It’s one of the most important and surprising events of our time and much of the discussion is anti-rational, i.e. bad people support Trump so Trump is bad; many are claiming that electing Trump would be catastrophic and discussing potential catastrophes is supposed to be one of the purposes of LW.
I think a question of how Trump interacts with x-risk is a potentially interesting conversation topic. I think an analysis of class that uses Trump as an example is a potentially interesting conversation topic.
But I worry that even here a direct discussion of Trump will be anti-rational / along cultural lines instead of about rational expectations, and I’m not sure what actions we would take differently as a result of having that conversation.
You said (emphasis mine): “one of the most important and surprising events of our time”
I tend to interpret “our time” as a period that is a bit longer than the last six months.
But even if you want to look at recent news, here are three things which I consider to be much more consequential than Donald Trump: (1) the European refugee crisis; (2) the Chinese economic troubles; (3) the Russian direct military intervention in Syria.
May I politely suggest paying less attention to the idiot box?
May I politely suggest paying less attention to the idiot box?
I’m not sure that argument goes through—if the European refugee crisis is important, then aren’t Merkel, Obama, and Clinton important? And if they’re important once they’re in office, isn’t the process by which they enter office important?
That argument involving the idiot box actually looks like this: Mass media optimizes for outrage. Estimating the importance of the topic by the amount of air time it gets is a mistake.
if the European refugee crisis is important, then aren’t Merkel, Obama, and Clinton important?
No. Not in the sense that Merkel, etc. are unimportant, but in the sense that a systemic crisis is not reducible to the importance of whoever happens to be in the office at the moment.
isn’t the process by which they enter office important?
If James_Miller wanted to discuss the crisis of the “establishment” center of the mainstream US parties and the rebellions within them, it might have been an interesting topic. But James_Miller want to discuss Donald Trump, personally.
Of course, that’s what Donald Trump wants as well X-)
a systemic crisis is not reducible to the importance of whoever happens to be in the office at the moment.
The reason I picked those particular people is because of Clinton’s role in the removal of Qaddafi, Obama’s role in the continued destabilization of Syria, and Merkel’s public pledge to take in refugees (which exacerbated the degree to which it is a European crisis, instead of a Syrian or Africa crisis). “Whoever happens to be in the office at the moment” is a factor in many of these crises.
I have a feeling we’re slowly slipping towards the conflict between the “impersonal forces” and “great people” views of history :-)
But I guess the question here is whether you want to discuss people or whether you want to discuss systems. Of course they are related and interdependent, but still. Going back to the source of this subthread, I find thinking about tensions between “rebels” and “nomenklatura” in US political parties to be moderately interesting (especially in the context of how they deal with the need to overpromise during the campaign). I find Donald Trump to be very uninteresting. YMMV, of course.
I have a feeling we’re slowly slipping towards the conflict between the “impersonal forces” and “great people” views of history :-)
A synthesis of the two views clearly outperforms either view on its own. There seems to be a difference between, basically, forest fires and earthquakes—both rely on long build-ups (the impersonal forces contribution) and when they happen may be surprising (I couldn’t tell you when the housing bubble would burst until it had but I could tell you that it would eventually), but the while there’s little control over when an earthquake happens and how the consequences shake out, there’s quite a bit of control over when a fire happens and how the consequences shake out (the great people contribution).
That’s an interesting distinction—can you say more about it?
It seems to me that events and changes vary quite a bit in how much control various people have over them. For things like the Chinese economic difficulties, it looks to me like this is the result of lots of malinvestment over the years, and there’s not too much control over whether or not things get worse / no clear single point of failure. Then there are other issues where there does seem to be a single point of failure, or a single failure avoidance point. Even in those cases, there are systemic forces that created the fuel for the conflagration.
One example that comes to mind is Arkhipov voting against firing nukes during the Cuban Missile crisis. The things that put the missiles there and made their standing orders to fire if attacked (and the officers agreed) might be better thought of as ‘systemic forces,’ but it seems hard to argue that ‘systemic forces’ are a better explanation of a 2-1 vote instead of a 3-0 vote than the ‘great people’ view. Similarly, one can imagine many forest fires that almost happened, and then didn’t because of direct action by a person on the scene.
(Or many forest fires caused by direct action of a person on the scene.)
No. Not in the sense that Merkel, etc. are unimportant, but in the sense that a systemic crisis is not reducible to the importance of whoever happens to be in the office at the moment.
Even if she did greatly exacerbate it by doing something really stupid?
Yes, even, because there are reasons she did that and those reasons don’t have much to do with her personally. It wasn’t like she buckled the entire German consensus.
The refugee crisis is very interesting. Not quite “Camp of the Saints”, but it’s a huge acceleration of frictions I expected to take much longer to play out, and not really hit the fan so soon.
Chinese economic troubles? Recessions are big things, but they happen. Economies go up, they go down.
Russian intervention in Syria. Russian satellite state getting military support. Shrug. Turkey seems much more interesting to me. I suppose the Russians intervention does make it possible for some serious confrontation with the US, but I don’t see Putin or Obama having much interest in that.
There are some complicated wrinkles to this one, including the observation that the (current) legitimacy of the Communist Party rule to a great extent depends on it being able to provide visibly and rapidly rising standards of living. And, of course, the question whether China is done with its growth spurt or it’s merely a hiccup has major geopolitical consequences a decade or two away.
Russian satellite state getting military support.
The first time post-Soviet Russia puts boots on the ground outside of the former USSR. The overarching theme is the global assertiveness of Mr.Putin and Middle East is always an… interesting place. And there is Iran nearby :-/
I agree that Turkey is interesting, too, but nothing “big” happened there recently and were were talking about events.
No, Russia started providing it’s bombers with fighter escorts with orders to shoot in self-defense. This is a situation that can easily escalate the next time one of these planes passes through Turkish airspace.
How about the various welfare states around the world finally starting to run out of other people’s money. The biggest manifestations of this so far have been the financial crisis in the EU, and the various pension crises in US local governments.
Heck, in my more conspiratorial moods I’m inclined to suspect that these migrant crises are an excuse to import a bunch of convenient scapegoats who can than be blamed for the collapse of popular entitlement programs.
I think Trump’s rise is interesting for a number of issues that people here have particular interest in.
How he wins. How his attackers lose. The power of his signature issues in trade and immigration. The potential for a political realignment with the Republican Party, and how that realigns US politics as a whole.
The media has been outraged, they have attacked, and they have failed to bring him down. His poll numbers just go up and up and up. That’s interesting, and merits discussion.
It’s one of the most important and surprising events of our time
I’m saying this in hindsight, but I disagree about this being surprising. Anti-immigration parties are on the rise all across Europe. The National Front in France are probably to the right of Trump, and Golden Dawn in Greece are genuine neo-nazis. More generally, non-mainstream parties are on the rise, probably powered by the ability to organise grassroots activism via the net. Even the Pirate Parties are winning seats.
Given this, is it really surprising that non-mainstream candidates would happen in the US too, both with Trump and Bernie Sanders?
I’m actually surprised that Sanders isn’t the Democratic frontrunner, especially when his only opponent is being investigated for espionage.
probably powered by the ability to organise grassroots activism via the net.
The ideological gate keepers are losing control. The Cologne cover up looks like a pretty significant event for discrediting the Top Men.
On Sanders, all the Democratic Powers that Be lined up behind Clinton, and even Sanders got in lock step to maintain that Clinton’s email catastrophe is much ado about nothing. The Democratic Party has spent a couple of decades dealing with Clinton scandals. It’s all just a cast right wing conspiracy, don’t you know?
