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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15774 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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they did what they did in ages very different from our own

There are people alive today who met veterans of the Slavers' Revolt.

There are over two hundred thousand people alive today who lived through the Holocaust.

A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.

The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.

The past is never dead. It is not even past. --William Faulkner

The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.

What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors? Do you believe how we currently teach these events inoculates students against these attitudes?

I think those two questions are what make the historiography of human cruelty controversial. Different people can look at the same event, and have completely different opinions on it.

An example of this would be the Holocaust. Just looking at Jews in particular, here were/are four responses/interpretations to it:

  1. This was a failure of insufficient small L liberalism. We must promote liberalism globally to avoid tragedies like this in the future.
  2. Capitalism and imperialism naturally leads to war and genocide. We need global Marxist revolution to prevent this.
  3. Jews need to be armed and have a state of their own, so they are too tough to victimize ever again.
  4. Hitler is a new Nebuchadnezzar, sent by God to punish us for our apostasy.

There are more interpretations, especially once you get interpretations beyond just Jews. If you teach a particular interpretation, it’s quite possible that instead of reducing the chance of a new atrocity, you either do nothing or maybe even increase the chance.

I mean gun to head I’d point to several things:

  1. Scientific hubris abroad in much of Western Europe at the time which assumed that humans in their infinite wisdom had the ability and thus the duty to reshape humanity and human genetics to create better humans.

  2. Nationalistic fervor that resulted from the loss in WWI and the desire to reassert Germany as a major power in Europe.

  3. Reparations demanded added to the global economic crisis of the Great Depression meant that the median population was experiencing hyperinflation and unemployment and so on. This lead to people being willing to look for anything and anyone who had some sort of plan to make things better before bread cost 2 wheelbarrows of marks instead of one.

  4. Jews were pretty easy pickings at the time. Many were immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe during the Russian revolution, they were isolated, they did weird things in their religion. They were already seen as enemies because of blood libels based on Christian beliefs from earlier centuries. They didn’t have a lot of political power. They were “those weirdos over there who dress funny and nod while they pray.” Getting people to not like them isn’t hard.

  5. Moral relativism that meant that people were no longer beholden to ideas of Good and Evil.

Jews were pretty easy pickings at the time

As opposed to at some other point in the previous thousand years?

What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors?

The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.

The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)

The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.

The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.

I agree that putting the Volk as the only thing worthy of moral consideration, with all other rights subordinate to it, is a core ideological feature that made Nazism, and fascism in general, so harmful.

At the same time, I think the issue is when you decide a group, or concept, is the only thing that matters morally and no other rights are important rather than whatever group or concept in particular you elevate. The communists killed millions for the revolution and utopia. In pre-modern eras, millions were butchered for king and/or faith. The crime is in discarding individual rights, not in the object you decide is the only important thing in the world.

The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)

Is there a limit to this principle? Can families morally have ingroup preference? What about a community the size of dunbar’s number? Is the limit more about how much preference you can give someone vs the reason for the preference?

While equality of people is a good, it is a good that has to be balanced against the fact that any individual human has people they care about and people they don’t and our social lives, and really civilization as a whole, are built on this distinction.

The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.

I think this is more the crime of the Confederates and isn’t really the core objection to Nazi Germany. I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights. All societies have had both positive and negative rights, and you can’t clearly separate the two in practice. Which rights different people have is a constant negotiation. While I think slavery is a clear violation of equality under the law, and the civil war is an example of the problems it caused, I don’t think you can just from the specific case of slavery to a modern rich vs poor issue.

I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights.

"the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.

Wasn't that a handful of cases of basically benefits fraud? Say someone is born in 1845, they marry at age 90 to a woman age 15 (born in 1920) and then she lives to around 100.

Turns out there's a Wikipedia page for these cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century

Another way to view this is that we are seven or eight generations removed from the Civil War - that's a lot of time for values to change, especially in an era of extreme technological progress.

All true, and still I see utilizations of overused names like Frank, Hitler and Lee for moral lessons as nothing but tired, tasteless propaganda.

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