This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Well who doesn’t love the germans. Those slavs could have taken solace in the fact that they would have starved to death in a very orderly manner.
Which causes, slavery, nazism? Anyway, we are not even disagreeing on the sides here.
Obedience, a sense of duty, loyalty, professionalism, those things are not good in a vaccuum. When they are present in people who serve evil, they become evil. They make things worse. It is morally blind to evaluate Lee’s qualities as if he had served the good. Had he been a cowardly, dumb, lazy drunkard, thousands of lives would have been saved. His honor has been a net negative for humanity. He failed morally as very few people fail. A mean-spirited, sadistic soldier in his army only has a small fraction of the blood on Lee's hands, he's an angel compared to Lee.
It’s like Scott’s ‘asymmetric weapons’ concept. Obedience, or, say, loyalty to your home community, helps both Hitler and Roosevelt, it’s a symmetric weapon. Otoh, disobedience, ie, asking the question ‘am I really doing the right thing here, should I give my loyalty to this guy?” is asymmetric, it is more likely to help the good guy and harm the bad guy.
Who's opinion do you think I'm asking you to ask for, if not Slavs'?
Nazism seems to fit nicely into the "would not have happened were it not for people deeply convinced they're on the Right Side Of History" template.
A quick glance at the modern progressive movement says otherwise.
Slavs. I think slavs who prefered germans to russians were a bit blindsided by the neatly polished hugo boss boots and would have died in much greater numbers under Generalplan ost than under any 5 year plan.
Show me people who fought for any side, anywhere, who thought they were wrong. I implied my side is morally good, that must mean I’m a nazi. Please. You said ‘people like me’ turn good causes into evil causes, then use nazism as an example, but of course, there was nothing good about nazism from the start. It was always on its predetermined path towards genocide and war. This was apparent. Alas, germans by and large chose loyalty to their country over morality and obedience over conscience. Like lee, like you and hlynka argue, is only right and proper.
FWIW, I think you make a good point. I'm still sympathetic to virtue ethics, but it seems obvious to me that neither those nor consequentialism end up doing much good if they are used in their undiluted extremes. Good men working for evil cause is bad because, well, in hindsight the cause was bad, and so is bad men working for good cause because, in hindsight, they never let the cause remain good for long. Catalina or Alcibiades may have been troublemakers for bad reasons, but we can still appreciate their bravery and other virtues without needing to "tea-bag" them. We can look at Sparta and see a society we would not wish to live in, but still give them the benefit of the doubt and admit that, at least for some time, what they were doing may have been the best feasible approach to their situation.
IMO we should be able to apply our hindsight and come up with better judgement than "Lee did good" or "Lee did bad". Be able to appreciate his chivalric and gentlemanly virtues, manage to imagine ourselves in his shoes and try to feel his attachment to the South, and yet say that his cause was unjust, that the world is better off for him having lost, that we prefer this outcome, that slave liberation and the preservation of the union were more important than securing the South's independence and way of life, that we still understand that for a Southerner at the time these priorities may have been inverted, that we wish he had been able to see things as we do now even though that may have been asking too much.
Now I for one am not American, and the whole affair is just idle talk on my part. So let's look closer to home.
The Nazis were a bunch of gangsters. It's hard to imagine a world in which they persisted longer than they did, but I have a hard time thinking that it would actually have been a better one for a German to live in than one in which they had never appeared, or the one in which they ended up beaten and Germany occupied by, mostly, the USA. I share Kaiser Wilhelm's criticism of some of them - the true believers - who correctly noted that their ideology did nothing to actually preserve the Germany that existed, either then or before, and merely aimed to create some abomination wearing the name of Germany in its place. This may not apply to all Nazis, and I suppose that many were more reasonable, but from what's visible through the fog of history I think Willy's judgement applies, at the very least, to Adolf Hitler himself and many of his most influential ideologues. And, as mentioned before, the Nazis were a bunch of gangsters - not only ideologues and patriots who stumbled upon a dark path, but also honest-to-god opportunists who loved the power and impunity their position in the party gave them. They lied and cheated, killed and destroyed, blackmailed and stole, often not even for the cause but merely to line their own pockets and lord it over their compatriots.
I think it's fair to say that the Nazi party, the National Socialist German Worker's Party or NSDAP, along with its non-member supporters and collaborators, was a thoroughly bad influence on Germany and the wider world, even if we just look and its very immediate doings and effects. What good they did was massively outweighed by the bad. In consequentialist terms - obviously. In terms of virtue ethics, also - the party enabled all kinds of undesirable excesses, and what militarist virtues it put on display were mostly just inherited from the Kaiserreich and the Prussians.
And still I don't want them "Tea-Bagged". I don't want their graves defaced no matter what they did. I don't need an army of media people ceaselessly ridiculing them. I think it's distasteful and pointless - if we actually are better than them, then we should be able to cast judgement that actually discerns between what they did well or poorly, between facets of their cause that were just and those that were unjust, be honest about what metrics we apply, and acknowledge that not everyone associated with them is automatically a complete monster from cradle to grave.