Probably the biggest hit Hillary has taken is from younger women, turned off by HIllary “standing by her man” and attacking his sexual abuse accusers, Gloria Steinem belittling Bernie gals as boy crazy for Bernie Bros, and Albright playing the Vote Vagina or Go to Hell card.
It looks just like a swastika. Sure, Putin and Trump and anyone who is nationalistic can be compared to Nazis, but this cheapens the term ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’.
By “actual neo-nazi” I mean a group which has significant use of Nazi imagery and when significant members explicitly endorse Nazism.
The flag looks almost exactly like a swastica. Also, see hairyfigment’s comment and read the wikipedia page. There is plenty more evidence.
They wouldn’t have chosen that flag unless they were neo-nazis. If they really wanted that symbol, it could have been against a different color background.
The party denies that it has any official connection to Neo-Nazism. Although it uses the Roman salute, a salute used by the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist movements, it claims to draw its inspiration in this primarily from the 4th of August Regime established by Ioannis Metaxas...Likewise, the Golden Dawn’s meander symbol, while sometimes compared to the National Socialist Swastika, is according to Golden Dawn a symbol drawn from Greek art, which the party sees as representing bravery and eternal struggle.[18][128]
Ilias Kasidiaris, a spokesman for Golden Dawn, wrote an article that was published in Golden Dawn magazine on 20 April 2011, in which he said, “What would the future of Europe and the whole modern world be like if World War II hadn’t stopped the renewing route of National Socialism? Certainly, fundamental values which mainly derive from ancient Greek culture, would be dominant in every state and would define the fate of peoples. Romanticism as a spiritual movement and classicism would prevail against the decadent subculture that corroded the white man. Extreme materialism would have been discarded, giving its place to spiritual exaltation”. In the same article, Adolf Hitler is characterized as a “great social reformer” and “military genius”.[129]
In an article published in 1987 in the Golden Dawn magazine titled “Hitler for 1000 years”, its editor Michaloliakos [see below] showed his support for Nazism and white supremacy.[130] Specifically he wrote, “We are the faithful soldiers of the National Socialist idea and nothing else” and “[...] WE EXIST, and continue the battle, the battle for the final victory of our race”.[130] He ends the article by writing “1987, 42 years later, with our thought and soul given to the last great battle, with our thought and soul given to the black and red banners, with our thought and soul given to the memory of our great Leader, we raise our right hand up, we salute the Sun and with the courage, that is compelled by our military honor and our National Socialist duty we shout full of passion, faith to the future and our visions: HEIL HITLER!”.[130]
...The founder of the party, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, appeared to give a Nazi salute in the Athens city council. He claims that it was merely “the salute of the national youth organisation of Ioannis Metaxas”.[128][136]
Of course, society normally finds it easy to recognize and ostracize such blatantly dishonest Nazism. It doesn’t create any actual confusion - unless people have gone out of their way to weaken society’s immune system, eg by deliberately signalling Nazism when the reality is more obscure.
It doesn’t create any actual confusion—unless people have gone out of their way to weaken society’s immune system, eg by deliberately signalling Nazism when the reality is more obscure.
I think it weakens the immune system more when anyone who isn’t in favour of completely unrestricted immigration gets called a Nazi. And there’s a failure mode where constantly calling people Nazis (or sexists/racists) makes them more favourable towards Nazis (the theory is that on a subconcious level they think ’if I’m a Nazi, maybe Nazism isn’t so bad).
(the theory is that on a subconcious level they think ’if I’m a Nazi, maybe Nazism isn’t so bad).
Or the more straightforward, if anyone proposing sensible immigration policy gets called a Nazi, eventually people conclude that “Nazi” means someone in favor of sensible immigration policy.
LOL. Seriously, do you have any more evidence beyond “their symbol sotra looks like a swastika”. How about you try looking for the factions in Greece using Nazi-style tactics, like say arresting their opponents on vague trumped up charges. Hint: it’s not Golden Dawn.
Try the entire wikipedia page on them! Take these bits for instance:
Scholars and media have described it as neo-Nazi[4][13][14] and fascist,[5][15][16] though the group rejects these labels.[17] Members have expressed admiration of the former Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas of the 4th of August Regime (1936–1941).[18] They have also made use of Nazi symbolism, and have praised figures of Nazi Germany in the past.[19][20][21] According to academic sources, the group is racist and xenophobic,[22][23] while the party’s leader has openly identified it as nationalist and racist.[24]
On 23 July 2012, Artemis Matthaiopoulos, a member of Golden Dawn, was elected as MP for the town of Serres. The website left.gr (associated with Syriza), reported that Matthaiopoulos was the frontman of the Nazi punk band “Pogrom” and pointed to the band’s song “Auschwitz” with antisemitic lyrics such as “fuck Anne Frank” and “Juden raus” (“Jews out”).[142][143]
Now, I’m not endorsing the other factions, some of whom may well be Stalinists or terrorists. It is possible for there to be extremists on both the left and the right.
I know that ‘Nazi’ may be overused, but you surely must see that in this specific instance, that is what the Golden Dawn are.
Unless the entire wikipedia page and the sources are all fraudulent...
I know that ‘Nazi’ may be overused, but you surely must see that in this specific instance, that is what the Golden Dawn are.
You did mention “using words precisely” at some point. If you still wish to do that, the word “Nazi” is a very specific word—it refers to things associated with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. I am pretty sure members of Golden Dawn are not members of NSDAP as well.
A better word for you might be “fascist”. It is more general—there certainly were more fascists than nazis—and describes a particular type of ideology (which originated in Italy, by the way).
The word “neo-nazi”, in contemporary parlance, doesn’t mean much beyond “I don’t like these people”.
Note that it’s perfectly possible to be racist, xenophobic, nationalist, and anti-semitic and still not be a Nazi or a fascist.
There’s an ambiguity here. Suppose the official position of the Social Party for German National Workers is as follows:
Germany needs to be a great power once more, and can only become so by military expansion, so that it can fulfil its destiny by ruling all Europe with a fist of iron.
Jews and Communists are responsible for most of the nation’s ills and must be destroyed.
The Aryan race is superior to all others and must be favoured and kept pure.
Traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved for fear of moral degeneracy.
To achieve all these things, it is necessary for the nation’s security forces to be able to know and control what everyone says and does.
… and suppose the SPGNW loudly proclaims “We have no sympathy with fascism or Nazism”. The SPGNW explicitly endorses a big pile of key Nazi ideas, but it doesn’t explicitly endorse the word “Nazism”. What then? Personally I’d be happy saying that they explicitly endorse Nazism and are just lying about it.
I don’t know enough about the Golden Dawn for my opinions on whether they’re doing something similar to be worth much. But it’s certainly possible a priori that they might be.
(Adopting this flag really doesn’t seem like something a party fully committed to not endorsing Nazism would do. The resemblance isn’t exactly subtle.)
Personally I’d be happy saying that they explicitly endorse Nazism and are just lying about it.
I could argue over the semantics of ‘explicitly’ but basically they are Nazis whether they all admit it or not.
Traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved for fear of moral degeneracy.
I don’t think they actually beleived this. Perhaps traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved to maintain the Aryan birthrate, but that’s a little different—if premarital sex leads to lots of Aryan babies, I doubt they would object.
It’s not clear to me what they actually believed. They may have been inconsistent.
modern-day Germany does censor the internet
Pretty much all governments, ancient and modern, left and right, intrude more into their citizens’ affairs than I’d like. But the Nazis seem to have been quite a lot worse in that respect than today’s German government.
I’m not sure whether you’re laughing at or with me. If the former, good; I was hoping to amuse. If the latter, perhaps consider explaining what I wrote that you find laughable?
OK, so let me do something that never works :-) and explain the joke, such as it was.
