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The Great Replacement theory is good at motivating people. However, as is also the case with Holocaust denial, the kind of people that it attracts are about 5% smart, sometimes even quite smart, but 95% very stupid. The reason in both cases, I think, is that it is hard for anyone who is familiar with history and is capable of even somewhat objectively looking at politics to believe that elites are both aligned enough with one another and competent enough to pull off conspiracies of the scale that faking the Holocaust or globally coordinating to destroy whites would require. As for why these ideas sometimes attract smart people, well, smart people's intelligence is uneven.
This, perhaps, is the far right's fundamental problem. It largely attracts imbeciles and literally mentally ill people. Now, this statement might come off as uncharitable, but I think that it is objectively accurate. Look at 4chan /pol/ for example. It is mostly made up of people who are some combination of 1) so ideologically minded that they interpret all politics through a simplistic theory (which makes them incapable of grasping nuance), 2) too stupid to follow even very simple chains of logical argument, and 3) literally mentally ill.
They do have some political strengths. For one thing, their stupidity and emotional frustration makes them doggedly tenacious. For another, they are willing to say some unpopular and taboo truths. However, despite their tenacity it is hard for me to imagine such people being competent enough to take over any society in which their opinions are not already very widely popular. And although they do speak some taboo truths, they shoot themselves in the foot by also being so ideological that they frequently accompany those truths with utter nonsense.
There are subsets of the left that have a similar problem in that they are largely made up of tenacious idiots. However, they have better branding than the far right does because those leftists' declared goals are basically "peace, love, equality, tolerance, and puppies" and to understand why their politics are a problem you have to be smart and knowledgeable enough to realize what sort of damage those people are doing and are likely to keep doing in their supposed pursuit of peace, love, equality, tolerance, and puppies. To understand how and why the far right might cause problems, on the other hand, you basically just have to have heard of Adolf Hitler.
Now, someone might say "but Stalin and Mao...". Yes, they are popular with tankies but very few wokists go around trying to defend Stalin and Mao. When it comes to the far right and Hitler, on the other hand...
I’m not sure that’s true. Barely anyone even on the far-right defends Hitler.
On the other hand, it’s fairly common to find who excuse, or are apologetics for, the USSR and pre-Deng China — more often for Mao and Lenin, perhaps less often for Stalin, but surely still more than for Hitler!
I don't know about this. I see a lot more rightists defending Hitler than I do leftists defending Stalin and Mao. Certainly here on the Motte, you will find more rightists at least implying that the Nazis had the right idea, whereas I can't recall any leftist defending Mao or the USSR since marxbro got banned way back when. Granted, the Motte is not a representative sample size, but this matches what I see in more normie online places as well (those few in which you can still find far rightists and far leftists coexisting).
That’s fair.
Conversely, my anecdotal experience is that something like a quarter to a third of the actual far-leftists I know will be like “Lenin/Stalin/Mao had the right idea, just went too far/did some things wrong”, “Great Leap Forward is capitalist propaganda”, “Communists would have succeeded and created utopia on Earth if it was not for evil capitalists sabotaging them”, etc. Usually not “everything they did was right”, but absolutely bending over backwards to excuse any “mistake” they made. I’ve heard someone claim that the Great Leap Forward was actually the US’s fault!
I have never seen anyone in real life defend Hitler, like, ever. Not even outside of the West where it’s less of a taboo.
Of course - if you cheer for Hitler you are spitting on everything Western culture sees as sacred, you are the true counterculture and true rebel, and such rebellion has consequences few people are willing to pay.
Waving red flags with hammer and sickle can make you feel like rebel, but everyone knows it is harmless pastime.
Firstly, the claim was this:
Secondly, that doesn’t hold nearly as well when I hear people say that Mao was “misunderstood”, mm? I think that goes beyond “harmless pastime”.
Well, TPTB are not worried of world workers revolution, are not worried at all that people with hammer and sickle in their twitter handle are going to seize the means of production and expropriate the expropriators.
Communism in the West was not always perceived as harmless, but it is now.
I mean, I agree with you in that sense; but I still think that both the absolute and the relative number of people who are legitimately, unironically tankies in the left is still greater than bona fide Hitler-did-nothing-wrong neonazi types in the right. That the establishment doesn’t feel threatened by them doesn’t affect the sincerity of the belief.
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