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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42495 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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IMO the leftists are correct. I mean, the ones that are serious about leftism. Or maybe I should say - the ones serious about what is supposed to be the most important struggle in the world, the fight against the greatest evil humanity has ever faced. And in that fight, enemy agitator has been killed. At a cost to, what, public decency? Social trust? The commons? Democratic norms of debate? None of those near-empty phrases matter more than what is cheekily undersold as "punching nazis". Has the right, by the way, ever come up with a similar term less cumbersome than "free helicopter rides" or "RAHOWA"? Something that calls for and legitimizes political violence, yet is convenient and palatable enough to employ in everyday speech? But I digress. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk prior to yesterday, me not being American. But in the context of an actual conflict, a struggle for the fate of humanity, in which one side is "the nazis" - the people of ultimate evil - what does it matter that a father, an unarmed man, or a polite debater was killed? A nazi was killed! Didn't you watch Inglorious Basterds, don't you know that this is the one good violence that everyone can agree on is necessary? Doesn't the American people regularly celebrate its historical deadly violence against the Nazis? And had Kirk not been killed, far greater evil would have befallen the American people! More of them might have been converted to naziism! "What's the worst that might happen?", one might ask in the face of a polite man getting up to stage and offering his opinions. Nazi rallies and the rise of the NSDAP, that's what. Who cares that they set out the bait politely if the end goal remains the Fourth Reich, or if not that then some even worse bastardization with American ideals that effectively results in Wolfenstein or The Man In The High Castle or Forever Trump? A world in which blacks are slowly shifted back towards exclusions and slavery, women back into the kitchen and domestic violence, and other minorities eradicated outright, and in which nothing good can be hoped for anymore, social progress is annihilated, and only caricatures of the darkest past are permitted as modes of life.

The older I get, the harder I find it to put myself into the leftist mind-space. I used to be there, but...I'm not the same person anymore. And even when I was there, I wasn't the same as leftists today, and doubly so American leftists. Still, I think it's important to consider the following: Given the values and cultural touchstones those people have been handed from birth, and the conclusions one can very directly draw from those, any elation at the death of Charlie Kirk is simply consistent with what is good and proper.

They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.

Agreed—based on the leftist avowed view they ought to celebrate this murder. Which is why, similar to when Trump was shot, it’s clear that many left leaders don’t truly believe the fascist claims they make. And of course it’s bullshit. Charlie wasn’t a fascist. Trump is at “worst” a very poor man’s Pinochet.

Personally I long for a Salazar (only way to fix our country) but won’t get one.

A world in which blacks are slowly shifted back towards exclusions and slavery, women back into the kitchen and domestic violence, and other minorities eradicated outright, and in which nothing good can be hoped for anymore, social progress is annihilated, and only caricatures of the darkest past are permitted as modes of life.

I don't quite understand why I'm supposed to consider that endgame to be worse than that of said violent leftists though.

Because for the purpose of the exercise, you were meant to imagine yourself a leftist.

They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.

This makes them monsters. At least the extremist subset of them who have drunk the Koolaid enough to literally believe this enough to celebrate violence. A monster does not need to be sadistic and take joy in doing evil, sometimes they are uncaring and hungry: acting on instinct rather than reason. Sometimes they are heroes in their own minds and do monstrous things in their futile quest to enact their utopian vision. There are many different types of monster.

The classical logical chain, Modus Ponens, goes "If A then B. A is true, therefore B." A is "my opponents are Nazis", B is "violence is justified to stop them". You've identified that the leftists are correct about "If A then B" but this is only half of the picture. The leftists are half correct and half wrong, and therefore reach a wrong conclusion and behave monstrously. And it's not some minor detail that they get wrong. "My opponents are Nazis" in the strong sense required to justify violence is a bold claim. It would not be sufficient that they wear swastikas or Heil Hitler: the part of the Nazis that justifies violence against them is the violence and genocide they use. This requires strong evidence. You can't just "be taught" that my opponents are evil and blindly believe it and start attacking them. The only way to look at the world we live in and come to the conclusion that right-wing people are literal Nazis to the level of deserving political violence is to practice sociopathic, monstrous, willful ignorance. To vilify such obvious non-villains is exactly what the Nazis themselves did that enabled them to commit so much evil.

I don't believe that ignorance or stupidity justifies evil behavior. Ignorant and stupid people still have to take responsibility for their own actions. If you lack the levels of intellectual sophistication required to parse the truth in the modern media landscape then it is your duty as a good person to practice some epistemic humility. Someone who says "I think right wingers are bad people because the news told me they hate minorities and that's wrong." Is a good person, even if they're wrong on a factual level. Someone who says "Right wing people should die because the news told me they want to kill minorities" and sincerely believes it rather than merely exaggerating for rhetorical effect, is a monster.

