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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
It's possible you may have heard of the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneecap_(band)), most of whose lyrics are rapped in the Irish language. They're best-known in Ireland and the UK, but recently they've begun to establish themselves in the US as well, to the point of performing in Coachella and selling out their US tour dates.
Their lyrics are often political, and they've been unabashed in their support for the Provisional IRA, their opposition to the British monarchy and government, their support for the Palestinian cause, and their concomitant opposition to Zionism. Their political lyrics have landed them in hot water with the British establishment on occasion (as they're from Northern Ireland, they're UK citizens even if they "identify as" Irish), with current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch once denying them an arts grant on their basis that the band "oppose[s] the United Kingdom itself" (a decision they successfully appealed).
Recently, the British government discovered footage of the band performing some time ago, during which the performers could be heard yelling "Up Hamas", "Up Hezbollah" and instructing the audience to assassinate their local MPs (it's unclear to me if all of these statements were made during a single gig, or individually during separate gigs). As a result of this, the band are being investigated by British police, because public expression of support for terrorist organisations is a crime in the UK (insert your own "loicense" jokes here). Their fans and many of their fellow musicians have come rushing to their defense. The band now claim that they have never supported Hamas or Hezbollah (doubt.jpeg) and their message has always been one of "love, inclusion and hope".
First things first: as a freedom-of-speech diehard, the idea of arresting and/or indicting Kneecap for yelling "up Hamas" is unconscionable to me. The fact that this "investigation" is happening at all is yet another canary in the coalmine (along with the numerous people investigated or convicted for gender-critical opinions, or the recent fellow arrested for burning a Quran) that freedom of expression no longer really exists in the UK. Probably no one will benefit from this probe more than Kneecap themselves, who made a name for themselves by cosplaying as radicals and going out of their way to be edgy and controversial. Glorifying a pogrom (albeit under the unpersuasive euphemism of "Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle" while grinning ear-to-ear) is revolting, but shouldn't be a criminal offense.
But, as noted by Brendan O'Neill, the double standard among the woke left is shocking. Because of his anti-Semitism and professed admiration for Hitler, Kanye West is now considered persona non grata among the woke left, or elsewhere. (It need hardly be said that probably the only reason he's expressing admiration for Hitler is because of his unmedicated bipolar disorder - but Mental Illness Doesn't Do That, so never mind.) Meanwhile, Kneecap (individuals, to the best of my knowledge, of sound mind untroubled by psychosis) expressed support for an organisation whose founding charter clearly and unambiguously states that its ultimate goal is the extermination of all Jews from the face of the earth - and the woke left eagerly support Kneecap, attending their gigs, joining in their juvenile football chants ("Ooh! Ah! Hezbollah!"), buying their merch, and rallying to their defense at every opportunity. The rules seem so arbitrary to me: you can't express support for Hitler, but you can express support for an organisation which shares most of Hitler's defining, animating opinions (hatred of Jews and desire to exterminate them, homophobia, misogyny etc.). You can't say that the Holocaust was a good thing - but if you want to cheer on the worst antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, go right ahead. It seems like some sort of perverse Sorites paradox, or Goldilocks effect: saying that the slaughter of 6 million Jews was a good thing will get you cancelled, saying that the slaughter of 1,200 Jews was a good thing won't get you cancelled. "Experts now believe it may be possible to express support for the murder of as many as two million Jews without suffering any reputational damage, but other sources differ."
I don't understand it one iota. I'm increasingly starting to think that the Holocaust has become completely de-Jewified (for want of a better word) and drained of its specificity, understood primarily as a grave crime because it was a mass slaughter, rather than specifically a mass slaughter primarily of Jews. I wonder if the current generation of secondary school teachers will go out of their way to "recontextualise" the Holocaust by listing off all of the more fashionable groups targeted for extermination by the Nazis: gays, disabled people, trans people (a myth; one of several, like "people have been acquitted for murdering trans people by using the 'trans panic' defense", that trans activists essentially dreamed up from whole cloth and which is now widely believed in woke circles), and then mentioning Jews at the end, as an afterthought. I wonder if the next generation, when asked why Hitler was so evil, will say that he was bad because he hated black people, he hated gay people, he started a war in Europe, and he killed lots of people - all true statements, and yet all statements which rather miss the point of why he was so evil. All of this "recontextualisation" of the Holocaust has the unnerving feeling of salami-slicing to me.
Either the etc. is doing some dangerously heavy lifting here, or this is a really rather woke opinion of Adolf Hitler.