Of course there is not really such a thing as being fully committed to not endorsing something; it’s not the kind of thing it makes sense to be committed to. So describing someone or something as “not fully committed to endorsing X” has to be an instance of meiosis (understatement for rhetorical effect); and so it is. What I am actually suggesting is that the Golden Dawn looks like a basically-fascist party that’s nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany, and that no one adopts a flag like that without the deliberate intention to evoke the Nazi flag, and that what GD is actually interested in is endorsing Nazism with plausible deniability. But—being a dry-witted English sort of chap—I chose to express that by understating it to pretty much the greatest extent possible. It was intended to be just very slightly amusing, at least to sympathetic readers.
As I already remarked, explaining jokes never works. (Especially, I think, this sort of joke.) And I’ve just spent at least 30x longer explaining what I wrote as I did writing it. Oh well, never mind.
That joke would have worked better if we were not discussing whether a contemporary political movement is actually Nazi and if demands to be fully committed to not endorsing white male cis hetero partriarchy (add more words to taste) did not actually pop up outside of Monty Python sketches.
Getting back to the subject at hand, do you suggest that the Golden Dawn is actually “nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany”? That strikes me as not very likely, not to mention that those good old days were very few before they became terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.
I think maybe “Adopting this flag really doesn’t seem like something a party fully committed to not endorsing Nazism would do” is British understatement for “Adopting this flag is tacitly endorsing Nazism”.
do you suggest that the Golden Dawn is actually “nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany”?
Literally? Quite likely not. Keen to reproduce most of the salient features of those days if they get into power? Yeah, probably. (And I’ll hazard a guess that if asked many of them would say: well, yes, Hitler did some terrible things, but at least he tried to make Germany great through purity and strength. Perhaps with a side-order of Holocaust denial.)
Keen to reproduce most of the salient features of those days if they get into power? Yeah, probably
Depending on your pick of “salient features”, this is applicable to a lot of political movements. The desire for a powerful state, national unity, a strong hand keeping miscreants in check, etc. is quite common.
Take a look at the NSDAP program—isn’t it easy to find some common ground with pretty much anyone? :-/
E.g. Bernie Sanders wants free education and hey look, it’s right here, point 20: “The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. … We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.”
Re. Bernie Sanders, he is clearly a socialist, and in some ways mildly nationalist, e.g. :
[open borders immigration policy is] …a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States...you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.[113][114]
So would it be accurate to say that Sanders may be mildly national socialist, but certainly not a capitalised National Socialist?
I dunno. Find a Bernie Bro and tell him that “Sanders may be mildly national socialist”. On an off chance that he knows what National Socialism is, duck X-D
Hmm, it is tempting to find a historically illiterate Bernie supporter and persuade them to describe their politics as “national socialist”.
“Look, many would love to be international socialists and raise the living standard for the entire world. But clearly the US cannot afford to supply welfare, heathcare and education to all 7 billion people in the world. So, maybe one day we can have international socialism, but right now we have to be pragmatic and advocate national socialism”
Get popcorn, sit back, and watch as Bernie Bro tries to convince others to national socialism :P
Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
Don’t just imprison the banksters, kill them!
I think we’re onto something here. I mean, if you replace the bits of Nazi ideology about ‘Jews control the banks’ with ‘white men run silicon valley and the banks’ and replace demands for lebensraum with demands for safe spaces then I think the Socialist Workers Party of the American Nation could really take off.
isn’t it easy to find some common ground with pretty much anyone?
Well, that’s why the things that tend to get described as specifically Nazi tend not to be things like “improving the education system” or even more specifically “providing good education for gifted children from all backgrounds” (er, of course some kinds of backgrounds wouldn’t have been acceptable to the Nazis) that have pretty wide support from all quarters. Just as describing someone as “very like Richard Feynman” probably doesn’t mean that they had some artistic talent and enjoyed drawing.
Well, that’s why the things that tend to get described as specifically Nazi tend not to be things like “improving the education system”
No, I think that’s not the why. I think the actual why is because the Nazis lost the last war and so became known as the incarnation of pure evil, and everything they touched turned to pure evil, the end. In less flowery prose, “Nazi” (or neo-nazi) nowadays is just a derogatory term without much historical meaning.
I am not a fan of NSDAP and though I don’t know much about Golden Dawn I doubt they are a bunch of decent fellows. If someone calls them neo-nazis, I mentally translate it to “I don’t really like ’em”. But if people want to insist that they are actually, literally Nazis and pine for the good old days of the Third Reich, well, at this point I feel compelled to point out that no, taking derogatories literally is rarely a good idea.
If someone calls them neo-nazis, I mentally translate it to “I don’t really like ’em”. But if people want to insist that they are actually, literally Nazis and pine for the good old days of the Third Reich
I may have used the word “fascist” or “Nazi” as derogatory terms back when I was an angry young 20 year old, but I am trying to be a little more rational now. I have been arguing that they are literally Nazis.
Well, that’s why the things that tend to get described as specifically Nazi
Where by “specifically Nazi” you mean “the parts that gjm doesn’t approve off”.
that have pretty wide support from all quarters.
Speak for yourself. I very much don’t approve of point 20 from their program. “The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program” is a nice-ish sounding way of saying, “we will ram whatever propaganda we want down all kids’ thoughts and force you to pay for it”.
You keep doing this. You keep being wrong. You should stop it.
Speak for yourself. I very much don’t approve of [...]
I fear you misunderstand me (and someone else seems to have misunderstood the same way, so presumably I should have been clearer). I meant not “everyone agrees with this” but “many people with a wide variety of political positions agree with this”. And I didn’t intend to imply that everyone in their programme other than “kill the Jews” is in that category.
“The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program” could, in isolation, mean anything from “we’re going to build a lot of new schools and fund a lot of new teachers” to “we’re going to close down the education system entirely” via “we’re going to turn the schools into brainwashing units” and “we’re going to change the schools from brainwashing units to places of actual education”. In the Nazis’ case, it turned out to be the brainwashing one, and no reasonable person would support that. And, lo, I think “brainwash all the children to agree with the State’s position” would generally be regarded as a characteristically Nazi policy, though of course totalitarians of all stripes do that—and this is consistent with both Lumifer’s analysis (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and it was really bad) and mine (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and most others didn’t).
Actually I think both Lumifer’s analysis and mine are right; something is easier to pigeonhole as Nazi if (1) you see it done often by people who aren’t Nazis and (2) you feel positively about it. I’ll add another: once Nazism is associated in everyone’s mind mostly with nationalism, Jew-killing, and war-making, any given other thing is going to be easier to think of as “Nazi” if it feels like it resembles those.
I meant not “everyone agrees with this” but “many people with a wide variety of political positions agree with this”. And I didn’t intend to imply that everyone [sic] in their programme other than “kill the Jews” is in that category.
What do you mean by a “wide variety of political positions”? Your definition of “Nazi” currently amounts to “supports the parts of the Nazi platform only Nazis support”. Now obviously stated this way, it is clearly a circular, hense useless, definition. So we are left with how you use it in practice, which brings us back to “supports the parts of the definition gjm doesn’t approve of”.
“The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program” could, in isolation, mean anything from “we’re going to build a lot of new schools and fund a lot of new teachers” to “we’re going to close down the education system entirely” via “we’re going to turn the schools into brainwashing units”
I don’t see the difference between your first and last interpretation. After all if “we” build new school and fund a lot of teachers, “we” are presumably going to have them teach cources on history, social sciences, etc. and do it from our precpective. One could get around this problem by not having education be centralised, but that’s not what either the Nazis or Bernie were proposing.