Someone who says "I think right wingers are bad people because the news told me they hate minorities and that's wrong." Is a good person, even if they're wrong on a factual level. Someone who says "Right wing people should die because the news told me they want to kill minorities" and sincerely believes it rather than merely exaggerating for rhetorical effect, is a monster.

This is the banality of Evil. What facilitates it is the socialisation of our youth into believing what they are told by authority figures or elites. This priming is mostly pro-social and allows mass programming so people can function in a society. Unfortunately if they listen to the wrong source they will believe crazy things that don't align with reality.

I wish to emphasise that last point. We have gotten so good at programming people that some do not trust their own eyes and ears. They are able to believe things like that a regular guy debating different ideas from themselves is an actual monster that must be slain.

Here is where I suppose the American public at large has not yet noticed the extent to which things have come full circle.

WW1 (yes) and WW2 propaganda clarified that resistance to and the ultimate defeat of the Nazis was a moral imperative. Post-war Germany adopted this, at the Allies' command, and went full hog - youths were indeed taught that nazism was the ultimate evil, and that even the most minute form of it was a germ from which the Third Reich could rise again. And with no narrative to actually counter this, since any opinions to the contrary were banned either in law or in practice, this view grew ever more extreme over the generations, and ever more wide-spread, and could take uncontested hold of many public institutions. You may have heard of the Frankfurt School and the philosophical underpinnings of modern American leftism coming from Germany. But please understand - the practice of modern leftism, its modes of operation and expression, its lines of thinking and of everyday argumentation, its symbols and axioms, have also been grown here, in our youth clubs and universities and cultural centers. And then, though I know not how exactly, they made their way back across to America. It's no coincidence that you now have "Antifa".

What you have now is a synthesis of all this; American propaganda filtered through generations of German self-hatred and nationally enforced anti-nazism, and all the weight of WW2 and the Holocaust behind it. And the spearpoint of it is this - that it is better to burn down the entire country and everyone in it than to permit even the smallest expression of nazism, than to risk a repeat of the greatest atrocity that ever was.

You don't need any more strong evidence to prove that violence is justified to stop nazis, because there's the 20th century to prove it. Are you ignorant of history to deny it? Do you secretly hate the jews to downplay the unique horror of the holocaust? Are you just unworried because you aren't a minority? Are you uneducated, or unintelligent, not to see what all good people agree is the case? Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now.

Post-war Germany adopted this, at the Allies' command, and went full hog

Yes, but. Initially, the former Nazis were hard suppressed. Then, they were softly and quietly let back into the normal life. Of course, no openly proclaiming their views allowed ever, but you could be, e.g., ex-Nazi - especially if it's low level position - and hold a government job. Even be a lawyer or a judge. I assume most of them are dead by now, but how ironic would it be if an ex-Nazi judge would imprison a Jew under the censorship laws meant to prevent the recurrence of Nazi atrocities?

There was a former Nazi official serving as the Bundeskanzler at one point.

This is true, but it makes no difference. The suppression of their views was thorough enought hat whatever secret views they might have held in the back of their minds could not compete with the decidedly un-suppressed leftist tendencies of German society.

But they don't compete. They blend. Her grandpa hated the Jews and she hates the Jews. His grandpa knew the country can be only saved if certain troublesome groups are eliminated and the political debate is curtailed - and he knows the same. It's not a competition, it's an evolution.

Maybe in some hypothetical world, but not in the real one. The secret true-believing nazi who clandestinely influences procedural outcomes from a position he obtained by hiding his power level might have been an observable phenomenon in the early days of the Federal Republic, but not one that secretly handed on his antisemitism to the current generation of woke anti-zionists. I don't believe that this ideological lineage can actually be traced.

They are not direct ancestors maybe, but close relatives. Cousins or something like that. The totalitarian mindset is the same, the world model is the same - there's a group of people which is the reason of every evil and must be suppressed by all means necessary. It's true that for the modern Left the inclusion of the Jews into this group is consequential to them being so close to foundations of the Western civilization (which is the real target) that it's impossible to not include them, while for Nazis the Jews were pretty much the sole focus. But looking beyond those surface differences, the ideological skeleton behind it is surprisingly similar. And I don't think this is a coincidence.

