George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf | Hacker News Reader

George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

gutenberg.net.au

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We belatedly changed the URL from https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein... to a copy of Orwell's text that doesn't shamelessly bowdlerize him. I mean, really—Orwell?

I'm referring to the omission of this passage: "I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.

... that several commenters pointed out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32135108

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32133675

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32130897

All: in the future, if you run across something like this, could you please send us a heads up at hn@ycombinator.com? We can't read all the articles or comments, but we do read all the emails, usually within a few hours. We will be especially grateful if you point out a flaw as massive as this one.

Edit: I couldn't resist diffing the bowdlerized text with the gutenberg.net.au one and the eliding of that bit is the only difference between the two, other than punctuation.

Edit 2: it turns out that bookmarks.reviews is guilty only of blogspam. They got the thing from https://www.openculture.com/2014/08/george-orwell-reviews-me..., which links to https://carnegiecouncil-media.storage.googleapis.com/files/v... (via https://boingboing.net/2014/08/17/orwells-review-of-mein-kam...). That looks like a decades-old copy of the 1968 edition, edited by Orwell's widow. I doubt that it was she who dropped that sentence—I bet it was whoever reprinted the essay. Considering that Orwell specifically wrote "I should like to put it on record", that took some brass, or lack of it.

The degree to which Orwell practiced intellectual honesty is an endless marvel. If there's one thing we should learn from anybody, it's that from him.

So, there's a lot to be said about Hitler and fascism and propaganda and all the other fascinating topics Orwell brings up here, but I'd just like to point out how routinely excellent Orwell's analysis is. Of course I mostly see the best bits brought out and dusted off, no doubt he did mediocre stuff as well, but it is worth noticing how often it turns out that Orwell, nearly a century on, still has plenty in his writing worth revisiting.

Any recommendations for other writings and analyses by Orwell?

Homage to Catalonia is his highly personal analysis of the events of the Spanish Civil War. It isn't at all comprehensive, but very plain spoken and perceptive and helps frame all of his fictional work.

His description of trench warfare and hand to hand combat is horrifying. I understood his views on communism better after reading the book.

The words “communism” and “socialism” have particularly slippery modern meanings - they depend where you are internationally, in time, and your partisanship. I have read a lot of what he wrote, and I am still unsure what he exactly meant by socialism. I find his essay ‘On Nationalism’ difficult to follow, although very interesting.

I love all his writings about his own experiences, because his observations are so exceptionally well written, with the foreignness of early last century, plus the familiarity of his daily life. He then often writes later in those books about his political thoughts, which can be a bit more difficult to read e.g. Road to Wigan Pier.

The US is the only place where the word "Socialism" isn't used properly. The rest of the world understands it perfectly well.

Not really, no. Most of Europe isn't using it properly, either - those "democratic socialist" parties aren't socialist.

to add to that look at what the letters USSR and DDR stood for...

IN case no one remembers

United Socialist Soviet Republic

Deutsch Democratic Republic

both not word plays on Democracy but word plays on social theory and what stateless means.

USSR is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I'm not sure what you mean by "word plays on social theory and what stateless means". Both are perfectly descriptive labels; they just lie.

Would you argue that the French socialist party is socialist for example? What do you claim “socialism” means?

> I have read a lot of what he wrote, and I am still unsure what he exactly meant by socialism.

Depends what you mean by “exactly”. Having a precise vision of everything Orwell puts under the “socialism” umbrella, is of course impossible, but at the same time, there are things that are clear: when he says socialism he definitely means means no capitalism, that is no bourgeoisie sitting atop the society by the virtue of being the owning class.

At that time in Europe "socialism" basically just meant "good". It was a stand in for a government where you care about each other.

Then there's the more "theoretical" definition of socialism. In the US it might seem bewildering why Orwell considered the anarchists of that war to be the "true socialists" (despite Orwell being a communist, he had a lot of support for them). But the truth is that both anarchism and communism far pretty well within the boundaries of socialist theory historically. And that's quite evident when you think about the fact that the final goal of both of these theories is a stateless society

What Orwell wrote about the Communists in Spain would not lead anyone to place him among them.

That what he wrote was written after he knew from personal experience the reality of Communism, which converted him from a supporter of Communism into an opponent of it.

There was a infamous forgotten year, were europes "on party line" communists (also in england) cheered on germany, because that was a ally of moscow then.

Those who hated on orwell, really showed their colors back then. Totalitarians, just with different decorations.

Orwell wasn’t a communist. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Not sure if this is a joke, but you are equating communism with totalitarianism, which is the opposite

I think you're referring to Communism-the-abstract-concept, whereas Orwell and OP are referring the Communism-what-actually-happened-everywhere-we-tried-it. The former is a utopic ruler-less society, the latter ends up being a totalitarian terror state brutalizing its impoverished citizens.

The very point of Orwell was recognizing this, and the fundamental similarity across totalitarian ideologies.

Read that recently. I'd advice anyone who reads it and isn't familiar with the time period to at least get an overview of the factions involved. Worst part of the book IMHO (though it wouldn't be fair to blame Orwell for that).

Other than what? This? 1984 and Animal Farm?

I saw the (?) cartoon Animal Farm on elementary school.

Politics and the English Language, Animal Farm, 1984

Down and Out in Paris and London.

This one is very unfairly ignored all too often. The details may have changed since then (not too much, though), but everything is spot on. I remember reading this living between jobs on a couple of quid a day in a hostel and thinking that the similarities really were uncanny. Except for the work houses, luckily this bit is gone from Western Europe.

What really struck me was how plain it was that laws and rules that are supposed to apply equally to everyone often have in-built repressive aspects, like the fact that you could get fined and jailed for sleeping rough. This is wonderfully summarised by a quote that I found only later: “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

So yes, Down and out is a must read, just as much as Animal farm and 1984.

It's an excellent book - my particular favourite part being the bit about being a plongeur at "Hotel X".

- Christopher Hitchens (possibly THE biggest expert on Orwell in the late 20th century, and a great intellectual IMHO) on "Why Orwell Matters" + Q&A (2002) [0].

- Why I write [1]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-FfrkGiWQ

[1]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Perhaps skip 12 minutes 30 into the YouTube video to where he starts talking about George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) if you want to avoid a long-winded intro.

Counterpoint: Christopher Hitchens was an expert on sophistry in the manner of a champion high school debater and doesn't deserve the reflected glory of being noted as "the" Orwell expert. Orwell was rather more courageous, incisive, intelligent, subtle, humane and kind. Hitchens is not in the same intellectual league let alone the same ballpark. Hitchens sucessfully hitched his wagon to Orwell's intellectual greatness for popularity and debating points but when you scratch the surface there seems to be less there than we'd like.

Everyone has the right to a different opinion than me on Hitchens and I think my politics are probably closer to (late stage) Hitchens than Orwell and I think I'm surely no more a great intellectual than Hitchens. Orwell really was a great intellectual, this is clear to me even if I think he was wrong about a bunch of stuff. Where I agree with Hitchens it remains lightweight by comparison.

> Christopher Hitchens was an expert on sophistry in the manner of a champion high school debater and doesn't deserve the reflected glory of being noted as "the" Orwell expert.

I love Hitchens, and agree with you 100%.

Since nobody else has brought them up yet, I would recommend ALL of Orwell's Essays, which can be had in various editions.

See “ESSAYS AND OTHER WORKS: A selection of essays, articles, sketches, reviews and scripts written by Orwell. This material remains under copyright in the US and is reproduced here with the kind assistance of the Orwell Estate.”

“Politics and the English Language” is a particular delight.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I’ll have to read them. Some of the most fascinating ideas I’ve come across were in some “Essays by Some Great Writer Known For A Single Novel.”

And it’s fun because I’m one of may a few hundred people on the planet to have read them.

Shooting an elephant is a brilliant short essay from his time as a police officer in Burma. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I think about this piece often after reading it for the first time roughly a year ago. The way he paints the picture really stuck with me, a very vivid depiction.

"The Freedom of the Press". It was meant to be a preface to the "Animal Farm", but ended up getting effectively censored (by publishers, not by the government) for decades.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

What I found striking is how much of the landscape described there is familiar aside from the names.

"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."

"But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice."

"The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

What's even more striking is that it's a socialist writing this. I'm far left myself and I'm with Orwell on this subject, but I see very few fellow lefties who are; as a whole, they're far more interested in deriding "freeze peach". Indeed, the quotes above would likely be quite sufficient by themselves to "cancel" Orwell if he were alive today - and I didn't even bring up the meatier parts where he e.g. defends Moseley's due process rights.

One of my favorites is The Road to Wigan Pier, which investigates living conditions of the British working classes. He fairly deftly draws a line between wages and social reforms in part 1, and why the working class largely don't identify as socialists in part 2. Fantastic read.

Yes, although in The Road to Wigan Pier you really see how socially conservative Orwell was. His complaints about socialists weren't just that many of them were well-off people out of touch with the real problems of the working class (in which he had a point), but also that some of them were vegetarians, some birth-control advocates, some didn't drink alcohol or smoke, and (although Orwell says this indirectly) some of them were gay. Orwell claimed that the working class didn't like these traits, but really, it was Orwell himself who didn't. His imagined working class was basically himself if he had been a factory worker rather than a writer.

Isn't the working class almost always more socially conservative than the middle and upper classes? It's certainly true of our time. AFAICT his analysis still rings true.

Well, that's debatable. Yes, certainly right wing populists (who are often funded by billionaires and/or are so themselves) like to claim that working class people are socially conservative and that the "elite" are the ones that are trying to instigate social change, but there seems to be quite a mix of social views at all strata of society.

It's very hard to qualify, I suppose. We just have our anecdotes.

I've definitely noticed that the more formal education people have had - and the better they've done in that system - the less socially conservative they are. I live in a rural working class area but work remotely with middle class professionals from big cities, there's a pretty distinct divide in social attitudes.

As for attitudes in the upper class, I can't speak to that.

to borrow the parlance of the venture capitalists, Orwell would be against the “lifestyle” socialists. It’s pretty rational if he wanted to see his movement grow into a sort of monopoly and not be stunted by infighting.

Indeed, if you add in the (more impoverished) rural classes, your thesis would still be stronger, for these are socially conservative by virtue of not being as educated or sophisticated as the urbanites.

The series "As I please" is very good.

I highly recommend "On Politics and English."

https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

One of my favourites is very short (but not sweet): https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I only started drinking tea a few years ago and found this advice to stand the test of time.

"Facing Unpleasant Facts" is a fantastic collection of his essays. Highly recommended.

Down and Out in London and Paris is a great, great memoir. It's 50% Kitchen Confidential, 50% tramping in England during the Depression. I really can't communicate how readable and fun it is.

Yes.

There are spots where Orwell gets convoluted. His famous and impactful (on me, lol) essay "On Nationalism" includes a confusing/backtracking carve-out for (presumably) Churchillian patriotism. But I think this is the nature of such ideas. They aren't absolute, falsifiable, scientific ideas. Just observations about people.

Why did you see this as confusing and convoluted? My interpretation is that he's saying the human psyche requires this and if a tame and healthy version of patriotism and national pride isn't provided by the centrist elements in society, then that vacuum will be filled by a populist demagogue who weaponizes it. It seems debatable but highly plausible.

.. and he is absolut on point, it just hurts to admit, that those who strife for a idealized version of humanity, might feed the darker side while doing so.

I am not the person you are reacting to, and while I guess your interpretation of Orwell's intent is correct, Churchill's patriotism can at most be considered tame and healthy when directly compared to Hitler's. It was deeply rooted in a sense of superiority that not only nowadays is considered extreme, but even then (not by all obviously).

I am he, lol.

Agreed, and it's explicitly that British superiority which Orwell defends in the essay, carving out for it a special place separate from "nationalism" that communism, Trotskyism, Irish republicanism, zionism, etc. are condemned for.

I kind of like the controversial nuance though. It shows that these ideas aren't supposed to be scientific, absolute and such.

It's interesting that this version is an edited version, and unclear when the changes occurred.

The full version[1] includes this:

> I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.

In the linked version that is represented by "..." which is easy to miss

[1] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

That is quite an enormous omission! It is kind of unsurprising though, because misinterpreting Orwell is nearly an art form.

His "Wells, Hitler and the World-State" is probably better: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws

Thank you, that's a great site.

> Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice

This fact has been the downfall of every utopian ideology, and ignoring creates a vacuum that fascist regimes readily fill.

I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure.

Maybe we should stop looking to government for that?

“There should be a science of discontent”

Many modern political problems stem from people needing something to struggle for and other people fighting against it.

There’s also a lot of shaping going on where if people weren’t so upset about X they’d realize Y was a huge problem so let’s distract them permanently with X.

> Many modern political problems stem from people needing something to struggle for and other people fighting against it.

Reminds me of the lines in Fight Club: "We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives."

I'm not sure if that precise quote is in the book, but it's certainly in the movie and it echoes your sentiment and those above.

And the saying “Good times create weak men”.

And it’s true. You often see a growing discontent among wealthy societies where everything is taken care of.

People need purpose in what they do and “my purpose is to fight for the survival of my country” is a pretty compelling one to many people.

> wealthy societies where everything is taken care of.

Which ones would they be? The one that I live most of my time in, Norway, does not seem to have growing discontent, yet it is quite definitely closer to "everything is taken care of" than others, such as the UK, where "growing discontent" seems to be a thing.

So unless you can name those that "You often see" I don't think the idea can be taken seriously.

> The one that I live most of my time in, Norway, does not seem to have growing discontent

The mass shooting and terrorism rate there increasing seems like a reasonable counter to that idea. Along with steady suicide rates despite massively increasing spending on it.

> The mass shooting

singular

> and terrorism rate there increasing

er, no?

> Along with steady suicide rates

So not growing, then.

I don't think anyone's going to argue Norway has solved society but let's not twist things to try to fit someone's off the cuff head canon.

Pretty sure it's meant to be parsed as "(mass shooting and terrorism) rate": that is, he's claiming that the rate of mass-shootings and the rate of terrorist atrocities are both increasing. I don't know whether either part of that is true, but if it's wrong what's wrong isn't that "mass shooting" is singular.

(And if, as grandparent claims, suicide rates are "steady [] despite massively increasing spending on it", that does seem like evidence of something getting worse. Again, I don't know whether it's actually true and I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't, but the criticism here doesn't seem fair.)

While I do love the quote line-by-line format, you are splitting up sentences and completely changing my post, which is, at least, in bad faith.

> singular ... er, no?

Mass shooting and terrorism _rate_. Are you familiar with the concept of a rate?

Also, 'mass shooting' is very much not singular, unless you have an exceptionally short memory.

> So not growing, then.

You are, again, changing what I wrote. Here, let me fix that for you:

> Along with steady suicide rates despite massively increasing spending on it.