“supports the parts of the Nazi platform only Nazis support”
Not quite. For instance, Soviet-style communism was pretty big on totalitarianism, which is certainly a distinctively Nazi trait, but Nazism and Soviet communism were very different things.
circular, hence useless
Nope. E.g., if some new political movement comes out for Jew-killing, totalitarian control, military expansionism, moral traditionalism, and fostering the Master Race, I’ll be very happy saying that yup, they’re basically Nazis even if they don’t use that term.
(That’s not meant to be a necessary-and-sufficient condition; just an example.)
“supports the parts of the definition gjm doesn’t approve of”
This seems to be your default assumption, to which you fall back as soon as you think you’ve ruled out any single alternative. It’s still wrong, just as it was before.
For instance: the NSDAP programme includes the abolition of unearned income—interest, rent, etc. I think that’s a terrible idea, but finding that an organization advocates the same idea wouldn’t much dispose me to call it “Nazi”.
(Perhaps it should—it’s a rather unusual idea as well as probably a bad one. So maybe I could be persuaded. But the fact that I’d need persuading indicates that I am not using the word the way you say I am.)
I don’t see the difference [...] “we” are presumably going to have them [...] do it from our perspective.
That word “presumably” would be one key difference. Another would be that teaching from a particular perspective is (possibly bad but) not the same thing as brainwashing.
but Nazism and Soviet communism were very different things.
In what way?
Nope. E.g., if some new political movement comes out for Jew-killing, totalitarian control, military expansionism, moral traditionalism, and fostering the Master Race, I’ll be very happy saying that yup, they’re basically Nazis even if they don’t use that term.
Ok, if a movement endorses their entire platform, it’s safe to call them Nazis. Except that isn’t the case for Golden Dawn, which was the movement under discussion.
Another would be that teaching from a particular perspective is (possibly bad but) not the same thing as brainwashing.
Many ways. Here are some examples. The NSDAP had the word “socialist” in its name but didn’t actually do much in the way of nationalization and communalization, whereas the Soviet communists did. The Nazis had racial purity at the centre of their rhetoric and policy, whereas the Soviet communists did not. (There was plenty of antisemitism in the USSR, but it was less explicit and less central and e.g. the USSR never made a systematic attempt to exterminate all its Jewish people.) Both were religiously oppressive but in quite different ways: the Communists tried to wipe out religion completely, whereas the Nazis tried (with limited success) to align it with their dogmas.
if a movement endorses their entire platform, it’s safe to call them Nazis.
The things I listed aren’t their “entire platform”—you may have forgotten that that was a point you were making a few comments upthread.
Except that isn’t the case for Golden Dawn
Sure. Because the question you asked—sorry, I mean the accusation you made—was not about the Golden Dawn. You claimed that my use of the word “Nazi” is circular and content-free because it amounts to saying “Nazis are those who hold the positions Nazis hold”, so I answered that accusation.
And the difference is?
The extent to which the teachers attempt to get the pupils to adopt that perspective, and the means used to do it.
For instance, schoolteachers would make life unpleasant for children who had not joined the Hitler Youth. And here are a couple of questions taken from Nazi-era school mathematics textbooks.
“A plane on take off carries 12 bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft makes for Warsaw , the centre of international Jewry. It bombs the town. On take off with all bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1500 kilos of fuel the aircraft weighed 8 tonnes. When it returned from the crusade, there were still 230 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty?”
“The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?”
It seems clear that what’s going on here is that even what you’d think was pretty much a maximally non-political subject, namely arithmetic, was being used to deliver particular political ideas to children.
Does that necessarily amount to “brainwashing”? Nope. I don’t know enough about Nazi education to know whether what happened in Nazi schools could rightly be described that way. But it’s certainly further along the spectrum from impartial teaching to brainwashing than, say, anything that happens in typical state-funded schools in the UK.
For instance, schoolteachers would make life unpleasant for children who had not joined the Hitler Youth. And here are a couple of questions taken from Nazi-era school mathematics textbooks.
Funny you should mention that. Let me quote the president of Chicago Teachers Union. She said this in 2014:
People always talk about how there’s no politics and values in math. That you can teach math and there’s no place for social justice. So let me tell you how Bob (Peterson) deals with that…Bob Peterson tells them about José working in a factory making piecemeal clothes. He uses the same numbers and gets the same answer. And yes, math is political too.
There is even a book: Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.
Yup, and moving in that direction is moving in the direction of brainwashing.
So, now, compare the situation in Nazi Germany (the textbooks are full of this stuff, all aligned with a single political perspective, and teachers do it all the time) with the situation in the present-day US (the textbooks don’t do it, and when one (ex-)teacher proposes it it produces a little blizzard of shocked responses).
Whereas Eugine was suggesting there’s no difference between teachers having a particular “perspective” and outright brainwashing.
So, now, compare the situation in Nazi Germany (the textbooks are full of this stuff, all aligned with a single political perspective, and teachers do it all the time) with the situation in the present-day US (the textbooks don’t do it, and when one (ex-)teacher proposes it it produces a little blizzard of shocked responses).
The major difference is diversity—US schools are locally controlled and the outcomes… vary. It’s not hard to find schools where political correctness dominates and social justice is explicitly taught (with no tolerance for dissent, of course). But it’s also not hard to find other schools which are conservative and basically Christian.
Brainwashing is one of major school goals, anyway.
That’s certainly a major difference. It is not the only major difference. Go and buy a dozen randomly chosen elementary mathematics textbooks in the US, or choose them at random from the ones actually used in public schools. I bet you will not find them filled with the sort of politically-loaded stuff that was common in Nazi Germany. (Though if you go looking, I’m sure you can find some that are.)
where political correctness dominates and social justice is explicitly taught
“Political correctness” and “social justice” are … extremely flexible terms. Would you like to say more explicitly what these schools do, and roughly what fraction of US public schools do it?
(The US is big and varied, and I bet there’s a wide variety of bad things we could find some US public schools doing. What we should expect to see if Eugine’s position is correct is, at least, that the majority of US public schools make vigorous attempts to make their pupils accept political positions agreeable to the governments that fund them.)
Brainwashing is one of major school goals, anyway.
I wonder what you mean by “brainwashing”.
There are quite a lot of schoolteachers in my family and nothing I have ever heard from them suggests that they see, or saw, their role as anything I would recognize as brainwashing. (This is in the UK, not the US. Things may be different in different countries.)
I expect that if pushed you could get many of them to admit that they try to encourage their pupils to be decent people—meaning e.g. not going out of their way to make one another’s lives unpleasant. You could call that brainwashing, if you insist. It seems to me quite different from trying to encourage pupils to hate the Jews, or want to die gloriously in battle. Anything beyond that, though? Nope. I’ve seen no sign that any of them have tried to push pupils in the direction of sharing their religion (or lack thereof) or politics (or lack thereof) or economic theories or anything of the kind.
My own recollection of the education I got is that some schools did systematically push a religious agenda (but only in specifically religious contexts, not by putting religion in the arithmetic questions), that at least one history teacher did admit to thinking that Nazism and Soviet communism were on the whole bad things, and … not much beyond that, actually. Now, that might just indicate how subtle the whole thing was and how completely they got to me, but given that plenty of other people who came through a similar education process have ended up with political and religious and other views quite different from mine, I doubt it.
“Political correctness” and “social justice” are … extremely flexible terms. Would you like to say more explicitly what these schools do, and roughly what fraction of US public schools do it?
No idea about the fraction and, obviously, there is a full spectrum from, let’s say, committed creationists to bona fide Marxists, so the fraction will depend on where you (arbitrarily) draw the line.
