As a Christian and a father I not infrequently find myself faced with a certain moral dilemma. Specifically, my income is pretty good and I’m in the position of deciding what to do with it.
Of course, there is no end of uses for money. Our family is growing and we need a bigger, better home. The sort we want in our area will run us about $6k/month in rent, or $1.2m to buy. The public education system is less ‘broken’ than it is actively ruinous (but both), so private schooling and tutoring considerations apply. There’s retirement planning in the face of an increasingly cartoon economy.
My parish, naturally, wants tithes. They want a whole ten percent! Off the top! And in fairness, if my dollar was the one to determine whether it thrived or failed, that would be the best investment I could make. Our community is amazing and the only place I’d want to raise my children. We run a thrift store (like Goodwill) that is an absolute lifesaver for many of the area’s poor. Also, we practice almsgiving, which is acts of charity above and beyond tithing, if not always monetary.
But many other mouths cry out to be fed as well, from crook-smiled politicians who nonetheless are important to support over the other guy to NGOs trying to staunch an arterial rupture of human tragedy with the equivalent of band-aids for want of bigger budgets.
And life’s finer things are to be considered as well. I like good art, soundly-crafted furniture, stylish clothing (important for my job too), high-quality ingredients for cooking, and the occasional getaway to see family, friends, or just interesting places. The kids want enrichment also, and while I’m not going to call this demand a pit, it certainly is bottomless. Too, there is the notion of self-care; that it’s important to expend enough resources on my own well-being that I continue to be able to generate the income.
Only, as all of these are valued in dollars, they directly trade off against each other. And in the way of autists, I can’t help but grope my way down the thing toward the root of the problem. It has taken me to some pretty intense places.
~All human societies hold in common an understanding that it is a father’s duty to protect and provide for his children. This is enshrined in law, culture, and everywhere else. Of course a father would do anything to save his child — rob, murder, cheat, lie, or give up his own life without hesitation. To do otherwise would be reprehensible.
This principle is not without its exceptions. Men in office, for example, are expected to set aside their familial obligations when acting in their official capacity (And, actually, one could find far worse yardsticks of a people’s worth than their ability to hold to this standard consistently). If a soldier on the front lines receives word of a family emergency, efforts are often made to excuse him to attend to it, but where this conflicts with operational considerations he is expected to stay put, and failure to do so is generally agreed to be worthy of capital enforcement, even if our hearts are understandably with him.
I have heard a saying along the following lines attributed to the Bedouin of the deep desert:
Me and my tribe against the world
Me and my clan against the tribe
Me and my cousins against the clan
Me and my brother against our cousins
Me against my brother
If my daughter and the neighbor-kid are both starving I am expected to feed my own and let the other die. So with my nieces and nephews over my second-cousins’ kids, all the way up the enumerated hierarchy. This is understood. This is a human universal. Most, I expect, would agree that this is the very foundation of morality, though as we will see I am not so sure.
Where exceptions come in it is because a man has taken upon himself the role of father to a greater family than that of his immediate. We honor enormously the Patriarch who puts the good of the clan above his own children. We remember with fierce admiration the Emperor who adopts a competent successor as his son while consigning his own degenerate offspring to some idle pleasure dome in the countryside. We exalt the young man who gives his own life in the trenches while his pregnant wife waits for him anxiously back home. We depend upon such men. We call them heroes. This, too, is moral. It is perhaps even a higher sort of morality.
A messiah is one who brings such benefit to his People at the grandest scales. A typical Christian narrative on the subject goes something like: The Jews were conquered by one hostile nation and then another, denied their own homeland, constantly at risk of enslavement and extermination, and were able to survive all of this by virtue of their hope in a coming promised messiah. They had many specific expectations of what he would be like, too. He would bloodily uproot the foreigners, bring the earth under his dominion, and elevate his own race to lordship, never to be so threatened again. When Jesus came to Jerusalem the people laid down palm fronds that he (or his mount(s)) might tread upon these instead of the dirt. They were elated. They knew exactly what was coming, and they were ready as only centuries of bitter anticipation can make a people. And then the State executed him in their ugliest fashion and he didn’t even attempt to resist. Even the disciples, whom Christ had tried to prepare for this over and over again, understood that all was lost and that Jesus was not the messiah. Messiahs do not lose. They conquer.
Let me shift gears now and talk about Hitler. There is no figure more reviled in our culture. He serves as our icon of utmost evil; of the worst aspects of human nature. To publicly question this in the slightest is to run a very real risk of losing everything and, in many Western countries, even runs up against laws that will land one in a jail cell.
Why?
Yes, I realize that I’m committing an unspeakable breach of social etiquette by asking. Yes, I know that many of us, even here, have an uncontrollable disgust reflex on the topic. Even those who are more or less comfortable with discussing differences in average racial IQs or impulse control, or personality trait variances between men and women.
Why?
The usual answer for someone in such circles is, “Because such discourse is controlled by the Jews, etc., yada yada yada” and while there is certainly something to this it is, at least at this resolution, entirely beside the point I’m trying to make. So please bear with me — that is not where I’m taking you.
One day a few months ago I, in the way of autists, asked myself what exactly was so unusual about Hitler that he should occupy the mythological position that he does. One can of course enumerate a long list of terrible atrocities for which he was responsible. Only, as I went through them, I couldn’t help but notice that not only were they all basically par for the course for the Father, the would-be messiah of a people, but that worse examples of each can be found (both quantitatively and almost always qualitatively) in the biographies of other leaders — including, not to put too fine a point on this, those seen often enough on t-shirts in public without ruffling anyone’s feathers particularly.
So, finding myself at a loss, I escalated the question to some trusted friends, and discovered that while it was extremely upsetting to most of them, none even attempted to answer, but rather clucked at me while shaking their heads in horrified exasperation. These are people, you understand, whose capacity for decoupled analysis I generally respect very greatly. Disconcerting, to say the least. Can’t you pick as a mascot, one said, someone other than the craziest and most evil man in history?
Only, I cannot fathom how anyone sees this when they look at Hitler. Here was a man who sincerely held the best interests of his People in his heart. He came of age in a time when his nation was — historical aggression notwithstanding — brutally, horrifically, oppressed. Countless of his countrymen, women and children, starved to death needlessly under spiteful, vindictive post-war Allied blockades. The economy was so saddled with reparation debt that rebuilding would take generations if it were ever possible at all. The people had no hope. Men and women who wanted families faced down a seemingly-insurmountable challenge in doing so. The risk of watching their babies die of starvation was all too real. And what chance had those children of decent lives even if they did survive to adulthood? They would end up de facto slaves, servants to the sneering foreigners who now controlled everything.
Germany’s culture — within living memory arguably the pinnacle of human achievement — was brought low, rapidly to be replaced with this new post-war thrust which we can now recognize as the antecedent to the sort of moral and cultural disintegration with which we are today so familiar.
And this man! This man was nobody. He was a failed art student. But he decided that he was not going to let that happen. He was going to save his people or die trying. Yes, in pursuit of this goal he engaged in some of the most reprehensible methods imaginable. But in what sense was he not playing the highest, most honorable role for his people — that of a messiah? Was the alternative really any more moral? Are we clutching our pearls and sobbing because it was mean to kill political opponents when what he should have done was to suffer the children of his nation to starve to death in the streets while foreigners feasted in the beautiful homes built by his forefathers? Can we really suppose for one moment that the Jewish zealots of AD 66 would have had any problem with Hitlerian tactics were the shoe on the other foot and being executed by Eleazar ben Simon against the Romans? Yes, Hitler was a mess and riddled with countless inexcusable flaws, but are we truly to believe that he did what he did simply because he enjoyed causing others pain? The man was a vegetarian for goodness’ sake!
Now contrast this with Stalin (or Lenin). How explicit do I need to be here? Whether they acted more out of lust for power or a sincere ideological commitment to, idk, ‘the working class’ (imo doubtful), these guys did not act out of love for their people, and did not hesitate to consign millions of them to starvation in pursuit of power.
And they killed so many more. So many more. But our politicians can admire them openly and the common man has only the haziest idea of why this might be a problem. And while, sure, the opposition will attempt to make much hay of this, the younger generations increasingly seem uninterested in what they have to say about it.
Last night a friend told me,
my opinion is that you've been brainpoisoned into calling evil good and good evil and rather than leaning into the caricatures of your enemies by using the word 'hitlerism' to refer to good things you should not do that
(Not that I was — it’s precisely the distinction that I’m trying to draw, but we’ll get to that.)
So on the subject of ‘my enemies’, let me tell you a few things I notice about them.
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They get abortions
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They permanently sterilize themselves, or
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They take pills to trick their bodies into thinking they've just lost a baby because this spiritual distress is preferable to them over the prospect of actually reproducing.
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They purchase chihuahuas, and pekinese, and felines, and portage them around in equipment intended for human children which will never exist
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They agonize over the irresponsibility of their own kind having children, but gasp in horror at anyone who suggests that African birthrates might become a problem
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They desire to privilege children of other races above their own, ceding educational access, preferential employment, etc.
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They get nervous at portrayals of healthy white families with several children
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They will loudly insist that they do not have a culture
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They really don’t like borders and seem to think that it’s their responsibility to feed and clothe the world
This list could be ten times as long, of course. You get the idea. So to circle back around to my original point —
My enemies do not feed their own children first. My enemies sell their children at the market and immediately donate the proceeds to the worst, most irredeemably valueless people they can find. And if they can’t find one close enough to hand, they go looking. And it’s disgusting. It’s reprehensible. It offends me to a degree that I have difficulty conveying without jumping up and down and screaming until I’m red in the face and collapsing into a pile of tears. Only, I seem to remember Jesus telling us to do what my enemies are doing — or it’s at least close enough that I can’t help but notice.
Which brings us back to my daughter. As her father, where does my responsibility to her end? At what point should I give a dollar to feed notional children on the other side of the world rather than investing it in her future? How stiff will her competition be? How can I know in advance which investment will turn out to make all the difference?
Consider the following scenario. I am walking down the street and notice my neighbor’s two year old breaking free from her front door and running into traffic. Of course if I can safely rescue her I should, but suppose I’m not sure that I can without endangering my own life in the process, and leaving my children fatherless? I could maybe look her parents in the eye afterward and say “There just wasn’t anything I could do” and they’d likely catch the nuance and understand and even bitterly sympathize.
But supposing I had plenty of time to save the child, and just choose not to because this would mean I don't have time to read my daughter a bedtime story. Is that equivalent to murder? I say yes. Trying to delineate between the two is an unseemly thing for a man to do and belies a womanly discomfort with agency. But when I spend a few extra bucks to get her the pink scooter someone, somewhere, is going hungry, and in aggregate dying.
