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Comment by borkt | Hacker News Reader

I drew a poignant yet very off color political cartoon the moment the scandal dropped showing German Sociopath 1940s with a gas chamber, side by side with German Sociopath 2010s with VW TDI’s tailpipe connected to a hose going into the same building, the new version with a sign above saying earth.

I know the comparison is dark and compares a targeted ethnic genocide with indiscriminate killing, but the truth is that the damage diesel exhaust does to the human body is truly hard to overstate. To be pushing out 40x the legal limit for years while smugly marketing yourself as so much better than all other diesel vehicles is just a level of evil that immediately drew the comparison for me

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Do you have a link to the comic?

I think it would do well in today's climate, but you definitely need to get rid of the "German" and replace it with something less general, maybe "Nazi"? (It works because VW actually did work with Nazis in the 40s). Not every German worked for the specific team at VW that propagated this crisis, just like not every German even knew about the camps, so they don't deserve to be targeted by a broad brush like that.

It's hard to decouple "Nazi" from "German." Nazi is the native language abbreviation for National Socialist German Workers Party. The nationality is baked into the name in a very deliberate way. Sad to report, the party and its beliefs were widely supported among German citizens at the time. Its grip was broken by catastrophic defeat followed by occupation.

(To their credit Germans faced up to their history in a way that is relatively rare among nations. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is just one of many examples.)

The abbreviation would be nsdap, not nazi. Nazi includes everybody with that ideology, not just party members

German abbreviations work differently. You typically pick 2-3 significant syllables. "Nazi" comes from NAtionalsoZIalistische deutsche arbeiterpartei. Usual pattern is more like GEheime STAatsPOlizei = "Gestapo", which picks the first syllables of significant words.

As to the second point, in Germany at least Nazi refers to party members or close adherents like Neonazis. The catchall term is usually Faschisten (fascists). Americans use the term Nazi far more loosely, to the extent it has lost much of its descriptive value.

Not all abbreviations work like that, see the Wikipedia entry for the party: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalsozialistische_Deuts...

Nazi is the abbreviation for Nationalsozialist.

It’s true that it’s used interchangeably but the official abbreviation is nsdap.

Thanks, your point about Nazi being really short for Nationalsozialist seems correct.

To be honest I don't think I've ever heard anyone say NSDAP out loud in German. Perhaps I should get out more.

They faced up to it because the Allies forced them through denazification.[0] Same thing we did in Iraq.[1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification

I'm not sure if you're aware that mobile gas vans with their exhaust piped in were used extensively by the Nazis, or whether you'd only heard of Zyklon-B and concentration camp gas chambers.

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

"The gas vans were specifically designed to direct deadly exhaust fumes via metal pipes into the airtight cargo compartments, where the intended victims had been forcibly stuffed to capacity"

They were used to kill "Jews, Poles, Romani people, mentally ill people, and prisoners".

There were two points I was making, that the analogy was more on the nose than maybe the parent comment was aware, and that it was not just "ethnic genocide".

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