Now, so far we only spoke of the Nazi Party, but what about German soldiers? Was Lee a politician and ideologue, or a military man? From what little I know, the latter - please correct me if I'm mistaken - so whom can we compare him to? As I understand from this thread, the primary offense he is charged with by The Right Side Of History is that he fought for his home country when it should have been obvious that its cause was unjust. Obviously we have countless similar Germans in the history of WW2. German officers in the Prussian tradition had varied views of the Nazis, but many detested them either from the onset or once they realized what they were up to. And yet they fought for Germany, because not doing so seemed even worse to them. In retrospect, did that cause more harm or more good? Had they not lent their expertise to the Wehrmacht, would the Nazis have avoided War? Or would they have started it anyways only for the Soviet Union to end up occupying all of Germany? Would their refusal to serve have broken the Nazi's war-making potential entirely and set a precedent for others to follow in resisting their ideological projects? Or would they only have bent themselves out of shape, broken their oaths, rejected their traditions and risked their and their families' and friends' lives for no change to the outcome? I for one don't know. And I wasn't in their shoes. I feel glad that there were men of virtue who fought for Germany, even as Germany was going down the wrong path. I think it would have been even sadder had no-one stood by our country, regardless of the consequences.
I'm not a Prussia fanboy either. Nomen est Omen, my Germany is that of the South, far from the centers of power. But when it comes to questions of "just following orders", our primary contribution is Erwin Rommel. A famous officer who helped conquer France, he was a living hero for his exploits in North Africa (though his status was helped by official propaganda), and though supposedly vaguely sympathetic to the party and, at least for most of his time, on good terms with Hitler, he ended up either tacitly endorsing or subtly supporting plans to assassinate Hitler and launch a coup against the German government. The assassination failed and everyone involved was swiftly put to death. Rommel, thanks to his status, was given the option to commit suicide in exchange for lenience for his family and associates (and to not damage the morale of the people and army), and he did so.
Using the same standards that end up condemning Lee to Tea-Bagging and Statue Removal, I guess we need to have Rommel suffer the same fate, yes? He was on the wrong side, after all. Or does his tenuous association with the assassination plot absolve him?
Well, Germany kept his name around. He had a monument, and a Museum, and even three barracks named after him. It seemed that we managed to differentiate between rabid ideologues, opportunist gangsters, obedient soldiers and the martyrs of the resistance. It seemed we condemned the first two, judged the third on their individual merits, and lionized the fourth. Obviously there are countless monuments to Sophie Scholl, Dietrich Bonhöffer and all the others who died in opposition to the Nazis, and you can find memorials to common soldiers who fell in the war in practically every German village.
Still, people do come after the memory of Rommel. His Museum was closed, and the Barracks in Dornstadt almost had to change its name. And you can be sure that many on the left are fuming every time they see his name and calling for a damnatio memoriae. But I don't want them to get anywhere with that, because in the little church in my home village there is a little stone plate on which are the names of all the locals who fell in the World Wars. One of those names belongs to my great-grandfather, who went as a private to fight both in the West and East until he finally fell in Stalingrad. What did he think of Nazism? What was his opinion on the Jewish question? What could he have done to stop the NSDAP? He was a dirt farmer in the middle of nowhere making barely more than subsistence and his last letters to home were reminders to take good care of the pigs.
I'd write more but my daughter just woke up and I'm not sure I really had a point to make anyways.
I don’t want to tea-bag anyone , as far as I’m concerned, the statues can stay, they’re a part of history, no need to re-write it. I do think history should be judged however, and not only on its own moral terms. I do condemn sparta, even though I recognize its martial excellence.
My grandma’s brother fell at 17 in the last months of the war. He didn’t want to go apparently. We could never mention him or the city where he died in front of her or she would start crying. I really can’t forgive the leaders, and even just regular adults who went along with it, for what they did to the country (to say nothing of all the non-german victims) . They all had their reasons of course, but they just were not good enough. Sure, most of the blame falls on the leaders, and the enthusiastic nazis, but in my view there is still more than enough blood left to mark every quiet follower as a murderer.
And it is true that rommel was tacitly supporting the stauffenberg attempt, but it was too tacit. As you say, even in his death he assisted the regime, keeping morale up. I’ll grant that he’s not morally in the same league as guys like schörner who were executing soldiers for refusing orders up to the very end (before abandoning his men to surrender to the americans).
It's this, I suppose, that really disagree with. I think the resistance to the nazis was admirable. But I also think that the "murderers" as you call them are by and far perfectly understandable. In between positive motivations like patriotism and martial ethos and just being law-abiding citizens and negative ones like peer pressure and the very real risk of getting executed as well as arrested and one's family badly harassed by the local nazi party barons, I'm fairly sure most of them had many good reasons for quietly following orders.
Then again, I guess it's ethically consistent to say that the man who surrenders his wallet when threatened with death by mugging is complicit in all further muggings, is an enabler and supporter of violent criminals, and a shameful failure of a human being next to the man who nobly attempts to overwhelm his would-be mugger.
A) It wasn’t always a gun to the head situation. The government dropped T4 in the face of popular opposition. Granted, if you told them head-on that you did not want to fight their stupid war, it would not take long before you were handed a death sentence.
B) That particular robber wasn’t asking for a few reichsmarks, but for your soul, and the lives of your children and brothers. I think it does change the calculus of what amount of courage can be expected of someone.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link