Or imagine that I’m the chieftain of one of two small tribes on a small island. Resources are getting scarce and everyone knows that at some point soon it’s going to be us or them. Does a good leader, a good father, wait for the threat to ripen, for the enemy to choose the place and time for battle? Or does he strike preemptively? It will be either our children or theirs who die. We will eat their babies or they will eat ours. Shouldn’t a father make sure of which it is? Isn’t that what a good father does?
The reason our society is so reflexively disgusted by Hitler is because we have mostly internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live, and the man with the tiny moustache represents the polar opposite of that.
Hitler seems to me, at heart, a very good father. If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate. The notorious Fourteen Words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — make the connection so explicit and unassailable that the Left dares not to look upon it.
But the icon-stand in my heart labeled “Father” does not have Hitler’s portrait in it. Actually the picture there is blank, ha ha, but that’s another story, and the point is that Christ fills in pretty well. My Father does not feed His own child first. He feeds His child to us. Bit by blood-soaked bit, forever. I can struggle with the apparent discrepancy between disinheriting my daughter to feed what looks to me like a total waste of the Imago Dei, but there it is. I am certain that the difference between my girl, whom I can assure you I adore unbearably and who always seems to have a beam of sunshine on her in my eyes — that the difference between her and the most contemptible human being ever to exist, is as nothing compared to the difference between God’s son and my daughter, or myself.
But the gorge does rise in my throat when I consider failing to protect what seems, to me, the most beautiful person, and the most beautiful People, ever to exist in favor of… that. Every cell in my body says that I should sooner glass an entire foreign continent rather than allow harm to befall one hair upon my daughter’s perfect golden head.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And we can’t even expect the problem to go away. The least of these will always be among us. He said so. Maybe the only clean way out of this is to not have children in the first place. I’m afraid He might have said that too.
I try to console myself with precedent. I try to believe. We have established two types of morality: A baseline morality of feeding one’s own children first, and a higher morality of sacrificing one’s children for the greater good of the People. But Christ would seem to indicate a third sort, which is to love the foreigner's child more than one’s own. This is, after all, what God did.
And for a minute there humans actually did it too! As Scott says,
The early Christian Church had the slogan “resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39), and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners. They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. [...] this should have been the biggest smackdown in the entire history of smackdowns.
And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected.
Food for thought, I guess.
So it seems to me that if I'm to be a Christian, this directly implies feeding my child to the dogs. And if I'm to do otherwise, this fully generalizes to Hitler. Either way I had better get serious about whatever it is I'm doing here.
Long story short, I’m currently trying to decide between this apron and this one for my daughter for when she’s painting at her easel. The first is a little bit cheaper, but she’ll like the second one better because it has unicorns. Hoping someone can offer some insight here.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think the reason Hitler is so hated is simply because he started a war against "us" and, even worse, he almost won. If Hitler had won, everyone would have soon gotten used to the new normal. If Hitler had been defeated easily, the whole war would have been soon largely forgotten. But almost losing a war leaves people nervous and they have to curse the enemy whenever they even think of him, just to soothe their nerves. People on the other side of the world who did not directly participate in the war do not feel the same way. There is probably an ice cream factory somewhere in Asia making Hitler branded ice cream, and to them he is just a famous figure with a recognizable moustache, no more associated with great evil than Elvis Presley or Albert Einstein.
So there is no abstract internalized value system or anything like that involved, it's just a historical accident.
Some people have called Christianity a death worshipping cult. Death of Jesus being the main symbol, martyrs effectively committing suicide, obsessing on life after death, and so on. Maybe that is just something you will have to accept if you want to stay in the cult, instead of trying to follow all kinds of flawed arguments in order to find a rationalization that is not revolting to you.
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I profoundly disagree with your view of Hitler.
He overthrew the democratically elected government of Germany and installed himself as dictator. He then used his newfound power to murder approximately 6 million defenseless people in the holocaust (mostly Jews, for whom he displayed a special hatred). He also caused the deaths of millions of other people by launching a war of aggression against his neighbors; I've seen estimates of 30-35 million people killed by the Nazis overall: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/non-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust Hitler also committed other atrocities.
Is this not obvious to you?
If you check the historical record, you'll see that murdering 6 million people is a highly unusual thing to do.
So why are you confused by his vilification?
What part of being the messiah of a people involves murdering 6 million of your own people??
That may be, but it doesn't matter much if Hitler is "the worst" vs. "one of the worst"
He murdered 6 million of them. You might as well say that a man is a good father if he murders some number of his own children.
My sources tell me that the blockade killed about 100,000 Germans in the postwar period, which is far less than 6 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany#cite_note-Blockade791-2 . This blockade ended in 1919, so it hardly explains Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s
I dispute this characterization. Foreigners did not control everything in Germany. German reparations amounted to 2.4% of the national income and the reparations were cancelled in 1932. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#End_of_German_reparations
Incidentally, the victims of the Holocaust were not foreigners. They were German.
What part of saving your people involves murdering 6 million of them?
I assure you that not murdering 6 million people would have been much more moral.
There are all sorts of ways to provide for a beleaguered people that don't involve murdering 6 million of them.
Are you telling me that vegetarians cannot possibly enjoy causing others pain? Did it ever occur to you that someone might be cruel to Jews but kind to animals for some reason?
No they can't. Anyone who openly admires Stalin is roundly condemned for it. https://www.foxnews.com/us/professor-praises-stalin-great-leaders-20th-century
Skipping most of these items in the interest of time, I'm confused why you seem to think that wanting to feed and clothe the world is somehow problematic. You said you were a Christian earlier, and Christ placed a lot of emphasis on helping the poor (or at least that's what the Bible tells me)
Are your enemies trafficking in child slavery? Who are these people? And who exactly are the "irredeemably valueless people" to whom they donate the proceeds? I am very confused by this.
Hitler did not save his people! He claimed to be doing that, but in reality he murdered 6 million of them and led the others into a disastrous war.
And considering how much of the United States budget is devoted to U.S. citizens as opposed to foreigners, I'd hardly say that our society (assuming you're American) has "internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live".
Isn't there some moral framework that maximizes human happiness? Shouldn't you be on the lookout for some way to save everybody's children?
While I disagree with the original posters view of Hitler, I disagree with some of your assertions also.
He was quite popular with the German people; he had the most votes of any party at the time, had the support of the majority of the people during his reign and was legally installed the dictator by a coalition government of his and two other parties. Arresting the Communist party for terrorism helped his 1933 election but it was no military coup.
You are completely missing the entire point of Hitler's National Socialism. National referred to the racially German people. In Hitlers' view all non-German people were non-people. Removing Jews, Poles, Blacks, etc was the way to save Germany. Killing non-Germans in Germany was his entire mission, a mission that the vast majority of Germans believed in, supported and fought for. However misguided they may have been; they were following what they saw as their logical mission to save themselves and their country.
You cannot say that killing Jews, which he considered "enemies of Germany", is killing his own people or children.
You can say that losing a war was bad for racial Germans, especially the 4-5 million military deaths (presumably Germans).
I didn't say it was a military coup. I said that he overthrew the democratically elected government.
I'll grant that that phrasing usually implies a military coup, but it was the best phrasing I could come up with for what actually happened.
First off, Hitler attempted a military coup in 1923 with the Beer Hall Putsch. Having failed at that, he then tried other tactics. In 1932 the Nazis won a plurality (but not a majority) in the legislature. Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. Four weeks later came the Reichstag fire, which was plausibly a false flag operation by the Nazis and in any case the Nazis used it as a pretext to demand much greater power for themselves. The March 1933 election saw the Nazis intimidating voters en masse, so it can hardly be called a free election. Afterwards came the Enabling Act which gave Hitler dictatorial powers, after which time the Reichstag always approved everything Hitler did by unanimous consent. At that point democracy was dead and the common people had no legal method for removing leaders they disliked.
This process, wherein democracy was killed off and replaced by dictatorship, is what I meant by the phrase "overthrew the democratically elected government". In retrospect I should have said that he "ended democracy in Germany". That would have been clearer.
Do you have evidence for this? I know he was popular enough to get plurality support in the Reichstag, but a plurality is not a majority. And however many people liked him in 1932, how did that sentiment change during the remainder of his time in office? It's easy to imagine a scenario where eventually a large majority of Germans resented Hitler or at least felt unsure about him, but they kept their thoughts to themselves because they were afraid of getting shot. How exactly can we measure the level of public support in a place without free elections or scientific opinion polls?
I know that was Hitler's view. I was using the concept of "his people" along the traditional national lines, e.g. if Hitler is the leader of Germany, then the Germans are "his people".
OP was drawing a parallel to fatherhood. If a man fathers 6 children and kills two of them, we would not say he was a good father to his children. If that same man arbitrarily declared in advance that the children he decided to murder were "not my children" based on some weird new definition he just invented, I don't think we would adopt that definition when discussing the question "Was this man a good father to his children?". That was one of the points I was making. OP claims that Hitler acted in the interest of "his people", but OP is using Hitler's own arbitrary definition of who "his people" were, which helps OP to sidestep the horrors of the holocaust. (Though of course in practice murdering 6 million defenseless people for no reason is evil no matter what nationality they happen to have, so it's a moot point.)
Again, I'd like to know if you have evidence as to what Germans really thought as opposed to how they acted. A person who's afraid of getting shot will do all sorts of things he doesn't actually believe in.
Why should we adopt a murderer's definition of who "his people" or "his children" were? Just because a murderer believes something doesn't make it true.
Suppose that a man named Bob murders five women, all of them prostitutes. Suppose that Bob declares that "prostitutes are non-human". In that case, would we go around telling each other, "You cannot say that that killing prostitutes, which Bob considered 'non-human', is killing humans"?
It looks like one of the sources is Götz Aly in his book "Hitlers Volksstaat" unfortunately german but claiming a study he did analyzing sentiment (no polls or rigged elections) among Germans showed his popularity rose from 1933 until 1939 and was above 50% until 1941. The german people were proud of re-uniting german speakers and reclaiming past borders (1933-1939) but they didn't want another war (1939-onward) but his popularity was so high in 1939 that it took until 1941 to go below majority.
https://www.quora.com/What-were-Hitler%E2%80%99s-approval-ratings via Google
While not the first thing Hitler did, he was clear from the beginning that non-Germans would be stripped of their citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws officially did strip the jews (and later blacks and gypies) of their citizenships and rights.
Family is based on genetics. The German Jews, being a different race, would at most be step-children in your analogy. Like fathering 4 and killing 2 step children which he believed bullied his own children for years. Genetics is not some "weird new definition".
I don't care. There isn't some "killing your own people" escape clause that says it doesn't count if you announce in advance that you hate the people you're going to kill and you intend to strip of them of their rights first.
When I said "Germans" I did not mean "People recognized as German by Adolf Hitler's government." I meant "People who had established permanent residence in the territory of Germany, regardless of Adolf Hitler's personal opinions."
In what way were they "a different race"? Do you have some actual science to back up that claim?
