This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think this is broadly true, but I think there’s another serious problem which is that starting with Gen X, there’s been a steady decline in literacy in the sense of having read and absorbed enough written fiction to understand how to use things like symbolism and metaphor and subtext to tell good stories. It’s actually weird, but for artists, they are not subtle at all. One conversation on Reddit sort of crystallizes this. There’s a very famous episode of old series Star Trek in which Kirk lands on a planet full of literal Nazis. As in full on swastika wearing, goose stepping Nazis. Turns out that this Nazi planet was turned Nazi, deliberately by a rogue Starfleet officer. Now, lots of people on Reddit, college educated, supposedly literate had a huge problem with the episode. They could not grasp that you could have the bad guy defend a bad idea unless you secretly hold the views that the villain is espousing. And of course if you can’t imagine other people telling stories without having to explain that X is bad so that you understand that they don’t agree with it, telling a story where you don’t hit people over the head with your own views lest you be accused of heresy becomes impossible. First because you don’t want to be mistaken as a heretic, as you kinda need to be able to work in mainstream media, but second because you have no idea how to use subtext or metaphor or symbolism to get a point across. It’s a skill issue.
I am confused what the complaint about the episode was and what subtext was occurring. It does not seem to me that the episode was any more subtle than that "The Nazis are bad guys, and the bad guys are Nazis".
I imagine it was "the bad guy didn't think he was a bad guy, he introduced the Nazi ideology to help this planet's culture unify and it was then taken over and brought to an extreme by power-grabbing native politicians" so that of course makes it Evil and it should be censored. Because trying to say that anything at all about Nazism was even slightly good (e.g. using what Hitler did to unify post-First World War Germany to try and unify a culture falling apart) means that you are saying "all Nazism is good" and we know that is not true.
I honestly don't know what the hell has been going on with education since I was scratching cuneiform on clay tablets back in my time at school. Just recently I saw someone on Tumblr showing why censorship of old books is wrong by saying she never even knew Long John Silver had a black wife until she grew up and read an old, uncensored version of "Treasure Island" (and even then in the comments people were going on about "but it is Racism to use the term 'negress' so censorship is good!").
More options
Context Copy link
The controversy on Reddit was that the writers on that particular episode must be Nazis because the villian of the story was particularly in Starfleet and had dialogue that suggested he believed that Nazis were on to something. So obviously the only reason that you could possibly make a character say something positive about Nazis is that they were obviously Nazis. Which, to me seems like a bizarre way to approach literature where the artist is incapable of imagining a belief he doesn’t actually hold. It’s like saying imagination doesn’t exist. But given that understanding of literature I can easily see why the message tends to be smack people on the head obvious simply because they cannot be anything else.
Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.
This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:
And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:
Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.
More options
Context Copy link
Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.
I’m not sure and I’m not sure how much of an honest answer to the question simply because no academic is free to say anything nice about the nation and era that’s seen as demonic. It would be like asking a 16th century academic in Catholic ruled parts of Europe to describe John Calvin’s Geneva. Saying anything good about it, no matter how true or even obvious is, is going to get you n so much trouble that no one would dare.
The classic example of people saying nice things about Nazi Germany is the autobahn, right? I think historians still feel free to compliment that.
I suppose I think the consensus around Nazi Germany has moved in the direction that they did make some right calls and pick some low-hanging fruit, but also that a lot of their strengths were either inherited (e.g. the military system) or illusory and exaggerated (e.g. taking credit for the German economic revival). Nazism as a system wasn't uniquely brilliant.
The way TOS frames it is as something like a deal with the devil. You get efficiency, power, a rapid rise to power, social solidarity, etc., and all you have to do is be evil. That's not what was going on with Hitler's Germany.
My understanding is that at least some historians are arguing that the autobahn was started as a project before the Nazi takeover and they just completed an existing good idea.
But really, I think the thing that people secretly feel the Nazis did good with was the drip (as the kids call it), and the aesthetics. Triumph of the Will was one of the most cinematographically influential films ever made. Even when I was in school we watched that film in order to understand how compelling Nazi propaganda was, when I took a class on single-party states.
Star Wars took a lot of influence from Nazi aesthetics when depicting the empire (obviously -- stormtroopers!), and it's a meme in the Star Wars fandom that the empire's aesthetics are way better than the rebellion. I think in a lot of way that's people sublimating the psychological appeal of authoritarian aesthetics into a fictional format, where they can engage in memes that reference the appeal without actually calling for authoritarianism, which was obviously horrific to a great many people.
Communism also has great aesthetics, though limited by... the economic problems of socialism in the USSR. I think that's a feature of authoritarianism; control over cultural output means that culture can be oriented towards state goals, and all the psychological tricks of manipulation, persuasion, and appeal become essential to cement the regime's power. No one will ever create an election billboard more chilling than Mussolini. And look at this mosaic of Kim Il Sung: it shows nice composition, and the color is so cheerful and compelling. And the Great Hall of the People in Beijing just looks cool.
I think that kind of intense symbolism only becomes possible in religion, monarchy, and authoritarianism. Systems of power where the appeal is totalizing.
Just food for thought.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.
It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I used to wonder why books sometimes had a little disclaimer on the copyright page about "the views expressed are not necessarily those of the author" because duh, of course someone can write about a thing without thinking it is a good thing (e.g. crime writers writing about serial killers).
And then this sort of literalism and inability to separate out viewpoints expressed by characters from what the author thinks came along. If it is not 21st century liberal to progressive all the way through, then clearly you are saying bad things, and clearly you only say bad things because you believe bad things, and clearly that means you are a bad person.
Though I can't blame "kids these days" for that, even if it is the most egregious examples; it happened back in the day as well. Arthur Conan Doyle had to make it clear to a review that yes, thank you very much, he was aware that he was working in the same field as Poe and Gaboriau of detective fiction, and that just because in early Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes had a poor opinion of Dupin, it did not mean that Doyle himself had a poor view:
To An Undiscerning Critic by Arthur Conan Doyle, in London Opinion (28 December 1912)
Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.
There's also the opposite situation where the author launders his beliefs through his characters. If the characters never have any flaws in their beliefs shown by the story progress (or if the only flaw is "he's too extreme, but it isn't otherwise a bad idea"), there's a good chance the author does believe them. If the author mentions fine details that would refer to some real life incident that is not actually supposed to be in the story, there's a good chance the author is trying to lecture about the real life incident. If the character makes a 3 hour speech and the story quotes 2 hours of it, the character's probably an author mouthpiece.
Don't overcorrect on this.
But I was assured that "the knife-ears took er jerbs!" scene was not at all meant to be a comment on Trump and immigration! 😁
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I have always enjoyed the critique of Red Dead Redemption 2 along the lines of 'bunch of outlaws and brigands happen to hold perfectly progressive 21st century views on gender, race, consent etcetera'
My favorite was the show Vikings when one of the lead female characters stops a fellow viking raider (and the fact thst there was a woman on the raid already tells you a lot) from raping a woman in the town they're murdering and pillaging in.
IIRC that scene was in the (admittedly heavily embellished)source material- the Vikings(or their Christianized great-grandchildren, whatever) themselves were the ones who lied about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link