> The mass shooting and terrorism rate there increasing

There have been 4 "mass shootings" in Norway[1]

One in 1988 (4 deaths) - perpetrator was insane, with no motive

One in 2011 (77 killed) - perpetrator was a Neo-Nazi terrorist

One in 2021 (5 killed) - perpetrator was insane, with no motive

One in 2022 (2 killed) - perpetrator was an Islamic terrorist

The rate per year there is so low that any real attempt to measure the rate is lost in random variations. I think it's fair to say the rate is higher over the last 20 years than the previous 20 but beyond that is difficult.

And I don't think you can draw any substantive conclusions from that.

> Along with steady suicide rates despite massively increasing spending on it.

Suicide rates have declined substantially since the 1990s.

"From 1990 to 2000 the suicide rate declined and stabilized at the levels that we have today. In 2020, the suicide rate was 12.3 per 100 000 inhabitants. This is 25 per cent lower than in 1990 when the rate was 16.4 per 100,000 inhabitants"

It is now roughly the same as most Western countries, and much lower than Finland or in Eastern Europe, Russia, China or Japan.

One could argue that shows Norway has been successful in reducing suicide and that ~10/100,000 people is a floor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_shootings_in_Nor...

[2] https://www.fhi.no/en/op/hin/mental-health/suicide/

> Good times create weak men

They give you strong science, economy and as a byproduct strong military.

> You often see a growing discontent among wealthy societies where everything is taken care of.

Like in Sri-Lanka, what a decadent society.

When the wheels fall off (Sri Lanka does have a history of stability long ago) it’s hard to get them back on.

Sri Lanka’s problems go back decades.

The fallen off wheels create bad times, which create all these stong men, ready to slap the wheels right back on, right?

Exactly. It’s not always the right strong men, but strong men certainly come out of adversity.

So, the problems in Sri Lanka now are due to its former prosperity? And at the same time the problems have been there for decades? This sounds like trying too hard to see a pattern. In reality, the situation in Sri Lanka has been awful for quite a while, as you note, and the current discontent has nothing to do with life there being too cushy.

Bad times necessarily follow good times at some point, if only because of regression to the mean. No need to read too much into this.

> “Good times create weak men”

Convert it to any form of observable, measurable phenomena, and you will see it doesn't make any sence.

How do we measure 'strength' of a man - perhaps military success? Then best fighters should come from background of poverty and deprivation - is that true? Medieval knights and samurai were the best of their time, did they recruit recruit starving peasans? No, they were a social class and were offered the best training and considerable social cloud. Commanders and officers where basically a nobility.

Well, perhaps those social institutions didn't recruit the best, what about sports - if this statement was actually true, we should find best MMA fighters in places where they encounter tought times, like Russia or Somalia. Does that match observation - do they win all the MMA championships or something? It doesn't.

Maybe 'strong men' means being morally upstanding and doing what's right, even when it is going to cost you? If this were true, we'd expect to see less corruption and fewer crimes in communities that are poorer, right? Does that sound like the world we live in?

Bad times only create bad things - they create uneducated, malnurished, and psycologically damanged people, and they lead to violence. Anything good that ever happens, happens in spite of them, not because of them.

> Medieval knights and samurai were the best of their time, did they recruit recruit starving peasans?

The best fighters of the Medieval period were probably the Mongols. But even Medieval knights and Samurai were often leading lives that were so rough that it's hard for most modern people to realize it. And they knew that if they failed to train properly, that in the next war (which was probably coming soon), they were likely to die first.

> No, they were a social class and were offered the best training and considerable social cloud. Commanders and officers where basically a nobility.

During times of war, capable warriors tend(ed) to increase their rank. Capable yeomen can become men-at-arms, men-at-arms can be knighted, knights can become commanders and maybe given a barony, on so on.

Such soldiers might certainly provide good training to their sons, making this multi-generational.

> we should find best MMA fighters in places where they encounter tought times

If you look at the backgrounds of a large set of MMA fighters, you would find that a LOT of them come from rough working-class conditions. (Or at least they did when I stopped following MMA about 10 years ago). For practitioners of golf, tennis or polo, you will find more upper class people, of course.

> Maybe 'strong men' means being morally upstanding and doing what's right, even when it is going to cost you?

'Strong' men tend to develop strong codes of honor, that may be considered un-empathetic or even brutal in civilized societies. Look at present day Afghanistan. 50 years of almost constant conflict has hammered the Taliban fighters into such a group. Their sense of morality is quite different from the western sense, but they seem to feel it very strongly. Currently, opium production is being shut down at a high rate, for instance. Whether or not their sense of honor will lead to prosperity over the longer term remains to be seen.

> If this were true, we'd expect to see less corruption and fewer crimes in communities that are poorer, right?

Maybe that will be the outcome 500 years from now. But short term, corruption and crimes lead to poverty faster than poverty leads to a strengthening of moral character, so such cycles may take a long time.

> Bad times only create bad things - they create uneducated, malnurished, and psycologically damanged people, and they lead to violence. Anything good that ever happens, happens in spite of them, not because of them.

Really bad times also remove the damaged people from the population, either by death or inability to have offspring, partly because of that violence you mentioned. Over Darwinian time that is an absolute necessity to keep random genetic drift (random mutations) from destroying the gene pool.

Over shorter periods, the same MAY be the same for the "meme pool", to use the Dawkins original use of "meme". Cultural shifts that accumulate randomly over time are likely to result in a reduction of social and economical robustness in an area. Only when a society is under some survivial pressure, will cultural elements that reduce the "fitness" of the culture be weeded out.

External pressure can lead to increased group cohesion, while economic downturns CAN lead to improvement of economic organization. Or, if a culture is not able to build robustness against such preassures, it can collapse and be replaced by a new culture.

Now, I'm looking at these things like a biologist would when describing animal populations. I'm not making the claim that the societies created by "strong men" are morally superior to older civilizations where men have become "soft" or "weak".

My point is rather that if a civilization makes life very easy for the inhabitants, if will over time lead to the same outcome that you will get if you start feeding wild animals. Eventually, those "wild" animals will come to depend on beeing fed, and may face extinction if the food stops arriving. If what you want is a pet, that's ok. If you want to ensure a sustainable species, you really have to limit the amount of food and other help you provide to wild animals.

> Well, perhaps those social institutions didn't recruit the best, what about sports - if this statement was actually true, we should find best MMA fighters in places where they encounter tought times, like Russia or Somalia. Does that match observation - do they win all the MMA championships or something? It doesn't.

Just look through UFC rankings and you will see that you are wrong. The only reason that you don't see fighters from places like Somalia (because there are plenty from Russia) is that they are too poor to move to place where they would be noticed and recruited, not that they would be bad fighters. Even fighters that came from USA are mostly from tough and poor backgrounds.

> And the saying “Good times create weak men”.

Ah yes, the the folks partying around in the 1920s were sure weak and certainly had no other events to deal within their lifetime.

> And the saying “Good times create weak men”. And it’s true.

It is not. This is utterly, completely, and demonstrably false. You can have a read here if you want to convince yourself: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

Ironically Orwell warned specifically against this kind of "strength worship"

> The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism, and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate. [snip] The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini, nor from the efficiency experts who preached 'punch', 'drive', 'personality' and 'learn to be a Tiger man' in the nineteen-twenties, nor from that older generation of intellectuals, Carlyle, Creasey and the rest of them, who bowed down before German militarism. All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty.

Full quote (Frank Herbert):

> "There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. (Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan)"

There are certainly many ways to fulfill this apparent necessity without resorting to war and other forms of tribal conflict. Exploration of wilderness, sporting competitions, running marathons, etc. They all have a kind of 'passing through the ordeal' similarity.

(Incidentally this is a central reason why preservation of large expanses of wilderness areas is very important)

>> "There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles."

If you’re interested, Andrew Huberman talks a lot about how it is important to work for your dopamine. If you get it almost for free, like in for example drugs, food, and Netflix, then that will cause unhappiness in the long run.

Honestly it sounds like exactly the form of government we have today, where all of those positive and “negative” features are available in varying quantities.

By all means check out the film The Tenth Victim.

I've actually seen it, and even read Shekley stories it was based on. How is it relevant?

Well, I thought it should be pretty obvious.

> > > they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice

> > This fact has been the downfall of every utopian ideology, and ignoring creates a vacuum that fascist regimes readily fill.

> I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure.

In The Tenth Victim, they fill the vacuum with a blood sport. Kind of like Rollerball, but without the corporate-level fascism.

> I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure.

A serious specification for such a thing is going to be bigger than the SVG spec.

At that point it's almost certainly cheaper to fulfill our need for adventure through eternal vigilance in a representative democracy.

> I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure.

i think that's supposed to be sort of the idea behind free market capitalism. whether or not we should be fulfilling our emotional needs with the system of production is an open question, but i think that's basically the idea. business as a risky adventure with exaggerated potential upsides and downsides.

> I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure.

Any government that will satisfy my need of adventure and struggle in colonising the solar system and exploiting the endless amounts of resources it has and harnessing the virtually unlimited energy of our star will have my vote.

But people prefer tribal adventures and struggles and here we are debating the very risk of an ideology promoted by a half testicled man 100 years ago making a comeback.

Why dont we just struggle for the greater good instead of all this pettiness is beyond me.

Anyway crazy comment on my part but i think we are wasting time as a species on petty crap.

> adventure and struggle in colonising the solar system and exploiting the endless amounts of resources it has

My hesitation won't last a minute before voting for such an adventure, but I think I cannot really rule out a rogue entity in such expedition that could cause a "kinetic winter" situation on Earth, that has to be first addressed(or taken as a managed but ultimately inevitable risk) before we would be able to do this.

You should read the Parable books by Octavia Butler. By the sound of it maybe you have already!

Thanks for this - havent heard of her books, but after a quick google search they do sound like something i should read!

You will never destroy ethnic identity in humans because once you manage it for one or two races, one of the many remaining will just over run them. It's not just a waste of energy to try, it's actively harmful and often causes reactionary movements like this when people realize what the end of it is.

What?

That sounds like a weird case of suburban sprawl.

The counterpoint is that regional support for the Nazis generally indicates the opposite. Their weakest electoral performance was in the West and South, which generally was the wealthiest and most liberal part of Germany. By contrast their base of support was the Prussian hinterlands which was already the most militaristic part of the country to begin with, as well as having a weak region economy.

I think it’s under-appreciated how much the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of Germany’s loss in World War One. It’s hard to overstate how central the prestige of the military was to the national consciousness of the German Empire. The failure of the military was largely internalized as a failure of German culture itself.

The Nazis offered a do-over, revisionist view of World War One, and a promise to restore Germany’s traditional militaristic prestige. (Not to mention being directly astroturfed by the old guard of the General Staff.) German liberals were more than happy with “comfort and safety”. It was the traditionalists stuck in the pre-liberal past that dragged the country into “struggle and self-sacrifice”

"I think it’s under-appreciated how much the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of Germany’s loss in World War One."

Under-appreciated today, well-known at the time. See the beginning of "Triumph of the Will".

Yes, the Nazi appeal was largely a response to the absolutely crazy things that had happened to Germany between 1914 and 1933. Losing a world war, and all the death and humiliation and privation that entails (The winter of 1916 was known as the Turnip Winter, because of food shortages, and that was barely halfway through the war!). Hyperinflation, where an egg might cost a billion marks. Then a Depression! And all the while, a ton of money gets siphoned off to pay reparations to the WW1 allies.

I'm not at all saying Nazism was justified. I'm saying that the insane German experience over the 20 years leading up to it had caused the average German citizen to accept extremely radical solutions.

It is always a poor choice to humiliate your opponent after defeating them. You either completely annihilate them or help them back up.

I'm not sure Germany's condition was very exceptional. (What about Italy?)

It was more that Nazis simply got into power and once they were in power it was no longer a question of whether the average German accepted it or not. And once Nazis were in power they had the propaganda machinery of the state to make people believe them.

It could happen here too, almost did on January 6th. And in Russia, it's a crime to criticize the war.

> It was more that Nazis simply got into power

They got helped quite a bit by fighting communists at the time. They legit were the lesser evil to a lot of people.

I would say "communists" were just fascists by another name. The distinguishing factor is does one support democracy, or not.

Two third of the population was unemployed, and as orewell write here "the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues".

Starving, economical depression and without any hope in sight. Then within a couple of years half or more of those previous unemployed got a job from the government and the government refused to do any more reparations and redirecting those fund back to the populace (farmed food was a common item in reparations).

Meanwhile Silvio Gesell just wanted a simple currency and land reform at the time to make it easier to pay off the reparations without dooming the country into poverty.

Nowadays people write books how he was literally worse than Hitler. It is kind of amusing how easy it is to be hated by everyone because you have a difficult to attack argument.

Is the idea of negative interest rates really that taboo? I personally got interested in negative interest rates due to macro economic balance mechanics which don't even require the existence of a real economy to justify negative interest rates. If you want to shrink the money supply without causing a deflationary spiral you must lower the interest rate below zero so that the real interest rate is zero which is fair for consumers and savers alike.

> I think it’s under-appreciated how much the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of Germany’s loss in World War One

FWIW I thought this was very widely understood as a leading cause.

Yes, if anything it's over-appreciated in public consciousness.

The Russian revolution and the Great Depression were also crucially important events that explain the rise of the Nazis.

It's more like the depression before WW1, the hyperinflation in 1923 and the great depression all combined resulted in Nazis gaining power.

I'm familiar with these two things:

- The Great Depression was the acute and proximate cause behind the rise in support for the Nazis. Their popularity went up by ~20-30% due to this one event.

- The Russian Revolution and the attempts of communist revolutionaries in Germany in 1919 was the defining event of Hitler's psyche, according to historian Ian Kershaw

> depression before WW1, the hyperinflation in 1923

I'd be interested to read more about this.

> I think it’s under-appreciated how much the rise of the Nazis was a direct result of Germany’s loss in World War One.

Huh? Even school textbooks talk about how the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles lead to the rise of Hitler. Or as my high school history teacher joked: WW2 started in 1919.

And still even people who agree with this point, will give all kind of validation and mysticisms on the nazi ideology. I mean I might be wrong, but I would be surprised if GGP didn’t also heard/agreed with the historical factors from WWI that explain WWII, but still the discussion went with human nature and a ideology about violence.

it might be a start to actually archieve "comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense" for all. Then we can see if they still want struggle and self-sacrifice.

There may be some dispositions of the human mind that are susceptible to this sort of thing, but for now, I find it somewhat remarkable that this supposed need for struggle and self sacrifice is almost always employed by classes in power to keep lower classes at bay. Hitler is no exception:

> He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.

This stuff seems less like a "science of discontent" and more like a "science of distraction" to me. As in: let them argue about race, gender, religion, patriotism and whatever else as long as they don't argue about classes.

Yes - comfortable people saying that comfort isn't enough for people; they'll still just complain, kill each other and die. Without ever having tried giving people comfort, that will always sound like a rationalization. It's an excuse comfortable people use to excuse everything from the wealth and income gap between US blacks and whites to silencing complaints about UI changes on software projects.