If you knew a man who had 4 biological children and two step-children and then he murdered the step-children, would you conclude "This man was a good father to his children"?
The Jews are genetically unique. Most closely related to Jews (from any part of the world), North Africans and Arabs. They were originally (less than 3,000 years) from modern day Iraq/Israel. Their religion prevents marrying non-Jews and it is typically difficult to become a Jew (years). In Europe, the result is almost no genes from non-Jews for 600 years and most Jews decend from ~500 originals.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19008-how-religion-made-jews-genetically-distinct/
https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-from-the-teeth-of-14th-century-ashkenazi-jews-in-germany-already-included-genetic-variations-common-in-modern-jews-194780
This isn't to say they didn't previously mix with the Celtic and Germani people: they did and those became known as the Ashkenazi tribe.
I think this is mostly definitional. If "his people" are people living within his borders then he killed his people. If a fathers' children are those in his care, then killing 1/3 of them would probably make him a bad father. Same if you define all people north of the Sahara and west of the Mongol Empire as the same race.
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Actually, the jews have their own answer for this, and that answer is an incredibly emphatic "Yes, we are different" - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-01-24/ty-article/.premium/israeli-high-court-allows-dna-testing-to-prove-judaism/0000017f-e13b-d804-ad7f-f1fb85f90000
They don't just consider themselves a separate race, they loudly advertise that they are a separate race and celebrate that separation. The difference between them and the people they live amongst is a constant subject of discussion and art. Their belief in the genetic and biological distinction of their race is so strong that they have religious laws about it and actually allow people to claim citizenship based on DNA, even though their culture insists that it can only be passed down via the mother (due to paternal uncertainty in history I believe). I can understand not liking Hitler, but insisting that jews are actually the same as everyone else and not a separate people is something that they'd object to in the strongest terms, and I get the impression that you don't consider yourself an anti-semite, even though a lot of strident jews would consider your claim that they are not actually special or distinct to be anti-semitism in itself.
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I think I should probably have a more in depth response ready, but this was profound, thank you for posting it.
I'm low-key trying to sneak back in and start answering people. You're welcome, and thanks for expressing your gratitude. I find that when I bother to openly bare my naked thought patterns to others I tend to get 40% telling me I'm dumb and crazy in one direction, 40% telling me I'm dumb and crazy in the opposite, incompatible direction, and 20% who seem to feel as though I've just expressed something that had been driving them crazy at best or totally opaque to them at worst. It's that 20% for whom I write, and their gratitude is what I want to keep going.
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Well, isn't that the point? You defect against your competitors, but it turns out that your neighbor also cares about their children, and if they cannot trust you to leave theirs alone...
Of course in practice everyone defects a bit and cooperates a bit, because the payoff matrix is different in every interaction we have and at every scale of analysis (and it's not like we are automata flawlessly crunching number; the payoff matrix is filtered through layers of instinct, emotions, and memes). I think -- and there's room for disagreement here -- that Hitler became the ultimate evil of the modern world because he was the Defectorest Defector who ever Defected. He openly poured contempt on the very idea of cooperation, mutual trade, or symbiosis, let alone altruism or charity; he celebrated death, violence, and suffering as the only aspects of human existence worth protecting; and his favorite, his only solution to any disagreement or conflict of interest was destruction of the enemy, for in his worldview there was nothing but Us and Enemy.
And what did all this defection brought him? Death, violence, and suffering in unimaginable amounts, not only for his outgroup, but for his ingroup as well. He flouted one international treaty after the other, landing on him in more wars than he could handle. He deliberately broke the most important peace treaty he had secured, opening a massive war front before he was finished with the other. He committed pointless atrocities while the war was still ongoing, to the point of convincing millions of Soviet citizens that Stalin was the lesser evil after all. He diverted resources away from the army toward the mass murder of prisoners, both weakening the army and ensuring that the enemies fought to the death, since they could not expect mercy. He forbid his troops from surrendering even when that resulted in being slaughtered. And what was the result, for the ingroup he was trying to serve? Germany occupied and divided, a generation of its men wiped out, its cities charred wastelands, cursing his own name forever. That's what defecting as hard as possible, rejecting even the slightest opportunity of cooperation, gets you.
Of course Hitler was the Ultimate Defector only at one level, nation (or race) vs. nation. Below that level, he was quite explicit that you should shovel your own children into the fire if that benefitted the Fatherland. "Isn't that what young men are for?", he said. And burn they did, those young men. Perhaps refusing even that level of cooperation would be better for you? Taken literally, "Me and my brother against my cousin" quickly results in destruction of your own genes, but even "Me and my tribe against the world, etc." gets you tribal Afghanistan, or possibly Mafia clans. Granted, Pashtun tribes managed to survive and preserve their culture against incredible odds, and there is something impressive and admirable in that. But they don't have many chances of doing anything but survive, except when they start broadening their circle of cooperation.
Because in the end your choice is not just between sacrificing other people's children to save yours, and sacrificing yours to save them; there is such a thing as positive-sum interactions. Even when fights to the death come, it's usually the side that harnesses best the power of cooperation that prevails. Neandertals could craft tools as well as Homo sapiens, and were much larger and stronger, to boot. The hallmarks of our species, as far as I know, were more complex figurative language, longer-distance trade, and larger social groups, in short instruments of cooperation. Similarly, hunter-gatherers were much healthier and better fed than early farmers, but farmers could organize in larger numbers and act on a larger scale. At any level of selection, cooperation, if you can get it, usually beats any amount of individual badassery. Cooperating between individuals makes stronger families, cooperating between families makes stronger communities, cooperating between communities makes stronger countries, and why wouldn't cooperating between countries make a stronger, richer world?
Pardon me if this is a bit rambling, it's been a long day.
EDIT: small fixes.
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People can elicidate Hitler's evil in all sorts of ways and it's not an interesting topic. There are plenty reasons to hate Hitler. Could his project have been redeemable from the point of view of unapologetic ethnocentrism, at least? Well, triumphant Nazi Germans would surely have thought so; nobody else is under the obligation to share their vision. Doesn't matter, he lost and, as the self-proclaimed Fuhrer, he now carries the blame both for his grisly means and for the ultimate end of the Reich (and for what I personally believe to be death of German people; I do not recognize Germans of my era as members of a living culture, it's just some bizarre creepy hive going through the motions and never producing anything that has human meaning or beauty, it's as bad as Russia has become, as bad as racists say China is, as bad as Orwell imagined Nazi Germany would have been).
As for your main point. Westerners in their infinite wisdom have discovered this thing one can call Secular Christianity (Catholics and the Orthodox often attribute it to Protestants, which looks like silly dodging of responsibility to an external observer; few of their own communities are without similar blame). It's Christianity without the inconvenient, cringeworthy, mythological and bigoted parts; but also without its fire («we were burning witches in that fire!» – well, yes, religion is not easy). It's Gelded Christianity. You feed the poor neighbor's child but you do not proselityze to his family; you turn the other cheek to people who allow BPD women be ordained and make mockery of this ethos; you save lives with no regard for souls. It's a crippled doctrine that naturally becomes complementary to the death cult you so despise. Often it is not Christianity at all but the kind of vaguely inspired mask one dons after losing faith and coming to fear and revere the new True Doctrine of collective death – the belief system of Yellowstone meme conservative, an overwrought system of copes obscuring the pointlessness of the whole edifice. What is the error of Yellowstone conservatives? Charitably, it's stupidity and gullibility. What is their sin, though? Idolatry. They have traded the essence for the fetishized form, so their observance of the form does not matter.
These people will turn Christ's word against your kin as readily as sneering nonbelievers do. Perhaps to you there still remains the question of their reading being correct on that one point. Well, I'd say it's not blatantly wrong. But it's part of a teaching that has no Christ in it, nor future where He matters. How you resolve that conundrum is up to you.
Er, sorry to necro, but...
Didn't you say this about China as well?
That evaluation doesn't seem to reveal a living civilization, either.
I'm not accusing you of being a racist; this is a genuine question. I've been reading your post history for a while[1] and am curious about the disconnect here (excusing my occasionally faulty reading comprehension skillz aside), since it seems to contradict your earlier comment, unless you've changed your views, or instead mean to say something like "Germany and China's ills as a civilization are just specifically different" or "my particular conception of China's societal malaise substantially differs from the popular racist ones": though in which case I'd be interested in knowing the specifics (e.g. what you view is the difference between, I dunno, Germany and China's problems).
Of course, this is quite old, and I'm merely nitpicking a minor strand here, etc., so no need to reply, necessarily, if you haven't the time or desire...
[1] No weird motivations of the online-stalker variety here: I just find your posts consistently insightful, so I read a lot of it and am now interested. (Don't take this badly, ploz :( )
I mean one can be racist in different ways and deemed racist for varying reasons. But yes, basically, if German culture is dead, then the Chinese one is as dead by the same measure, both peoples reduced to manufacturing workshops at different links of the global value add chain.
I differ with people whom I refer to here as racists in relatively minor details when it comes to evaluation of Mainland China (I don't much care about muh communism/eating dogs/other nonsensical disgust- or morality-driven attacks at them like that series of posts from @Lepidus) but they sure don't produce a whole lot of great art. It's a shame because Han Chinese are, in my opinion, great and talented and perfectly artistic people, as shown by their diaspora.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. Personally, I do think it's probably something vaguely related to state censorship, although admittedly that's just surface-level intuition which doesn't elucidate much... still, probably closer to reality than something something Chinese culture irrevocably soulless and defective.
I would assume you've at least read the Three-Body Problem? What do you think of it? (Not that I'm necessarily saying it specifically is good, it's just the one example of a modern Chinese cultural product that comes to mind other than Genshin Impact—and that one probably isn't anyone's definition of art, although it can be fun—so I thought it might be pertinent. Of course, I sit in the dreaded "genre fiction can be art" camp, but hey...)
Just out of curiosity, though, in your own words, what cultures would you say still exist today, in a "living sense"? (I guess in terms of regularly producing great art). Curious to get some feelers for your aesthetic preferences, tastes about nations, etc., if I can ask.
(Admittedly, this might cross into the realm of vaguely unsavoury cultural generalizations, but surely if we can talk in terms of dead cultures there must also exist relatively living ones on the other end of the scale from which they can be contrasted with: that is the nature of making any normative claim based in relativity, after all)
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Modern Germany is a wealthy, thriving democracy. It ranks #15 on the international happiness index ( https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/happiness/ ) and 9th on the Human Development Index. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index )
Modern Germans produce things of meaning and beauty at a perfectly normal rate; I challenge you to prove me wrong. George Orwell's imaginary dystopias (such as Great Britain in 1984) are vastly worse than modern Germany.
Are you trying to say that burning witches is ok?
Modern Germany is wealthy and happy and democratic because we inherited a country shaped by the work ethic, social norms and self-organizational abilities of post-war Germans. Those are passing, and being replaced by atomized hedonists and by foreigners. What we have looks good thanks to inertia, but is immensely sclerotic and inefficient.
