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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37560 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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This is not political commentary it's lashing out. He's still framing the nazis as villains.

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.

Given his difficult relationship with Ms. Swift I suspect that might be intentional.

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