It's a statement that people don't actually want what they say they want, all they want is attention and drama. The logical way to respond is by not acknowledging anything they say, and enforcing the behavior that you want to see, by force if necessary.

The real problem is that improvements in general comfort are difficult, and require lots of force to be organized and applied in a rational way. It's easier just to insure that you and your friends stay comfortable, and to silence or redirect elements that may intrude on that comfort. Ultimately, though, the failure mode on that is catastrophic. Once discontent overwhelms the institutions created to suppress it, the institutions shrink or convert while the discontent grows. Very soon, the discontent becomes the new, young establishment, and if you haven't joined yet, you're now the problem that the new institutions are intended to eliminate.

Why can't people struggle and self-sacrifice for utopia?

I mean they can, they'll probably just fail.

they did in the Soviet Union very admirably.

And in the US, which gave the world May Day (a day to remember the fight for worker's rights.) Sadly, it gave the US (the country that ruthlessly crushed and salted the fields of the organizations that fought for worker's rights) "Law Day," where we celebrate obeying the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day_(United_States)

Most do. Most often, the problem is not that people are bad but that people choose to fight for a good that isn't compatible with others. From their point of view, they are fighting for an utopian society.

Strictly speaking, utopias are fantastical and by definition unattainable.

Maybe the strange centrist form of government that the US had from about 1935 to maybe 1995.

Only if you were white middle class.

It's a good point. But I don't think the moves away from New Deal economics (e.g. reduced financial regulations, increased wealth disparity) have helped non-white folks or poor folks.

star trek, which depicts a moneyless quasi-communist society but with the fleet organized along traditional navy lines is an interesting concept

Yes, I absolutely agree. For much of our evolutionary history, young men were optimized to fuck and to fight. I’m not sure how we square this with the needs of modern civil society.

Quality sex education and martial arts?

More like a rigid patriarchal class hierarchy that harnessed male violence and sexual aggression into "noble" and "gentlemanly" codes of behavior, in other words, "masculinity," where sending boys off to war was considered a good way to condition them into men, and a list of sexual exploits before marriage was a signal of masculine virtue, at least among elites.

And the parameters of masculinity are far more culturally than biologically imposed, so they change over time and place.

A real explorable, pioneerable frontier would serve this need for adventure. A new continent. Or space.

The present popularity of gender-flux might be an expression of that. Gender as a wild frontier to conquer?... Ok maybe that's a stretch.

Capitalism does it pretty well problem there is that outside information technology those frontiers are kinda closed now at western countries thanks strong regulation or need for several years of education.

I dunno, but they’d probably use catchphrases like “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country.”

It's also an observation made by Agent Smith in the Matrix. It's even observable in the schoolyard, with kids subjecting themselves and others to utterly avoidable drama, for no discernible reason

Kids do it for the same reason politicians do it - there is an entire social hierarchy and jockeying for the position of the top dog that lets you boss around others. All psycologically healthy people can easilly tell that apart from 'real' conflict, as most kids do not try to open each-other's skull with a rock.

Good comment.

JFK government.

Reagan demanded nothing, started the stuff we’re in today, perhaps inadvertently.

> I wonder what sort of strange centrist form of government might be able to strike a balance between our need for comfort and our need for adventure.

America

America is the worlds richest third world country

You’d describe American governance as centrist?

For some meanings of centrism, sure.

You often see the "America is super conservative" claim but that's only true if your definition of "the world" is North America and Europe. The US is fairly centrist taking the entire world into account.

The funny thing is we are facing a deep crisis that will require sacrifice and huge effort, but 50% of the country claims it's a hoax and the other 50% accept the problem but are whistling past the graveyard. I speak, of course, about climate change.

We have had a century of millions of people worldwide working ferociously and spending tens of billions of dollars every year to extract coal and oil for profit. To fix this problem will require a similar, sustained investment in labor and capital to halt that process and even capture and sequester some amount of what we are releasing at this very moment.

That seems like a struggle and self-sacrifice that is sufficient to unify not only nations but the world. Yet apparently it is not. I admit it lacks the adventure aspect.

The insistence that climate solutions involve self sacrifice I believe is a misguided one. I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so.

People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice. Electric vehicles have many desirable features like being very performant, lower maintenance, able to be used as a home battery backup system, refuel/recharge at home, and are cost effective in a high gasoline price world. One of the major selling points of solar panels is the return on investment through lower electricity bills. The fact that both are considered green and makes some feel good that they are helping the planet is merely extra.

In general, sacrifice too often considered the path to virtue. I increasingly believe this to be mistaken. If we want the masses to adopt green technology it must materially improve their lives (superior in features and/or lower in cost). The benefits of being green for climate's sake I fear are too intangible be a significant driving factor in decision making.

I believe there is not one "silver bullet"; there are a wide variety of actions that must be taken to make a dent. Some are personal, and some are systemic, and both require personal sacrifice.

Here is an example (this is just a cooked up example, not an actual policy recommendation) where the large scale systemic change will require personal sacrifice.

Say a politician or a party says: we must act now. We need to spend two trillion dollars over the next 10 years on upgrading our electrical grid, both for overall capacity and to allow dynamic load balancing over long distances to make solar and wind power more effective. We are going to invest heavily in the private sector to accelerate battery research into production, adding significant battery storage to aid in the short fluctuations as part of that smart grid. To pay for this, we are going to increase the tax rate on capital gains to 24% and set a floor on the price of gasoline at $4/gallon for the foreseeable future. We will accelerate the closure of coal generators which will, in the short term, increase the price of electricity.

The opposing politician or party says: hooey, you don't need to do anything different than you are doing today. As we all know, plants consume CO2 and what little effect CO2 has on the world, it will be only good for crops. Vote for me and your taxes won't go up. The other guy is lying to you because he hates your freedom to burn whatever you want.

Here is the personal sacrifice part: you will have to vote for the guy who is going to raise the taxes and spend the money to address the issue. You will have less money in your pocket at the end of the month, and the benefits won't be seen for decades. All the while the naysayers will undermining work on the problem and spreading lies.

I wouldn't say self-sacrifice either but people do not like and are generally not good at changing habits. And some things will certainly have to change.

> People aren't buying electric cars and installing solar panels on their homes out of self sacrifice.

This idea is simply wrong. Many of them are doing exactly that, they are using their brains and making sacrifices in their daily life in hopes that collective action in reducing impact will at least give us the time to course correct or reduce the impact of our collective failure with respect to climate change. If you don't know anyone doing this, that's because of who you know.

> I view the transformation to a low carbon future as happening primarily through the existence of natural economic incentives to do so.

Yes, we will need economic pressures to get everyone overall to conform to a sustainable lifestyle, mainly because we cannot coordinate global human action any other way. No, those pressures are not "natural" ones unless you mean as a result of destroying Earth's climate to the point change is necessary for even day to day survival. We have to choose our future, however hard it may be.

A tiny minority claims climate change is a hoax at this point.

Unfortunately, that tiny minority controls the Senate, and now the Supreme Court.

It sound like you are talking about US because in the EU the discussion is a bit different. There about 50% want to fight climate change by using renewables + natural gas, and now with the Ukraine war, renewables + oil and coal. The other 50% want to use renewables + nuclear power. Neither side think that climate change is a hoax, but they are still dragging in two completely different directions with just as much effort as they did before.

Didn't Biden just a few days ago advocate towards the Arab states to increase oil productions?

I agree, imagine perfect ideology X, it solves every conceivable problem but then people stop the utopia because they want to struggle a little bit and feel challenged.

I think he highlights some fundamentally toxic aspects of human nature with this bit:

“The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

The engineer in me wishes we could substitute the soldiers with construction workers or something, but I can’t deny enjoying war games growing up. These days “peace games” like Stardew Valley are more appealing to me, but maybe I’ma little odd.

> The engineer in me wishes we could substitute the soldiers with construction workers or something,

LEGO® Minifigs?

While there are no modern LEGO soldiers, there are Knights, Ninjas and Pirates, all equipped with weapons.

Yes! I spent many hours with Legos growing up!

I also remember playing a basic little kid video game about road construction. You’d select various heavy machinery to plow snowy roads and build bridges. I vaguely remember laying down pavement for a road being very satisfying.

Stardew Valley has the monsters in the mines. I thought it would have been a cute farming simulator game to play with my toddler, but shortly after we discovered the mines it was all he wanted to do.

Duplo, Lego, Brio

You see a lot of children playing Minecraft, or when older, Factorio on pacifist modes where they can focus on "the good bit" of building something. Historically war management was what was available, I remember enjoying building a city in Age of Empires more than the battles, and I think with the options available, while combat will always be popular and engaging, it does have alternatives some people enjoy more.

I'm waiting to see how Vic 3 turns out. Given the devs claim to focus on diplomacy and politics moreso than map painting warfare (much to the distaste of the paradox community)

Ofc war is still an option, albeit the mechanics are rather high level and less micro involved than past games.

If the mechanics are well designed in general I think I may find it really engaging.

Looking at Paradox's past promises and what was delivered, I expect the game to be just as focused on warfare as Europa Universalis IV.

I love the survival crafting genre but am so dismayed that the best games have gone heavy into combat or thriller directions. And I've played most of them. There may be a way to set a peaceful mode but it is rarely if ever a fully fleshed out experience.

That genre seems to be in the midst of a rush, with every publisher Indy or large trying to pump out games in that genre.

I generally like it, but my steam queue are now filled to the brim with crappy, rushed survival games trying to copy everything else all because I played Ark and Valheim a few times.

Kids just don't know any better. I would imagine that those who actually spent some of their childhood in a war zone would have a very different perspective. What's toxic is when grownups end up glorifying war or thinking of it as a solution to hard problems.

I don't think this counts as Godwin's law given the context, but:

What exactly is your solution to the sort of naked aggression by Hitler in WW2? Is war not a solution to that problem?

Lets translate your question.

What exactly is your solution to the sort of [war] by Hitler in [war]. Is war not a solution to [war]?

Yep. I know what you meant to do here, and I still agree.

You do not get to choose whether someone else is violent or not. If you aren't prepared for violence, you can only be a victim of it.

I guess you appreciate any opportunity to restate your beliefs.

I was just suggesting that offering war as a solution to the problem of already being at war is pretty circular.

I appreciate an opportunity to provide clarity when it seems like a point was missed.

Whether it's circular or not isn't a meaningful property when bombs are dropping.

In that spirit of providing clarity: what is your answer to the un-translated question I asked?

> What exactly is your solution to the sort of naked aggression by Hitler in WW2? Is war not a solution to that problem?

With a 70–85 million death toll, I find it hard to describe it as a success. Saying there was no other choice seems fair but calling it a solution seems a bit far-fetched.

War stopped Hitler's germany. That's a solution.

No, those things are not synonymous.

> I would imagine that those who actually spent some of their childhood in a war zone would have a very different perspective.

They very much play war games, even incorporating the realities around them into the games, like checkpoints, airstrike alarms, and such.

Speaking of:

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/ukraine-war-children-with-toy...

Eh, war is simply fun. It’s appealing to males in particular, and our testosterone tends to lock in the intoxication. There’s a reason that Battlefield is one of the most successful gaming franchises of all time, and that it’s very hard to find any videogame that doesn’t involve some kind of warfare. (There are dozens of wonderful counter examples: Minecraft, celeste, undertale, sim city, stardew valley. But for every one of those, there are dozens of Halo wannabes, and even Quake and Doom were one-man wars against demons.)

> Eh, war is simply fun.

Well an idealized version of war that’s designed to glorify it could be fun.

Is actual war fun? Is the Ukraine war fun? I doubt it’s fun for any of the participants. It’s not fun for Ukrainian soldiers, it’s not fun for Russian soldiers, and it’s not fun for Russian or Ukrainian civilians.

Maybe it’s fun for some onlookers that like to cheer and spectate, but I would argue that speaks more to the nature of the spectators than to the nature of war.

Eh it is fun to an extent. When I fought with the YPG I saw a lot of Kurds jumping with exuberance cheering at the enemy "he tried to shoot me" and then joyfully shooting back. Many wars are mostly intense boredom, punctuated by occasional bouts of terror or joy. Also there's a weird sort of release from the typical responsibilities of life -- _all_ you have to do is fight (which as fucked up as it sounds, can be more simple than worrying about the next side hustle / the wife / the kids). If you're on a rear-guard type of situation it's mostly drinking chai and smoking cigarettes.

> Is actual war fun? Is the Ukraine war fun? I doubt it’s fun for any of the participants. It’s not fun for Ukrainian soldiers, it’s not fun for Russian soldiers, and it’s not fun for Russian or Ukrainian civilians.

War seems to rewrite the brain. People are miserable and bored most of the time, are terrified while in combat, and come back with psychological issues we're still just beginning to understand. It's hell. And yet, people do get addicted to the mayhem and the rush. The mercenary life is attractive to a lot of people. There's still a lot being debated here, but one of the theories about PTSD is that much of the damage is done (or, at least, is made permanent) when people return to civilian life. Having been exposed to life-or-death situations, they find daily life to be low-stakes and artificial; the time in which they were most alive as in combat (even if they hated the experience and what it did to them).

Still, I agree that actual war is not at all "fun".

It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee

There definitely seem to be combatants that enjoy at least some aspects of war. If you look at the historical military literature, including poetry, it is not all just negative.

It is true that with increasing industrialization of war during the last 150 years, the overall tenor has changed.

Look how they re-enact the civil war. Nobody wants the historical truth of dying from cholera in a Confederate stockade or burning down farms in Georgia with crying families in the background. Humans are really good at cognitive dissonance.

War is a way for mindless and aggressive men to do whatever they really crave (which is escaping from a state of victimhood), without much justification and little immediate consequences to themselves, mostly under cover of patriotism. To kill and rape for fun and pleasure, and hopefully die fast, absolutely ecstatic.

To such men, please note: life never really ends, and you and your offspring gets eternally impacted by all miserable and soulless destruction of life's beauty you may have caused, inflicting more hardship and perpetuating novel state of misery upon flocks of others.

War is a terrible waste. On the other hand, an able bodied man not willing to use destructive faculties to defend young and old against perpetrators of violence is as irrational as the able bodied man who refuses to use constructive faculties to provide necessities of life to same.

Defensive action is for the most part formidable and magnificent. The stuff that builds and creates heroism, myths and legends. Never miserable or soulless, unless it goes beyond its original purpose.

Every reality has at least two versions of it, or more.

Experiences in war vary greatly, and feelings about them are complicated and conflicted. I've met many people who genuinely seemed to enjoy it. This article nails it: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-lo...

"There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter." --Hemingway

That doesn't sound like fun to me. That sounds more like a nightmarish psychosis.

Strong or weak, in the long run all of them break down. All, that is to say, of those who are initially sane. For, ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity

There's a video floating around of Ukrainian soldiers managing the unusual feat of destroying a helicopter (and obviously its pilot) using a Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT8Um69fbHA Fun might not be the right word for it but you can't tell me that the cheer from the soldiers when the missile struck home wasn't born of positive emotion, even in the midst of the hell of war.