And that's without going into the cultural problems. German culture is not competitive. It fails to propagate or assimilate or to produce media with any sort of staying power. Our cultural products are either tediously generic or faintly transgressive, and always tripe that's forgotten by tomorrow. Our inability to maintain or spread a healthy culture may be an old problem - maybe even Hitler knew that the only way to make Germany grow was by force? Speculation; doesn't matter. The problem remains: Germany as a cultural entity is shrinking rapidly.
If we produce things of beauty or quality at a normal rate, then the world has a problem because that rate is shit. I've always lived in Germany and there are good reasons why everyone who's not linguistically challenged looks to the Anglosphere or elsewhere for cultural intake. We make a little music. We make a movie worth watching once every other decade. We coin a new phrase once in a lifetime. We develop new cultural practices never, and our language grows impoverished by the day.
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Challenge rejected on grounds of its absurdity and lack of substance. What exactly do you mean they produce?
https://old.reddit.com/r/de/comments/3d4khn/deutsch_kommt_mir_so_vor_wie_eine_tote_sprache/
“Versteht Ihr mindestens ein bißchen davon, was ich meine?”
Probably not.
What exactly did you mean by the words "it's just some bizarre creepy hive going through the motions and never producing anything that has human meaning or beauty"?
My challenge had just as much substance as your original statement.
Your reddit link (thanks to Google translate) leads me to check if German-language films are scarce compared to French-language films.
Counting only "mother tongue" speakers, German has 95.9m speakers (https://www.worlddata.info/languages/german.php) and French has 97.6m speakers (https://www.worlddata.info/languages/french.php)
According to The-Numbers.com, Germany produced 192 films in 2022 while France produced 392. However, the site describes its chart as being "in beta mode". (https://www.the-numbers.com/France/movies#tab=year and https://www.the-numbers.com/Germany/movies#tab=year). Elsewhere I find the number of German films in 2019 to be 237 (https://variety.com/2022/film/festivals/german-films-berlin-film-festival-1235179304/) while the "usual production levels" in France amounts to 287 films per year (https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/440515/), which is a much closer comparison (though admittedly it still leaves France with more films that Germany).
Of course the raw number of films produced doesn't tell us much about how much "human meaning or beauty" they contained, but it's nice to have something empirical to refer to.
It sure is nice to search for your keys under the street light, too, but it doesn't mean they are to be found there.
What's your favourite German movie?
What postwar German movie is comparable to, say, Amelie, The City of Lost Children, Léon, The Fifth Element – just off the top of my head?
Exactly like I've said: a hive goes through the motions, with nothing to show for it.
I liked Rescue Dawn, which was by a famous German director. The movie is English-language, but so is The Fifth Element.
As far as German-language films are concerned, Run Lola Run was memorable (and a bit strange).
You may be right that Germany is lagging behind other countries somewhat, but that's still a far cry from your claim that modern Germany never produces "anything that has human meaning or beauty,".
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Goodbye Lenin, The Downfall, The Lives of Others, Das Boot come to mind. But on the other hand, these are only German films I have heard of, which are at least of artistic merit. All are about either the nazi or the east German regime.
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Lola Rennt and Die Welle come to mind.
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Independence Day
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I think looking objectively at the problem, I think that the issue lies at the point where Christians basically dropped any sort of orthopraxy to their beliefs. Which seems to be the issue because by doing so, daily reminders to oneself that God is real don’t happen.
On the old subreddit there was a post about Orthodox Judaism, and why it remained and why those Jews didn’t assimilate. The answer was, essentially that to live as an Orthodox Jew was to be constantly reminded of that fundamental fact. You couldn’t eat without thinking about it, because there are Kosher laws. You couldn’t get dressed without thinking about it, because you’re looking at the labels to be sure the cloth is only one type. There are special prayers for everything down to praising god for giving you the means to relieve yourself. This makes belief just part of the life — you are doing the things and thinking about God and what God wants. This cannot help but inspire the confidence that you are in the presence of God.
By contrast, especially for the low church Protestant, there’s no requirement for anything, and in fact the kinds of things mentioned above are frowned upon unless they’re spontaneous and you want to do them. So then when does someone raised in this sort of religion think about God? Sunday, maybe a Wednesday night service, but that’s really it. And these events are not ordinary parts of the day, they exist outside of it, in a special place called church wearing special clothes, it’s not ordinary life, it’s a field trip. And when you have to make trips to see god, he becomes less a natural part of your life. A long distance relationship you don’t think about except when you mentally visit or maybe send a quick prayer when you think about it. Most of the rest of your life is spent in this world where you think about business and kids and school and politics and ordinary life.
For reference, an Orthodox Christian is expected to pray upon waking, at noon, and upon retiring, if not twice also through the night if a monk; he is expected to pray before each meal and upon exiting a doorway, initializing a car, or upon seeing an ambulance, etc., and I really do mean etc.. Faith without works is dead.
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Couldn't agree more about the death of the German people. When I talk to my countrymen, I get the sense of a deep need for them to belong to some kind of higher tribe of Germanic people. But cultural self-hatred is not a basis for unity. So they gesticulate vaguely to the "Grundgesetz", Germans aren't as loud about it, but if you ask them they hold this ineffective book in higher esteem than Americans do their own constitution. And that's it. That's the only mainstream acceptable level of German national identity. Even the German language itself is problematic and must be destroyed with degenerate new grammar rules.
This isn't some hyperbolic exaggeration, either. A legal fiction is the only thing that binds the Germanic diaspora. Of course, If you ask Sepp from Bierdorf#2334 in Bavaria what he has in common, with Gunther in Kackdorf#697 in Lower Saxony, you will probably get a different answer (With little agreement between them). But Cities are sadly indispensable for visible cultural output. And they are filled with the apathetic worker ants and legacy poisoners.
At least I have regionalism cope. I wonder if @Southkraut agrees.
There's a feeling that many Germans would wish to turn EU into a country precisely to have this place of belonging.
That's a good one, also explains the beliefs of my culturally adrift friends from my international schooling experience.
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Underclass culture has become Immigrant culture. Reverse assimilation.
Answer: Nothing. It's been too late for dozens of years. Have a respectable job, and you won't have to interact with them.
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Sadly, yes. I stand by my country because what can I do, it belongs to me and I to it, but it's clearly a sinking ship without a future. Hell, without a present, even.
I'm not opposed to civic nationalism, but the Grundgesetz, that makeshift postwar document cobbled together under occupation, is hardly worth much. What binding power does it have, other than being invoked when someone wants to use it against his enemies? What else is there to mark the German? The language, as you noted, is despised even by those who speak no other fluently. Work is esteemed, those who work and pay their taxes are somewhat rightfully considered productive members of society, but this too is only a flimsy pretense or else we woulf not be so tolerant of parasites, of wastes of taxpayer money, of welfare queens. How can a German even be German, nowadays? By holding on to cultural products of bygone ages, since nothing of value is produced any longer?
In the end there may be nothing left of Germany but the land itself. There yet remain Germans, millions of them, who are clearly German and nothing else, but as you and Ilforte said, their national identity is fatally crippled. It cannot reproduce, it cannot expand, it cannot propagate or assimilate, and it cannot innovate. Whatever parts of are lost to time will find no replacement.
I'd write more but I think duty calls.
How about German cars? The Germans seem (rightfully) proud of them.
They used to write music and poetry that redefined the whole idea of art, and make philosophy that turned the world upside down. I'm not sure what @Southkraut thinks of those results but it was a mark of something more than a nation and bordering on a sovereign civilization – and all that half-drunk, in a murky state of lingering feudalism. They had magic, they had their own German Logos yearning for a systematic universal expression. Now they have neat logistics. Great.
Maybe not just 'great logistics'.
You are one of the few people here who could probably sneeze in Metzinger over a couple of weekends without his head exploding. Contemporary philosopher with some neuroscience training. Writes books about the problem of consciousness.
I've heard good things about the books by Peter Watts, not someone whom you'd expect to be indulgent of bullshit. (except where his baptist apocalypticism is concerned, mind you)
He also said it was 'harder reading' than many textbooks because the ideas are just .. complex.
«But doctor…»
That's exactly my journey over a decade ago, Watts to Metzinger. I think he's basically correct.
Germans definitely have individual giants. Schmidhuber is probably more impressive.
The snide comments over on his wiki page that he takes credits for other people's achievements are perfidious attacks by jealous anklebiters?
There are different perspectives on that. He definitely plays fast and loose with definitions of ideas to say he published «basically the same thing» first, or that later inventions follow «trivially». He also is genuinely an author of a ton of seminal papers, and Americans (Canadians too) don't like to admit his priority. I'd say he's personally smarter than the Turing Award trio, though this is only relevant to the previous topic.
He also tries to redistribute credit on behalf of the dead, so that's not only about personal ego, charitably speaking.
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I don't want to overreach there. I think Germans achieved much in many fields for a good while, and unusually so while being politically fragmented, but ultimately both divided and united under Prussia we remained more or less in the same weight class as, say, the French and the English.
Without expertise, I'd say German philosophers during feudalism often produced absolutely useless tripe they only got away with thanks to patronage, whereas in the Prussian era they often tended towards overly-grandiose ideas in the vein of "Am deutschen wesen soll die Welt genesen" (German nature shall cure the world). Maybe I'm oversimplifying and conflating politics and philosophy here. Even the big names like Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, in my estimation, were prolific but the quality of what they wrote varied wildly. But in either era, Germans did philosophize. And they made art. Maybe it really was the granular feudalism that enabled all this - everyone somewhat stuck in their own little world, and the heads of each of those little worlds eager to provide patronage, leaving people half-forced and half-enabled to think and create somewhat more than the inhabitants of wider, more open countries. Heine said it succinctly: To the French the land, to the British the sea, and to the Germans the clouds.
But in my comment up there I didn't even mean high art and philosophy. I was thinking more of that which actually makes up the cultural day-to-day of people. That which they share. Language, stories, figures of speech, values, priorities, norms, songs, ways of working, modes of social interaction. "I'm a German, you're a German, which I know because we do X and wouldn't have it any other way.". What X is left for us nowadays?
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And you think that's something a German can think about and go "yeah, it's good to be a German, we make nice cars."? That's enough for a tiny subculture, but hardly the nation. And how many immigrants will shed their old national identities in favor of becoming one of "the guys who make nice cars but otherwise hate themselves"?
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Japanese life may seem depressing from a western perspective, but what they have managed to do that nearly every other country has not has been to adapt to modernity without losing the core of their culture. Rather than splintering into one faction that blindly apes Americanized global culture and one that tries with desperate futility to turn back the clock to the good old days, as most societies have (see Dubai vs ISIS, Westernized Russian oligarchs vs Putin-style revanchists, etc.) they have adopted the technological trappings of the West without becoming a poor imitation of it, and are able to export their own culture back in the form of anime, samurai movies, video games, food, and the general sense that there is something ineffably different about them and their way of life.
