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Ye, better known as Kanye West has released a song titled "Heil Hitler"
I have to admit, it's quite catchy, especially the unlikely refrain "nigger, Heil Hitler", which definitely has an intriguing ring to it. Whether Kanye is a truly great artist or not, he's nothing if not a skilled craftsman.
I've long since lost the ability to treat anything on the internet seriously and my reaction was limited to squeezing my eyes shut and suppressing a chuckle, but I suspect that the wider audience is also outraged only in a performative, inertial way. I doubt it will end up making any real impact on anything and waves in the social media will likely fizzle out in no more than a few weeks.
I wonder if we're seeing the first signs of postmodern corrosion eating away at the last grand unifying narrative of our age: WW2 mythos, with Adolf Hitler at its center not as mere historical figure, but as the archetypal villain and the secular devil. In many countries the taboo is backed by legal force, but legislation doesn't truly govern things of this nature. The law may end up hollowed out and irrelevant long before someone cares to remove it from the books
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
Should this really happen, good riddance. Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization
He is nothing if not this. Its the one thing you can't take away from him. If he's is great NOW is a debate but overall I can't see how you would argue to the contrary.
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Kanye West is like a Holocaust-denying parrot. Imagine it, a parrot squawking "six million didn't die, the Holocaust is a lie!" Funny for a few days, but then you're left with a Holocaust-denying parrot squawking and crapping all over its cage. The parrot can't vote. It can’t work for DOGE. It can’t argue cases before a judge. I get it, it's funny, I'm a 4chan troll too. But I'm also interested in actually exercising power. Fuentes, who I'm not sure if he was behind Ye's ideological evolution or was just there to cheer it on, seems to be recognizing the Right's strategy of relentlessly and exclusively appealing to low human capital is not gonna go anywhere good:
https://x.com/FuentesUpdates/status/1908187813117411525
One figure replacing him as the secular devil is Jeffery Epstein.
Special Agent Fuentes was more than happy to pal around with Kanye when his ridiculous cringe mental illness antics were making the far right look like a bunch of unserious clowns. Now when Kanye knuckles down and independently puts out an actually effective piece of viral far right propaganda, Nick is suddenly hammering the “uhhh actually guys we have to distance ourselves from this, it’s making us look low status”. Even though Nick’s own low human capital has been making the far-right look low status for over half a decade.
This is quite the claim buried in there. Is I t?
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The value of calling Ye a parrot rests exclusively in the idea he is mindlessly repeating phrases, and while I think that is an odd accusation to level at a guy who just released a rap song literally nobody ever even imagined making before, it maybe fits if you uh, don't count stuff like that. What really frustrates me though is that you extended the analogy so far as to throw parrots under the bus - funny for a few days? Like they're a Yak Bak from the nineties you play with for a bit and throw in the closet? Have you never had a pet bird before?
A parrot is not just for Christmas Alex. They can be for a birthday too. In fact you can eat them all year round.
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Wait, why can't he vote?
Yeah, if West, an otherwise free man, had his franchise taken away from him, that would seem like news worth bringing up.
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The actual lyrics of the song are 'I still can't see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don't see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I'm the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don't understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler nigger heil Hitler they don't understand the things I say on twitter all my niggers nazis nigger heil Hitler'. This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.
I agree that the WWII taboo is fading. I don't think a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in an act of rebellion is the sign thereof.