Yes, victory is a great thrill. Especially, I'm sure, a rare victory against a powerful enemy that has invaded your homeland. That doesn't mean that in the aggregate war is great fun.

Outer Wilds! I just played it on the basis of a recommendation in an earlier HN thread and loved it.

>Eh, war is simply fun. It’s appealing to males in particular, and our testosterone tends to lock in the intoxication. There’s a reason that Battlefield is one of the most successful gaming franchises of all time, and that it’s very hard to find any videogame that doesn’t involve some kind of warfare.

I think there is an argument to be made that Battlefield doesn't involve any warfare.

Even minecraft has combat in the default game mode. No guns, but it does have swords, axes, arrows, and numerous kinds of explosives.

Obviously it's better than Grand Theft Auto, but it definitely falls short of pure pacifism.

War is plenty of fun as long as nobody gets hurt - but that's kind of tautological. Real wars are no fun, and that's what pacifists argue against.

Sometimes it's a little too much. And it starts to be a little dumb. One time on an Assassin's Creed I was like wow why kill that guy?? It wasn't even for the part to gather info. That was so unnecessary (even for the story itself). Can I just talk to him and persuade him first or something?

But Battlefield is not war, it's a simulation of war. It lacks real stakes, extensive physical activity, death and basically everything that make war a war.

> There are dozens of wonderful counter examples: Minecraft ...

Younger boy of mine spent years fighting and smashing and destroying other avatars /players in Minecraft, not so interested in _building_ anything. One's experience may vary.

None of the things you mentioned is like war, like not at all. They are fantasies designed to be as pleasant as possible.

I'm fairly certain you haven't been involved in a war if you make a statement like "it's fun"!! Or at least you've never had to kill someone !!

This seems like it's essentializing psychology into core biological elements (with a shaky, uncited relationship to evolutionary psychology) without question. When statements are made this way, don't you think it closes off possible avenues for research beyond the bare facts of war and competition in future societies, at least without genetic modification? I think questions like these should be left open rather than dismissed as "war is fun, testosterone".

> Kids just don't know any better.

Either that, or they are dealing with a scary, unknowable, potential direction their life might take and working through it by playing. This is normal, and how kids try to understand situations they might find themselves in. A kind in a war zone knows war and does not have to play to understand it.

I spent some time in Northern Syria and there were quite a few "child" soldiers there (mostly teenagers), as well as people who grew up as children in war. I'm sure it was partially a coping mechanism, but I found many of them embraced and enjoyed their existence fighting the enemy that claimed the lives of their family members. The military also provides a sort of place for brotherhood and oddly stability (food / depending on where youre stationed shelter) at least until things really go sidewise.

(Second-hand) Anecdata: My Grandpa was born in '39, was 6 when the war ended and lived very close to a big city / region that was bombed regularly by the Allies from '42-'45. He was old enough to remember this and the (light) fighting when the Americans arrived.

After the war, he and the local kids played with live guns that the German soldiers just threw away. They used a Flak (anti aircraft cannon) as a carousel, played with the shells of it and used the local bunkers to play "soldier", with some playing the Germans and some playing the Americans.

So I'm not sure whether or not spending the childhood in a war zone actually changes the perspective of children (to the better). It sure can later, when they become adults, though.

Adults are often more traumatized by it than children are; for them it's just the new normal, and something to play with.

As a small child in Essen, my mother lived through the bombing nights of 44/45 and the also harsh post-war period. The trauma that people close to her can suddenly disappear (e.g. suicide, abandonment, sometimes result of canibalism) still shapes her behavior today.

Did you know anything about role preferences (if any)?

I mean: would children prefer to be Allies (because they won) or Germans (because, well, they were Germans)...

My grandpa prefered the Americans, because the local soldiers gave him (and the other kids) sometimes sweets or stuff like an orange (which he thought was a ball at first, being disappointed that it didn't bounce :D) and were generally very nice to them.

Some older kids only wanted to play as the Germans or Hungarians (at the end of the war, apparently some Hungarian troops were stationed in the local bunkers to fight off the Americans).

I don't know what the other kids in his age group prefered, though.

The people who started and promoted and wanted WWI experienced WWI - either as soldiers or as kids. The young ones glorified army and wanted to prove themselves.

Wars don't make people peaceful. Instead, they normalize violence, hate and desperation.

>I would imagine that those who actually spent some of their childhood in a war zone would have a very different perspective.

Not sure if it would imply less war. Around the Napoleonic wars, many officers started their careers as teenagers or pre-teens. Nelson joined the navy as about 12-year old, which wasn't unexceptional age during the Napoleonic times. Napoleon was 10 when he was enrolled in a military academy. He was admitted to Ecole Militaire around 15 years old, graduated in one year, and got a commission as 2nd lieutenant.

a few personal notes:

- as kids we all did fight games, from just kung fu fights for fun, to team fights where we somehow considered a group strongly as "not our friends"

- maybe remains of evolution needs to make kids ready to fight for survival ? it might sound primitive but some bits are important because life may become chaos and ability to secure your own vital space is life critical (even in a modern world)

>as kids we all did fight games

My daughter would not have touched toy soldiers with a stick. And her older brother always picked up war movies from a dump on the floor, while she picked up only films about "relationships".

>team fights where we somehow considered a group strongly as "not our friends"

I was amazed, watching myself playing on a PvP server in World of Warcraft, how easy it is to hate another faction - even though you play it yourself half of the time.

>remains of evolution needs to make kids ready to fight for survival

Evolution does not need anything. It just so happened that populations where boys did not like to play war games are now dead. That's the process of evolution. But it does not care if your population is dead or alive in the next step. It goes on anyway.

Yeah, no need for semantics, we agree on evolution "emergent" property.. I was just trying to explain that the aggressive nature of boys is not just a poor defect. In a random bath of beings, if you're too passive, the more aggressive ones will stomp you brainlessly.

I don't know; I loved SimCity as a kid. I tend to think this sort of thing rather signifies a lack of imagination on the part of video game authors.

City simulators still exist and are still made; so are countless other economic simulators and puzzle games.

Their popularity is a reflection of demand for them, not developer creativity.

I loved city builders and tycoon games as a kid. I think many of them tend to follow the same formula and so the returns becoming increasingly diminished.

I am excitedly looking forward to a follow up to Cities Skylines.

I don't understand why that's toxic. Striving, struggle, and violence are critical for any living thing to survive. Short of reaching post-scarcity, this can't change.

If we define toxic as harmful, then violence is the opposite. It's the only reason we have civilization.

Cooperation, not violence, is the reason for civilization.

I think possibly cooperation and violence. Or even cooperation for the purpose of enhanced violence.

What if both are?

Cooperation is certainly critical, violence is what allows for it to take place.

You can build a utopian commune, but if your neighbors want your crops you would be wise to get a weapon.

Cooperation within the group and violence outside the group.

Perhaps a bit of both.

> So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.

- “The Haj” by Leon Uris

Perhaps applies to other cultures as well. After all, the Western world is now struggling against Russia and tries to define “us versus them” through this struggle.

Pretty much this.

Humans are not peaceful by nature. And when one group of humans want something another group of humans don’t want them to have, violence is the ultimate option to solving that conflict.

Thankfully many countries see the cost of solving conflict through violence and seek to avoid it, but it’s always there.

| Humans are not peaceful by nature

You can't make a broad sweeping generalization like this. There have been so many peaceful, even pacifist civilizations throughout history.

That they have been wiped out or dominated by the violent ones is a valid historical point, but it doesn't disprove that human "nature" can just as easily be peaceful, given the right conditions. Failing to protect yourself from external violent pressure is not the same as intrinsic nature.

The only strict statement about human nature that we can confidently make is that we are extraordinarily adaptive to and malleable by the conditions we live under.

That's semantics imo. If pacifism results in extinction, then any revision of human nature that involves it is irrelevant. Humans don't exist without violence.

It's not semantics at all. "Human nature" implies a universal, inherent state. If we have peaceful, pacifist civilizations regularly cropping up throughout history, then saying that human nature is violence just simply isn't true. It doesn't matter if the violent civilizations come to dominate. That the peaceful societies exist at all (let alone are abundant and common) means that argument falls apart.

> universal, inherent state

It's not a universal, inherent state in any humans that survive. It's an aberration.

That being said, I'm not actually aware of any of these abundant/common peaceful/pacifist societies you're referencing. It's entirely possible I'm ignorant of them, but I'm suspicious that they weren't actually 'peaceful'. Can you name a few of them?

| It's an aberration.

It's common enough to disprove the statement "Human nature is inherently violent". It shows that understanding humanity is simply too complex to boil down to pat remarks like that.

| I'm not actually aware

Anthropology has documented plenty. The Kung! come to mind. And this is not the early-days "noble savage" anthropology, the perspective that there have been many civilizations that operate through cooperation and peaceful negotiation is not controversial in modern anthropology.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00692-8

> It's common enough to disprove the statement "Human nature is inherently violent". It shows that understanding humanity is simply too complex to boil down to pat remarks like that.

If we accept every aberration as disproving human nature, then there is no such thing as human nature. There are exceptions to any possible definition of it. Suicide disproves self-preservation, childless adults disprove reproduction, laziness disproves innovation.

I'm not actually opposed to that argument, but it is, as mentioned and in context, semantics.

> Anthropology has documented plenty. The Kung! come to mind. And this is not the early-days "noble savage" anthropology, the perspective that there have been many civilizations that operate through cooperation and peaceful negotiation is not controversial in modern anthropology.

!Kung society absolutely had violence and homicide[1][2]. It's very much noble savage anthropology. They did not operate through cooperation and peaceful negotiation: they were just isolated hundreds of kilometers from anyone else, so the scale was smaller.

If anything, the !Kung disprove your argument. They spoke the same language, had the same beliefs, had a fair division of resources, were geographically isolated, and still killed each other.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/680660 [2] https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

I'm not arguing any societies were completely void of violence, obviously. There is a significant difference between a society where violence occurs and one in which violence is the defining principle and method of organization. Yet even in societies organized around violence and domination, the majority of people are not violent and do not commit acts of violence.

At this point, it's not worth continuing the conversation here. You'd be best served engaging with anthropological sources themselves since your perspective has been well addressed by the field. "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman was suggested below. I haven't read it myself, but I've heard good things and it's sources might serve as a good jumping-off point. "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber I have read and it is a light read and works well as a starting point, despite it's issues.

Those are certainly interesting books, but Graeber's work in particular has been widely criticized by his peers[1]. Dawn of Everything was a naked attempt at (further) politicizing the field, and was riddled with logical and historical errors. Much like his other writings.

> One review it’s known that he did read, because he wrote a response to it, is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s in the New York Review of Books. Entitled Digging for Utopia, it accuses the authors of making ideologically driven arguments at variance with the studies they cite.

> [historian David A Bell] referred to “an astounding collection of errors” and accused the authors of coming “perilously close to scholarly malpractice”.

You would be best served by not basing your opinions on fringe material.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/12/david-wengro...

> There have been so many peaceful, even pacifist civilizations throughout history.

> That they have been wiped out or dominated by the violent ones is a valid historical point [...]

The violent societies have also been wiped out and dominated by other violent ones. Or have caused their own collapse by other means. So violence has not yet shown itself to be a successful strategy for societial survival.

Survival, it turns out, is a game one cannot win. Everything and everyone comes to an end eventually, even the universe itself apparently. Justification of violence on the sole grounds of continued survival is therefore very suspect.

> Humans are not peaceful by nature

I also believed this until recently when I finished reading "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman. What an amazing book ... Bregman analyzes why we commonly believe that humans are not peaceful and that this assumption turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there is surprisingly little evidence that being aggressive or violent is in our nature, pretty much the opposite is true.

To me, reading this book did the opposite of what reading the news usually does: I finished every chapter with an optimistic smile. :)

I mean peaceful societies only exist because of the threat of violence to anyone who attacks them.

Well yes, I already understood that's your point of view, but the book offers a different perspective which I found pretty convincing.

I don't see how this squares with all the violent primitive societies (which are more common than the non-violent variety).

Post-scarcity is not (ever going to be) reality

It's interesting that Socialism was so synonymous with pacifism in the early 20th century, and how that radically changed.

Mussolini famously broke with his Socialist Party to abandon the pacifist doctrine of Socialism and form his own movement which he called Fascism.

That speaks more to socialism's enduring PR successes than reality. Lenin's Red Army didn't roll into Poland in 1918 to spread worldwide revolutionary socialism with just flowers and poetry. That happened basically immediately proceeding from the success of the October Revolution.

There’s an amusing short story about “tin pacifists”, The Toys of Peace.[1] The introduction claims that this is a “primitive instinct”; but I tend to agree more with the conclusion.

On a related note, a Tumblr post[2] that’s been making the rounds recently:

> “In a game with no consequences, why are you still playing the ‘Good’ side?”

> Because being mean makes me feel bad.

> Because my no-consequences power fantasy is being able to help everyone.

[1]: https://gutenberg.org/files/1477/1477-h/1477-h.htm#page3

[2]: https://deflare.tumblr.com/post/157885054221

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

Giving in to the violent tribalism that’s obviously part of humanity’s matrix is bad, but pretending it isn’t there will get you into a tight spot pretty fast too.

Violence sells better than sex at the cinema.

The regulation in this space is weird. It’s more acceptable to show someone getting shot than to show a nipple.

Is war play “toxic” or “essential to the survival of human communities?”

It’s interesting to me how “humanism” veers into “human denialism” (denying the nature of the human condition) or active “trans-humanism” (seeking to transcend the human condition).

Post-ww1 pacifism didn't do much good to France.

And building a military machine didn't do much good for Germany.

The answer to this is sports. War is competition through violence. When you remove the violence you get peaceful competition. It satisfies the tribal urge to fight things different than you, but also encourages healthy behaviors. Respect for your opponent. Accepting loss. Recognizing your weaknesses and working to improve them.

Nope, usually you get the cult of war and cult of sports together as a bundle.

Do people regularly mass murder each other over sports? Because that's the stakes we're talking about here in context.

Brawling and screaming over a sport is much preferred to bombing and poisoning.

No (though it does happen, see Constantinople's chariot teams). But expansionist and militaristic societies are often obsessed with sport, for example imperial Britain, Germany at the 1936 Olympics, and arguably the modern US.

Not to mention Ancient Greece. Sport as a substitute for war is a joke.

Both sports and war leverage the same dynamics, just as individual athleticism improves one's chances in a fight. Neither are ends in themselves.

I'm with you in the abstract, but where I live there's toxic culture around sports that made it unpalatable for me as a kid. Back then what turned me off was belligerent parents on the sidelines yelling at the children, but the symptoms actually go way beyond that one little thing. (Conflating excellence with dominance is another example.)