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Sure, it's better to be alive now in the first world than at any previous point in time. Our material well-being is historically pretty maximal, though we may have peaked just about now.
But in terms of national identity? Is there any non-materialist reason why someone should want to become a German? Or why a German should be glad not to be a member of any other first-world nation?
This is a popular talking point and even Jordan Peterson capitulated on this when he was murdering those Swedes, but I have my doubts. The worthiness of human existence is not defined by material comfort, and I suspect that many a man exists in these benighted latter days who would have been much happier in an era of shitty rights, worse food, and a faithful and stalwart wife who would bear him many children. Your mileage may vary but I know which I would choose, were I not blesséd enough to have both.
Re: Germanity, what can I say but F. I doubt very much if that race can be reconstituted but if I have the opportunity and no greater obligation I surely will accomplish this thing.
Well, yes, but it's counterfactual for most people, whereas the material advantages are easy to quantify. Maybe it's a grass-is-greener issue on some level, too? Would we have hankered for atomization, for a shedding of social responsibility, for sheer wealth, and damn our faithful wives if only we could for once ride on an airplane to go on a whoring trip in Thailand, eat as much as we like and do all the superstimuli under heaven?
I too look upon the past and see much to like, but I have no illusions about how incomplete my idea of life-in-the-past is. But sure enough, there is much in the present to dislike, and there our judgement can be more easily trusted.
Well, thanks if you get around to it, would be swell.
To be honest, these are big questions and you seem closer to the answers. You tell me - how would you go about restoring an entire nation that's almost a century into its own dismantling, dilution and degradation?
And do tell me about my people. My own appreciation of them is too colored by personal connections to make much sense in the abstract, given my limited abilities with language.
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You say that "Hitler was a mess and riddled with countless inexcusable flaws". Can you elaborate on what you mean by flaws? You also praise Hitler for his "fatherly" motivations, which you believe are sincere and unimpeachable. What part of his implementation, if any, do you disagree with?
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One of the biggest reasons for why Hitler is hated is that his troops and armies literally invaded, or occupied violently otherwise, or at least bombed, of nearly all the European countries at one point or another. Or gave a helping hand to the local dictator, or lured them to an useless war. In almost every country there is some memory of Germans behaving very badly indeed around 1939-1945. (Finland is almost the exception and there's a rather curious relationship to our co-belligerence/alliance of this period, but even here there was a war against the Germans in Lapland in 1944-1945 - the new movie Sisu takes place in this period.) Meanwhile, the country he led was the one he led to utter ruination, occupation, division and poverty.
USA is different, of course, but in America's case, fighting Hitler served as America's great trial by fire that allowed it to firmly become the global champion and by far the strongest power that has ever existed, which is at least in great deal responsible for how USA sees the WW2 - a battle where the Good Guys defeated the ultimate evil and everyone... well, didn't live happily ever after, but at the penultimate evil after that fell without a direct war.
Lenin and Stalin didn't do that for a half of Europe. In the other half Stalin is, of course, still remembered at least as badly as Hitler. Again, that's the case in Finland; praising Stalin would be like praising Hitler, something that would ruin a public figure and is left to the dankest fringes of the society. Meanwhile, in Russia, many still remember Stalin fondly precisely because at the moment of this death Soviet Union, which can easily be seen as Russia with a sheen of red coat, was probably at the strongest it had ever been or would ever be vis-a-vis the global standing. Besides, most of Stalin's victims were non-Russians (Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Balts etc.), apart from those falling victim to the Great Purge, and hell, those were a bunch of Bolsheviks anyway.
Why is it any more doubtful than with Hitler? If it was just about power, both chose one of the hardest, most difficult and dangerous routes there is. Both would have had considerably easier paths to accumulate power if they had set on those paths, Stalin having been a bright student of theology and Lenin a minor aristocrat by birth.
Instead, they pushed themselves to a path of active revolution in probably the most extreme minor Marxist faction of their day where they committed acts that not only killed a lot of other people but continously put themselves in great amount of personal danger. At any point of Stalin's bank-robbing career some local guard might have shot him. When the Bolshevik revolution was at the earliest stages, Lenin was certain that it would get crushed and all of them, most likely, would be shot; he danced when he learned that the Bolsheviks had lasted longer than the Paris Commune. Clearly there was something motivating them beyond just accumulation of power for power's stake.
Who?
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I've wrestled with similar questions. Life was simpler before I had kids! The following is something I wrote a few months ago around Christian's response to culture:
I have been struggling with what Christianity’s role should be in a West that becomes increasingly culturally incompatible with the traditional teachings of the Church. I have read Christ and Culture by Neihbur and To Change the World by Hunter. I have perused the writings that are at least adjacent to Rod Dreher’s Benedictine Option. When it comes to Christianity’s role in the broader culture, I see three typical approaches. First, what are we commanded to do. As Jesus summarized the law, “Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself”. And the dual creation/commission mandate: “Be fruitful and multiply. Go into all the world and make disciples”. Second, how did Jesus himself engage with the culture and politics of his time. Third, what is the strategic direction we should take to maximize our impact on culture.
I have listed these three in descending order of importance. God’s commands should trump our perception of how Jesus engaged with the world (this perception being tainted by our predispositions and bias). Jesus’ example (even through our tainted perception) should certainly be given more weight than mere strategic direction especially since political strategists would (and in fact did) recommend a vastly different approach than Jesus took.
Of course, interpretation plays a key role in all three of these approaches. The words “as yourself” and the meaning of “love” can be read very differently. Some modern protestants may see this as a command to help both Christians and non-Christians along a journey of self-actualization. Calvin may have seen this as a command to ensure orthodoxy and right thinking in the population he was responsible for, even if it meant burning heretics at the stake.
All three of the authors I mention above interpret the “commandments” approach similarly and in a manner compatible with orthodox Christianity. I will delve into my own perspective in more depth later in this essay.
Neihbur focuses more than the other authors on the depth and unexpectedness of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Reading through the Gospels while attempting to remove our cultural expectations of Jesus is eye-opening: Jesus is caustic, frustrated, exasperated, and something of a pre-internet troll. He overturns money tables in a one-man riot. He is repeatedly the target of lynch mobs. What Jesus did not do was set up an earthly kingdom or impose God’s law through state force despite continual temptations (and certainly the ability) to do so.
The strategic direction is where the authors have the most disagreement. Hunter thinks we need to change the culture by being present yet different. He points to the success of small groups of people in changing opinions and culture especially through the influence of elite thought. Elites command outsized soft power and a compelling narrative that can be adopted by the elite will do more than any other political or cultural power to make society more aligned with God’s good design. Hunter wrote in the early 2010s, a simpler time when elites were left-leaning but not despised by millions of Americans. Dreher probably would agree with Hunter on the power of elites, and this may be a reason he calls for withdrawal. The elites are lost, and thus the culture is lost. The best option is to at least shield our children from the culture.
Commentary on God’s commandments
If I was offered the opportunity to be dictator what would I do? Would I, like Jesus, decline the option? My scope of effort is local and transient while Jesus’ was eternal, so I could not directly appeal to “WWJD” in this case. Indeed, if part of my call as a Christian is to encourage societal flourishing I could not decline such an opportunity. What would be the form of government and the laws which I would enact? Certainly I would not presume to know more about a flourishing society than God, so I would have to set up something very similar to a theocracy following God’s laws.
The very concept of theocracy is anathema to modern sensibilities, both Christian and non-Christian. Part of the reason for this is that “love” is often conflated with, or is considered inclusive of, “acceptance” and “tolerance”. Hence a call to love our neighbors is interpreted as an acquiescence to moral pluralism. But note the fallacy here: we have let a fallen and hedonistic culture (footnote 1) define love for us, and then have allowed them to hold us to their standard of love. Broad acceptance of immoral behaviors have negative societal impacts, as one would expect from a culture that deviates so strongly from God’s laws and good purpose.
The creation mandate is to be fruitful and multiply. Christians can and should have a strong voice against declining birth rates. It is one of the few moral areas surrounding sex and procreation that Christians can demonstrably practice what we preach. Yet we don’t hold any stigma for childless couples, late marriages, and women who prioritize their careers over motherhood. Our society also has frustrated singles, historically high levels of depression, and a sense of unfulfillment and loss. Christians have adopted the cultural milieu in this area unthinkingly. By prizing and enabling individual self-actualization we have begat physical and emotional barrenness. In a sense, “loving our neighbors” has led us to not having neighbors.
The creation mandate by itself is sufficient (though not necessary, since the Bible repeatedly describes Godly behavior on these issues) to explain orthodox Christian positions on many issues. Cohabitation and homosexuality are implicitly anti-natalist. Abortion is explicitly anti-natalist. Infertility via “sex changes” is anti-natalist. A society that is accepting of these lifestyles is one that is embracing death rather than life.
The great commission extends the creation mandate to proclaiming the gospel. This commandment directly contradicts Dreher’s approach for removing ourselves from society: it is hard to proclaim the good news when not involved in the world.
Commentary on Jesus’ example
Jesus took issue with the legalism and hypocrisy of the religious leaders of his time. He also fraternized with those were outcast by society either due to moral failings or by their socio-economic status. Both John the Baptist and Jesus led populist, anti-elite movements that shook Palestine and its leaders to its core. This runs directly contrary to Hunter’s suggestion for Christian engagement with the cultural elite. A modern equivalent may be a tent revival at the Talladega Speedway. Importantly, this fraternization did not extend to accepting or tolerating immoral behavior but changing it. The women of loose morals altered their lifestyles after their encounters with Jesus.
One point in Dreher’s favor is the argument that paying taxes into a system that supports abortion and gay marriage makes us complicit in society’s evil. I am personally very sympathetic to this argument. Every time I hear a snide commentator on NPR denigrate everything I believe in I grind my teeth. My hard work paid for those who wish my destruction. Yet Jesus tells us to render to Caesar’s what is Caesar’s; paying taxes that went to pay the very soldiers who nailed him to a cross.
Commentary on our strategic approach
There are two additional concerns I have with Hunter’s approach to Christianity’s engagement with culture. The first is simply that “faithful presence” is exposing oneself to intense temptation to conform to the world (see footnote 2). I would put Tim Keller in the very small group of Christians with a successful “faithful presence” but even he does so while fully engaged in ministry. The second is that a “faithful presence” is not the tactical win that he thinks it is. The grassroots radicalism of the Black Power movement led to the introduction of those ideas into the academy, and has now spilled back into the culture as if from the “elite”, but the “elite” only paid attention due to the initial populism.
While I disagree with Dreher’s conclusion that we should sequester ourselves on grounds that it is being disobedient to Christ’s calling, it is also transparently a strategy of failure. In the best case scenario it is a Christian “Atlas Shrugged”; where we let Sodom and Gomorrah burn while we create a new Christian society from the ashes. Far more likely we will become another Amish, with their cultural irrelevancy.
