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Today I learned there exists a person who likes both Hitler and Netanyahu. He likes Hitler because he helped his nation get devloped and was a great leader. He likes Israel because they are defending against terrorism.
I don't think learning that Nationalism exists warrants any comment, let alone here.
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This isn't particularly weird, there's always been a strand of antisemitic thought that just wants the Jews removed from the speaker's own country and views Israel as an effective containment zone. There are other strands that despise the Jews but view them as the second most important threat next to the Muslims and take "the enemy of your enemy is your friend" seriously.
There's also of course people who just want to be edgy and given explanations are just cover for that. And taking the Hitler is cool stance is edgy. Increasingly taking the Bibi is cool stance is getting edgy. Quite a lot of extremists when you get to know them are really just that, they wanna be edgy extremists first and pick which flavor of extremism after. It's the same thing with a lot of the authoritarians, there's a reason why Trump is so fond of both Putin and Kim Jong Un. He likes people who boldly hold extreme power and people who will flatter him, regardless of idealogy.
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This is a rather low-effort post. Are you referring to someone in particular? Are you subtweeting something? Is this a reference we are supposed to recognize? Or did you just come across a random person who has a random set of beliefs, which we are supposed to find interesting... why?
"Likes both Hitler and Netanyahu" is odd enough to be worth contrasting, I suppose, but not in such a vague way that it just reads like a drunken shitpost.
Is it? Both need Lebensraum, both view their neighbors as potential targets for conquest, both draw their legitimacy from historic grievances, nationalists, conservative, preside over some of the best engineering minds in the world. Both policies could lead to their countries potential downfall. Somewhat cavalier attitude towards the civilian suffering and deaths inflicted on the populations they subjugate.
If you have a general liking to nationalist strongman, they are not that different aside from their answers on the jewish question.
Hitler and Lizzardspawn are both humans. Look at the similarities!
Yes if you take a 1,000 miles high view, the two look similar. But…if you have any sort of refined look the differences emerge pretty quickly.
Hitler was subhuman. He was vegetarian after all.
He sometimes ate sausage or meat dumplings. He wasn't a very devoted vegetarian.
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He liked dogs, which brings him most of the way back. This analysis is, admittedly, incomplete, and has not taken into account every aspect of his character or biography.
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It was a meme posted by an Indian man on Twitter. It shows an image where half of Hitler’s face and half of Netanyahu’s face have been joined together at the center to make one face. They are both images where the men are making an intense Kubrick-style stare at the camera. The Indian Twitter user posted the image because he greatly admired both men and saw similar characteristics of personality in each.
It’s not that weird when you realize it’s an Indian guy from India making an independent assessment of both guys from his own vantage point: Hitler held all the imperialist powers of Europe by the throat for a moment, and did it while draped in a lot of mythical quasi-Hindu symbolism. Netanyahu is a strongman leader who defends his country from the Islamic hordes, much like Narendra Modi. All in all it’s no weirder than a western liberal admiring both Harvey Milk and Che Guevara.
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This is surely an uncommon pairing of leaders for someone to appreciate, but I don't actually see any internal contradiction. Someone could also like Saladin and Pope Urban II even though they weren't exactly working towards the same goals.
If all of someone's favorite historical leaders could sit in the same room together without a fistfight eventually breaking out, I don't want to know them.
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This is an incredibly bad top level post, even for a weekend.
First this seems 'boo outgroup'.
Second, liking Hitler is an extreme fringe position in Germany. Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe. As a rule of thumb, great leaders do not cause their countries to be ruined within a decade and change.
Or do you mean that the person you are talking about is not a German, and Hitler helped develop another nation, indirectly? The US? Israel? This would be much easier if you had bothered to proactively provide evidence, e.g. a link to a tweet or something.
Third, you can't chose what people admire you, and as a dig at Netanyahu it seems incredibly weak. I dislike his policies from the bottom of my heart, but "a fringe German Neonazi agrees with him" does not change at all how I feel about him.
From a German nationalist point of view, East Germany wasn't all that bad compared to the rest of what Stalin did - the annexation of Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland, with the entire German population of those regions expelled. There are plenty of Germans today for whom the land of their ancestors is forever gone.
Sure. I tend to forget about that because the Oder-Neisse line was reality for about four decades when I was born and had even been accepted by both Germanies for more than a decade. Perhaps 1 in 100 Germans today would seriously consider sending tanks to change our border with Poland to acquire lands which have not had a German population in 75 years.
And while driving out the Germans of lands which they had settled long before Hitler would definitely be a war crime by today's standard, the Germans had just done the same to the Polish and Russians (and a lot of other Slavic peoples) before with a much higher death toll. Basically my understanding is that if the Red Army wanted you gone from the lands, you had a decent change to escape with your life. If the Wehrmacht really wanted you gone from the lands, you would likely just end up as a civilian casualty to the siege of Leningrad.