>toxic culture around sports

I was rather fond of practicing team sports as a kid, but I found the culture off putting for the same reasons

Some people just can't behave, adults weren't even much better than your regular kid

> adults weren't even much better than your regular kid

If life has taught me anything, it's that the notion of adults being emotional mature is a joke.

I've seen numerous grown people suddenly turn into a character from Mean Girls instantly after a petty slight.

I have noticed team sports tend to be vastly more toxic than solo sports.

Climbing for example has a wildly different atmosphere. Just listen to the crowd in this or read the YouTube comments, people are supportive when several women have disappointing results. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfhGW6Bwyks

People will complain about the route setting or camerawork not the athletes, that’s a shocking amount of empathy IMO.

Funny enough full cobtact sports are somewhat similar. Sure, you actively fight and beat each other in the ring or on tha mats, but outside ofbit things are surprisingly civil. Of ciurse over aggressive exceptions proof that rule.

One of my favorite sports memories was going to my son's first big cross-country running meet. There were hundreds of kids lined up for the race and parents lined the course to cheer them on. The crowds clapped loudly for the leaders, it died down for the long stretch of mid-pack runners, and then grew to a roar for the kids working their hardest at the back of the pack. Everyone there seemed to understand how hard it is to get started in endurance sports, but also how transformative they can be to a kid's confidence, especially if they have not felt welcome or successful in team sports.

This is a valid observation, however I wonder if the best frame is to consider if that toxic culture is preferable to a warmongering society.

It may be that some level of toxic behavior is inescapable when humans release their tribal competition instinct. And if team sports is construed as a war-replacement, perhaps it is a better (though not perfect) mechanism to absorb that toxicity.

Maybe there are better-still options to absorb tribal toxicity, bit I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

The future might robot competitions: compete with zero-ego robot beings, the robot is always kind.

BattleBots

Indeed, many sports serve as a way of developing and competing on "war skills": throwing, running, strength, coordinated maneuvers as a group, etc. All of which are useful in fighting, and a way of establishing a male hierarchy without fighting.

There may have been some genetic selection here. Societies without those who want to defend the tribe with violence, ultimately succumb to the violence of other societies that perpetuate that violence. Prisoner's dilemma means universal instinct of pacifism is a difficult steady-state to hold.

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist." -George Orwell

https://reason.com/2014/06/18/why-selectively-quoting-orwell...

I've always thought of Wall Street and what goes on there to be our substitute for war.

Big Law too

True for both, and these are actually unhealthy outlets because it means everyone essentially lives under sanctions and oppression while norms fray altogether.

> The answer to this is sports. War is competition through violence.

Absolutely not. Sports is competition through violence, as well. Watch a game of American football, or ice hockey, or basketball for that matter and be able to say otherwise with a straight face.

The answer is cooperative, not competitive, activities.

For people wired for competition, that's no answer.

Aldous Huxley’s perspective was that competition is driven by the desire to dominate. We can play games - like wrestling or war - that cause us to dominate other people. Or, we can play games - like rock climbing - that cause us to dominate ourselves.

Calling football or hockey "violence" dilutes the meaning of the word. May as well call a high five violence.

I've seen plenty of people rejoice at the injuries of another team's players

I assume the OP is completely unaware of "head hunting" in professional sports. An awful practice still subtly used today.

Story Time:

I play beer league/pick-up hockey as an adult, and we once had a suspected thief that was stealing from others in the locker rooms during pick-up games. It was believed said thief would get dressed with everyone, and would then "accidentally forget something" before his shift was up, and he would then return to the locker rooms when the rooms were unattended and proceed to shift through people's belongings.

After some time and some mob mentality, people managed to figure out who the thief was. I heard numerous instances of all the various plots and methods other players were working on to ensure this guy would never be able to play again due to an unfortunate accident (i.e. premeditated and intentional permanent or long-term injuries).

Thankfully, the police got ahold of the thief before any of the psychopaths managed to ruin the life of the thief and their own lives. I am also thankful that I was a goalie, so that I was never encouraged to participate in such barbarianism. I value the safety of another person more than a wallet full of replaceable items.

Still, there have been instances where police have been called due to unruly players and/or unruly parents of children players, refs being assaulted by players/parents, etc..

I've never seen that although I'm sure it happens. What I have seen a lot is the entire crowd cheering when a visiting player is able to walk off after being knocked down with a possible injury.

Comparing American football and hockey and other brutal sports to a high five is what dilutes the meaning of the word. These are sports where men aggressively assault each other. They are institutionalized violence.

I think intentions should be considered when describing something as violence in a sport.

I assume you are unfamiliar with "head hunting?" If so, it's where a team or player intentionally tries to injury the better player(s) on the opposing team in order to secure a competitive advantage.

Here are some examples of what I would consider "violence" in hockey, some of which, could be argued to be head hunting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHPktgmbdbA

Then how do you satisfy the real need for an outlet for aggression? I personally did this with motorcycle racing, which is competitive but mostly non violent. Cooperative activities are great and I really enjoy them, but don’t scratch the same itch.

There's no 'answer', violent competition is always going to exist because at some point the aggregate costs are lower than other forms of competition. A world completely dominated by war is bad, but so is a world completely dominated by productivity, which just creates and infantilized society.

> Absolutely not. Sports is competition through violence, as well. Watch a game of American football, or ice hockey

And golf, the worst one of them all!

Also horse riding, Javalin throwing, etc. Mixed bag

Team sports are the best cooperative activities around, AFAIK.

Primarily within your team.

But also, by both teams playing within the rules, cooperating with the other team in creating a meaningful game.

I know team sports isn't for everyone, but it's a great thing for those suited to it.

Sports are better, but I think encouraging competition and tribal urges are a waste of time in general. Better to encourage collaboration and self expression.

You need some amount of brotherly conflict and competition in order to have healthy collaboration. Otherwise, you just get the pretense of agreement and a slow slouch into frustration and resentment.

Disagree that sports are a form of brotherly conflict. Maybe within the same team but definitely not considering the win/loss dynamic between teams. You can approach disagreements with the idea that both people are working together to make the best product and are are disagreeing with the same goal in kind; a different type of argument than the one opposing teams are engaged in.

Sorry I wrote this on my phone at the gym and should have proofread better.

> but I can’t deny enjoying war games growing up

Depending on the player and the social context around it the same game can be glorifying war, or be neutral, or even be a way to release steam and become more relaxed around people.

Confusing real war, violence, genocide with a game is quite stupid. Or prudish.

Isn't Orwell kinda trolling here, or is he unaware of his fallacious statement? Not all kids of WW2 generation played with tin soldiers, like 50% of kids, namely: girls. This oversight is a bit of a bias in his false-dichotomy: there are only soldiers or pacificts as toys/role-models.

Play fighting is observable in many adolescent mammals. It is perhaps, in a way, vestigial for humans, but not really because conflicts do still arise often enough.

As you get older you become increasingly aware of the horrors of war and fighting and it losses much of the naive appeal it had when you were young.

I think the substitute are explorers, where the enemy is the unknown. Tin astronauts works.

I don't see it as a problem. War games don't transfer to real world violence, anymore than street racing games translate to real world dangerous driving.

I remember when I played need for speed most wanted for the first time and they had the main actress in the opening cutscene to the game telling you that... this is all just a game and in real streets you should drive safely and responsibly and wear your seatbelts. I never skipped the cutscene because Josie Maran (the actress) is really really pretty, but the message is absolutely and unimaginebly dumb.

You're sitting in front of your computer manipulating a car through an interface that doesn't look remotely like the controls of any real car, "driving" through a world with bizarre physics and collision logic with zero haptic feedback, again, an experience unlike any in a real car. Does any reasonably intelligent person really need an actress telling them that "remember, this is all just a game" ? isn't it all kinda obvious ? would a person who somehow got the idea that real driving is as easy as mashing some buttons on a keyboard with zero consequences be snapped back to reality by a character inside the game telling them that it's not true ?

The only real way I can see a "fiction leads to the real thing" argument working is through propaganda, a military might invest in war movies and war games to make it look glamorous to a gullible teenager who will be of military age soon. But how can you prevent that without demonizing all fiction ? Before video games, before movies, before even reading and writing, the military had no problems whatsoever with getting recruits. Propaganda is just the symptoms, the real problems are all downstream.

Lego bricks is a perfectly acceptable substitute, from my experience. Or something like Minecraft.

So, Bob the builder??

>Probably, in Hitler's own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia's turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it.

Unsurprisingly, Orwell here was wonderfully prescient, even as many contemporaries failed to see that this exact plan was the case.

You mean Hitler really turned to Russia after he defeated England?

After he gave up on conquering Britain, which is kinda 'out of the picture' I guess

Had he attempted to conquer Britan before turning to Russia?

The Battle of Britain is generally accepted to have had a peace treaty with Britain as a (failed) strategic objective, thus putting it “out of the picture”.

I've read, the Battle of Britan can indeed be called a failed attempt to conquer Britan. Althouhg not ended with a peace treaty, wikipedia even says: "Hitler believed that the United Kingdom's refusal to end the war was based on the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Germany sooner or later." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

So I am not sure it is really "out of the question".

Overall, the Orwell's sentence is not very insightful, imho.

The prescience of Orwell's comment is that "Russia's turn would come" rather than any semantics about exactly what "England is out of the picture" meant.

Germany and Russia were in a military alliance and were dividing Poland between them when Orwell wrote that.

So yes, it was very prescient.

I am not a historian of course, but by that time I don't think serious politicians had illusions about the upcoming war between Russian and Germany.

Russia was not in alliance with Germany. The Non-Aggression pact with Russia was similar to the pacts Germany had with other countries. For example, Germany had a Non-Agression pact with Poland, and Poland took pieces from Czechoslovakia when Hitler took Sudetenland in 1938. This didn't prevent Hitler from attacking Poland.

The Soviet-German pact was just buying time in preparation to the future war.

The Soviet Union had been seeking to create a collective security military alliance with France and Britan against Germany, because it considered the war with Germany inevitable. But after the negotiations failed, Soviets made the pact with Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

We should remember, this Orwell's text is a newspaper article, so may be a propaganda to a degree. For example, Orwell himself multiple times called his work for BBC a propaganda - see his resignation letter to BBC and the famous quote from his diary:

> Our radio strategy is even more hopeless than our military strategy. Nevertheless one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. Eg. I am regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. I don’t believe this to be so, but the calculation is: ...

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/14-3-42/

In this article what is interesting to me is how he explains that Hitler poses as a Christ or Prometheus, a self-sacrificing heroic victim. (Because I am not familiar with Mein Kampf and Hitler's rhetoric in general).

The rest - not a revelation. BTW, he attributes the "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" to Hitler, but that's wrong, the phrase has a different author.

His plan certainly was to, and his generals told him it would happen.

Operation Sealion (the German invasion of Britain) was planned for September 1940[1]. The German invasion of Russia[2] commenced June 1941.

Note that Orwell was writing this in March 1940, before it was clear that Britain would win the Battle of Britain (the airwar that was supposed to destroy the British airforce in preparation for invasion) and Germany would be unable to invade. His whole quote is worth reading:

Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture—that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion_(wargame)

They war gamed Sea Lion with actual Nazis around at the time.

Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion.

The hard-fought draw was just hard enough.

By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all appearances preparatory to its own invasion. That is why its cities were almost undefended when the German tanks rolled past them, cutting their supply lines.

> Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion.

What a weird take!

In what possible way is the stopping of the enemies goals interpreted as anything except a win?

That's like saying "X tried to invade Y, but Y threw than back. So it was a draw"

> By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all appearances preparatory to its own invasion.

It's almost certian that Stalin did not intend to attack Germany in 1941, and no evidence at all that Hitler thought he was planning to attack[1]. The opposing theory is based on Viktor Suvorov's book in the 1980s, but it isn't widely supported.

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

England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized.

Much of the history of the war has had to be rewritten since Soviet records became available in the '90s. That has not penetrated far even yet.

"No Simple Victory" by Norman Davies goes some way in that direction. Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.

Russian mobile forces massed at the border needs explanation if not preparatory for invasion.

> England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized.

England was already beaten bloody before the Battle of Britain.

> Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized

I think it's very widely recognized that England had been at the limit, but by the end of the Battle of Britain they had proven they could obtain resupply from the US and Germany couldn't stop enough convoys.

> Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to

No one is arguing Britain won the war then, just that specific battle.

> Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.

I think most people who've read about the war in Europe would acknowledge this - at least between 1941 and 1944.

There were no exceptionally unusual Russian mobile forces massed along the Soviet/Reich-occupied border during 1941. In fact, Stalin pulled a number of forces back from the very border itself while a transition was being made between the partly abandoned Stalin Line and the (further west) newly developed but still unfinished Molotov Line of border defenses. Almost everything Stalin did in mid 1941 before June 22 reeked of two things: A heavy application of desperate appeasement towards Hitler and secondly, a lackluster defense preparation that was a pragmatic minimum whose absence would be too much to justify even by appeasement standards.

It's amazing how much Viktor Suvorov's completely discredited book and its arguments still carry weight with many people today. There was NO serious Soviet invasion plan of what Germany controlled in 1941, only hypothetical scenario planning and poorly designed plans for near future offensive power. The one thing the USSR was doing right however, as part of a more general strategy was gearing up a massive rearmament and war production program. This had been in progress since even before 1939 but only really picked up steam in the early 1940s.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This was not a rare view at the time, was it? IIRC a lot of people saw it coming.

It was always matter of when and who will betray the other in Nazi-USSR pact. AFAIR NY Times even mentioned this in their story on the pact from august 1939.

Rare view? Maybe not, but neither was it widely assumed or a sure thing in the eyes of many contemporaries. Even inside Germany, inside Hitler's own government, quite a few well-placed people thought that the alliance with Stalin might be made to last quite a while as a pragmatic, mutually useful thing. There was even good logic for the notion: Stalin's own government almost certainly had no intention of actually attacking and trying to invade the Reich. What Stalin wanted most from the pact was enough time to fortify soviet defenses against a possible eventual German attack while grabbing up as much territory under the pact's leeway points as he could. Hitler's fear was in letting that go on for too long, to the point that the USSR would be much more difficult to invade.

The Journal of Finance just published this paper: "Financial crises and political radicalization: How failing banks paved Hitler's path to power" https://www.bis.org/publ/work978.htm.

The recent biography of Keynes (“The Price of Peace” by Carter) spends a lot of time discussing similar theories put forth at the time; Keynes was very critical of the Treaty of Versailles as he considered it an inevitability that crushing the German economy post-WW1 would produce a nationalist demagogue.

Indeed, the treatise by Keynes after which the biography was named provided a technical argument for that thesis.

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) Keynes puts the blame squarely on the French delegation as led by Clemenceau:

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

> crushing the German economy post-WW1

It was so crushed it was the strongest economic power in Europe by 1923. Truly a crippling burden.