His defining, animating opinions other than hatred of jews were...homophobia and misogyny? Really? Nothing about the militarism, the authoritarianism, the totalitarianism, the expansionism, the sheer magnitude of out-of-his-depth the man was as dictator of Germany, the enormity of ego he acquired over the years?
No, no, he didn't like the gays and thought women should be homemakers.
I presumed it went without saying that, as an Islamofascist terrorist organisation, Hamas is just as militaristic, authoritarian, totalitarian and expansionist as Hitler was, and, in its quixotic, decades-long, suicidal battle against an obviously militarily, economically, technologically and numerically superior opponent, just as out of its depth.
Sure, but then focusing on misogyny and homophobia next to jew-hatred as his "defining, animating opinions" still seems non-central. It's not a big deal either way.
That's fair.
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Isn't this stuff just reasonably common with Leftist handling of 'Oppressed groups', in which the oppression is centered and what the group actually believes/practices just doesn't really come up despite the fact they're some combination of borderline theocratic, hardline conservative and run contrary to woke culture. The point is they're the underdogs and therefore you root for them, not that the society where they hypothetically got on top would be significantly more repressive than the status quo.
Ironically both Israel and the Provisional IRA are good examples of this. Both are basically bog-standard 19th century ethnic nationalist movements that spent decades getting glazed by the left wing because they bothered to give the bare minimum of socialist lip-service. The difference is, the Provos never won (not completely anyway), so unlike Israel they never got the chance to reveal that their left wing commitments were a paper thin cover for their real goals. Whereas Israel has the misfortune of being a leftist bette noire due to their socialist apostasy. This apostasy is also why most of the left hates modern Russia so much.
I disagree with you - I think the Provisional IRA and related organisations are far more sincere in their socialism than you give them credit for. Sinn Féin (the political wing of the PIRA) sent a delegation to attend Maduro's inauguration in Venezuela, following an election that pretty much everyone agrees was a sham. There's little doubt in my mind that if they were ever to achieve a majority in the Republic, they'd bring Ireland a lot closer to Cuba or Venezuela than it currently is.
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That actually was the usual didactic approach to the Holocaust in America in the late 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. Portraying it as a more general crime against humanity. The number of deaths was often described as 10-12 million and it included Soviet POWs, homosexuals, religious and political dissidents like Jehovah’s Witnesses, other miscellaneous ethnic groups like the Romani people and Polish Slavs, Rhineland Germans of African ancestry, and the disabled. I don’t know exactly what the politics behind the shift was, but that approach fell out of favor in the last half of the 2010s and it started being described again as mainly a crime against European Jews.
It's my understanding that the figure of "5 million non-Jews" was more or less invented from whole cloth by Simon Wiesenthal, and the real figure was likely as much as an order of magnitude lower. "The Holocaust was mainly a crime against European Jews" is, in my view, the only historically accurate and responsible way to describe it.
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Hitler was a bad man. The Holocaust happened and was a terrible crime. But what makes it a worse crime because it was aimed at Jews? I’ll grant you that I find Jews more sympathetic than gypsies or gays, but I find them less sympathetic than the disabled, or Slavs. The Jew-targeting wasn’t what made the Holocaust evil. The mass murder was.
The argument for the Holocaust being worse than the holodomor is one of either a) Jewish lives are worth more than gentile lives(I reject this premise, and if forced to choose between saving a random kulak or random Jew would probably pick the kulak, although you could easily flip it the other way by specifying that eg the random Jew would be a child. I don’t claim the moral high ground from this; in shitty decisions you just have to make the decision and base prejudices are as good a way as any) or b) intentional mass murder is worse than negligent mass murder and the holodomor was the latter while the Holocaust was the former(to note- I reject both premises. Mass murder as a policy is mass murder as a policy; rulers have an obligation to be competent enough to avoid it and also the holodomor was intentional- getting rid of kulaks was a specific policy goal).
So, I ask- what makes the Holocaust worse than the holodomor to you?
Killing all the members of a group is worse than killing a lot of people.
Genocide, in its literal sense of cide ie completely killing a genos ie an ethnicity or race, is viewed as uniquely bad because of reification of race and ethnicity as concepts. Stalin killed many millions of Slavs, but there was no possibility that he would kill all of them, that left to his own devices there would be no more Slavs remaining. Hitler killed many millions of Jews, and his intention was very much that there would be zero Jews remaining in the areas under his control at the conclusion of his process. Hitler's intention was to exterminate the Jews, Stalin's was never to exterminate the Ukrainians.