I’m sitting in my office at Pierce & Pierce, the glass walls reflecting the sterile glow of Manhattan’s skyline, and I can’t help but think about Kanye West’s latest track, “Heil Hitler (Hooligan Version).” The lyrics are raw, unpolished, almost juvenile in their repetition—“I still can’t see my children, niggers see my twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling, so I became a nazi yay bitch I’m the villain, nigger heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on twitter nigger heil Hitler…” It’s crude, yes, but there’s something… deliberate about it. I adjust my Hermès tie—red, with subtle navy accents, a perfect complement to my charcoal Armani suit—and I consider the narrative being spun here. Some might call this a tantrum, a mentally ill black man identifying with Hitler in some rebellious fever dream, but that’s too simplistic. No, this is political. This is Kanye leaning into the role of the Nazi villain, a role the left, the globalists, the rootless cosmopolitans, and the neoconservatives have already cast him in, whether he likes it or not. Let’s break this down. I sip my San Pellegrino, the bubbles sharp against my tongue, and I think about Kanye’s trajectory. He’s been a lightning rod for years—his 2022 X post, where he declared he “loves Hitler” and identified as a Nazi, wasn’t a one-off. It was a gauntlet thrown down. The man’s been frozen out, his assets seized, his partnerships with Adidas and others severed like a bad merger. The American Jewish Committee’s Ted Deutch called it “blatant antisemitism,” and The Spectator’s Johnathan Sacerdoti dismissed the lyrics as a “crude litany” of Nazi slogans. But what do they expect? Kanye’s not playing their game. He’s not apologizing, not backtracking, not begging for forgiveness at some gala at the Waldorf Astoria, wearing a borrowed Brioni tuxedo while sipping Veuve Clicquot. No, he’s doubling down. And why shouldn’t he? The left, with their sanctimonious word-policing, the globalists with their borderless, homogenized agendas, the neocons with their endless wars—they’ve already labeled him a Nazi. They did it the moment he stepped out of line, the moment he supported Trump in 2020, the moment he started talking about “Zionist schools” and “financial engineering” on Tucker Carlson’s show. They don’t care about nuance. They don’t care about his custody battles or his bipolar disorder, which he’s admitted to, by the way—31 million followers on social media, and they still reduce him to a caricature. So what does he do? He gives them what they want. He becomes the villain they’ve scripted for him. “So I became a nazi yay bitch I’m the villain.” It’s almost… poetic. I flip through my Rolodex, looking for my tailor’s number—I need to schedule a fitting for a new Zegna overcoat—and I consider the political angle here. This isn’t just lashing out, some primal scream into the void. Kanye’s smarter than that. He’s always been a provocateur, a performance artist masquerading as a rapper. Look at the album this track is tied to—“Cuck,” with its Ku Klux Klan-inspired art, tracks like “Gas Chambers” and “Hitler Ye and Jesus.” He’s not shying away from the imagery, the symbolism, the history. He’s weaponizing it. The left and their allies have created a world where dissent is met with excommunication, where any deviation from the script gets you branded with the scarlet letter of “Nazi.” Kanye knows this. He’s seen the neo-Nazi Goyim Defense League banners in Los Angeles, proclaiming “Kanye is right about the Jews” over highways, giving Nazi salutes while the Anti-Defamation League scrambles to condemn them. He’s seen the protests, the outrage, the think pieces. So he leans in. “Nigger heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on twitter, all my niggas nazis.” He’s not framing the Nazis as villains here—not really. He’s framing himself as the villain, yes, but it’s a middle finger to the system that’s already judged him. If they’re going to call him a Nazi no matter what he says, he might as well own it, amplify it, make it so loud they can’t ignore it. It’s a power move, a reclamation of the narrative, even if it’s drenched in swastika-like doodles and militaristic visuals of men in animal skins, as the music video reportedly shows. I glance at my Patek Philippe watch—1:47 PM, I have a lunch reservation at Le Bernardin in 13 minutes—and I think about the broader context. The WWII taboo is fading, sure, but this isn’t about that. This isn’t some cultural shift where we’re all suddenly okay with Nazi iconography because the history feels distant. No, this is Kanye recognizing the hypocrisy of his critics. The left, the globalists, the neocons—they thrive on control, on dictating the terms of discourse. They’ve built a machine that crushes dissent, that paints anyone who questions their dogma as a monster. Kanye’s not identifying with Hitler because he’s mentally ill or because he’s rebelling against some abstract taboo. He’s doing it because he’s been backed into a corner. They’ve called him a Nazi for years—since his “Jewish bitch” lyrics, since his Burzum-inspired album art, since his rants about Zionist schools. So he’s saying, fine. You want a Nazi? I’ll give you a Nazi. “Nigger heil Hitler.” It’s a mirror held up to his detractors, a grotesque reflection of their own tactics. He’s not the villain because he wants to be. He’s the villain because they’ve made him one. And in that sense, this track, this video, this entire album—it’s political. It’s a statement. It’s Kanye West taking the label they’ve forced on him and turning it into a weapon. I grab my coat—cashmere, Tom Ford, impeccable—and head for the elevator. I can’t be late for lunch. Eric Ripert’s sea urchin dish is a revelation, and I need to be seated before the Wall Street crowd floods the place. But as I step into the lobby, I can’t shake the thought: Kanye’s not wrong to play their game. He’s just better at it than they are.
This is I think what we used to call "Posting"
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There is an idea of an @AvacadoPanic, something illusory. But there is no real him.
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Is this meant to be read in Patrick Bateman's voice?
edit: shows my shallow media literacy that I didn't recognize a direct reference as soon as "Pierce & Pierce"
Ideally.
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A fair take, and entirely plausible given that it’s Kanye we’re talking about.
But, I think there is an alternative possible interpretation. Identifying with the villain doesn’t necessarily, in our modern age, indicate that the speaker thinks they are wrong or even the evil guy. It is entirely possible that Kanye both understands Hitler as the pre-assigned villain of the modern religion, and not only identifies with him but in some fashion views him as having done good things, or been on the right path, or something like that.