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

> By 1932, close to six million people were unemployed. The situation in Germany became so precarious that Hitler and the Nazi party started to gain the support of the people.[11]

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

> The United States was the only country to come out of World War I without debt or reparations to pay. Germany owed a huge sum and had to take a loan from the US just to survive. No one had any hint that there would be a stock market crash with worldwide repercussions and that this crash would ruin Germany and set the stage for Hitler to come into power.

Ooh! I just read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia". In it, he describes how he and his wife almost got into serious trouble for having a copy with them in Barcelona. Orwell had joined a loyalist political faction as a volunteer to help fight Franco's fascists, which were backed by Germany. However, communists took over the Catalan government, using Orwell's party as a scapegoat to gain power. They started rounding them all up as traitors. Thousands were put in jail or summarily executed.

The police came to search Orwell's wife's hotel room in the middle of the night and found a copy of Mein Kampf, which given the circumstances, was incredibly incriminating. But apparently they found other political books and luckily for her, decided it wasn't incriminating. I have no idea how.

I thought the book was enlightening and Orwell really is an amazing writer. I lived in Spain for a few years and visited most of the areas he went to, which made the whole book even more vivid. Orwell was sooooo lucky to escape the country. Just a week after he and his wife left, formal charges were brought against them as traitors in Spain.

By the way, I have no idea how I went this long without knowing it (maybe I forgot) but George Orwell is a pen name. I was reading the Wikipedia page about his wife and I was like, "Who the hell is Eric Blair?"

Just have to admit to being impressed by how succinct and clear yet deep this writing was. Easy to read and understand, and certainly gets the point across.

That's Orwell for ya. Journalism background.

I think he made it a point to write like this. Check out his essay "Politics and the English Language".

I agree, but I am not surprised.

Today's writing about politics mostly seems much more convoluted, bloodless and meaningless.

I don't think that the main reason for that is with the writer though.

I think the reason is the "triumph of liberal democracy" or capitalism.

We have invented a pretty robust sugar-coat for the interests of the powerful.

Nowadays, we even call some of our exploitation schemes "eco-friendly".

Reading the comments below the article (generally a bad idea) show that a paragraph of the article seems to have been ‘redacted’. Sources are quoted but I don’t see a reason for the change.

“I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power - till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter - I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.”

>>Sources are quoted but I don’t see a reason for the change.

Redacted [by who?] If this was removed by Orwell then it isn't for you to see a reason or not. If removed by the editors of the abve site, then I'd agree that that's a questionable choice; at any rate an ellipsis would be called for.

Have a read of the comments, the essay seems to vary depending on where you read it.

given the phrasing - "I should like it put on record" - I would not be particularly sympathetic even towards Orwell choosing to have it redacted from future publications

he is not alone in this feeling. the numbers are no longer on the site, but I remember YouGov [a British polling company] indicated that British people hold Stalin in far more contempt than they do Hitler, even in spite of the far closer proximity and impact of Hitler's crimes.

whether that polling can be trusted I do not know, but I do get the feeling that despite genuine hatred for his actions, a lot of people harbour a soft spot for his persona.

I suspect this is as or more likely a result of his abundant comic depictions as it is the characterisation as a hero-like figure manfully struggling against inevitability.

Contempt is different from personal animosity. I don't know how you can have soft spot or feel personal animus for a long dead historical figure in another country.

This is pretty much independent of whether you would attempt to kill him on meeting, knowing everything about him.

There would be no Hitler without Stalin to begin with, while the opposite isn't true.

Besides, the UK has committed acts of (de facto) shameful collaboration with Stalin, such as the forceful and brutal "repatriation" of Cossacks to the USSR where they faced certain death.

To quote Wikipedia, "On 1 June 1945 the UK placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks and delivered them to the Red Army for repatriation to the Soviets [...] most Cossacks were sent to the gulags in far northern Russia and Siberia, and many died").

This was an enormous tragedy and human rights violation, comparable to what deporting thousands of North Korean refugees back to North Korea today would be.

The Cossacks knew it was a death sentence, and they resisted, but obviously in vain. In the words of Julius Epstein (after Wikipedia again): "The first to commit suicide, by hanging, was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin, who shot himself...The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd, and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again, and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious, and threw them, like sacks of potatoes, in the trucks."

No British Jews have ever been deported to the Third Reich. And this certainly may add to the sense of contempt for Stalin, as the Soviet dictator sort of corrupted British politics making the UK an accomplice in a way Hitler never managed to.

> I suspect this is as or more likely a result of his [Hitler's] abundant comic depictions as it is the characterisation as a hero-like figure manfully struggling against inevitability.

That's an alternative explanation, sure (although personally I tend to doubt it)

while this is clearly good reason for Brits to hate Stalin, I sincerely doubt any significant portion of the general population is even aware of it. Your average Brit has heard of the purges, the terrors of Soviet communism and maybe about Soviet spies infiltrating the British government (Philby, Burgess, Maclean etc), but that's about it. practically no one has any awareness of our government's actions in the era after WW2

I think this is highly unlikely to be the explanation

That's probably true (I doubt the premise to begin with, I'm not sure if Stalin is universally perceived as more repellent than Hitler by the general public in the UK, the poll results notwithstanding - although I'm not a Brit, I only lived in the UK for a few years).

However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.

>However such general sentiments can 'survive' the knowledge that kickstarted them and propagate in the collective consciousness without it.

very true, but that would require the general public to have known about it at any point, which is doubtful in itself.

if we do take his lesser contempt to be true, which I agree is not a given, a darker hypothesis could develop from Hitler's view of the British as as or more Aryan than the Germans

perhaps this twisted compliment could have seeped into the public (sub)consciousness. but again, whether people are or were actually aware of it is questionable, and whether it would have an effect is equally uncertain

Certainly way more people know about the bombing campaigns of 1940-41, whereas at the end of the day, Stalin never dropped bombs on the UK

Maybe they thought it looked bad… But it was only 1940 when he wrote the essay, so at that point a lot of Hitler’s crimes would not yet have been known in Britain, and a lot of them were not yet even in full swing. So he’s looking from a very different perspective to us who know about the holocaust and the other shocking things the Nazis did.

That's too charitable. It's a rhetorical tool that Orwell uses to invoke a sort of comradery with the reader because it lends itself to the largely anti-establishment points he tried to get across. It's the old Etonian going "I'm one of you guys" which has a long tradition in British political rhetoric.

So?

You say it like it’s a bad thing to use rhetoric. But even pg has his own sharp set of rhetorical tools.

it's a bad thing to mistake rhetorical skill for profundity. The same is true for pg. Most of what he writes is trite but he's popular because he's mastered the skill of talking to his audience in a tone that has convinced them they're all secret geniuses with access to forbidden knowledge. If Orwell was alive today, he'd probably have a thriving substack.

In reality much of Orwell's output was the result of his personal feud with Stalinism, deeply conventional and elitist, and not that deep, and it's not surprising that he is today probably the most mindlessly-quoted writer around.

Do you really thing a book like 1984 is "not that deep"?

1984 is a particularly shallow book. It borders on being so simplistic as to cater to a teen equivalent crowd intellectually. It'd be deep for a 12 year old reading it for the first time, maybe. It's a cartoonish dystopia, laughably absurd in structure; although it gets his points across, which is obviously important. Orwell paints the kind of fantasy dystopia one might envision if one knew absolutely nothing about totalitarianism firsthand. Its popularity over the decades owes primarily to being shallow, simplistic. People that otherwise can't or won't approach complex ideas can read 1984 and get it. It's also not very original, even Ayn Rand took a shot at the premise a decade before Orwell with her book Anthem (1984 is a better book however).

This is what's so good about hacker news, morons that enjoyed the book can learn how deficient their minds are at grasping complex ideas in comparison to intellectual heavyweights such as yourself.

I too was blessed by the above comment illuminating precisely how shallow and dumb I am.

You must be so lonely, being so intellectually superior.

Orwell was tremendously skilled at clear, elegant, vivid writing. Is that somehow bad? I will read something he has written just for that. There are books with interesting ideas that I won't read because they bore or even annoy me. Brave New World was somewhat boring and Babbitt I had to stop reading, the author was so unable to say anything well.

Orwell's writing is such a palate cleanser compared to (say) the continental philosophers of not very long after him.

The link is actually to a censored version of the review which omits the sentence "I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler."

An uncensored copy of the review which does contain that sentence is here: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

Here is a reference from the NYT to show that yes, he really said this: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/22/opinion/l-orwellian-ambiv...

The fact that most of the copies of Orwell's review of Mein Kampf have replaced this sentence with "..." is downright Orwellian.

I don't know that it's Orwellian except insofar as it's stupid, and since stupid conventionality was one of Orwell's great themes, it is Orwellian, so you're right.

We've belatedly changed the URL now. I wish I'd seen it sooner.

Orwell omitted a few details: Hitler never had a majority in the Reichstag/german parliament - he benefited from the enmity between the Social democrats and the Communist. I mean a popular front, like in France of 1936 would have stopped them. The German soial dems and communist were mortal enemies, because the social dems shot a lot of communists in the aftermath of the Kapp putsch.

Also Hitler had the massive support of German industrialists, they bailed him out in 1932, and both Thyssen and Schlacht urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler. They all thought that they would control Hitler, von Papen certainly thought so.

Also the social dems were very passive (to say the least). Von Papen dissolved the Prussian state, where they social dems were the government - that was the state with the largest police force in the country. What did the social dems do? They went to court, when they should have called a general strike (they did exactly that during the Kapp putsch, some thirteen years earlier)

Hitler wasn't acting alone, I wonder why Orwell didn't mention that. I think Orwell didn't like the idea of a popular front, because of his negative experience with the communists during the Spanish civil war.

That is true, but also that tend to be true in multi-party voting system in general. Having over 50% is not routine at all. Generally, the leading party must make coalition of some sort.

I think that if you want to attack legitimacy of that election, going through the street violence and voter intimidation Nazi party produced is closer to mark.

Also communists were actual communists alien with Russian communist party. And news of purges going on Russia previously were available in Germany. Socialist party was the pro-democracy party on Germany. That is not compatible with party that takes their instructions from Stalin as communists were.

By the time of the KPD-SPD split, Stalin was not in power. In fact, the KPD split from the SPD in 1918, when the USSR was still being born. And far from taking orders from the Bolsheviks, they actually had a fair amount of influence on them. The idea that they split because the meek SPD was afraid of the Stalinists is revisionist history, and the SPD itself at various points in its history was far from above purges and political violence

The reason the KPD split from the SPD is that the SPD supported WW1 and the KPD were against the war. The reason they became mortal enemies was because in 1920 the SPD and the Freikorps killed many KPD members, from then on there was no hope at reconciliation.

Stalin took leadership of the country in 1924 and lost it when he died much much later.

By the time of elections of 1933, Russia was full totalitarian and that is what communist party wanted for Germany.

Yes, and the SPD banned anti-war socialists and communists in 1918, and then ordered to have leaders of the KPD shot in 1920. As you surely know, 1920 is before 1924. The point being, the KPD and the SPD were irrevocably alienated from each other past the point of no return before Stalin took power.

What is often forgotten, by the early 1930s, the split between SPD and KPD (which dates back to Marx and Engels and the condemnation of the "Bernsteinian revisionism" on the one hand and the SPD not being a revolutionary party after 1903) had become an abyss: to the KPD the SPD was a "social-fascist movement" and the SPD had adopted the three-arrows symbol, which symbolized an equidistance to fascism, communism and monarchism. There was probably not much room for a scenario of united forces.

The rift dates to WW1, not the 1930s, and considering the three arrows to be a better marking of the rift than the SPD literally giving the order to murder KPD is nonsensical.

There was no split in 1903 - the SPD simply had both a revolutionary and electoral faction.

And Bernsteinian revisionism wasn't about taking power through elections or through revolution (which is what the SPD took position on in 1903), it was about the idea that capitalism wasn't going to implode on its own and that accelerationism was a bad policy (on which he was objectively right), but he still allied with revolutionary Marxists such as Liebknecht in the USPD.

Why the USPD? Because he was essentially excluded from the SPD for not supporting WW1.

Hence the doctrine of social fascism - the SPD supported war (and to some degree imperialism), so the KPD and the USPD exaggerated this and called them fascists. That was a result of the core reason of the split, which is differing views on war.

The split itself was already an abyss in 1920, it did not in any way get worse - indeed there is little that is worse than armed confrontation.

There was absolutely room for united forces is the SPD didn't kick out the KPD and USPD (including Bernstein) over WW1, and then progressively gotten more and more centrist as predictably the pro-war position was beneficial to centrists. Without that central event there would have been so split. The USPD is an example that shows that both revolutionary communists and social democrats (by the definition of the time, you would call them communists nowadays) were able to work together as they all agreed that electoralism and harm reduction were inherently necessary, that capitalism had to be abolished, and that this abolition had to be done fairly gradually.

Nazis in their past Freikorps incarnation also killed plenty of communists. It did not prevent KPD from doing joint strikes with them.

So I find it very dubious that KPD and SPD couldn't have made a single united front, if instructions from Moscow weren't towards the opposite.

> So I find it very dubious that KPD and SPD couldn't have made a single united front, if instructions from Moscow weren't towards the opposite.

And if social democrat's were willing to cooperate with them. Because communists were only slightly smaller threat then nazi. Hitlers tactic was to talk about communists and Jew and social democrats interchangeably, but they were not. That does not mean the three were the same in practice.

Social democrats were the one pro-democracy party in Germany. That is not compatible with communism. Then there were those pro-monarchy or military dictatorship, then nazi.

> The rift dates to WW1, not the 1930s (…)

What I wrote is that the rift dates back to the late 19th century and had become rather an abyss by the early 1930s (considering things like the Iron Front).

> he benefited from the enmity between the Social democrats and the Communist

To support Hitler Stalin ordered German Communists to not join forces with Social Democrats.

When? In 1918 when the KPD split from the SPD? Or in 1920 when the SPD and the Freikorps shot all of their leaders dead? Perhaps when the death of those leaders and the ensuing infighting allowed the Comintern to take influence? No, because Stalin wasn't in power when the SPD and KPD became literally mortal enemies. You don't join forces with people that gave the order to kill your friends. Pretending Stalin was the reason they were alienated is ridiculous - the alienation predated him taking power.

More like the center-left SPD failed to respond to the depression well (i.e. govern properly) and made alliances of convenience with the right and the Nazis to marginalize and ban Communists along with anyone else on the left.

That's how it's going to happen in the US, too: The governing center/center-left party expends all of its effort attacking the left, and becomes completely ineffective at governance through incompetence, corruption and self-dealing, losing the support of the voters. The far-right (rising in popularity) eats into the center-right through direct targeting of individuals and the rewards of conversion to a movement currently rising in popularity. Eventually a charismatic far-right speaker starts giving popular speeches indicting the corruption and incompetence of the governing center, probably during a deep economic crisis, and insisting that this corruption and incompetence is disarming the country in the face of the real existential threat that everyone from the far-right to the center-left agrees upon, which is the left. And the left is actually covertly foreign-based, funded by powerful Jews and enemy governments, so their opinions are actually a form of invasion. So we need to cleanse this country of the traitors, then take the fight to the countries that supported them.

that's true. On the other hand: when the nazis came to power the communists were advocating for a generals strike, whereas the SPD leaders were staunchly against it.

in German: https://www.gewerkschaftsgeschichte.de/1933-konflikt-ueber-d...

now both parties took part in a general strike in 1920 against the Kapp putsch, and that was the end of the coup attempt.