What I specifically mean is topics like “women scientists” in science classes, “black history month”, etc. I expect you’re familiar with the current epidemic of identity politics, microaggressions, triggers, etc. on college campuses in the US. You don’t think students acquire these… propensities solely on their way from high school to college? See e.g. Haidt’s experience.
I wonder what you mean by “brainwashing”.
It’s a loaded term, of course. Expressed neutrally it is the forming of overall frameworks involved in perceiving the world (especially socially and politically), shaping of values, and internalizing of the social acceptabilities and unacceptabilities. If you want it as a positive expression, it’s “preparing students to enter the society”.
I expect that if pushed you could get many of them to admit that they try to encourage their pupils to be decent people
“Decent people” is a… relative term. Teachers in, say, 1930s Germany or 1950s Russia also probably wanted their students to become “decent people”. It’s just that I think their idea of decency doesn’t quite match yours.
Your definition of “Nazi” currently amounts to “supports the parts of the Nazi platform only Nazis support”. Now obviously stated this way, it is clearly a circular, hense useless, definition.
That doesn’t follow. You can do the comparison of obvious Nazis and obvious non-Nazis to see what the Nazis support, then use the information from that to assess whether the non-obvious cases are nazis.
That one—the frontman of the Nazi punk band “Pogrom”—right? So you’re willing to stick a label onto a whole political party because someone from a punk band said controversial things and generally trolled the public?
Normally, no, I wouldn’t take a punk band’s politics seriously, but when the frontman of a Nazi punk band gets elected, that’s different.
Plus, he’s not the only one:
As depicted in a picture taken on 14 September 2012, Panagiotis Iliopoulos, another Golden Dawn MP, has a tattoo reading the Nazi greeting Sieg Heil.[139]
I mean, obviously a random member of a party’s views do not represent the party, but when they are leaders or get elected, thats different.
The party admitted them as a member, and given that, why wouldn’t it approve their candidacy? Especially since I don’t think there was much of an in-party contest in this case. It’s not like the primaries for POTUS elections.
Of course, society normally finds it easy to recognize and ostracize such blatantly dishonest Nazism.
What do you mean by “normally” and can you find any examples of society that actually operated like you describe? Keep in mind the word “Nazi” was already being applied to anything and everything the speaker disliked as early as 1942.
It’s one of the most important and surprising events of our time and much of the discussion is anti-rational, i.e. bad people support Trump so Trump is bad; many are claiming that electing Trump would be catastrophic and discussing potential catastrophes is supposed to be one of the purposes of LW.
I think a question of how Trump interacts with x-risk is a potentially interesting conversation topic. I think an analysis of class that uses Trump as an example is a potentially interesting conversation topic.
But I worry that even here a direct discussion of Trump will be anti-rational / along cultural lines instead of about rational expectations, and I’m not sure what actions we would take differently as a result of having that conversation.
*cough*bullshit*cough*
Then name three more important events that have transpired mostly in the last 6 months?
You said (emphasis mine): “one of the most important and surprising events of our time”
I tend to interpret “our time” as a period that is a bit longer than the last six months.
But even if you want to look at recent news, here are three things which I consider to be much more consequential than Donald Trump: (1) the European refugee crisis; (2) the Chinese economic troubles; (3) the Russian direct military intervention in Syria.
May I politely suggest paying less attention to the idiot box?
I’m not sure that argument goes through—if the European refugee crisis is important, then aren’t Merkel, Obama, and Clinton important? And if they’re important once they’re in office, isn’t the process by which they enter office important?
That argument involving the idiot box actually looks like this: Mass media optimizes for outrage. Estimating the importance of the topic by the amount of air time it gets is a mistake.
No. Not in the sense that Merkel, etc. are unimportant, but in the sense that a systemic crisis is not reducible to the importance of whoever happens to be in the office at the moment.
If James_Miller wanted to discuss the crisis of the “establishment” center of the mainstream US parties and the rebellions within them, it might have been an interesting topic. But James_Miller want to discuss Donald Trump, personally.
Of course, that’s what Donald Trump wants as well X-)
The reason I picked those particular people is because of Clinton’s role in the removal of Qaddafi, Obama’s role in the continued destabilization of Syria, and Merkel’s public pledge to take in refugees (which exacerbated the degree to which it is a European crisis, instead of a Syrian or Africa crisis). “Whoever happens to be in the office at the moment” is a factor in many of these crises.
I have a feeling we’re slowly slipping towards the conflict between the “impersonal forces” and “great people” views of history :-)
But I guess the question here is whether you want to discuss people or whether you want to discuss systems. Of course they are related and interdependent, but still. Going back to the source of this subthread, I find thinking about tensions between “rebels” and “nomenklatura” in US political parties to be moderately interesting (especially in the context of how they deal with the need to overpromise during the campaign). I find Donald Trump to be very uninteresting. YMMV, of course.
A synthesis of the two views clearly outperforms either view on its own. There seems to be a difference between, basically, forest fires and earthquakes—both rely on long build-ups (the impersonal forces contribution) and when they happen may be surprising (I couldn’t tell you when the housing bubble would burst until it had but I could tell you that it would eventually), but the while there’s little control over when an earthquake happens and how the consequences shake out, there’s quite a bit of control over when a fire happens and how the consequences shake out (the great people contribution).
Of course—they are just endpoints and the discussion is about where in the middle the proper balance is struck.
That’s an interesting distinction—can you say more about it?
It seems to me that events and changes vary quite a bit in how much control various people have over them. For things like the Chinese economic difficulties, it looks to me like this is the result of lots of malinvestment over the years, and there’s not too much control over whether or not things get worse / no clear single point of failure. Then there are other issues where there does seem to be a single point of failure, or a single failure avoidance point. Even in those cases, there are systemic forces that created the fuel for the conflagration.
One example that comes to mind is Arkhipov voting against firing nukes during the Cuban Missile crisis. The things that put the missiles there and made their standing orders to fire if attacked (and the officers agreed) might be better thought of as ‘systemic forces,’ but it seems hard to argue that ‘systemic forces’ are a better explanation of a 2-1 vote instead of a 3-0 vote than the ‘great people’ view. Similarly, one can imagine many forest fires that almost happened, and then didn’t because of direct action by a person on the scene.
(Or many forest fires caused by direct action of a person on the scene.)
Even if she did greatly exacerbate it by doing something really stupid?
Yes, even, because there are reasons she did that and those reasons don’t have much to do with her personally. It wasn’t like she buckled the entire German consensus.
The refugee crisis is very interesting. Not quite “Camp of the Saints”, but it’s a huge acceleration of frictions I expected to take much longer to play out, and not really hit the fan so soon.
Chinese economic troubles? Recessions are big things, but they happen. Economies go up, they go down.
Russian intervention in Syria. Russian satellite state getting military support. Shrug. Turkey seems much more interesting to me. I suppose the Russians intervention does make it possible for some serious confrontation with the US, but I don’t see Putin or Obama having much interest in that.
There are some complicated wrinkles to this one, including the observation that the (current) legitimacy of the Communist Party rule to a great extent depends on it being able to provide visibly and rapidly rising standards of living. And, of course, the question whether China is done with its growth spurt or it’s merely a hiccup has major geopolitical consequences a decade or two away.
The first time post-Soviet Russia puts boots on the ground outside of the former USSR. The overarching theme is the global assertiveness of Mr.Putin and Middle East is always an… interesting place. And there is Iran nearby :-/
I agree that Turkey is interesting, too, but nothing “big” happened there recently and were were talking about events.
Um, shooting down a Russian plane.
And… nothing happened.
No, Russia started providing it’s bombers with fighter escorts with orders to shoot in self-defense. This is a situation that can easily escalate the next time one of these planes passes through Turkish airspace.