It’s sort of like how Joshua is viewed as a Biblical hero by Christians and Jews, but did quite a lot of total genocide in Canaan, of the sort that makes him very much a proto-Hitler if assessed by the dominant morality of our age. Villain to some, but an indicator to others that the dominant morality is actually wrong about quite a lot of things.
Kanye could be viewing Hitler in something like the same sort of framing.
Edit: I just realized Taylor released a song a while back about being the villain. I think there is an incipient cultural trend of “Maybe I’m the bad guy, but I’m right and I’m going to embrace it” occurring. Which is the first step on the road to the villain eventually being reinterpreted as the hero.
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WWII's monolithic cultural universality is definitely waning as we approach its centennial anniversary, but i don't think kanye's tweets are some sort of canary for us to look to for signs of danger.
The guy, and i kinda feel bad for him even though he only has a few songs i really liked, seems to have actually lost his damn mind. People speculate as to the cause of this, was it pete davidsons giant schlong, was it his mom's death, was it his divorce that broke his tenuous grasp on reality? Nah. the guy has been doing rich people levels of the wrong drugs, hes been talking a lot about inhaling nitrous. Bro has prettymuch all the symptoms of inhalant induced brain damage and his cultural relevance will quickly fade for the normies as he transforms in real time from an avant garde rapper to a terry davis-esque lolcow insane guy yelling schizo word salad about nazi's and jesus and sucking dicks.
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“This Post from @kanyewest has been withheld in Germany, France, Poland based on local law(s). Learn more”
Speaking of the legal force. Maybe you will have better luck on YouTube, or failing that just use VPN.
It's banned on YouTube and every single streaming or music hosting service (Spotify etc.). X is the only place that allows hosting it.
It cannot be denied that it's a truly transgressive song, and a genuine act of rebellion, given it warrants this response. Can anyone else think of a single song that has received this treatment despite the ubiquitousness of explicit material in that genre?
Some actual literal nazis in the vein of 'gas the Jews like we actually literally mean that' have had their pro-holocaust songs banned everywhere, I think. I can't remember a case of an American being banned from literally everything though, so that might have only been after a German court order or something.
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Will it be “post-modern corrosion” or will it be time? Genghis Khan Is believed to (1) have caused the deaths of enough people to slightly alter climate, and (2) have been the most-prolific rapist of which we are aware. And, currently, there are a couple of restaurant chains named after him here in America.
I once saw an inflatable, bounce-house type slide made to look like the Titanic. Kids would slide down the tilted deck, onto a landing area made to look like the sea. Fifteen hundred people died in the actual tragedy.
There is typically a loosening of taboo once knowledge of horrible events passes out of living memory. Are those around WW2 going to be different?
(West is certainly, dementedly ahead of the curve, here.)
The youngest people to claim they have experienced anything from WWII are 91-2 . Doesn't help that the biggest victims are universally hated. Also doesn't help that nazism struggle was intrawhite thing, and white people are at record low share of global population.
I wouldn't call antisemitism universal, although it's certainly more common than most forms of ethnic prejudice.
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For what it's worth, there's restaurants (and people even!) in Asia and Africa named after Adolf Hitler on the same "here's a Great Man of History with an iconic aesthetic" logic.
hugo boss really gave his best.
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I am not aware of any of these three things being true.
Also Japan has ジンギスカン料理 (Gengis Khan food) which is basically various forms of grilled lamb.
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The restaurant thing is.
https://genghisgrill.com/
https://www.gengiskhanbbq.com/
As far as I know if you want Hitler restaurants you have to go to Asia. Evidently a Stalin-themed Middle Eastern cafe didn't go over too well in Moscow, so this is one situation where the Reds don't have a great advantage over the Heilers.
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Is one example enough
https://gkmgrill.com/
Or would you like more?
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I personally fear this process but for a very different reason: I think the peacekeeping effect attributed to MAD was actually mostly on the WW2 mythos. The real reason we haven't had such a terrible war since WW2 is that we have WW2 in living cultural memory, and now it's exiting living cultural memory.
I suppose that makes sense, given how costly WWII was, though I also thought that MAD worked because everyone understood that warfare in the atomic age would not resemble WWII.
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This shortly after he essentially came out (whispers of various gay relationships have been gossip fodder for years, the most widespread rumor involving the late Virgil Abloh, the fashion designer). I do feel bad for him, I don’t think going through this kind of thing in public is dignified.
Will it change the narrative? I think the narrative has already been changing for at least ten years. Given AI / AGI / ASI, and its effect on the economy, culture and politics, I think it’s impossible to say what will happen even ten years from now.
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