But please understand - the practice of modern leftism, its modes of operation and expression, its lines of thinking and of everyday argumentation, its symbols and axioms, have also been grown here, in our youth clubs and universities and cultural centers. And then, though I know not how exactly, they made their way back across to America.

Do you have any sources I can read on this boomerang effect of American propaganda? What were the "modes of operation and expression" and whatnot that American propaganda imposed on postwar Germany?

Do you have any sources I can read on this boomerang effect of American propaganda?

Nope. Just half a lifetime of first-hand experience and German general education. Just trust me Bruder.

What were the "modes of operation and expression" and whatnot that American propaganda imposed on postwar Germany?

Here's the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

My grandpa's joke about Denazification was that it was like like potato harvest - pull out the big ones and leave the rest.

But denazification was officially and ostensibly only about punishing and removing from positions of power or influence in post-war Germany the most prominent nazi funcitonaries. Things went further than that. I blame the allies for the original impulse, the leftists of back then for taking it and running with it, and the good people of Germany for taking it all at face value, doing as their told, and making denazification-in-all-things the de-facto civil religion of Germany. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the immediate post-war years, Germans were dazed and confused. Teachers didn't know what they were still allowed to teach. Public officials tried to keep a low profile. The only thing that was clear, and which allied propaganda now becoming official policy codified, was that the nazis had been evil, and that good Germans must wholeheartedly reject nazism. Which they did, and then mostly washed their hands of history, and concentrated on the simple work of rebuilding normal life. The federal republic of Germany was created in 1949, as a state without even an army until 1955. For the Allies, an apolitical Germany with an army was what they needed as a bulwark against the rising threat of communism. And at first young Germans seemed to grow up with no higher ideals at that time other than "reject nazism". But that's a negative without a positive, a void that communist propaganda eagerly filled. And so, while the allies barred the way for any expression of right-wing sentiment or nationalism in Germany and would have left it at that, German youths egged on by leftist agitation had an ideological void to fill and picked up what they could. Which was a proto-globalist worldview that experimented with rejecting national culture and identity in favor of something in between https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkerverst%C3%A4ndigung ("Understanding between peoples". German, sorry) and more general cosmopolitanism.

And so we get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement in 1968. And then we get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Autumn in 1977.

And I'm rambling. To cut to a tl;dr: American propaganda during the wars created a general anti-German sentiment among Europeans Edit: American propaganda was part of the general promotion of anti-German sentiments among Westerners, Allied policy de-politicized German society from the top down AND set anti-nazism as the default position and absolute boundary of all political thought, and Germans growing up in the post-war years adopted the anti-Germanism and the anti-nazism and filled the remaining political void with the then-ascendant communism. Following generations synthesized that into modern German leftism.

Where does anti-Nazism in Russia come from? Is it the same flavor and degree at all?

I wouldn't know. Don't we have any Russians here who might answer?

But I reckon that Russian anti-nazism is different. Firstly because their opposition to Nazism is driven by a more explicit ideological difference, and secondly because they had to fight for their lives in an existential conflict against the Nazis that was even more horrible than the War in the West.

I see, thank you for the detailed summary!

To cut to a tl;dr: American propaganda during the wars created a general anti-German sentiment among Europeans,

I can accept a great deal of your premise, but given how much anti-German propaganda in both wars was used to get the Americans into the conflicts, years after the wars had started and many of the greatest battlefield calamities and sovereignty violations had already occurred (on all sides), I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to say it was the American propaganda specifically that shaped the anti-German sentiment among Europeans. Certainly the French and the Russians needed no American inspiration, and the German violent-left had its own interwar ascendance (that was crushed, but still a rising).

If the propaganda claim aperture were widened to the allies in general, fellow Europeans they might be, I'd have no objection. Or even the British in particular, given their anglosphere influence through the language of the Americans, that might work in a stretch. But American propaganda being the decisive influencer of European views of Germany?

Certainly the French and the Russians needed no American inspiration

You might be surprised. As an Easterner I grew up with a fair bit of "Germany bad" injected right into my veins, but then I met actual Germans and it turned out trotting up historical greviences isn't even that fun with them, bcause they've been self-flaggelating to the point that nothing you throw in their face can faze them. Then started hearing about "controversies" like "people are waving the German flag after winning the world football championship".

These were bizarre and unsettling experiences, even with all my historical biases in place. The French / Russian propaganda was a completely different thing from what was being pumped into Germany.

Then started hearing about "controversies" like "people are waving the German flag after winning the world football championship".

I couldn't believe it when I saw Angela Merkel's attitude to the German flag.

Fair criticism. You're right. American proapganda was not the driver of European anti-German sentiments, I conflated things there.