How about the various welfare states around the world finally starting to run out of other people’s money. The biggest manifestations of this so far have been the financial crisis in the EU, and the various pension crises in US local governments.
Heck, in my more conspiratorial moods I’m inclined to suspect that these migrant crises are an excuse to import a bunch of convenient scapegoats who can than be blamed for the collapse of popular entitlement programs.
That’s not one of the events “that have transpired mostly in the last 6 months” :-)
But yes, I’m watching Japan with great interest :-D
I think Trump’s rise is interesting for a number of issues that people here have particular interest in.
How he wins. How his attackers lose. The power of his signature issues in trade and immigration. The potential for a political realignment with the Republican Party, and how that realigns US politics as a whole.
The media has been outraged, they have attacked, and they have failed to bring him down. His poll numbers just go up and up and up. That’s interesting, and merits discussion.
I’m saying this in hindsight, but I disagree about this being surprising. Anti-immigration parties are on the rise all across Europe. The National Front in France are probably to the right of Trump, and Golden Dawn in Greece are genuine neo-nazis. More generally, non-mainstream parties are on the rise, probably powered by the ability to organise grassroots activism via the net. Even the Pirate Parties are winning seats.
Given this, is it really surprising that non-mainstream candidates would happen in the US too, both with Trump and Bernie Sanders?
I’m actually surprised that Sanders isn’t the Democratic frontrunner, especially when his only opponent is being investigated for espionage.
The ideological gate keepers are losing control. The Cologne cover up looks like a pretty significant event for discrediting the Top Men.
On Sanders, all the Democratic Powers that Be lined up behind Clinton, and even Sanders got in lock step to maintain that Clinton’s email catastrophe is much ado about nothing. The Democratic Party has spent a couple of decades dealing with Clinton scandals. It’s all just a cast right wing conspiracy, don’t you know?
Probably the biggest hit Hillary has taken is from younger women, turned off by HIllary “standing by her man” and attacking his sexual abuse accusers, Gloria Steinem belittling Bernie gals as boy crazy for Bernie Bros, and Albright playing the Vote Vagina or Go to Hell card.
Depending no who you listen to, so’s the National Front, Putin, anti-Putin, Trump, mainstream Republicans, insufficiently left-wing Democrats, etc.
Ok, so what’s your reason for believing Golden Dawn are actually neo-nazi? (Edit: and what do you mean by “actual neo-nazi” anyway?)
Just look at their flag:
https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Meandros_flag.svg/150px-Meandros_flag.svg.png&imgrefurl=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)&h=100&w=150&tbnid=CDly4gAodIMPcM:&tbnh=80&tbnw=120&docid=g-53Bx9BWHOy2M&usg=__gcjSL8sDC3eM9-5mVj4vERTCyW8=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-oezK-bfLAhVpQpoKHY3fANQQ9QEIITAA)
It looks just like a swastika. Sure, Putin and Trump and anyone who is nationalistic can be compared to Nazis, but this cheapens the term ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’.
By “actual neo-nazi” I mean a group which has significant use of Nazi imagery and when significant members explicitly endorse Nazism.
Seriously? You’re only argument is that their flag looks like a Swastika if you squint just right?
The flag looks almost exactly like a swastica. Also, see hairyfigment’s comment and read the wikipedia page. There is plenty more evidence.
They wouldn’t have chosen that flag unless they were neo-nazis. If they really wanted that symbol, it could have been against a different color background.
You think so?
Glad you asked, Eugine:
Of course, society normally finds it easy to recognize and ostracize such blatantly dishonest Nazism. It doesn’t create any actual confusion - unless people have gone out of their way to weaken society’s immune system, eg by deliberately signalling Nazism when the reality is more obscure.
I think it weakens the immune system more when anyone who isn’t in favour of completely unrestricted immigration gets called a Nazi. And there’s a failure mode where constantly calling people Nazis (or sexists/racists) makes them more favourable towards Nazis (the theory is that on a subconcious level they think ’if I’m a Nazi, maybe Nazism isn’t so bad).
Or the more straightforward, if anyone proposing sensible immigration policy gets called a Nazi, eventually people conclude that “Nazi” means someone in favor of sensible immigration policy.
I agree, and I am trying to use words in a precise manner. Trump is not a Nazi. The Golden Dawn are.
LOL. Seriously, do you have any more evidence beyond “their symbol sotra looks like a swastika”. How about you try looking for the factions in Greece using Nazi-style tactics, like say arresting their opponents on vague trumped up charges. Hint: it’s not Golden Dawn.
Try the entire wikipedia page on them! Take these bits for instance:
Now, I’m not endorsing the other factions, some of whom may well be Stalinists or terrorists. It is possible for there to be extremists on both the left and the right.
I know that ‘Nazi’ may be overused, but you surely must see that in this specific instance, that is what the Golden Dawn are.
Unless the entire wikipedia page and the sources are all fraudulent...
You did mention “using words precisely” at some point. If you still wish to do that, the word “Nazi” is a very specific word—it refers to things associated with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. I am pretty sure members of Golden Dawn are not members of NSDAP as well.
A better word for you might be “fascist”. It is more general—there certainly were more fascists than nazis—and describes a particular type of ideology (which originated in Italy, by the way).
The word “neo-nazi”, in contemporary parlance, doesn’t mean much beyond “I don’t like these people”.
Note that it’s perfectly possible to be racist, xenophobic, nationalist, and anti-semitic and still not be a Nazi or a fascist.
Well, everyone to the right of Stalin has been described as neo-Nazi by scholars.
I guess there goes your “explicitly endorse Nazism” claim.
Weren’t people saying the same thing about the National Front ~20 years ago?
I said if “significant members explicitly endorse Nazism”, and in this case it seems at least one elected official does, even if the group doesn’t.
Perhaps. I’m not an expert on the history of European politics.
There’s an ambiguity here. Suppose the official position of the Social Party for German National Workers is as follows:
Germany needs to be a great power once more, and can only become so by military expansion, so that it can fulfil its destiny by ruling all Europe with a fist of iron.
Jews and Communists are responsible for most of the nation’s ills and must be destroyed.
The Aryan race is superior to all others and must be favoured and kept pure.
Traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved for fear of moral degeneracy.
To achieve all these things, it is necessary for the nation’s security forces to be able to know and control what everyone says and does.
… and suppose the SPGNW loudly proclaims “We have no sympathy with fascism or Nazism”. The SPGNW explicitly endorses a big pile of key Nazi ideas, but it doesn’t explicitly endorse the word “Nazism”. What then? Personally I’d be happy saying that they explicitly endorse Nazism and are just lying about it.
I don’t know enough about the Golden Dawn for my opinions on whether they’re doing something similar to be worth much. But it’s certainly possible a priori that they might be.
(Adopting this flag really doesn’t seem like something a party fully committed to not endorsing Nazism would do. The resemblance isn’t exactly subtle.)
I could argue over the semantics of ‘explicitly’ but basically they are Nazis whether they all admit it or not.
I don’t think they actually beleived this. Perhaps traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved to maintain the Aryan birthrate, but that’s a little different—if premarital sex leads to lots of Aryan babies, I doubt they would object.
Interestingly, the leader of the SA was gay.
Of course, modern day Germany does censor the internet for anti-migrant comments...
It’s not clear to me what they actually believed. They may have been inconsistent.
Pretty much all governments, ancient and modern, left and right, intrude more into their citizens’ affairs than I’d like. But the Nazis seem to have been quite a lot worse in that respect than today’s German government.
LOL
I’m not sure whether you’re laughing at or with me. If the former, good; I was hoping to amuse. If the latter, perhaps consider explaining what I wrote that you find laughable?
At :-P
I find the idea of being fully committed to NOT endorsing something to be laughable.