My tentative suggestion
I think that faithful, populist, grassroots movements is the most compatible with God’s commandments, with Jesus’ ministry and example, and is close to an optimal strategic approach. Christians certainly need to be engaged with the elite as Hunter suggests , but the biggest impact will be through converting already existing elites. This will happen more naturally and organically as the elite inevitably contact and confront the societal undercurrents of such a Christian movement.
1
I am aware that not all Christians believe that culture generally, and our culture specifically, is diametrically opposed to Christianity. I believe all earthly culture is tainted by the fall, just as all individuals are tainted by the fall. That said, some earthly cultures align more closely with God’s design than others. A culture that is 80% Christian will be more aligned with God’s design than one that is 10% Christian. One of my key concerns is that cultures move slowly, and we adopt new aspects to a culture assuming that it retains the same relative alignment with God’s design even as it moves farther away in actuality.
2
I also find it unavoidable to notice how apparently self-serving the “faithful presence” proscription is to an academic like Hunter.
I think a huge issue is just how far it’s drifted from anything remotely like what the very early church taught. And I think therein lies the problem. Divorced from the roots, what remains is credalism— as long as you confess the Nicean Creed then all is well. I don’t think the apostles had such a thing in mind. A vague belief about a heavenly home, a thought that simply believing the “right” things about god— this isn’t what Jesus taught. All your heart, soul and mind isn’t “just pray to Jesus and do an altar call.”
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I agree with the vast majority of this, including the recommendation for grassroots first; I don't want to say where, but I've moved to such a community myself. But a few points jumped out at me in the post; speaking from a Catholic perspective...
Abortion isn't just anti-natalist, it's taking a life that we have no right to take. Natalism or no natalism, capital punishment or no capital punishment, a Catholic must be pro-innocent-life.
There's also the presence or absence of a particular vocation: some (at least, again, in the Catholic understanding) are called to be celibate priests or religious; others to marry, and so become parents; some have no particular vocation, only the general vocation to holiness. The call to chastity is obligatory outside the married state, while there's certainly such a thing as marital chastity as well; I've found that prayers to the Holy Spirit help enormously. The birth of children or not is in God's hands, but the only requirement for sexual relations within marriage is no reproductive impediment.
But the culture of death is certainly a painfully real thing.
Jesus was also a frequent dinner guest of the Pharisees and Sadducees, that is to say the religious and cultural elite; they regarded Him as someone whose views were worth engaging with, if only to refute.
Of course, engaging in dialogue with cultural elites requires elite willingness to engage in that dialogue. The Pharisees and Sadducees cared enough about Jesus' ideas to argue with Him, even to try to trap Him with preposterous thought experiments ("now, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be?"); I don't see that will to dialogue, at least not with conservative Christians, in the elites today.
Shaking a place and its leaders to its core is a vague term, but I would think that such a shaking would come to the attention of the political and military authorities, and I think there's evidence in the Gospels, especially in St. John's Gospel, that Jesus did not come to Pilate's attention that way over the course of His ministry. When the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to Pilate, they have to explain to him who He is; then Pilate's "interrogation of a rebel against the state" turns into "awkward but earnest theological discussion in his third language" and he breaks it off, declaring to the crowd that whatever kind of person Jesus is, He isn't the kind who needs to be crucified. (John 19:37-40) Pilate infamously loses his nerve after that, but "I find no guilt in him" isn't what one says of someone who one is already aware of and concerned about.
And it's not like Pilate had no experience with rebels. The Holy Land was a dangerous, restive place; the two "robbers" crucified with Jesus were Zealot rebels, and Wroe, following Josephus, mentions many other incidents when Pilate put down Jewish rebellions. So Pilate knew what a Jewish messianic rebel was like, and when he met Jesus, he concluded that He wasn't that kind of figure. Jesus shook the foundations of morality and personal conduct to their core, but He permitted changes to politics to come along at their own pace.
I see the point of this argument, but it's a tall order to avoid paying taxes. One can at least make charitable contributions to good causes, vote when one can, shop at good businesses, invest wisely (no iShares/Blackrock or other liberal investment firms) if one's in position to invest, and do what one can to fix the culture.
Eventually, a society ends up so far gone that one has an obligation to emigrate, or even to rebel if the other criteria for just war are met, but I think we still have a long ways to fall before then. Read Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People (the preface is eye-rolling, but it gets better fast when she engages with the core subject), and remember that canonized saints, like St. Maurice and St. George, fought in the Roman legions nonetheless. They didn't endorse the evils of classical civilization -- the slave women forced to be prostitutes, the open pedophilia, the witches starving children to death to grind up their livers for love potions (we can only hope, with Ruden, that this one never actually happened) -- but they also didn't pull on a turban and defect to Parthia. "Far enough gone that the obligation to leave kicks in" is pretty far gone, although I think there were Christians who emigrated to the openly Christian kingdoms of Ethiopia and Armenia.
But one part of being far enough gone is that one can no longer preach the Gospel. I think there was an obligation to escape Tokugawa Japan; I think the Tokugawa Shogunate thought that too, given all the effort they put into keeping Christians from escaping. I don't rule out the possibility that this obligation might kick in in the United States at some point, but I think we're still a long way from that.
I apologize for writing such an enormous post on a small number of minor disagreements! But I hope you find these subjects interesting. I certainly agree that we need grassroots first, rather than elite dialogue, given that the elites aren't in a very talkative mood right now. I'd add that there are areas that already have a sort of Benedict Option going, and those are worth moving to; if you're Catholic, any parish with a Traditional Latin Mass is likely to host such a community. A less atomized world is a good thing in general, and I think it's a strong path forward for the Faith.
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Jesus did not preach kin selection, but the opposite:
Luke 14:12-14 New International Version
Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid.
But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous
That’s a parable, which is interpreted non-literally. A lot of what Jesus says is non-literal, like “if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out”, and “go into your closet to pray”.
Jesus fathered no children. His most fervent followers, like monks and nuns took it literally and worked to help the poor and needy, neglecting to have families of their own.
Jesus and his followers didn't expect many generations to come after them, and humans to colonise the galaxy... they expected an apocalypse, and soon.
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I must confess that if you weren't such a long-standing user I would assume you were trolling for the exact response that Kulak just gave you so that you could post it to Twitter, SA, or wherever it is the wokies organize their lynch mobs these days.
But you are, so I will attempt to engage on the merits, and my first piece of advice would be to stop nuking the problem.
The situation is simultaneously much simpler than you imagine and much too big for our puny human minds to comprehend which has led you to seek systems and similarities where there are none. In short, I feel like you're falling into the same pattern that @FCfromSSC calls out in their reply to my post here.
Jesus (and by extension Christianity) can transcend tribal barriers precisely because he was/is a(the?) Messiah. If you're trying to "make sense" of Christianity without first internalizing the notions of a) Divine Grace as force at work in the world, and b) capital-M Mystery (IE the existence of things literally beyond human understanding) you can't help but have a bad time because these notions are fundamental to Christianity.
Was Jesus a wise teacher? Yes.
Was Jesus an insane apocalyptic radical? also Yes.
It is only our modern social hang-ups that suggest that these two statements in anyway contradict each other or that either is incompatible with him being the son of G-d.
So with that out of the way, let me now address the elephant in the room.
You say you are a Christian, and you say that a Christian community is the one in which you wish to raise your children. I may be hopelessly biased on this topic but I think that speaks well of you. At the same time, I feel compelled to ask; What are we as Christians admonished to do?
Note that he says "neighbor" without qualification. There is no, "as long as he has the same skin color" or "is of the same social class" as you. And as Jesus makes clear in the parable of the Good Samaritan he's not even talking about members of the same tribe/culture. He's talking about literal neighbors IE the people around you.
With that made clear, now ask yourself what did Hitler and the rest of the Nazi fail to do? (aside from than win their war)
This scene is from Man In the High Castle is from an alternate history where the Nazi's win because the US went Fascist. You said you're autistic so it is possible that this scene might not have the same effect on you as it does on someone like myself, but I find it deeply creepy, disturbing, and an apt illustration of the truly dark and Satanic forces at that operate under the veneer of "socialism".
The Lord lays before us life and death, blessings and curses, and tells us to choose. The Nazis chose death and had death wrought upon them, by those they viewed as lesser. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
The general consensus here on theMotte is in favor "bio-determinism" not a week goes by in which someone will argue that "culture doesn't matter" or that it is "down stream" of politics or biology, but I remain unconvinced. Much is made of the US's military and industrial superiority in WWII, and I would ask how much of that superiority was a result of a culture where in a man could sincerely sing songs like Battle Hymn of the Republic and Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition without a hint of irony? I suspect the anser is, a lot more than any rationalist or progressive would like to imagine.
In the meantime @netstack's reply is more succinct and likely closer to the capital-T Truth than mine.
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Hitler has to be despised... for the very reasons you cite.
In any other era he'd be considered a great hero of his nation.
The Greeks, Romans, Mongols, hell the Indians, Arabs, Thais, and Ukrainians today all see him as a great hero of history. You can buy management books in many third world countries that proport to teach "Hitler's secrets of management".
There is very VERY little Hitler did that was not what great tribal leaders did for 99% of human history, only scaled up and industrialized... His worst crimes are 1 to 1 what Caesar did to the Celts, Alexander to Thebes, Agamemnon to Troy, Lincoln to the Natives... Indeed Hitler often compared himself to the great American presidents and his plans for the east to America's settlement of the west.
He was a great chieftain proposing to save his tribe by forcing out and crushing their rivalled neighboring tribes... he is analogous to Saladin, Jean D'arc, Geronimo, Scipio Africanus, Hannibal, Napoleon...
He is exactly what western civilization has always defined and expected a great hero of history to be.
Thus everyone who defines themselves by their "anti-fascism" inevitably winds up denouncing western civilization itself... which really can be expanded to just human civilization back to the earliest tribal level (since again there isn't anything uniquely western or even modern in what Hitler did)
Hell look at Fiction... Aragorn in Lord of the Rings basically did what Hitler... United the various factions of middle-earth through a combination of alliance building, inspiration, and threats in the case of the Dunharrow... Defeated the foreign force that was encroaching on the lands of his people... and he went to the black gates and (with the help of hobbit intervention (maybe analogous to eastern European axis factions?)) wiped out the Mordorian civilization and the orcish race to the last.
By contrast the great communist leaders were plagues upon their own nations. Mao sacrificed tens of millions more Chinese people for the sake of his own twist vision than he ever sacrificed foreigners for the sake of the Chinese. Likewise Lenin and Stalin were nightmares for Russia and the slavic peoples.
