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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Genghis Khan is some 800 years ago, the Nazis are 80 years ago. Perhaps in a few hundred years, there will be Nazi-themed restaurant chains called "Adolf Hitler Wirtshaus" which will serve vaguely German dishes which will be invented near the end of this century.

This matches somewhat with the outgroup/fargroup distinction. Genghis Khan is very much in the fargroup outside Asia. You can safely dress up as him for Halloween and nobody will bat an eye, he is playing in the same league as Darth Vader or Sauron.

I think that a lot of factors play a role in determining when a tragedy or atrocity loses its gravity. Raw numbers are one thing -- a single death is more easily shrugged off than a million (but I would argue that this scales only logarithmically, because humans are scope insensitive. Accidents are forgotten quicker than atrocities.

Sometimes, a traumatic event becomes almost permanently imprinted in a culture. As far as Roman occupiers go, Pontius Pilate is hardly one of the worst. Using the death penalty against some guy who has offended local religious sentiments as a favor to the local elites is just how the sausage gets made, hardly a reign of terror. But because the killing of that guy spawned one of the most successful memes of all times, dressing as him for Halloween is probably a bad idea.

For the Federal Republic of Germany, Nazism plays a central role in the founding mythology. Where before Germany had been a Great Power run on Prussian militarism and patriotic fervor, with a tenuous relationship to democracy, it basically reinvented itself after WW2, rejecting its ambitions to rule the world and fully embraced democracy. (While keeping all the Nazis around, but that problem solved itself through time.)

Of course, there is another state in whose founding Hitler inadvertently played a major role, which is modern Israel. As long as these two states are around, they will remember the Nazis as the Big Bad.