Are you fully committed to not endorsing, say, Genghis Khan? Can you prove it? X-D
OK, so let me do something that never works :-) and explain the joke, such as it was.
Of course there is not really such a thing as being fully committed to not endorsing something; it’s not the kind of thing it makes sense to be committed to. So describing someone or something as “not fully committed to endorsing X” has to be an instance of meiosis (understatement for rhetorical effect); and so it is. What I am actually suggesting is that the Golden Dawn looks like a basically-fascist party that’s nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany, and that no one adopts a flag like that without the deliberate intention to evoke the Nazi flag, and that what GD is actually interested in is endorsing Nazism with plausible deniability. But—being a dry-witted English sort of chap—I chose to express that by understating it to pretty much the greatest extent possible. It was intended to be just very slightly amusing, at least to sympathetic readers.
As I already remarked, explaining jokes never works. (Especially, I think, this sort of joke.) And I’ve just spent at least 30x longer explaining what I wrote as I did writing it. Oh well, never mind.
That joke would have worked better if we were not discussing whether a contemporary political movement is actually Nazi and if demands to be fully committed to not endorsing white male cis hetero partriarchy (add more words to taste) did not actually pop up outside of Monty Python sketches.
Getting back to the subject at hand, do you suggest that the Golden Dawn is actually “nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany”? That strikes me as not very likely, not to mention that those good old days were very few before they became terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.
I think maybe “Adopting this flag really doesn’t seem like something a party fully committed to not endorsing Nazism would do” is British understatement for “Adopting this flag is tacitly endorsing Nazism”.
That was in fact exactly my meaning.
I like to believe I understand British understatements. This one… didn’t perform as expected :-P
Your opinion is noted.
Literally? Quite likely not. Keen to reproduce most of the salient features of those days if they get into power? Yeah, probably. (And I’ll hazard a guess that if asked many of them would say: well, yes, Hitler did some terrible things, but at least he tried to make Germany great through purity and strength. Perhaps with a side-order of Holocaust denial.)
Depending on your pick of “salient features”, this is applicable to a lot of political movements. The desire for a powerful state, national unity, a strong hand keeping miscreants in check, etc. is quite common.
Take a look at the NSDAP program—isn’t it easy to find some common ground with pretty much anyone? :-/
E.g. Bernie Sanders wants free education and hey look, it’s right here, point 20: “The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. … We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.”
Re. Bernie Sanders, he is clearly a socialist, and in some ways mildly nationalist, e.g. :
So would it be accurate to say that Sanders may be mildly national socialist, but certainly not a capitalised National Socialist?
I dunno. Find a Bernie Bro and tell him that “Sanders may be mildly national socialist”. On an off chance that he knows what National Socialism is, duck X-D
Hmm, it is tempting to find a historically illiterate Bernie supporter and persuade them to describe their politics as “national socialist”.
“Look, many would love to be international socialists and raise the living standard for the entire world. But clearly the US cannot afford to supply welfare, heathcare and education to all 7 billion people in the world. So, maybe one day we can have international socialism, but right now we have to be pragmatic and advocate national socialism”
Get popcorn, sit back, and watch as Bernie Bro tries to convince others to national socialism :P
Bonus points if the expression “workers’ party” gets used.
Double bonus points if you persuade him to rail against fat-cat bankers who suffocate the common people with their greed. Abolish unearned (work and labour) incomes! Break debt (interest)-slavery!
Don’t just imprison the banksters, kill them!
I think we’re onto something here. I mean, if you replace the bits of Nazi ideology about ‘Jews control the banks’ with ‘white men run silicon valley and the banks’ and replace demands for lebensraum with demands for safe spaces then I think the Socialist Workers Party of the American Nation could really take off.
It’s not a new observation :-/
Well, that’s why the things that tend to get described as specifically Nazi tend not to be things like “improving the education system” or even more specifically “providing good education for gifted children from all backgrounds” (er, of course some kinds of backgrounds wouldn’t have been acceptable to the Nazis) that have pretty wide support from all quarters. Just as describing someone as “very like Richard Feynman” probably doesn’t mean that they had some artistic talent and enjoyed drawing.
Providing special attention to gifted children is extremely controversial. Far more resources are spent on the slow kids.
I didn’t intend to imply it’s uncontroversial. Only that it’s widely supported by people with very varied politics.
No, I think that’s not the why. I think the actual why is because the Nazis lost the last war and so became known as the incarnation of pure evil, and everything they touched turned to pure evil, the end. In less flowery prose, “Nazi” (or neo-nazi) nowadays is just a derogatory term without much historical meaning.
I am not a fan of NSDAP and though I don’t know much about Golden Dawn I doubt they are a bunch of decent fellows. If someone calls them neo-nazis, I mentally translate it to “I don’t really like ’em”. But if people want to insist that they are actually, literally Nazis and pine for the good old days of the Third Reich, well, at this point I feel compelled to point out that no, taking derogatories literally is rarely a good idea.
I may have used the word “fascist” or “Nazi” as derogatory terms back when I was an angry young 20 year old, but I am trying to be a little more rational now. I have been arguing that they are literally Nazis.
Literally Nazis means they are members of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
How are you defining the word “Nazi”? (or the word “literally”?)
Where by “specifically Nazi” you mean “the parts that gjm doesn’t approve off”.
Speak for yourself. I very much don’t approve of point 20 from their program. “The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program” is a nice-ish sounding way of saying, “we will ram whatever propaganda we want down all kids’ thoughts and force you to pay for it”.
You keep doing this. You keep being wrong. You should stop it.
I fear you misunderstand me (and someone else seems to have misunderstood the same way, so presumably I should have been clearer). I meant not “everyone agrees with this” but “many people with a wide variety of political positions agree with this”. And I didn’t intend to imply that everyone in their programme other than “kill the Jews” is in that category.
“The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program” could, in isolation, mean anything from “we’re going to build a lot of new schools and fund a lot of new teachers” to “we’re going to close down the education system entirely” via “we’re going to turn the schools into brainwashing units” and “we’re going to change the schools from brainwashing units to places of actual education”. In the Nazis’ case, it turned out to be the brainwashing one, and no reasonable person would support that. And, lo, I think “brainwash all the children to agree with the State’s position” would generally be regarded as a characteristically Nazi policy, though of course totalitarians of all stripes do that—and this is consistent with both Lumifer’s analysis (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and it was really bad) and mine (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and most others didn’t).
Actually I think both Lumifer’s analysis and mine are right; something is easier to pigeonhole as Nazi if (1) you see it done often by people who aren’t Nazis and (2) you feel positively about it. I’ll add another: once Nazism is associated in everyone’s mind mostly with nationalism, Jew-killing, and war-making, any given other thing is going to be easier to think of as “Nazi” if it feels like it resembles those.
What do you mean by a “wide variety of political positions”? Your definition of “Nazi” currently amounts to “supports the parts of the Nazi platform only Nazis support”. Now obviously stated this way, it is clearly a circular, hense useless, definition. So we are left with how you use it in practice, which brings us back to “supports the parts of the definition gjm doesn’t approve of”.
I don’t see the difference between your first and last interpretation. After all if “we” build new school and fund a lot of teachers, “we” are presumably going to have them teach cources on history, social sciences, etc. and do it from our precpective. One could get around this problem by not having education be centralised, but that’s not what either the Nazis or Bernie were proposing.
Not quite. For instance, Soviet-style communism was pretty big on totalitarianism, which is certainly a distinctively Nazi trait, but Nazism and Soviet communism were very different things.
Nope. E.g., if some new political movement comes out for Jew-killing, totalitarian control, military expansionism, moral traditionalism, and fostering the Master Race, I’ll be very happy saying that yup, they’re basically Nazis even if they don’t use that term.
