that. Which isnt the case currently by a large margin. It might work in individual sectors but not with society as a whole. Trying to exclude and shame large parts of society is pushing for a power struggle with the confidence that you are powerful enough to come up on top. Thats simply not the case, quite the contrary. (And the far right is aware of that, simply take a look at the documentary above and Jordan Petersons comment on Identity politics https://youtu.be/97FGbbTzJZ4?t=1593 or more precisely 26:48)The tactic is not just unproductive, its actively counterproductive. You are not just creating a strong coherent group with exactly the attributes you wanted to get rid of, you are also alienating quite a few of potential allies by utilizing this authoritarian and anti free speech approach. Its the whole problem of the urban guerilla again. Focusing on the justification for a tactic and ignoring its real world effect. You simply dont get points for being in the right.
>The alt right sells victimhood as a reason to be part of their in group. It’s constantly pushed that white males are under attack. They aren’t.
Which doesnt matter if they can convince their voterbase that its happening. And a broad approach of exclusion and shaming works to convince these people that exactly this is happening.
And you shouldnt kid yourself, while large parts of "the left" is retreating more and more into echo chambers forgetting how to actually convince people instead of forcing adherence, the far right is out there doing exactly that. You just have to look towards groups like the Identitarian movement who are creating a vast array of easy to access material and discussion guidelines on how to convince people. Hoping to solve that by banning hatespeech is insane.