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[Apologies in advance for bringing up an old story, but I couldn't find any record of discussion of it]
Deep downthread in the election megathread @Folamh3 linked to a wonderful article you might all enjoy, but that's really beside the point. I want to talk about something mentioned within the article, namely a commercial. I'll copy the article's description here:
Here is the commercial in question that seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from Youtube.. This kicked off a series of only vaguely connected thoughts I lack the ability to synthesize, but perhaps you all can put it together more successfully than me.
Burgers?
Of course there's a certain element of "Burgers?" to a commercial about suicide for an upscale department store. But I feel a few other elements of the commercial are curious to me. Take this screenshot from the ad, does this not look like a scene from Midsommar? Why are all the participants women? Why are they all White? This seems to frame the euthanasia as some sort of White feminist religious ritual, possibly connected with nature worship.
Suicide Girls
I'll note that the euthanized woman was described as having Ehlers Danlos. Anyone that has casually explored "SickTok" in the past few years will have surely heard of this condition. While I'm sure it's a real disease in some cases, there is undeniably a trend among young women sharing this concept with each other. I actually first encountered this disease when exploring the twitter of a porn model (so sue me) at least a dozen or more years ago. It struck me at the time as an obviously invented attention-seeking condition that allowed her to post hospital selfies every few weeks and be continually weak and bedridden with no obvious externally visible symptoms.
My second encounter with this disease was my cousin. My cousin is a few years younger than me and fifteen years ago was a sufferer of gluten sensitivity of one form or another (when it was popular for everyone to be suffering from it). About three years ago I heard she was now suffering from Ehlers Danlos.
It strikes me as telling I first encountered this in a porn model as I now consider them to be sort of canaries-in-the-coalmine for female neuroses and social messaging, obviously being more susceptible than most to these things.
Appropriately I just saw this going viral on twitter yesterday with the infamous Taylor Lorenz catastrophizing about her long COVID
Antinatalism, Environmentalism, Suicidality and Leftism
Here I'm just going to wave my hands in the general direction of The Socialist Phenomenon with its lengthy sections relating the running theme of suicide pervading socialist movements (Christian and otherwise) throughout human history. If you ever visit the /r/antinatalism subreddit you'll notice the distinctly leftist and often environmentalist concerns of its posts. In contrast, as pessimistic and addicted-to-doomposting as the far right can be I've never detected a major suicidal or antinatalist current on /pol/ for example. As an aside, see the movie First Reformed, it's horrible.
So what to make of this? I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide. Just wanted to hear whatever thoughts this commercial might spark in you all, as I don't really know how to connect the dots myself in a satisfactory way. Apologies if this is not coherent or focused enough for a top-level post.
The through-line is the conception of guilt and the utility of victimhood.
Only white people are sincerely interested in whether they are or are not 'guilty', whether their actions are 'just' in some universal sense. The Mongols don't torture themselves over Genghis Khan, the Turks take the attitude of 'it never happened and it was good that it did, Armenians are scum' when it comes to their misdeeds. Arabs will complain about the West but happily smash the Kurds. They don't think there was anything wrong with going around raiding and brutally enslaving southern Europeans, they haven't apologized for it. There's a reason Slav and Slave sound so similar - Turkey is sublimely indifferent to their role in the slave trade. Only whites think they have some need to correct for past wrongs they've inflicted on other peoples. So in our culture being wronged can be helpful, victimhood can be a useful status.
By and large, all other populations are immersed in Schmittian friend-enemy logic. It's still pretty hard to coax apologies and guilt out of Japan and they've been heavily immersed in white culture and norms for many years now. And before we messed with Japan, they were totally Schmitt-pilled, they were the archetypal 'white people are terrible oppressors and we're liberators (We shall do worse)' faction.
Environmentalism is another angle of being guilty, this time in crimes against the planet.
Antinatalism is an expression of an overwhelming sense of guilt. 'Being ill' is a way of being a victim and getting sympathy from others.