(That’s not meant to be a necessary-and-sufficient condition; just an example.)
This seems to be your default assumption, to which you fall back as soon as you think you’ve ruled out any single alternative. It’s still wrong, just as it was before.
For instance: the NSDAP programme includes the abolition of unearned income—interest, rent, etc. I think that’s a terrible idea, but finding that an organization advocates the same idea wouldn’t much dispose me to call it “Nazi”.
(Perhaps it should—it’s a rather unusual idea as well as probably a bad one. So maybe I could be persuaded. But the fact that I’d need persuading indicates that I am not using the word the way you say I am.)
That word “presumably” would be one key difference. Another would be that teaching from a particular perspective is (possibly bad but) not the same thing as brainwashing.
In what way?
Ok, if a movement endorses their entire platform, it’s safe to call them Nazis. Except that isn’t the case for Golden Dawn, which was the movement under discussion.
And the difference is?
Many ways. Here are some examples. The NSDAP had the word “socialist” in its name but didn’t actually do much in the way of nationalization and communalization, whereas the Soviet communists did. The Nazis had racial purity at the centre of their rhetoric and policy, whereas the Soviet communists did not. (There was plenty of antisemitism in the USSR, but it was less explicit and less central and e.g. the USSR never made a systematic attempt to exterminate all its Jewish people.) Both were religiously oppressive but in quite different ways: the Communists tried to wipe out religion completely, whereas the Nazis tried (with limited success) to align it with their dogmas.
The things I listed aren’t their “entire platform”—you may have forgotten that that was a point you were making a few comments upthread.
Sure. Because the question you asked—sorry, I mean the accusation you made—was not about the Golden Dawn. You claimed that my use of the word “Nazi” is circular and content-free because it amounts to saying “Nazis are those who hold the positions Nazis hold”, so I answered that accusation.
The extent to which the teachers attempt to get the pupils to adopt that perspective, and the means used to do it.
For instance, schoolteachers would make life unpleasant for children who had not joined the Hitler Youth. And here are a couple of questions taken from Nazi-era school mathematics textbooks.
“A plane on take off carries 12 bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft makes for Warsaw , the centre of international Jewry. It bombs the town. On take off with all bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1500 kilos of fuel the aircraft weighed 8 tonnes. When it returned from the crusade, there were still 230 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty?”
“The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?”
It seems clear that what’s going on here is that even what you’d think was pretty much a maximally non-political subject, namely arithmetic, was being used to deliver particular political ideas to children.
Does that necessarily amount to “brainwashing”? Nope. I don’t know enough about Nazi education to know whether what happened in Nazi schools could rightly be described that way. But it’s certainly further along the spectrum from impartial teaching to brainwashing than, say, anything that happens in typical state-funded schools in the UK.
Funny you should mention that. Let me quote the president of Chicago Teachers Union. She said this in 2014:
There is even a book: Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.
Yup, and moving in that direction is moving in the direction of brainwashing.
So, now, compare the situation in Nazi Germany (the textbooks are full of this stuff, all aligned with a single political perspective, and teachers do it all the time) with the situation in the present-day US (the textbooks don’t do it, and when one (ex-)teacher proposes it it produces a little blizzard of shocked responses).
Whereas Eugine was suggesting there’s no difference between teachers having a particular “perspective” and outright brainwashing.
The major difference is diversity—US schools are locally controlled and the outcomes… vary. It’s not hard to find schools where political correctness dominates and social justice is explicitly taught (with no tolerance for dissent, of course). But it’s also not hard to find other schools which are conservative and basically Christian.
Brainwashing is one of major school goals, anyway.
That’s certainly a major difference. It is not the only major difference. Go and buy a dozen randomly chosen elementary mathematics textbooks in the US, or choose them at random from the ones actually used in public schools. I bet you will not find them filled with the sort of politically-loaded stuff that was common in Nazi Germany. (Though if you go looking, I’m sure you can find some that are.)
“Political correctness” and “social justice” are … extremely flexible terms. Would you like to say more explicitly what these schools do, and roughly what fraction of US public schools do it?
(The US is big and varied, and I bet there’s a wide variety of bad things we could find some US public schools doing. What we should expect to see if Eugine’s position is correct is, at least, that the majority of US public schools make vigorous attempts to make their pupils accept political positions agreeable to the governments that fund them.)
I wonder what you mean by “brainwashing”.
There are quite a lot of schoolteachers in my family and nothing I have ever heard from them suggests that they see, or saw, their role as anything I would recognize as brainwashing. (This is in the UK, not the US. Things may be different in different countries.)
I expect that if pushed you could get many of them to admit that they try to encourage their pupils to be decent people—meaning e.g. not going out of their way to make one another’s lives unpleasant. You could call that brainwashing, if you insist. It seems to me quite different from trying to encourage pupils to hate the Jews, or want to die gloriously in battle. Anything beyond that, though? Nope. I’ve seen no sign that any of them have tried to push pupils in the direction of sharing their religion (or lack thereof) or politics (or lack thereof) or economic theories or anything of the kind.
My own recollection of the education I got is that some schools did systematically push a religious agenda (but only in specifically religious contexts, not by putting religion in the arithmetic questions), that at least one history teacher did admit to thinking that Nazism and Soviet communism were on the whole bad things, and … not much beyond that, actually. Now, that might just indicate how subtle the whole thing was and how completely they got to me, but given that plenty of other people who came through a similar education process have ended up with political and religious and other views quite different from mine, I doubt it.
No idea about the fraction and, obviously, there is a full spectrum from, let’s say, committed creationists to bona fide Marxists, so the fraction will depend on where you (arbitrarily) draw the line.
What I specifically mean is topics like “women scientists” in science classes, “black history month”, etc. I expect you’re familiar with the current epidemic of identity politics, microaggressions, triggers, etc. on college campuses in the US. You don’t think students acquire these… propensities solely on their way from high school to college? See e.g. Haidt’s experience.
It’s a loaded term, of course. Expressed neutrally it is the forming of overall frameworks involved in perceiving the world (especially socially and politically), shaping of values, and internalizing of the social acceptabilities and unacceptabilities. If you want it as a positive expression, it’s “preparing students to enter the society”.
“Decent people” is a… relative term. Teachers in, say, 1930s Germany or 1950s Russia also probably wanted their students to become “decent people”. It’s just that I think their idea of decency doesn’t quite match yours.
That doesn’t follow. You can do the comparison of obvious Nazis and obvious non-Nazis to see what the Nazis support, then use the information from that to assess whether the non-obvious cases are nazis.
Except then you’d have to use some other criterion to determine the “obvious” cases.
I think Otto Wels, Ernst Thälmann and Ludwig Kaas would be the most obvious non-Nazis.
That one—the frontman of the Nazi punk band “Pogrom”—right? So you’re willing to stick a label onto a whole political party because someone from a punk band said controversial things and generally trolled the public?
Normally, no, I wouldn’t take a punk band’s politics seriously, but when the frontman of a Nazi punk band gets elected, that’s different.
Plus, he’s not the only one:
I mean, obviously a random member of a party’s views do not represent the party, but when they are leaders or get elected, thats different.
When they get elected, that’s evidence about the voters, not about the party.
But the party approved their candidacy.
The party admitted them as a member, and given that, why wouldn’t it approve their candidacy? Especially since I don’t think there was much of an in-party contest in this case. It’s not like the primaries for POTUS elections.
What do you mean by “normally” and can you find any examples of society that actually operated like you describe? Keep in mind the word “Nazi” was already being applied to anything and everything the speaker disliked as early as 1942.