It all could have been averted, I think people exaggerate the strength of the NSDAP in march 1933. They were already on a downturn, when they took power - in terms of the popular vote. It is possible that they would not have mattered, half a year later.

IDK if I'd call that an "omission." There was a political system, and Hitler came to power within it. France still has a political norm of banding together to defeat populist far right parties, and an electoral system that lends to it.

The fact remains that Fascism, Hitler, and Nazism was popular and that was key to achieving power . This is essay is about that. Why, despite promising burdens and hardship, was Fascism popular. It just isn't about electoral tactics, negative politics or such. I'm sure he would have conceded the point that any given elections could have been determined by such tactics.

I agree with Orwell. The tactical-electoral subject isn't really that interesting, even if it is/was consequential. The point about promising voters burdens, hardship, & "military virtues" is interesting.

For example, I think this gives us clues about Russian communism's decline (also in the West, ideologically) after Stalin.

^Also I doubt Orwell was against "popular front politics." (a) I've read a lot of Orwell and can't recall any statement that suggests this and (b) Orwell himself volunteered in a communist militia against fascism. He himself was a socialist. If you're willing to join a communist militia to fight fascism, surely you'd be OK with joined ticket.

> For example, I think this gives us clues about Russian communism's decline (also in the West, ideologically) after Stalin.

The decline only started well after that, even after the 1968 Prague Spring debacle. Only a few of the faithful in the west were put off by it.

I'd put it at late 1970s, maybe really sinking in with Poland's Solidarnosc turmoil around 1980.

In Poland we say that popular support for communism ended together with food supply.

This is somehow relflecyed in Solidarity’s initial mission of fighting for „socialism with human face”.

I think I agree with you.

I don't think that the integrity of elections and democracy are the main point of this essay.

Orwell wrote a lot about authoritarianism, and as you say, "communism" was the prime example at the time.

What he hints at here is not only the fragility of democracy. It's about the fragility of civilization.

It's about the "will to power" as defined by Nietzsche, and the power of belief systems, as well as the primal underpinnings of our society.

This essay makes me think about the authoritarian side of capitalism, "freedom" (to take what you can), slavery and many more topics.

My takeaway is that our contemporary masquerade of "capitalism=freedom=human rights" is nothing but an illusion of a select few.

But that's what makes Orwell great, everybody reads him differently.

I'm well aware that Orwell is favored for "anti-socialist"/"pro-freedom" stances and I have read 1984 and Animal farm.

I must disagree.

Orwell is not the bible, or an if-by-whiskey politician. Everybody reads him differently because they're combining hearsay, random quotes and attributions.

If you read Orwell's essays or articles directly, he's extremely clear and unambiguous. The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability.

On capitalism as a belief system, Orwell was a critic. Not because of freedom, or lack thereof... but because he thought capitalist politics didn't offer enough hope. I can't find the quote but somewhere he goes into Socialist, Communist & even Fascist promises of a better future. Capitalism offered a very modest amount of hope on a very long timeline. Conservatism offered none, which is why (according to Orwell) Fascism succeeded it.

Thanks for the reply.

I have read Down&Out and the odd essay in addition to the ones I mentioned.

I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist" often enough so that my reply partly argued against this simplification.

There's some hard-to-explain background for my comments:

1) The above-mentioned simplification: I grew up with socialism and fascism equally being put under the "totalitarianism" umbrella in media and education. In German we call it "Hufeisentheorie". There's probably some truth to this. But I incrasingly feel that for capitalism to appear "human", an exponentially growing amount of available natural resources and slave labour is needed.

2) The post-war generation of which i.e. my parents were a part; they were in a way the undertakers of mainstream leftism.

3) You hint at it: Fascism and capitalism tend to go hand in hand. We have just been brainwashed to forget about it. See US foreign policy in Latin America.

>>I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist"

I don't think the last part is true. ASAIK, Orwell remained a socialist all his life. I don't think he was disillusioned, because he wasn't a kool aid kind of guy at any point.

Orwell died young, before the cold war so he didn't really weigh in on that dialogue. The terms and cliches we tend to use came after he died.

In my opinion fascism courted, supported and leaned on capitalists, not really capitalism. The ideological view of capitalism (in the Rand/Hayek/Neoliberalism sense) was still new ATT.

Yes that all makes sense to me.

In hindsight I made some vague points partly because I misread your original comment.

I am myself annoyed by some popular misconceptions about Orwell and his work.

I had read some nuanced articles about him as well and they didn't all paint him in the way that I put in quotes.

Regarding capitalism and fascism, I misleadingly wrote "you hint at it", but maybe we disagree here at least partly.

> The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability.

This is common and always amuses me. My favorite is Adam Smith, beloved of the most demonstrably ardent self-described “capitalists” who would be shocked and repulsed by what he actually wrote.

Sometimes this property is considered a feature, not a bug, in particular by Marxists and religious leaders, and doubtless by many more.

As it happens I really love Eric Blair’s writing even when I disagree with him.

True, Orwell has a worldview (though it evolves over time) and it connects his thoughts if you pick up a collection of his essays and study them systematically. But one does not need to agree with everything to find agreement with some particular elements and thoughts.

Slavery pre-dates capitalism. Slavery is more a product of feudalism. In fact, it was the capitalist successes of the northern states in the US that drove the defeat of the southern slave states.

Yep, it's convenient today to connect the two or to pretend that America's (or Britain's) success in the early day was largely a product of slavery. But even when slavery ended there was hardly a sudden decline in prosperity, that engine kept accelerating.

> Slavery didn't make America rich. It made a few Southerners rich and a few Northerners rich, but it didnt make the country rich.

> Another way to look at it is, the Confederacy was a loose collection of agricultural states. The real money was made by the industrial northern states. In the north were mills, factories, ship building, and steel mills.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-slavery-contribute-to-Ame...

American capitalism (and the labour movements that reacted to it) was built in the factories and mills, not the farms in the south.

> Also Hitler had the massive support of German industrialists, they bailed him out in 1932, and both Thyssen and Schlacht urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler.

From the essay: “It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. ”

"Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of ‘living room’ (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder."

That bears reading twice.

>[...] at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”

Orwell's attribution of the quote here seems to be incorrect.

While it's true that Hitler used the saying in his speeches [1], it predates him by many decades, and is often attributed to Ferdinand von Schill (the guy who unsuccessfully rebelled against Napoleon). [2][3]

[1]: https://comicism.tripod.com/341108.html

[2]: https://de.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/lieber_ein_Ende_mit_Schreck...

[3]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6564585-better-an-end-with-...

Thank you! I was surprised to hear that Hitler coined such a phrase, so it’s great to see it attributed properly.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

> [...] because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’tonly want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

One wonders whether this desire for struggle, self-sacrifice, drums, flags and loyalty-parades is not a right/left thing, and whether the consequences of indulging it are independent of the stories we tell about it.

There's a deeper cause for it though I think. The civilization from which I write this comment offers comfort, safety, and hygiene and really everything you could possibly imagine, so long as you don't challenge its weaknesses and falsehoods. There is a (very partisan) quote from UK physician and author Theodore Dalrymple that captures it well, "When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control..”

The urge for those drums, flags and parades is a desire for the dignity that the comforts don't provide, and in the fascist case, it was also an opposite reaction against the indignity of precieved comfort and lies. My pet theory about the nazis was what made them so explicitly and sickeningly cruel was they were compensating for the psychosexual shame and humiliation, not only from war reparations, but from a generation of mostly fatherless boys (post-WW1) raised in the culture of the Wiemar Republic. They envied the masculine eros of Mussolini's fascism and directly adopted its aestheics combined with a new occult mythology to compensate for the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and with the promise of largely ethno-socialist policies. Jews in Germany were not total outsiders at the time (though there is no denying anti-semitism before NSDAP, Europe's historic anti-semitism practically defines it), many Jews having fought for the country and Kaiser, but nazi propaganda against them was all about scapegoating them for the liberalism (so-called "degeneracy") of Wiemar, and crucially, for the psychosexual shame of a generation of German boys who would eventually join the nazi party. Add freely available meth (pervitin) to the mix, and the dictator had everything he needed.

This doesn't excuse or explain at all, but rather, asks whether these factors have any predictive power, where if you add these ingredients together again, do we get a similar result, and how do we know the reaction is occurring as predicted without it becoming a chain reaction throughout the whole system? It seems like an urgent contemporary question to me.

>[my civilization offers support] so long as you don't challenge its weaknesses and falsehoods

Yowch. To be clear, just challenging it results in the blanket ripped from one's bed? Romania?

The top comment points out that a part is redacted, removing "I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power - till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter - I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.". This Gutenberg version appears to include that line: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

Note, this review is from March 1940. At that point in time, WWII was 6 months old. Germany and the Soviet Union annexed land from their neighbors, and in response a number of countries declared war.

I suspect he would have even stronger feelings a few months later when the Air Battle of Britain begins... or when the mass murder of jews in concentration camps is discovered in June 1942.

I can't believe they flagged and censored my reply, which addressed that point of censorship. Are these people irony-proof?

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32127971: users flagged that. It was an unsubstantive, flamey comment on an inflammatory topic—indeed the mother of all inflammatory internet topics—so I'd say they were right to do so.

I don't see irony there. Plenty of low-value comments going on about "censorship" get rightly flagged. Indeed, if they didn't, that would be a loophole anyone could drive a truck through.

Incidentally, would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You've unfortunately done it a lot, and we've had to ask you several times to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You've already stuck your blow, and bravely sided with the consensus, and I can practically see you building your little case like a tetris game inside your noggin.

What's the point of arguing?

Obviously the parallels to what we're living through with our last president are plain and should be alarming. The ridiculous idea that the secret service sms messages aren't available somewhere from the NSA or some other agency is a joke. We are in the midst of a slow moving coup and as long as 45 remains free, spewing his vitriol and handing out cash to his devotees unimpeded we should be very concerned.

Does anyone know why Hitler hated Stalin and communism so much? The article alludes to how Russia was always the main target, and he was friends with industrialists, but I've never seen a good reason why.

Communism was the main competitor with Nazi ideology. They offered competing solutions to the problems of the downtrodden and destitute population. As the main competing vision, it was also the main threat to nazi success.

From Hitler's writing, it is clear that he despised socialism/communism because socialist ideologues promoted class antagonism and internationalism, both of which undermined the unity of the German people.

Of course, at a practical political level, leftists were also his rivals for the votes of the dissatisfied in inter-war Germany.

Dictators hate other dictators. There can only be 1 winner and Stalin was his main competitor.

He probably saw what happened during the Holodomor

He'd either not care, or actively cheer for it. More Lebensraum!!

Because Jews are the primary enemy in Nazi ideology, and the idea of communism being a Jewish plot was an existing antisemitic belief well before Hitler was a known entity in Germany's political scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism

Hitler was a nationalist, the Communists were internationalists. Communists wanted to improve the lot of people, Hitler wanted to improve the lot of the German people. A random German could become a Communist, but a random Communist would never spontaneously turn into a German.

So the same reason why all kings hate universal philosophies/religions. They bypass border defenses.

How does that fit with the Nazis forming alliances with Italy, Japan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Thailand and even China at one point? Hitler agreeing to a pact with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to further German nationalism in the Near East? Then they had Muslim SS officers that had to stop training multiple times a day to pray to Mecca. Because Hitler was so anti-internationalist, the Nazis were eager to host the Olympics and invite people from around the world to show off their regime? What were they doing in Africa, were they defending the interests of the German state in the Sahara?

Don't be blinded by their propaganda, both Stalinism and Hitlerism and any totalitarian ideology is inherently internationalist. Because they tolerate nothing beside and beyond their own ideology, so they end up getting involved with the entire world always. It's about control and these regimes do not stop until their are either defeated of control the entire world.

this is tangentially related, but i've always loved reading this critique of orwell & 1984 by asimov: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

i've always thought it a valid critique, and it makes me think less of orwell's writings

Thank you for posting this. I really enjoyed it.

Asimov spends criticizes how Orwell got future technology wrong.

But I wonder how the technology “1984” corresponds to the technology in Eastern Block countries circa 1984.

HBOs Chernobyl is praised for its accuracy of Soviet life in the 1980d, and it looks a lot like what Orwell describes in 1984.

And some of Asimov descriptions of 1980s tech were fads:

> His hero finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes and electric razors.

I’ve purchased two sets of shoelaces and 20 sets of razor blades (in bulk) this year.

1984 didn't have the concept of outsourced manufacturing. (For that matter, I guess the Soviet view of the world didn't either.)

I read it just now and I think Asimov is being far too hard on Orwell in that review.

> The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.

> One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers for every person watched.

Except as I sit here and write this now with tape over my webcam "television set is two-way" hardly seems like an idea worthy of derision.

Nor does the idea of government mass surveillance seem laughably impractical.

Of course, we have computers now that make this type of mass surveillance possible, Isacc couldn't conceive of the advances in computer and ML that have unlocked these terrifying government capacities.

In this way it was Asimov not Orwell lacking imagination.

And he takes George to task for not mentioning computers:

> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.

Oh the irony.

As for the rest of the review he dresses down Orwell for not envisioning the rise of new drugs (vices) or the liberated role of women in society.

These are only flaws if you assume Orwell's goal was to accurately predict the future.

Personally I don't.

I wouldn't criticize Animal Farm for not having the most accurate of farm equipment in its depiction and I don't read 1984, especially now, to get a sense of what the world will actually be like in 1984.

It's a silly and unfair framing of the objective.

I read both Animal Farm and 1984 as allegorical retellings of historical events which separated from the specific details of those events allow us to see general patterns and apply them to our own societies.

Animal Farm isn't less of a book because Stalin was not literally a pig and 1984 is not less of a book because gin wasn't the primary vice of the youth in the literal year 1984.

To dismiss the book for saying so is to miss the point completely.

this is great, but I smirked at this line

>Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.

Which is very not true as punch cards (hollerith machines) were very important to the Nazis, and the second part is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps no relationship actually exists there.

Yeah, that's clearly wrong. The Nazis were about as far away from Luddites as you can get. The whole point of the post-WWII recoil at the horror of Nazi-ism was the realization that a culturally-advanced high-tech progressive society was capable of using all of that advancement as a lever to do the same barbaric and horrible things humans had done before, only much more efficiently.

much better put

I enjoyed reading Asimov's review, but I'm surprised that it makes you think less of Orwell rather than understand that they're two polar points in perspectives on writing.

