If you don’t think Hitler was awesome, odds are very good that you are trying to smuggle in virtues and good-old-fashioned good, buried under an extra layer of obfuscation, by saying “I don’t know exactly what awesome is, but someone that evil can’t be awesome.” Hitler was evil, not bad.
And that you probably haven’t watched stuff like Triumph of the Will to understand why Nazi aesthetics and propaganda could be so effective.
Clearly reducing the number of disgusting Untermenschen and increasing the Lebensraum for the master race is awesome if you consider yourself to be one of the latter.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I’m missing something.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I’m missing something.
You totally are. The point of Goetz’s comment and mine was not that Hitler was ‘awesome’ simply because of ordinary in-group/out-group dynamics which apply to like every other leader ever and most of whom are not particularly ‘awesome’; the point was that Hitler and the Nazis were unusually ‘awesome’ in appreciating shock and awe and technocratic superiority and Nazi Science (sneers at unimpressive projects) and geez I even named one of the stellar examples of this, Triumph of the Will, which still remains one of the best examples of the Nazi regime’s co-option of scientists and artists and film-makers and philosophers to glorify itself and make it awesome. It’s an impressive movie, so impressive that
Riefenstahl’s techniques, such as moving cameras, the use of long focus lenses to create a distorted perspective, aerial photography, and revolutionary approach to the use of music and cinematography, have earned Triumph recognition as one of the greatest films in history.
or
The Economist wrote that Triumph of the Will “sealed her reputation as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century”.[7]
(Oh, how that must burn in the hearts of American feminists: the great female filmmaker is not American, and was a lackey of the Nazis.)
I watched it once, and was very impressed, personally.
Take a moment to savor that. Hitler and Naziism are the ultimate embodiment of evil in the West; modern cinema, invented in America & Europe, are world-around still recognized as one of the quintessentially Western mediums. But here we have a propaganda movie, produced to glorify Hitler and Naziism, 100% glorifying Hitler and Naziism, featuring only Hitler and Naziism, commissioned by Hitler who “served as an unofficial executive producer”, etc etc and not only has it not been consigned to the dust-heap of history, it is still watched, admired, and studied by those who are sworn to hate Naziism and anything even slightly like it such as eugenics or criticism of Israel.
Also, I had a fit of the far view, and it occurred to me that Germany was rather a medium-sized country (I’m so used to continental superpowers, but the world wasn’t always like that), and it tried to become a large country, and it took a big alliance of the other major powers to take it down. This is awesome from a sufficient distance.
They had population of 70 million (probably after eating Austria) which was quite a lot at the time, compared to 48 million of Britain and about as much of France. The only more populous independent countries in 1939 were China, USA, the USSR and perhaps Japan.
Wikipedia says 73 million in 1940. For Germany it says 69,3 million in 1939 and almost exactly 70 million, but apparently without the annexed populations of Austria and Sudetenland, which I estimate at about 10 million or more.
Edit: not sure whether to include the population of Korea into Japan’s statistics, which would make Japan more populous than Germany with certainty. The 73 million figure is without Korea.
That was the German narrative, was it not? Starting from the avowed English-French ‘encircling’ of Germany—why do you think they were allied in the first place with decrepit Poland?
Probably. I remember a similar conversation where I posted a Wittgenstein lambasting mindless British nationalism in a WWII context, and VladimirM stepped in to defend said nationalism to much upvotes.
Not very rational to vote down a fact >:( it’s not even politics like that one just the things they believed. Is there any post on bias against the poor Nazis, it seems a bad plan if you want human rationality to tar facts about them with the same brush as their evil deeds.
Not really. It falls under standard biases like ‘horns effect’ (dual of ‘halo effect’). Sometimes LWers point out in comments good aspects of the Nazis, like their war on cancer & work on anti-smoking, or animal cruelty laws, but no one’s written any sort of comprehensive discussion of this.
I’m thinking this evil halo effect regarding Nazis is the most common bias in our civilization, we all know about Godwin ;) but most people who come here probably have a bit of this stuff in their head. If we know this is true maybe it should be fought (or is the benefit from no Jew bashing allowed so huge its OK?)
There’s not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though. So the Nazis were expressing a general German sentiment in disliking the Franco-British grand-strategic encirclement. So they had some great policies on health and animals. Why does any of that really matter to non-historians?
The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?
That is, if they react ‘incredible how evil Nazis were! They would even steal animal rights to fool good people into supporting them!’ rather than ‘huh’ or ‘I guess no one is completely evil’ or ‘I really wonder how it is possible for us humans to compartmentalize to such an extent as to be opposed to animal cruelty and support the Holocaust’, you have learned something about them.
There’s not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though.
In most people Eugenics (even the good ones) is evil Nazi stuff and this can count even helpful GM as evil.
The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?
But we fail the test thus our sanity waterline could be raised :(
I realize this is super belated and may not actually be seen, but if I get an answer, that’d be cool:
If we see the horns effect in how people talk about Nazis as evidence that our sanity waterline could be raised, wouldn’t trying to fight the thing you’re calling “bias against the poor Nazis” be like trying to treat symptom of a problem instead of the problem itself?
Examples I can think of that might illustrate what I mean:
Using painkillers instead of (or before?) finding out a bone is broken and setting it. Trying to teach a martial arts student the routine their opponent uses instead of teaching them how to react in the moment and read their opponent. Teaching the answers to a test instead of teaching the underlying concept in a way that the student can generalize.
It seems to me that doing that would only lead to reducing the power of the “Nazi response” as evidence of sanity waterline.
sidenote: I’m finding this framing really fascinating because of how I see the underlying problem/topic generalizing to other social biases I feel more strongly affected by.
And that you probably haven’t watched stuff like Triumph of the Will to understand why Nazi aesthetics and propaganda could be so effective.
