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.
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.