So I think the core of privileging killing millions of Jews over killing an equivalent number of Slavs is simply that there are more Slavs, while Jews were reasonably close to being, as it were, an endangered species. The number of Jews has been permanently reduced, the number of Slavs remains large. The rule would be: It's worse to kill all of some group than it is to kill 10% of a 10x larger group.
With regards to animal species, where we can say definitively that two species aren't equivalent and one can't produce the other, I agree with this concept. I'd find it much more abhorrent to kill a California Condor than to kill a Turkey Buzzard, and I'd find it almost infinitely more abhorrent to kill 500 California Condors than to kill 500 or 5,000 or even 50,000 Turkey Buzzards; regardless of the method or motive or degree of cruelty involved. Because the death of a Turkey Buzzard (1/5,600,000 in the USA) is just the death of a bird; the death of a California Condor removes a piece of genetic diversity from the world, some fraction of some utils from everyone.
With regards to humans, I'm a little more skeptical but still see the logic. This attitude reflects a reification of the idea of nationality and race as ideas more important than mere lives. If one recognizes a superhuman value attached to the idea of a nationality as a cultural project, ending that cultural project is much worse than mere murder. If one deeply believes in HBD and one values diversity, either genetic or cultural or whatever, then wiping out a branch of the tree of life is much worse than merely killing a lot of folks.
If one identifies instead by class, than one ends up at Mao's infamous remarks on the subject of nuclear war: Mao expounded at an international conference that China had (at the time) 700 million people, and that even if half of them were wiped out in Nuclear War the remaining 350 million would be able to build world socialism. An Italian communist asked how many Italians would survive. Mao replied "None, but what makes you think Italians are so important to World History?" For a Communist, whose identification is with the international proletariat rather than with race or class, killing every Italian is a small price to pay for permanent liberation from Capital.
Of course this adds obstacles to the cultural diversity arguments. Ok, you still have Ukrainians, but you killed all the Kulaks, so you lost their culture, you lost their unique class of genetics, you might still have Ukrainians but they're not the same Ukrainians. But this lapses quickly into absurdity: any cultural change reduces diversity by killing off what came before, and any lack of cultural change kills off what might have been. Humans are malleable.
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Option B mostly.
I think of evils as having three axes of severity - harm, intent, and depravity. The Holocaust was worse than the Holodomor on all three axes.
The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million. The Holocaust was an extremely deliberate and concerted effort to wipe out a particular type of person using the tools and efficiencies of the industrial revolution and the entire apparatus of the modern state, which killed 6 million
To bring it down to a more individual level, being murdered by a serial killer is worse than being murdered in a store robbery, which is worse than catching a stray bullet in a gang fight, which is worse than being mown down by a negligent driver, which is worse than dying of a preventable disease, which is worse than dying of an incurable disease. I find this pretty intuitive and I think most people would agree.
A quibble: some estimates put the death toll as high as 5 million.
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I'm not saying the Holocaust was a particularly bad crime because it targeted Jews, and I'd be the first to argue that the Holodomor was a comparable atrocity. At the very least, the fact of the Holodomor ought to mean that wearing a hammer and sickle t-shirt on a Western university campus is as unacceptable as wearing a swastika t-shirt is. The fact that everyone in the West has heard of the Holocaust and so few have heard of the Holodomor is appalling, and didn't happen by accident.
My point is that all of this "recontextualisation" of the Holocaust, talking about how the Nazis also targeted homosexuals and Slavs, is diluting one of the most important and essential facts about a crime: who the victim was. I don't believe it is remotely historically controversial to say that the primary victims of the Holocaust were Europeans who had the poor fortune to be born Jewish, and that this was entirely by design. And yet in our modern culture, it's not remotely uncommon for people to expound at length about what a horrific crime the Holocaust was and how it shines a bright light on the depths of evil to which the human heart can sink - without once specifically mentioning the group which represented the overwhelming majority of the Holocaust's victims. I find this distressing and alarming in much the same way that everyone knows the names Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, but few can name even of one of their many victims (myself included, I'm holding my hands up here). Or, to cite an example I encountered recently, in the series The People vs. OJ Simpson there's a heartbreaking moment when Ron Goldman's outraged, teary-eyed father is being interviewed on TV and says something to the effect of "this was supposed to be the trial of 'did OJ murder my son?' and instead it's turned into the trial of 'did Mark Fuhrman say a bad word?'" Think of how suspicious you'd find it if someone did begrudgingly acknowledge that the Transatlantic slave trade happened and it was bad, but seemed to be bending over backwards to avoid mentioning who exactly was enslaved by it.
