> The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
What scares me most is that the political climate is such that I'm fairly sure that some country will go down this path again. Too many wannabe camp guards at large already.
What scares me most is that the political climate is such that I'm fairly sure that some country will go down this path again. Too many wannabe camp guards at large already.
Wannabe camp guards indeed. It was a sickening and sobering realization as an adult.
— William Pannapacker writing as @WernerTwertzog
You and I are biologically the same as people who became Nazis; we have the same potential in us. When we imagine we are not is when we do wrong. Lots of ordinary Germans; smart, sophisticated people; and other people in many countries supported the Nazis.
At the same time, the people who embrace Naziism, or go along, or tacitly allow it, also have good in them. A tactic of such ideologies is a display of aggression, to scare you off; it's a political tactic that solidifies their movement by distancing members from everyone else; it also dehumanizes outsiders (also through disdain from them), allowing violence. In the end, it's a tactic, a display, a barking, scared dog. It may bite, but they are the same as we are, and have the same good inside, and have allowed themselves to be misled.
The classic citation is to Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil':
The point of WW2 propaganda was to demonzie Nazis so much, and to distance them so much from the likes of you, me or your neighbour, in order to dehumanzie them in order to justify going to war with them and make killing them easier on the psyche for those who had to pull the trigger or send their sons on the battlefield to die fighting them, becasue in WW1 they discovered humans don't naturally want to kill other humans and will hesitate to pull the trigger making them shit soldiers, but if you demonzie and dehumanize the enemy enough, that hesitation loosens.
It's basic war propaganda 1-0-1. You now just realized Nazis are literally everywhere, not just in 1939 Germany.
It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two. The veneer is very thin. You find them in the halls of politics, in the police force, in the armed forces, in the offices of just about any company, at your local soccer club and just about everywhere else. And none of them is going to come out to admit it. I seriously wonder how big a fraction of a society has the subscribe to this kind of ideology before it is unavoidable that it will be expressed but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was well under 50%.
This is like saying that people are offended when called racial slurs because there's some truth to what the slur means.
Racial slurs attack an individual’s personhood - calling out people’s bigotry criticizes their choices and behavior.
It is not anywhere near the same thing.
I don't think that follows. Or rather, it might be true, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. I'm a pretty peaceable individual, generally wish good things for others, consider people as individuals, etc. I stay away from political activism. I would still be pretty upset if someone called me a Nazi.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, offensive terms tend to be offensive regardless of the underlying reason. When someone gets upset about it, you can't infer that it's because you struck close to home --- it could be utter indignation about the injustice of the situation, or something else entirely.
But you better not question their ideals or beliefs or you're a nazi and "it's always morally ok to kill nazis", their words, not mine.
What scares me is that it seems like actually believe these people when they say they are the anti-fascists. To me they're just goose steppers of another stripe.
Many people seem to disagree with the ruling on emotional grounds though.
That said, to think that this matters is pretty nuts. In the entire western world today, the structural environment on the extreme left is strongly opposed to the idea of campus, while on the extreme right the idea is welcomed by a critical mass.
In other words, the left polices itself. The right doesn't.
https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/09/04/the-hardest-thing-a...
Notice how he deleted a bunch of comments (perhaps justifiably, but who can say now...) and then closed comments. How dare anyone disagree with him...
The truth is people want acceptable targets they can lash out against with no consequences and feel justified in doing so.
History has shown time and again that when motivated it is not difficult for any side to acquire arms.
So your comparison is irrelevant in that as soon as someone wants arms they will acquire them.
Ultimately crazies are dangerous either way. It is dangerous to underestimate them or to say one crazy is better than another crazy. Comparing crazies is like saying one poison is healthier than another. Poison is poison.
100% true, but false equivalence can cause you to mis-prioritize a more pressing danger.
People on the right are worried about the crazies on the left canceling them for using the wrong pronoun.
People on every other part of the spectrum are worried about the far right literally ending our democracy. To be clear this is not hyperbole. Just watch a Trump rally these days—he has upped the rhetoric, even for him, to an alarming degree. And it’s met with the frothing cheers of his followers.