There a book "They Thought They Were Free" about Germans living under the Nazis and how many people were happy to buy into it, and you had to actually look to notice the disturbing aspects of what Germany was becoming... (For example for most of the 30s the concentration camps held fewer people per capita than American mass incarceration)... no one is ever going to write a "They Thought They Were Free" about the early Soviet Union, hell you can read accounts by figures like Solzhenitsyn and they are deeply pained by just how hard it is to convey that NOTHING was comparable to a free society.
Ayn Rand gave a speech to congress about the Soviets in the 50s and a congressman thought she was being ridiculous "Do families not gather for holiday dinners in the Soviet Union?" and Rand struggled to express how even that was a paranoid affair that merely mentioning politics or a disagreement at dinner could result in an uncle or niece, or even grandparent informing and destroying you and a good chunk of your family.
And Rand and Solzhenitsyn were RUSSIANS! They were the people at the heart of Soviet empire, they weren't some despised conquered peripheral people the state wanted gone... you have to look at Ukraine and Holomodor to see how they treated them... there is no Nazi Equivalent to Holomodor. No people they slayed by the millions in the midst of a decade plus of peace... Horrific as the Holocaust was... 95% of it happened during a world war a time when even America and Britain had concentration camps and killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands, Holomodor, the Great Leap Forward these were done as matters of policy without external pressure or even the fig leaf that these would be just part of the millions already being killed by the realities of scarcity and human conflict.
But our elite justify their multi-ethnic empires and right to plunder the democratic majorities they're supposed to be beholden to... with the same moral language as the Soviets... Its very convenient when you rule "For the betterment of mankind" or for "the worst off" because you can always justify taking from someone who has something, either their property or their liberty, in the name the worst off... Does it ever get around to benefiting the poor or the destitute or the unwashed masses of the working class? Well that's the convenient part, they're poor and disempowered, therefore they aren't really positioned to do an accounting of what's taken from the productive segments of humanity in their name, and notice somehow 50 or even 90% of it is lost in transit. Their loyalty can be bought for peanuts, not even their loyalty, the loyalty of the thugs amongst them, and then any tall plant can be harvested in their name... such that all power concentrates in the hands of the, self appointed, "defenders of the poor". And then when this ruling elite wants to sacrifice the poor... well they can always withhold in the name of some more deserving, more desitute, more moral, impoverished group somewhere...
It is a system for not for benefiting the marginalized at the expense of the established, but to crush all rivalled established social power so that everyone will be marginalized and unable to resist the state.
There is a very good reason in the Western Democratic nations where society and the majority are supposed to control and make the government subserviently to them, the governing class really wants you to admire unelected dictators who crushed social institutions and impoverished the majority of their nation even when they killed hundreds of millions in peacetime, and really REALLY wants you to hate an elected leader who rallied social institutions and the majority to benefit themselves at the expense of the minority, who only killed tens of millions in wartime.
No they don't. It's utter bullshit. Yes, I know all the supposed "examples" of some Ukrainian decades ago used some symbols that triggered somebody because it looked like Nazi estetics. And there are probably Nazis (and idiots) in Ukraine, just as they are in any other place. But no, "Ukrainians" - in any sane meaning of generalizing this term - do not see Hitler as a great hero of anything. That's just plain lie.
Just as Hitler as a plague to his. I took Germany from being the most civilized and admired culture of the Western world to the most despised, he caused it to be split up - just recently after uniting, he completely destroyed the economy of course, he made a huge way into destroying the scientific potential and supply his enemy with the best and brightest minds of Europe - who could be all working for him if he weren't such a complete moron, half of his country were under Communists for half a century due to him, he created the situation which made it impossible for Germans to have political freedoms even now, and he also murdered a lot of Germans, as any totalitarians regime does. If Chinese communists were a "plague" on their country, Hitler was ten plagues on his - combined with all the evils he inflicted on the rest of the world.
If you think Western Democracy is just the rule of the majority, you understand very little about how Western Democracy is supposed to work. Majority is stupid. Majority is fickle. Majority is hateful and manipulable. All the work the founders of the US did, designing this complex system, was because they didn't want it to be just the majority.
For a totalitarian dictatorship, it's always wartime. If it's not today, it's certainly will be tomorrow. And of course, the totalitarian dictatorship kills as much as they can, at any time, including their own citizens - which happened in Germany too. The willful historical ignorance - especially when we're not talking about the times where barely a handful of sources survived but about times where the witnesses are still alive or were alive recently, which are extensively documented - is astonishing. But I guess, not very surprising.
Enthusiastic Ukranian collaboration with Germany during the war is well-documented and not exaggerated. It's not merely a matter of symbols being appropriated decades after the fact, there's a real historical legacy. If anything, the extent of Ukranian collaboration with Germany is understated because the fact the Germans fielded one of the largest foreign volunteer armies in history, composed primarily of Slavs who were Soviet Citizens, is not exactly compatible with the prevailing WWII narrative.
It would be more properly described as Galician collaboration rather than Ukrainian collaboration. The inhabitants of left-bank Ukraine had about as much to do with it as Serbs did with the war crimes of the Croat Ustaše.
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Can you explain this comment?
Britain invented the concentration camp during the Boer war and killed 10s of thousands during it via starvation, Canada and US used concentration camps for forced labour during ww1 and ww2, and the allies firebombed purely civilian cities killing hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands more during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasagi, often explicitly "To break the will" of the civilians being bombed.
it takes really special pleading to argue the Nazis were uniquely evil and not simply on the spectrum somewhere between the warcrimes and mass murders of the west and the peacetime genocides of the communists.
Nazi concentration camps (what they called Konzentrationslager) were quite a bit different from what their contemporaries called "concentration camps." Those were effectively large prison camps for holding civilian populations, like Japanese internment in the US and Canada. Nazi Konzentrationslager on the other hand was a slave labour camp where you were worked to death. Death was the ultimate goal of your stay there. The only reason they aren't called "death camps" is because the Nazis also built Vernichtungslager where they killed people within hours of arrival.
Japanese Americans interned in Canada and the US were used as forced labour in ww2, as were interned Ukrainians in Canada in ww1.
If you want to see a society that sat idly by whilst minorities were stripped of their liberties, forced into camps, and enslaved, .merely look at your own.
And if you think the interned Japanese would have survived if the war had turned and the Japanese started landing in California, or food shortages started hitting the American homeland... you have far more faith in the US and Canadian governments than I do.
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't "purely civilian cities" - not likely any major cities in Japan were, they were completely mobilized for war. Hiroshima had army and naval headquarters, was key military supply depot, military assembly point and had extensive war industry (which, btw, used slave labour). Same for Nagasaki.
It really takes a special... I don't even know what, to jump from "Nazis were not unique, there were other evil people in history" to "Hitler is an example of a hero of Western civilization". Any word that I can fish out doesn't even start to cover how boneheaded this jump is.
By that standard New York or Boston would have been legitimate targets if the Nazis or Japanese had gotten the bomb first. Also "purely civilian cities" was a reference to the firebombings of Europe... in which yes many targets were almost wholly indefensible from any military perspective.
"hero of western civilization" if you're going to use quotation marks actually fucking quote me. I did not say Hitler was a hero of western civilization, I said he was a figure that for most of western history would be considered a "Hero of his nation" I even gave helpful examples of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Ceasar, Hannibal, and Lincoln. All war criminals responcible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands if not millions, who never the less are venerated by their nationalities, and loathed by anyone who takes a second to remember the genocides they committed (ask a Native American about Lincoln)
One could add the reverence modern Romanians have for Vlad Tepest or Mongolians for Genghis Khan.
The fact that you have juvenile Ahistorical definition of "Hero" does not change the fact the term used correctly absolutely would be applied to Hitler by anyone prior to 1914. and the vast majority of people on planet earth (south asians, Middle easterners, Latin Americans, Chinese) AFTER even 1945.
There are billions of people around the world right now dreaming some Hitlerian figure will rise and lead their glorious historied but somehow wronged... faith, ethnicity, tribe, nationality etc. to some final victory over their hated rival tribe... Indians and Pakistanis dream of this, Arabs and Palestinians dream of this... hell Peruvians and Chileans dream of this.
Hell the Chinese and Russians actually still STILL have personality cults and reverence for Mao and Stalin! As great national leaders who fought for Chinese or Russian nationality against the hated foreigner, and they both killed vastly more than Hitler, and their victims were disproportionately their own people.
Hilter is not some exception. He's the rule.
As far as national heroes go he's worse than Wellington, Lincoln, or Hannibal, but still better than Stalin, Mao or Genghis Khan... and per capita probably comparable to Caesar, or Alexander (who genocided the celts, and a whole list of cities respectively)
If the Nazis did, these cities would be (see what they did to Britain). I don't see what "legitimate" does here - nothing Nazis did was "legitimate", it would be just another crime they committed, among many.
And you are the only one who did so - no actual nation ever proclaimed anything like that, so the responsibility for such proclamation is squarely on you. You are either committing libel, or engaging in wishful thinking. Neither of these options is good.
Lincoln is not venerated for what he did to Native Americans. I am amused that you think such a simple trick is going to work.
It's Tepesh, if you want to transcribe, but here you're confusing a mythical cultural figure with historical prototype. Also, I must notice here how far back you have to reach to support your point even with most flimsy and fictitious examples. Hitler didn't live in 15th century.
First - and most important - morality is not a majority vote. If a billion people think genocide is just fine, it doesn't make it fine. Second, you claimed Hitler would be a hero in Western civilization, not it India or China or Bangladesh.
So they do. I don't see how it makes your argument any better. It's like trying to acquit a murdered by pointing out there are other murderers. Yes, there are. So?
Not sure about China - it's really hard to understand what's going on there with all censorship and without knowing the language - but in Russia not many revere Stalin, mostly old farts whose reverence to Stalin is best described by a Russian expression "in Stalin's times, my dick was hard" and young idiots in search of most idiotic figure to worship to show they are different.
Stalin never fought for "Russian nationality", whatever that could mean. In fact, under Stalin, for mentioning something like that you'd probably be shot (after being tortured for a week or two to name the names of those people who gave you these ideas and those you shared them with) - there was only one nationality under Stalin, "Soviet people". And he never fought for them, either - they fought (and died, in millions) for him. That's the only was it worked.
Could very well be true, both Mao and Stalin were one of the evilest people ever born. I fail to see how it gets us closer to any point of yours, though. It's not even "tu quoque", it's "ille quoque" - what it is supposed to prove?
Rule of what? That there are evil people? Sure. He is a representative of the rule evil people exist, and he is an exceptionally evil - though, possibly, not uniquely evil - example of it.
Better for what?
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Look, I get that as someone who bristles at the very concept of nations you have an ideological reason for denying and/or ignoring the distinction between resisting a foreign invader (Scipio, Saladin, and Joan of Arc) and invading others (Napolean, and Hitler) as it supports your broader position on the evils of civilization, but what's the old line? Never go full
retardStormfront.I can't say I'm surprised, but I am a bit disappointed. I thought you were smarter than this.