Feminism requires a sense of guilt and restraint in men to have much relevance. Afghan women might be super-feminist, that doesn't change their conditions. It's a little like anti-colonialism in that it requires the occupying power to feel ashamed and hold back their full power. The British could have (and did) smash colonial uprisings in Malaya and elsewhere - even then they reserved their full energy for killing Germans. If the British decided that they weren't going to give up India or Africa, there's nothing their subjects could've done against the enormous fleets, bomber wings, toxic gas and tanks (foreign intervention complicates this but it would mainly be an expression of broader white opinion)... But instead there were 'winds of change'.
Likewise, if men wanted it, feminism would be gone tomorrow. And so we see feminism has its fullest expression in white countries, followed by countries heavily influenced by whites.
If you have to claim it never happened I think it does demonstrate that on some level you're either aware it's morally indefensible and do feel guilty over it, or you at least know it would look really bad if you tried to defend it as justified. Even if in the next breath you go on to imply the targeted group were scum who would've deserved it anyway, people are quite capable of this sort of doublethink. I definitely think this is what's happening in most cases of people denying atrocities, whether it be the Holocaust, Holodomor, Armenian genocide or Japanese war crimes: they know they can't defend those things so they deny or downplay them instead. Obviously you have some non-white/Western examples there.
So, I don't think it's true that non-white people just don't care about whether they're morally culpable for various atrocities groups they identify with have committed, because if they didn't care they wouldn't feel the need to deny or downplay them. They would either defend them or simply shrug.
Wikipedia:
That's basically 'it never happened and it was good that it did'.
I'm surprised that the Turkish foreign ministry can't string together an English sentence but this does seem like an official website: https://www.mfa.gov.tr/the-armenian-allegation-of-genocide-the-issue-and-the-facts.en.mfa
They're just playing games, if you try hard enough you can produce mountains of proof in favour of the most ridiculous nonsense. As long as big players care about right and wrong, countries will produce all kinds of arguments for why they're in the right. And everyone does this stuff for propaganda reasons anyway.
Furthermore, unlike with the Holocaust, Turkey isn't going to apologize. They won't pay reparations. They won't write it in their textbooks that this was a terrible shame on their civilization - they say that patriotic Turks need to be vigilant against all national security threats. There is no 'never again'. Only whites do this. The substantive differences are more important than the rhetorical differences. Talk is cheap, actions are costly. And it's only white countries that take costly actions to uphold concepts of guilt and moral virtue - consider the British anti-slavery work amongst other things. Nobody else would even consider 'giving back' the Elgin Marbles.
I'm not saying that all genocides and atrocities are committed by non-whites, it's that only whites show any significant guilt or shame.
I wasn't accusing you of saying all atrocities are committed by non-whites. Anyway, fair, there is a distinction in how white/Western countries respond to accusations of having committed atrocities and how non-white/Western countries do, whether that be due to the influence of the Enlightenment or Christianity or post-WWII guilt or whatever it may be, and it does have important implications for culture and politics.
I still think the distinction isn't a result of non-whites not feeling guilty over their actions, though, it's just a different and more covert way of dealing with guilt. Rather than accept the framing of these actions as evil and apologise, sometimes to the point of exaggerating the harm or self-flagellating, non-white countries engage in downplaying and denials, and the fact they do this indicates they do feel their actions are difficult to morally defend. If Japan for example said the Rape of Nanjing did happen and comfort women were coerced and abused, just the way Western or Chinese historians claim, but that it was either good or at least justified in service to the larger national wartime goals, this would indicate a genuine lack of guilt and shame.
When they instead deflect and say Nanjing was exaggerated, or the atrocities weren't authorised, and anyway the other armies were just as bad, and the comfort women were mostly just normal prostitutes, it shows they know they can't convincingly claim those events as described by mainstream historians were morally acceptable, so they have to twist and distort the facts. Unless it were the case that the Japanese accounts were actually more accurate, I suppose.
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