Clearly reducing the number of disgusting Untermenschen and increasing the Lebensraum for the master race is awesome if you consider yourself to be one of the latter.
[EDIT] Hmm, feels like a knee-jerk downvote. Maybe I’m missing something.
You totally are. The point of Goetz’s comment and mine was not that Hitler was ‘awesome’ simply because of ordinary in-group/out-group dynamics which apply to like every other leader ever and most of whom are not particularly ‘awesome’; the point was that Hitler and the Nazis were unusually ‘awesome’ in appreciating shock and awe and technocratic superiority and Nazi Science (sneers at unimpressive projects) and geez I even named one of the stellar examples of this, Triumph of the Will, which still remains one of the best examples of the Nazi regime’s co-option of scientists and artists and film-makers and philosophers to glorify itself and make it awesome. It’s an impressive movie, so impressive that
or
(Oh, how that must burn in the hearts of American feminists: the great female filmmaker is not American, and was a lackey of the Nazis.)
I watched it once, and was very impressed, personally.
Take a moment to savor that. Hitler and Naziism are the ultimate embodiment of evil in the West; modern cinema, invented in America & Europe, are world-around still recognized as one of the quintessentially Western mediums. But here we have a propaganda movie, produced to glorify Hitler and Naziism, 100% glorifying Hitler and Naziism, featuring only Hitler and Naziism, commissioned by Hitler who “served as an unofficial executive producer”, etc etc and not only has it not been consigned to the dust-heap of history, it is still watched, admired, and studied by those who are sworn to hate Naziism and anything even slightly like it such as eugenics or criticism of Israel.
Now that is “awesome”.
Also, I had a fit of the far view, and it occurred to me that Germany was rather a medium-sized country (I’m so used to continental superpowers, but the world wasn’t always like that), and it tried to become a large country, and it took a big alliance of the other major powers to take it down. This is awesome from a sufficient distance.
They had population of 70 million (probably after eating Austria) which was quite a lot at the time, compared to 48 million of Britain and about as much of France. The only more populous independent countries in 1939 were China, USA, the USSR and perhaps Japan.
Meh. Japan does seem like it was higher, according to projections. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=country+populations+1939)
Wikipedia says 73 million in 1940. For Germany it says 69,3 million in 1939 and almost exactly 70 million, but apparently without the annexed populations of Austria and Sudetenland, which I estimate at about 10 million or more.
Edit: not sure whether to include the population of Korea into Japan’s statistics, which would make Japan more populous than Germany with certainty. The 73 million figure is without Korea.
That was the German narrative, was it not? Starting from the avowed English-French ‘encircling’ of Germany—why do you think they were allied in the first place with decrepit Poland?
I don’t understand why this was downvoted :( I upvoted it because it’s a good point and true. Is it too understanding to Nazis?
Probably. I remember a similar conversation where I posted a Wittgenstein lambasting mindless British nationalism in a WWII context, and VladimirM stepped in to defend said nationalism to much upvotes.
Not very rational to vote down a fact >:( it’s not even politics like that one just the things they believed. Is there any post on bias against the poor Nazis, it seems a bad plan if you want human rationality to tar facts about them with the same brush as their evil deeds.
Not really. It falls under standard biases like ‘horns effect’ (dual of ‘halo effect’). Sometimes LWers point out in comments good aspects of the Nazis, like their war on cancer & work on anti-smoking, or animal cruelty laws, but no one’s written any sort of comprehensive discussion of this.
The closest I can think of is Yvain’s classic post on religion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fm/a_parable_on_obsolete_ideologies/
I’m thinking this evil halo effect regarding Nazis is the most common bias in our civilization, we all know about Godwin ;) but most people who come here probably have a bit of this stuff in their head. If we know this is true maybe it should be fought (or is the benefit from no Jew bashing allowed so huge its OK?)
There’s not really any benefit from fixing that bias, though. So the Nazis were expressing a general German sentiment in disliking the Franco-British grand-strategic encirclement. So they had some great policies on health and animals. Why does any of that really matter to non-historians?
The best I can think of is it makes for an interesting sort of critical thinking or bias test: give someone a writeup of, say, Nazi animal welfare policies & reforms, and see how they react. Can they emit a thoughtful reply rather than canned outrage?
That is, if they react ‘incredible how evil Nazis were! They would even steal animal rights to fool good people into supporting them!’ rather than ‘huh’ or ‘I guess no one is completely evil’ or ‘I really wonder how it is possible for us humans to compartmentalize to such an extent as to be opposed to animal cruelty and support the Holocaust’, you have learned something about them.
In most people Eugenics (even the good ones) is evil Nazi stuff and this can count even helpful GM as evil.
But we fail the test thus our sanity waterline could be raised :(
We don’t fail the eugenics test, though. So that’s evidence that maybe our waterline could be higher but it is higher than elsewhere.
I realize this is super belated and may not actually be seen, but if I get an answer, that’d be cool:
If we see the horns effect in how people talk about Nazis as evidence that our sanity waterline could be raised, wouldn’t trying to fight the thing you’re calling “bias against the poor Nazis” be like trying to treat symptom of a problem instead of the problem itself?
Examples I can think of that might illustrate what I mean:
Using painkillers instead of (or before?) finding out a bone is broken and setting it.
Trying to teach a martial arts student the routine their opponent uses instead of teaching them how to react in the moment and read their opponent.
Teaching the answers to a test instead of teaching the underlying concept in a way that the student can generalize.
It seems to me that doing that would only lead to reducing the power of the “Nazi response” as evidence of sanity waterline.
sidenote: I’m finding this framing really fascinating because of how I see the underlying problem/topic generalizing to other social biases I feel more strongly affected by.
Minor note: According to an article in Wired recently, the Nazis invented 3D movies.