I don't think I've read a character in Asimov that had more than 1 or 2 deviant terms in an otherwise averaged society utility function -- and he's far more interested in what the future 'looks like'

While Orwell engages (similar to Dostoyevsky, et al) the psychological aspects that deviate from an Enlightenment world-view/vision.

It's even more hilarious to read > The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'.

> This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control.

It sure is inefficient! -- all of our web-browsing and Internet connections would be so much faster and efficient if 80-90% of it wasn't spying on us -- but that hasn't stopped the big tech companies, nor did it stop the Soviet Union, the Nazis, or J Edgar Hoover.

And I don't think those things in Heaven and Earth, Asimov dreamt of in his philosophy.

Wow - awesome! Asimov’s review reads like every engineer’s nit-picking arguments (including my own!). In this case they are almost all strawman arguments, seemingly painting 1984 as a work of science and prediction. Asimov saying Asimov’s writing is great, and another style is bad.

Big Brother was not a person, but an immortal simulcrum of the party. Asimov ignores that and assumes that Big Brother is just an individual dictator that will die.

Pick a sentence in the second half, and think about whether Asimov is critiquing like an engineer or not.

1984 is not a book written as a coherent hard sci-fi novel, it is more akin to a allegorical fairytale where you need to pick up the concepts by implication.

Asimov is annoyed 1984 uses Stalin as a setting. That is like being annoyed that Asimov uses starships as a setting. The story is not the setting.

I wonder no more why my people, after Habeck announcing more than a uncomfortable winter, are united in supporting the people of Ukraine. He offered suffering for a cause. While the morale is quite different, the social mechanics repeat.

He might have decided so but the people don't share his cause. They are suffering with the heatwave and will also freeze during winter. Time will tell just how far his cause is going to last (it wont)

People in the West are quick to forget that fight against Nazism wasn't unanimous. Many in America supported it. Many in Western Europe supported it.

It was only when there was economic interests at stake they jumped in the war. Not to save people from Nazism (although this is what their decendants have been taught in schools) but to protect their own interest.

Very few occasions countries enter into a war based on some goodwill or emotion. It just so happens that a common enemy and common goal appear enough to threaten their selfish interests that momentarily, countries rally around it.

I can already see public opinions sliding against Zelensky here in the West. People's livelihood is impacted and not everybody feels that they need to suffer for a foreign country that they are far away from. For countries who border with Russia its a different story.

But its a lot more than just about the "need to suffer for a foreign country", isn't it? Its about the geopolitical interest of Europe. To be dependent on an autocratic foreign power (in this case gas) shows the problems.

For example, if Russia takes over Ukraine, it would make Russia by far the largest exporter of wheat in the world (from 22% to 33%) (second: US 16%) [1]. They would gain additional power in other market commodities like corn, sunflower, steel, etc.

Russia is already playing with their resource exports, I expect them to use it more whether or not they managed to achieve their goals regarding Ukraine. And other partnerships are building and increasing too like BRICS, CSTO, SCO.

Step back and think for a second: Countries staying neutral because they are dependent on the aggressors export resources are exactly that type of influence that superpowers like to have.

Sources: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wheat_exp...

Yes but if they piss off Putin arent they already forgone that scenario? It's guaranteed that Russia will target countries that helped Ukraine by weaponizing its captured commodities. So it puzzles me why rest of Europe would do this because NATO and Russia is NOT going to engage in WW3 like so many people have you believe.

Europe will go on its own way while experiencing shortfalls and Russia will go on theirs. They both suffer but in different ways. Europe's middle class will pay the price for this war. Russia's entire population pays the price. The United States benefit massively here 1) destroying an old enemy 2) several new customers to buy their energy and food supplies from.

I think whats clear is BRICS emerging as its own sustainable barter economy of sorts (its sure as hell not going to be able to push its reserve currency beyond its own borders) with some onramp/offramp to precious metals that becomes impossible to track when melted down and cleared in second/third tier merchants.

Nobody wins from this multi-polar world order, its really bad for the global economy and the middle class suddenly finds itself unable to afford the lifestyle that they enjoyed not too long ago. (ex. PS5 is prohibitvely expensive, think back to PS1, PS2 how affordable and liquid the supply was).

This is the new norm, get ready for even more expensive stuff you took for granted. Eventually it will cause a deflation as boomers wallets dry up as their pension is in limbo. The biggest losers will be the MZ generation.

I think you're overthinking it a bit. A world where aggressive dictators are invading nearby countries not good. Peace and prosperity are better. Hence most of the world is trying to help fix things.

The lifestyle thing will sort itself out - we've had a couple of hits from covid and then the war but it'll pass.

I consider it a good thing in this case.

Germany could try rationing its natural gas to ensure that everyone gets at least a minimum amount. Could that work?

Interesting read.

Speaking of dystopian fiction authors; Aldous Huxley wrote the well-known book "Brave New World". [0]

Doing a quick search for MK-ULTRA on Wikileaks one can find this now unclassified transcript from 1974:

> ... AND OTHER CULTS LIKE IT ARE NOT RELIGIOUS, BUT WERE DELIBERATE SYNTHETIC CREATIONS PART OF A SERIES OF PROJECTS THAT INCLUDED THE MK-ULTRA OPERATION, THAT WAS RUN THROUGH BRITISH INTELLIGENCE CONTROL OVER A SECTION OF THE CIA, WAS RUN THROUGH ALDOUS HUXLEY AND GREGORY BATES OUT OF PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA. [1]

Wonder if BNW is a blueprint, rather than a fiction book. Thoughts?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201109003500/https://wikileaks...

Hitler tried to use copyright law to prevent translations from being published, notably in France.

Dear YouTube, do you know who else tried to copyright claim content? Thats right ....

Interesting point, that lead me to finding this article about the French translations. [1] Ironically, until 2016, the German government also used copyright to prevent republications of his book. [2]

[1]: https://theconversation.com/amp/the-curious-history-of-mein-...

[2]: https://france24.com/en/20160108-germany-mein-kampf-bookstor...

Something similar is happening these days too, only they don't use copyright but intimidation: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/05/gr...

Meanwhile the actual leadership is busy reviewing the writings of a fascist political theorist...

https://www.oxfordhouseresearch.com/xi-jinping-carl-schmitt-...

> clumsy writing of Mein Kampf,

Mein Kampf is clumsy but offers real insights into propaganda. He really thought about it. He clearly understands the value of propaganda in the war: "propaganda demands the most skilled brains that can be found."

When Hitler talks mass psychology and propaganda, he says something very insightful even if it's inconvenient to hear for some. He calls masses feminine. When he talks to his followers, he talks to a beast that knows to be emotional and irrational. Rational reasoning is useless. Just emotion, repetition, never backing down, or admitting mistake.

Was Hitler particularly good at that, or did he just have a desperate audience? The usual downfall that people point to with autocratic governments is that their leaders think they're in touch with their citizens but are really a million miles away.

He was at least good at it.

His chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels was really good. Goebbels made propaganda that was way subtler than Hitlers. Nazi cinema created expensive movies under Goebbels until the end. Nobody sees them today but they are very subtle and clever in a way they build a sentiment. Not at all like the short clips they show you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolberg_(film)

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

I appreciate the added perspective; the Anglospheric view is often either "Look at those monsters, we would never do that" or "If only the German language had the concept of humor, they wouldn't have taken that guy seriously."

If you want to see a American movie that has similar feel to the Nazi wartime propaganda movies, watch "Acto of Valor" (2012) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591479/ It's Navy Seal action movie, and not a very good movie (propaganda rarely is) but it has the "dark undertone" where individuals, enemies, heroism, duty and sacrifice are presented in the same way as it was in the Nazi propaganda.

By all accounts, he was good at it. Nazi party was not the only rough party fighting for dominance over audience. There were multiple of them. When Hitler joined, they were rather small party. Hitler as a speaker was drawing crowds, but he was not the only guy trying to get attention. They got large under his leadership.

I am surprised no one has mentioned Paul Bloom's "Sweet Spot". He looks at the psychology behind chosen pain / suffering / struggle (e.g. running a marathon ) https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56922622-the-sweet-sp...

> But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches … The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.

A commenter here (and one on the original article) has noted that the part being elided appears to be the following:

The full review is, apparently, here:

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

That this is the only elision seems very strange. The passage is crucial to understanding how Hitler was able to do what he did. Orwell is expressing his admiration for Hitler's deep understanding of human nature while at the same time despising its application. It's a lesson too hard-won and too relevant today to be brushed aside.

Still, I can't help but think that Orwell, who gave us the Ministry of Truth and its capacity for historical engineering at scale, would be highly amused.

>The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.

I think the magic ingredient is utter, palpable self conviction. Complete unwavering dedication to your own rightness, regardless of any counter argument, any prevarication, even evidence to the contrary, is intoxicating. You don't need to argue, you don't need to convince, you don't need reasons, you're just right by definition. The simplicity and lack of complexity is intoxicating.

a.k.a. reality distortion field

If that’s a Jobs reference, I don’t think so. He talked about hiring smart people so they could tell him what to do, owned his mistakes, changed course when things didn’t work as expected. He said making mistakes was good as long as you learned something. Yes he could be an arse, but he was no Donald Trump.

I think the grievance husbandry is part of the cocktail too.

Obviously if your message is too complicated you’re going to lose people, but if you’re operating at an effective complexity level, you still need a story to tell.

“You’ve been very badly treated by not rich people, rather someone else” sells in job lots even today.

Good point. Resentment is the root of all evil. You create a narrative where you’re actually the real victims, and then that justifies ‘retaliation’ at almost any scale or severity. It even justifies lies or distortion because it’s in the service of a ‘greater truth’.

On a smaller scale, this is how people are able to build fiefdoms inside of companies, become successful local religious leaders, start cults, and maintain abusive domestic relationships.

Strong conviction is like a magical spell because it literally changes reality. Most people, myself included, are not really wired to be able to resist a constant force which is informing them of what “reality” is (not of its actual constituent components, but the framework of meaning and importance). This is normally a natural part of being human and living in society. We speak the language of the people around us, make the same foods, use the same body language. We think of society as the totality of what there is, but in reality it is providing us only a finite number of infinite options.

But every once in a while someone comes along who sense of reality is so self possessed that they create a force field around them. They change the set of available options for assigning meaning . Anything that falls into their event horizon is twisted and mangled by their totally consistent and unchangeable worldview, and it is contagious. If that person also happens to be charming, it’s all over.

The only way that I know not to fall into these kinds of traps is to regularly practice intentionally subverting or rejecting the norms around me. Not all of them, just the ones that don’t serve me. If I’m used to evaluating and potentially rejecting common practices in my culture (both societal and interpersonal), Then I know that if someone in my life is living in such a warp field that I will notice it since I am practiced in resisting its pull.

He was highly charizmatic and could adjust the way he talked to audience very well. Both in personal encounters and in public speeches. He would told you what you wanted to hear and project exact kind of personality he needed to project.

I can't help but think one of the most appealing aspects of Hitler would've been his ability to deliver passionate speeches.

For example, I have no idea what he's saying in this speech [1], but the tone at which he delivers it is undeniably quite mesmerising, especially when compared to the tone of, say, Joe Biden [2].

In a time where radio ruled, it's hard not to think he wouldn't stand out, irregardless of the content contained in his speeches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3N_2r6R-o

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6R6nllpsc

Yeah charisma is one of those things that can draw people in. Look at many cult leaders too. Charles Manson often went on just entirely nonsensical tirades, but could sound almost profound while speaking them. Jim Jones speeches have a similar angry rallying cry type of feel.

A historical survey of political personality cults, from Martin Luther to Mao, is The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, the "longshoreman philosopher":

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=eric+hoffer+the+true+believer&t=ip...

Very timely post given the threat of the fascist movement in the US right now.

Especially interesting that Orwell mentions the right to birth control, since that, too, is now being threatened and destroyed in the US. Orwell understood the link.

> "Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war."

I think there's been a profound change in popular thinking on this since the end of World War II, and it's all due to the nuclear arms race. Maybe the aerial bombardment of cities in the later years of WWII had an influence as well, and to some extent the reality of chemical and biological warfare, but it's really the threat of immediate nuclear annihilation that has made the 'world leaders' less enthusiastic about sending the young people off to die in wars in the name of national patriotism and defense of the country.

The result, however, has been a long string of proxy wars between the so-called 'Great Powers' (which are now defined as those having a sizeable nuclear arsenal), right on up to Ukraine today, and the rise of smaller nations with nuclear arsenals (Israel and North Korea) who view them as an indispensable protection from external forces. There's also the case of India and Pakistan, who likely would have fought several WWII-scale tank/air/sea battles by now without the looming threat of MAD to dissuade them.

It's not an argument that the nuclear disarmament organizations like to hear, but I think if we really got rid of nukes then we'd be back in large-scale aerial bombardment and mass tank battles, and of course in that situation there'd be frantic efforts to rebuild the nukes. I don't see them going away ever, sans their actual global-scale use, in which case it'll be back to sticks and stones.

"made the 'world leaders' less enthusiastic about sending the young people off to die in wars in the name of national patriotism and defense of the country."

Not supported by current events.

Less enthusiastic != Completely against

NATO os certainly very reluctant to send forces into Russia, or even Ukraine for that matter. They can only send weapons to Ukraine.

Russian leadership has no such reservations.

It’s possible that MAD is wearing off as more conventional war emerges because no one believes the other side will dare use them… so it’s almost as if they are not there or a threat.

Dunno, sure seems like Russia would've been attacked by now if it weren't for MAD...

I suppose that's true, and humans have regrettably short memories it seems. However, Ukraine has 15 nuclear power plants IIRC, and WWII-era 'total war' strategies would have included their immediate destruction to cripple Ukraine's power grid. This was the strategy the USA and allies followed in the Gulf War against non-nuclear Iraq:

> "More than 90 percent of Iraq’s electrical capacity was bombed out of service in the first hours... This comprised the country’s 11 major electrical power stations and 119 substations. Existing generating capacity of 9,000 MW in December 1990 was reduced to only 340 MW by March 1991."

https://aldeilis.net/english/physical-destruction-iraqs-infr...

Bombing functioning nuclear power plants would create a radioactive disaster and Russia wasn't willing to do that. By that metric, MAD is still in effect to some extent. It's also keeping Russia from attacking NATO bases, and NATO from attacking Russian bases, at least for now.

MAD is also not as simple as generally described in the popular press. Power Transition theory is a school of thought that has some interesting ideas about the emergence of conflict and fits into a social physics type analysis.

sending the young people off to die in wars

This does of course happen, but one shouldn't underestimate people's own enthusiasm for fighting. A lifetime of peaceful toil is immiserating to many, and toil in the service economic competition is destructive of liberty and leisure.

WW2 without nukes already made the entire European continent destitute. Thanks to Hitler the US could take over as a superpower.

"...All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet....

...Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal...”

> He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Well, he wasn't wrong.

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