I think that acknowledging a crime took place but going out of your way to avoid mentioning who the victim of that crime was amounts to a tacit denial of that crime (or at the very least, it's one step removed), and all the more so when the victim's identity characteristics are the entire reason the crime was perpetrated in the first place.
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You seem to be accepting the predominantly American framing of Hitler ("he was bad because he genocided the Jews, and then I guess there was also that whole WWII thing") as default truth, whereas in much of Europe it has been closer to "he was bad because he wanted German supremacy and started WWII, and then I guess there was also the whole Holocaust thing" all along. (The difference makes sense, since Europe bore the brunt of the WWII part of Hitler's record, while the Americans are under the heel of all various kinds of Zionists.) Where does the UK land between those poles?
Being anti-Hitler and pro-Hamas looks a lot more coherent in the latter frame. In fact, I think that, for example, in Germany, an interpretation like "Hitler would be pro-Israel in 2025" would catch on easily were it not for constant effort exerted by Transatlanticists and other establishment types to keep the blood debt alive and salient.
(See also the question whether Ukraine could be run by "Nazis" - reactions ranging from Americans seeing a Jewish-heritage president and concluding obviously no, to Russians seeing swastikas, German steel and people who want to violently move the Western European cultural sphere closer to Russia and concluding obviously yes)
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I think the piece by O'Neill gets close enough, though it reads like he gives too much credit to people that don't deserve it.
If one wants to oppose Israel's latest foray or advocate for the dissolution of the Israeli state they can do so a number of ways. A leftist, secular academic position has built-in sympathies and perceived solidarity with the Arab world. In addition to a finite understanding of a concept called colonialism. One could also don the suit of an Islamist, or a bygone pan-Arab nationalist, or pick up a /pol/ suit and throw stone slurs to bring down the house of Global Judaism. Our reasons don't need to be. Status is enough. Status delende est.
The "middle-class ‘progressives’ who fancy themselves as anti-fascist" worldly champions of the down trodden fill the secular leftist academic's shoes, but only indirectly. The secular, leftist academic made an easy-to-use cookie cutter framework to view the world: oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. If you add a garnish of Global South to the brown, colonialism, and campism derivatives, then you've got a rich, if limited, set of ideas that nearly anyone can pick up. From broader complexified works of the humanities come ideas distilled for Popular Use.
It's a hell of a meme. Simple enough to be understood by people who never have to read a book, but truthy enough to get by as a deepity. Most importantly, the beliefs as an applied moral framework are not universal enough (or are inappropriate often enough) to be controversial. The last bit is important, because one doesn't wield youthful rebellion without spirit. Warriors don't volunteer for boring, centrist peacetime garrison duty. The white man didn't have a burden to stay home and send paper and pencil to civilize the world.
Institutions like the academy have only started to consider their incubation chambers worth a looksie. For the elite institutions, in a meek, delicate way. We are experiencing a hangover from the Cold War, with all the Soviet propaganda, ideology, and theories that came with and preceded it. That's the material we are left to work with.
The march through institutions was not a test. Coordination and intent can be debated, but, frankly, there's plenty enough people happy that the kids are Waking Up. The kids could be waking up to champion some terrible not-yet-known techno-electronica rock'n'roll to achieve peace (I suppose the Nova festival goers were trying this) or they could rebel against HFCS. They land on Palestine, they land on the West Must Be Destroyed, because those are the ideas that were left to them.
The CIA really didn't do a very good job.
I don't think this is true. The Holocaust was hyper-Jewified! One can critique the motivations and actions of the ADL and the Jewish lobby, but "not Jewish enough" or "not heavy handed enough" can't possibly be true. Israel as a controversy does reduce the impact Jewish Genocide messaging though.
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The woke problem with Kanye is that he doesn't want to kill jews right now. Sincerely. He wants to troll the woke.
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Modern leftish associated movements analyze these cases based on who has power. The weaker party is the victim and should be supported.
A moral realist question about "how evil it is to support the murder of jews" isn't going to get a consistent answer because it's not a question the framework really answers. Also the rules are also going to seem arbitrary because you'll be talking to different people within a movement who have different fault lines they care about.
The animating question is which faction has the ability to control the other side. Oppressor/Oppressed dynamics. The history of the conflict matters less than you think.
Kanye/Kneecaps -> rich celeb supporting white supremacy or small artist supporting Brown foreign causes.
Hamas/Israel -> If Israel stopped caring about civilians casualties they could flatten Gaza with little opposition. This makes them the powerful side, and therefore actions should be more scrutinized. The retaliation violence is the voice of the unheard.
See parallels to discussions about police violence vs protesters in 2020. See parallels to USA military operations in Vietnam.
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