American propaganda did however drive American Anti-German sentiments (duh), which influenced American policy.

I edited the post above accordingly.

They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.

This sort of thought crosses my mind whenever I see someone call people celebrating Kirk's murder as "mentally unwell" or "insane." Sadly, I think those people are the historical norm, and not because of coincidence, but because of basic human psychology. Society seems to have become better to live in as we built structures and methods to temper this perfectly natural predilection to cheer on the suffering of people we dislike, but the progressive left seems to disagree, and the rest of the left seems too cowed to prevent them from having their way.

It's been fascinating to see this happening in and due to academia, which was ostensibly meant to generate truth in part by enabling and encouraging the sharing of different ideas and perspectives. Even in the mid-2000s when I was attending an ultra progressive liberal arts college, I would have bet that a sizable majority of students - and a higher proportion of leftist students - would support literal swastika-wearing Nazis giving a talk on campus, with counterprotesters being respectful enough to allow the audience to actually listen to the talk they came to hear. This sort of commitment to enlightenment values and open exchange of ideas was one of the ways we smugly considered ourselves superior to the uneducated masses, in fact.

That academia not only became a breeding ground, but a source, for such a blatantly anti-intellectual ideology has made me think that, perhaps groupthink, status seeking, and social shaming are the most powerful forces known to man. Certainly more powerful than truth seeking.

Society seems to have become better to live in as we built structures and methods to temper this perfectly natural predilection to cheer on the suffering of people we dislike, but the progressive left seems to disagree, and the rest of the left seems too cowed to prevent them from having their way.

I disagree on that specific point. The left does not promote cheering on the suffering of disliked people. The left promotes cheering on the suffering of evil monsters that all actual people agree must be destroyed. Please keep in mind that they're nazis! They've been dehumanized since the 1930s (actually since the 1910s if you ask me, but that'll take more explaining), and everyone agrees that this is a good thing! American institutions public and private, governments of no matter which party, all American cultural goods, all media, agree and generations of Americans of all stripes have been born, have lived and have died knowing that the nazi is no longer human and killing him is a service to mankind!

That the modern left somewhat further weaponized this license to kill by expanding the category of nazi to include right-wingers that are at most directionally nazis is a shift so subtle that it barely even classifies as sleigh of hand. "Wahret den Anfängen", we Germans were told. "Prevent the beginnings", or "Nip it in the bud". This goes hand-in-hand with "Never Again". Identifying that those beginnings, this budding of fascism, starts not with the literal reincarnation of Adolf Hitler himself but with the promotion of directionally fascist views is, IMO, perfectly legitimate. And with that step taken, you rapidly go through all the others until it's not just OK but actually morally required to kill people like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump. If anything, it's somewhat embarassing that you have to play dumb with expressions like "punching nazis". Obviously the correct thing to do is to kill them. It's what good Americans have always done.

And nazis aren't people. They're not even human. A century of propaganda to that purpose should have made it evidently obvious. Nazis occupy the moral compass' pole of ultimate and unmitigated evil. They cannot be tolerated, cannot be humanized, and cannot be permitted to exist, lest real people actually suffer.

I disagree on that specific point. The left does not promote cheering on the suffering of disliked people. The left promotes cheering on the suffering of evil monsters that all actual people agree must be destroyed.

Not that this is an important point, but I would contend that "genuinely, in good faith, believing that people they dislike are evil monsters that all actual people agree must be destroyed, and propagating that honest belief" is merely describing how they promote the cheering of suffering of people they dislike. People generally don't like to think of themselves as vindictively cruel like that. And yet being vindictively cruel feels really good, and our biology is naturally pushing us towards it. Our brains are too clever for that, though, so we're very good at convincing ourselves that external factors are such that we are being helplessly forced to do what would've made us feel guilty if we consciously voluntarily chose to do them.

In this instance, it seems pretty trivial to convince oneself that anyone one dislikes in a certain way is actually belonging to some sort of subhuman. We've seen this happen pretty commonly throughout history, I think. To the extent that it may very well be non-trivial not to unintentionally, in good faith, repeat that pattern.

And yet being vindictively cruel feels really good, and our biology is naturally pushing us towards it.

Are you aware of any evopsych theories on why this is? It feels true, but why on earth would sadism be an adaptive trait?

Tribal warfare, or even hunting other animals.

FWIW, I agree. I just want to highlight the degree to which the prerequisite dehumanization has already happened, and has happened over a long time, and happened very thoroughly, and is supported by media and public institutions and prevailing narratives that are shared and promoted even by non-leftists.

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