No, they're worried about crazies with guns too. Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shootin... was a left wing activist targeting Republicans.
But it is still a worry; right wing politicians get targeted and there is a lot of incitement on the left encouraging it.
Globally, the far left has killed orders of magnitude more (intentionally, Stalin's purges, and unintentionally, Mao's famines).
In the future (or the past) of course it’s possible that the left wing could be (or was) more dangerous. I didn’t even think we had a truly dangerous problem with the far right in this country until Trump brought the crazy out of the shadows, and January 6th drove home the damage they were willing to do for him.
You alter priorities as conditions change. In this present era, we have a serious problem with a violent far right lead by a demagogue that has already shown a propensity for trying to overturn the results of legal elections. The far right has gone up several notches in my “we should be worried about this right now” list as a result. The more pressing danger to prioritize.
For all those people in history, right wing *appeared* more dangerous years before the mass killings happened.
That led to the far left capturing power and leading to disaster.
Both extremes should be condemned irrespective of how likely we think they may act as we are all bad at predicting the future.
You can’t try to tell me the left is worse like you did in your first post, and then try to insist they’re actually equally dangerous when I say the right is the bigger problem. Pick a stance.
There is a very long history of "left" bombings, going all the way to French Revolution. Did the modern left somehow lose the ability to inspire people capable of such actions?
Stop trying to blame anti-fascists for fascists acting like fascists. They do that anyway, no matter what, and they'd do it even more if there was no opposition keeping them in check. If you want to speak for yourself about why you're inspired to fascism, then just do that, but stop making excuses and carrying the water for other fascists.
Trump has energized and polarized and united the whole right of center a hell of a lot more than AntiFa. Just because he was a Democrat for longer than he was a Republican doesn't mean he's the far left's fault.
I'm blaming lunatics who happen to also be anti-fascists (or claim to be) that are turning non-fascist people fascists.
They're not "turning" non-fascist people fascists. You are denying the agency of non-fascist people to decide whether or not to turn fascist themselves. AntiFa does not control them.
They're not suddenly becoming fascist against their will, because of somebody else forcing them to. Nobody is forcing non-fascists to make that life choice to become fascist, certainly not anti-fascists.
It's completely their own fault that they decided to become fascists. Got it? It is nobody's fault but their own. So stop carrying the water for fascists and putting the blame on other innocent people who oppose them.
Did somebody else force you to make your "biggest concern" carrying the water and making excuses for fascists, because you have no control over your own mind and mouth, or did you actually chose to do it yourself? Take some personal responsibility for your own beliefs. What a pathetic and misguided "biggest concern" you have, dude. Those were your own words.
So don't do fascists the favor of blaming anti-fascists and victims of fascists for the existence of fascists: they don't deserve your favors and excuses. It's 100% their own fault. Find a better biggest concern.
By your own twisted logic, Jews are responsible for anti-semitism. And that's absolute total bullshit.
But I also suspect you're been primed to be on the defensive given how many people are attacking liberal values.
My point is this:
There is a growing rhetoric on the right of center that tries to frame "the left" as this obscure force that all sort of nefarious things. They take examples out if the most fringe corners and use them to fuel their base. Like the guy that insisted to have a litter box in the workplace because he identified as a cat.
But none of that shit is a "policy of the left". None of that shit is anything you be worried about. That's my point.
There is almost nothing fueled by sincere progressive values that one should be afraid of. The left is not raping babies or whatnot.
In that sense, the only strategic mistake that people on the left of center are doing is to feed the trolls on the right.
I understand that you're framing this as "well, fuck them, _they_ are the trolls don't blame me for feeding them, I'm the victim don't blame me".
But that kind of logic works only when dealing with individuals. Our natural moral instincts are not adapted to dealing with massive societies with hundreds of million of people engaging in an information warfare of an unprecedented scale.
Every real fascist out there would be neutered if it wasn't for a number of people who have no clue about anything and are just passively going through their lives just passively following along whatever their social group is nudging them to follow.
Denying this fact and claiming that absolutely all people are 100% active political agents that are either 100% fascist or 100% anti-fascist is wishful thinking at best and a dangerous trap at worst.