We were actually rather lucky that despite Hitler betting all and losing, we did end up with a lot more than nothing after the war. Germany did not share the fate of the Carthage. We did not even get the Morgenthau plan, West Germany got the Marshall plan instead for geopolitical reasons. If I had to chose between living the life of either the modal 20-yo Sudentendeutscher making it to West Germany with the clothes on his back in 1945, or the life of the modal 20-yo Soviet citizen, then with the benefit of hindsight I would pick the life of the 20yo who starts from zero but gets the Wirtschaftswunder after a few years.
My point was that this adds on to the list of shit Hitler ruined for Germany and Germans.
Yes, I totally agree with you there.
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It was a pretty funny post.
Notably, you made a bad not too level post by comparing Hitler to Trump (ie make Germany great again). Trump isn’t Hitler even if Trump has an authoritarian streak.
I will stand by this, actually, because while it was not a NSDAP slogan (they used "Deutschand Erwache", awaken Germany, I think), I think it is a fair summary of their platform in four words.
Take the endonym of the regime, 'Third Reich'. Its explanation supposes, simply enough, that there were three times in history were Germany was great. The first time was the thousand-year long Holy Roman Empire (ending with Napoleon), the second time was the Prussian German Empire (ending with Germany losing WW1, or in the mind of the Nazis with Germany getting stabbed in the back in the back by traitor Jews and Commies in alliance with evil foreign powers bent on keeping Germany down through the Versailles treaty), and the Nazi project was promised to be even greater than these two glorious periods of German history, lasting another thousand years or so.
I concede that I would have been unlikely to pick exactly that phrasing if Trump had not used it before. I did so intentionally, because I claim that the most basic narrative -- our nation is destined for greatness but traitors and evil foreigners are keeping up from it, but now a strong man will clean up is pretty similar.
I think it is more than just combining a presidential campaign slogan with a bloodthirsty monster of history. If I tried "Lenin promised the masses Change They Can Believe In", I feel like the analogy would fall apart plenty of steps before the MAGA/MGGA one, as Lenin wanted to violently change the system, and Obama advocated working within the system.
I am also not claiming that Trump is Hitler or as bad as Hitler. I am pointing out a curious similarity (not unique to them, plenty of strongmen have campaigned on similar premises), which would be a deadly sin on LW ("how can you poison our minds by bringing politics into this"), but seems pretty standard for the motte.
As you point out, it is very common. It isn’t something that was only found in Nazi German or MAGA thought. Thus pointing out the similarities falls apart as an excuse since it would be similar with other movements.
Instead it looks like an attempt to sneer at your outgroup by Goodwining it.
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I posted it because it was funny not because of any political implications or as a dig at Netanyahu. I suppose that can count as low effort here.
Then it should go in the Friday Fun Thread.
If felt too political for that, since it is Netanyahu. What thread is best for political jokes anyways?
TheMotte is not for all purposes. Political jokes and political satire specifically do not fit here very well.
Go to X or reddit for that
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Makes sense? The polar opposite (hates both) surely is common, as is the person who would be inclined to say that said polar opposite is wrong about approximately everything. Then just take that thought to its logical conclusion.
Also, "strong leader who values everyone outside of their own people at <=0" is an obvious and coherent category.
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Not unheard of for some niche lowbrow online Indian/Hindu nationalist types. In both cases it’s “enemy of my [historic] enemy”.
They dislike Britain because of the British Empire, so they like Nazi Germany, plus they used the Swastika and extended some token sympathies to Indian nationalists contra the British.
And they very much dislike Muslims and the Muslim presence in India, so like Israel because they’re carving out territory in a formerly Muslim land and have good relation with India. And Palestine is the central global Muslim cause more than any other, so it often comes up.
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Why is it so surprising? Yes, Hitler hated Jews, but this isn't the only thing he's infamous for, and it's wrong to reduce the lessons of WWII to "anti-Semitism is bad". If you are able to decouple, you can easily compare Nazi Germany to Israel: a country that punches well above its weight vows to never again be humiliated, puts the well-being of its nation above all others to the point that makes everyone else accuse them of committing atrocities.
Notably, everyone seems to hate "Nazis", but what exactly is the defining characteristics of such seems to vary quite a bit: Putin calls anyone opposed to Russian dominion of Eastern Europe a Nazi (or sometimes anti-communist positions), which I suppose are some of the actions Hitler is famous for. I've occasionally seen other parts of Europe drop the reference to any sort of German leadership of the bloc. Israel-stans point to the Holocaust as the defining action for obvious reasons, which part of America seems to align with, while the rest of America sees "Aryan supremacy" as the most salient. I'm sure there is some mass-transit-stan somewhere who sees the Autobahn and its ilk and the idea of a "People's car" as central.
They are such a widely-defined enemy that it's almost important to clarify why the Nazis were evil in contexts like this because it can explain otherwise-nonsensical positions.
The frustrating thing from my perspective as a history nerd is that, to me there seem to be clear and obvious reasons why the Nazis were evil/went down the path they did but we don't talk about those reasons because there are a lot would-be revolutionary socialists in Academia who would find themselves having to answer some difficult questions if we did.
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