If you want to make the world a better place you need to understand people and find compromises that get most people on board. If you're doing that somebody else will and some will not hesitate to leverage the lowest human instincts such as xenophobia to rally people on their side. I don't want to live in such a world
Back to the other point: YOU said it's your BIGGEST concern. Those were YOUR words, I did not put them into your mouth. And that's an absolutely ridiculous priority. There are much bigger and more important and real concerns than your logical fallacies about blaming victims for their aggressor's behavior.
I surely didn't mean that was my absolute biggest concern out of all concerns. Please apply the principle of charity when interpreting other people's words.
note that this doesn't mean "at face value".
Proof? Look at how right wing is winning elections across us and europe. A few years before they didn't win, then now they're winnin, then a few years in the future they will no longer win.
Why so? Because people change their minds!
What kind of people change their minds? Two kinds of people: a) people who have open minds and are presented with compelling evidence yadda yadda b) people who don't think much in the first place and just go with the tide.
You're holding me to unreasonable standards if you "require" of me that I present "evidence". I'm just a person sharing a personal opinion and you're tone is honestly a little rude. For some reason you decided that I really believe that I said that fascists shouldn't be blamed for being fascists and it's all fault of the left, just because I aired a personal opinion that if we don't want to see fascists win general elections we should be careful and not give those fuckers fuel to spend on undecided people. You're free to disagree but don't strawman my position.
Perhaps I'm wrong and perhaps there are indeed 51% of immovable fascists in my country who voted literal fascists who are literally doing nazi salute as of last week in a public square in the capital.
But, hey, I'm an optimist, I really hope they won the elections because they are tons of people who don't give a fuck and just got confused into voting these literal fascists. You can disagree about that!
Perhaps you can try to convince me that >51% percent of countrymen are literal fascists and there is just no hope talking to them and making a case that there are better ways to live on this planet. Or perhaps that's true in your country but not in mine? Who knows. I hope it's not the case though. Have a good day
Edit: perhaps someone can explain to me the clear and present danger from the far left?
No, they aren't. It is virtually impossible for the far left to become as problematic as the far right, because the right wing in the US intersects with the vast cultural and financial power of the gun lobby and conservative Christianity, whereas the left is primarily composed of minority groups systemically oppressed and disenfranchised by the system. Unless you can drape your message in the iconography of the flag and the cross you can't have real power in American politics. That's baked in, down to the electoral college, which is designed to give rural American (more likely to be right-leaning) votes more power than urban (more likely to be left-leaning) votes so as to preserve the status quo, which is white, Conservative, capitalist and Christian.
Every left-wing movement in the US has been infiltrated, undermined and eventually crushed by the right. Occupy no longer exists. BLM no longer exists. Go back to the 60s - MLK, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Weather Underground. Bernie, the closest thing the US has to a mainstream socialist, was quickly swept aside by his own, supposedly "leftist" party, meanwhile Trump is still the frontrunner to win in 2024 and QAnon is still a viable political and cultural movement. Native Americans protesting pipelines get beaten, white Americans showing up to the White House with guns and Nazi flags get welcomed in. Show me an anti-war protest in the US that mattered. Vietnam, Iraq, Israel, Americans protesting in the millions, all definitionally "leftist." none of it mattered.
I mean, I wish the far left were just as problematic. At least then we would live in a somewhat equitable society where all political points of view had equal weight, an actual marketplace of ideas. But we don't, and really the only place the left is allowed to exist without facing the violence of the state is online, where it does far more harm to itself with endless infighting, purity spirals and factionism than to the system it opposes.
Are you implying those groups were infiltrated and sabotaged by the alt right baddies and that is why they failed?
Similar effort against right-wing groups is more limited and politically difficult because such groups would be considered militias protected by the Second Amendment. It's much easier to get away with suppressing left-wing speech than right-wing violence in the US.
- https://www.nlg.org/cointelpro-disrupting-resistance-movemen...
- https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/7/alphabet_boys_podcast_...
Fortunately, far too many people in “power” have ego problems for this to ever actually become a problem.
Until then, we will continue to get action/reaction like has happened in American politics for the past few cycles.