@FiveHourMarathon has the truth for anyone who cares to read it. The Third Reich was despised by it's contemporaries above and beyond the other enemies of the West for the same reason traitors and heretics are always hated more than infidels. They were expected to know better.
How was Saladin, a Kurd from Northern Iraq, defending his own nation when he launched a war against a Kingdom that had existed in various states of peace and war for 100 years.
By that Standard Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi of ISIS was merely resisting the crusader infidel when he promised to drive the Israelis into the sea and Unite the arab world under his Caliphate... after all the state of Israel is now younger than the Kingdom of Jerusalem was when Saladin reconquered it.
This is the problem with trying to base your morality around "attacker vs defender" EVERYONE HAS DIFFERENT CLAIMS. Hell when Hitler invaded Poland to recapture Danzig and the Prussian homeland it had only been separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles for 21 years!
in the conflciting claims of European nationalities and nations you are never going to carve out some clear distinction as to who's claims are legitimate and who's aren't... because they're imaginary ethical Ideas... Why are Saladin's claims 100 years after a kingdom has formed more legitimate than the crusaders claims 100 years earlier 300 years after Islam conquered the holy lands from the Christian/Jewish Kingdoms that reigned there before hand?
Why is Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi's claims to reclaim the holy land 70 years after the formation of Israel then completely out of the question? Why is it Russia fighting a war to try and recapture Poland in 1918-1921 the very years Poland declares independence considered worng, but complex enough that Brittian and France don't declare war or intervene on behalf of the Poles... but 18 years later Germany, actually setting out to recapture German speaking lands that had always been under German or Prussian rule, somehow demands a WORLD WAR to stop?
STOP PRETENDING YOU HAVE PRINCIPLES. You have rationalizations. You're just like every other person in human history.
You don't have compressive fully complete theory of just war that somehow magically supports all the wars on the side you like and denounces all the wars on the side you don't, You have ingroups and outgroups.
you think its good Saladin Reconquered the kingdom of Juerusalem 100 years later, because you don't like the Crusader Kingdom. You think its bad Al Baghdadi declared he wanted to do the same thing with Israel merely 70 years after because you support Isreal.
In ww2 the US and Brittain invaded or annexed dozens of countries that were otherwise neutral, and had done nothing aggressive, because they held some strategic value, nothing more.
Iceland was invaded by Britain, Ireland was nearly invaded Britain. Should the Icelandic people have fought to the knife, landed in Scotland, firebombed London, and set about a decade of De-Churchill-fication?
Every war. Every fucking one... Is WW1. Its all stronger powers positioning whilst weaker powers get fucked, or through extraordinary obstinance and violence, manage to carve out some nationalist vision for themselves.
Some are vastly more brutal, some more temperate... but to pretend there's some magical principle that entitles America to decide the fate of Poland, or some Kurd from northern Iraq Jerusalem in the 12th century, but not a Sunni from southern Iraq the fate of Jerusalem the in the 21st... its laughable.
You claim to be such a Hobbesian, actually read him! Read his theory of international relations and justice between kingdoms and nations.
Hobbes holds no such justice can exist, because nations, knigdoms, and princes are inherently in the state nature against one another... there is not Just or unjust aggression or defense... For no one is ever going to agree with eachother who's claims are legitimate and what counts as aggression, and what's more no lawful sovereign exists between separate nations kingdoms, and princes... or they would not be separate nations kingdoms, and princes... There is only noble or Ignoble conduct within the contest, and observations of what regulating rituals nations come observe between each other in inherently unstable equilibria.
Leaders, if they are to be judged, are to be judged by body-count and violence committed vs. avoided. Not some Laughable Idea that we can somehow disentagle why Hitler invading Poland was unjustified and demanded a World War... but Stalin invading Poland 2 weeks later did not, or that somehow Germany is not entitled to militarily intervene on its ancestral homeland right on its border 100kms from berlin... but DC is entitled to Invade Iraq 10'000 kms away.
As I said in the other thread, you are free to believe that things like a shared religion, shared philosophy, shared culture, or even shared personal affinity are no basis for social coordination. But the Followers of Saladin and Joan D' Arc are under no obligation to abide by your preferences. In short I see you much the same way as I see my neighbor expecting her cat not to walk through an open door. You're appealing to a system and a consensus that does not exist.
You say "stop pretending to have principles" but what do you even think that means? I know what I think "having principals" means but I want to know what you think it means because it seems clear to me from posts like this one that we are not talking about the same thing.
Leaders can ultimately only be judged by two people, G-d and the led. What you see as a contradiction I see as the great tragedy of the 20th century is the fact that we (the West) failed to crush the Stalinists as thoroughly as we crushed their allies the Hitlerites. WWII started because socialists invaded Poland and it should not have been allowed to end before Poland was free and the socialists (be they nationalist or soviet) had been defeated.
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No. This entire diatribe is either in bad faith or entirely incorrect, because it cantilevers itself out into infinity on an assumption that you entirely fail to justify:
That Hitler, a man once arrested for gay prostitution who died without issue despite ample opportunities, was filled with familial feeling and accurately assessed his kinship in and out groups.
Your rhetorical opponents, rather than engaging in elaborate mental gymnastics about how other people's children are more important than their own, simply feel that if der Fuhrer was the father of his nation, then his children included German Jews.
If we're looking at it from a genetic perspective, I will take any bet that we can find a German Jew more closely blood related to Hitler (or Himmler or Goebbels or whichever German Nazi one chooses) than a random Sudetenland German.
If we're looking at it from a "Father of the Nation" perspective, than your argument depends on the unproved premise that Jews were not part of the body politic, that German Jews who had lived in Germany for centuries, who had served in the Great War, were not Germans, they were foreigners.
Hitler was not a father who looked out for his children, valuing them above the children of others. Hitler was a father who valued some of his children above others, a father of five who loved four and murdered the fifth because the child came out with a different hair color. At best, even accepting racial unity arguments, he was a stepfather who murdered his stepchild. A father is obligated to love value and protect all his children.
Citation needed. Wikipedia says there was "no evidence that he engaged in homosexual behaviour". The article cites some allegations, all of which are apparently discredited.
There are arrest records that indicate he was arrested in Vienna on charges of male prostitution. It is equally likely/possible that charge was simply used for vagrancy rather than for actual prostitution, hence why I said charged with rather than committed.
Where did you hear this? Because googling "Hitler arrested" or "Hitler arrested Vienna" doesn't bring up anything relevant.
Just scanning Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler (which is what usually gets thrown around as the most "complete" English-language text) and there's no mention of it. Lots of talk about how Hitler was scared and disgusted by prostitution and how he (and other contemporaries) linked it in his mind with Judaism, but certainly nothing about an arrest for male prostitution. Kershaw generally dismisses sexual rumours about Hitler as "little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise, and innuendo, often spiced up by Hitler’s political enemies."
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and who runs Wikipedia?
Okay, this time you need to speak plainly because I genuinely don't understand what you are trying to say here. Who exactly are you suggesting is trying to erase evidence of Hitler's homosexuality on Wikipedia? Neo-Nazis? Hitler fans? The LGBQT lobby? I admit I've never read a biography of Hitler and am not familiar with claims of homosexual prostitution, but if you're gonna say "Wikipedia is lying" could you at least wave cogently in the direction of evidence?
Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people and in the case of Wikipedia insane members of the activist class who have a vested political instance in emphasizing what little distance there is between themselves and their closest ideological cousins.
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It would seem to be Hitler, scrubbing articles of content that makes him look bad. ;)
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I think the toddler running towards the street example is categorically different to donating to African kids. The first example is understood to be one-off. It isn’t happening even monthly and if it is then there will be discussions with the parents and probably the authorities.
The African kid happens every minute.
The first requires you to sacrifice very little to save a life. The second requires you to sacrifice most of your life.
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I would suggest that, if you actually believe this and are not simply trolling, that you might have an empathy problem.
Re why Hitler is seen as the ultimate evil, it is probably because pictures like this were in newspapers across the country. Were others, such as the Japanese, and the Soviets, just as bad? Perhaps. But the pictures were not as available. And, of course, Germans were civilized -- the home of Goethe and Beethoven -- and Christian, not primitive heathens or Godless communists, of which no better could be expected.
Finally, this idea that Hitler was doing what he felt was best for his "children" does not get you very far. Yes, it is moral for me to give a scrap of bread to my starving children rather than to a starving child who is a stranger. But that says nothing about whether I can kill a stranger to feed his flesh to my children, especially if my children are not, in fact, starving, which of course the German people were not.
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This 100%! After the war, Douglas MacArthur remarked to a reporter that Germany's crimes were worse than Japan's, because the same offense was much worse when it was committed by a man of mature years than by a child of twelve. The Japanese didn't like that much (discussed in John W. Dower's Embracing Defeat), but it was certainly a part of the Western Allies' thinking.
Was the thinking (by MacArthur, and/or by the general Western Allies) that Japanese civilization as a whole was a much younger or less developed/more recently modernized culture than Germany, or that the people of Japan were inferior to the German people by such a degree that they were characterized as 12 year olds compared with Europeans?
Here are MacArthur's remarks, from Embracing Defeat pages 550-51:
These remarks were from testimony to the US Senate on 5/5/1951, at the end of 3 days of hearings (the MacArthur testimony begun 5/3/1951; full text at https://www.jstor.org/stable/45307951 ). MacArthur actually meant them as a compliment; he believed that Japan could go on to be a valuable American military ally, while Germany would always be an enemy, and would certainly rearm and start a new world war if the US occupation ever eased up. (In fairness to MacArthur, he had the German rearmaments against Napoleon and between the wars as precedent; no one imagined at the time that the Germans would turn into peaceniks.)
These remarks touched a raw nerve in Japan; Asahi Shimbun had described the Japanese as MacArthur's children in an emotional farewell editorial on 4/12/51, but it's one thing to say that yourself, quite another to have someone else say it of you. There was even a joint advertisement by a group of Japanese manufacturers titled "We Are Not Twelve-Year-Olds!! -- Japanese Manufactures Admired by the World!"
Prior to these remarks, there had been plans to give MacArthur an honorary citizenship, and to build him a memorial in Tokyo; afterwards, those proposals were quietly shelved.
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Yes, something that I feel is missing from a lot of the anti-nationalist narratives like those of Kulak and the OP is that it is only natural/rational to hold a traitor and/or heretic in lower regard than an infidel or otherwise honorable foe.
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Details aside (the situation of Germany between the wars wasn't as dire, your portrayal is very hyperbolic), I believe you are onto something with your observation.
It's also not that original - that European civilization doesn't really want to live, has lost confidence and vitality has been said many times before.
I believe that's secondary to the main cause of his really bad rep which is IMO this:
-) The suffering caused by Hitler was severe and in some cases (death camps) novel.
-) his unabashed nationalism means he doesn't even have Lenin's / Stalin's / Mao's etc 'fig leaf' of "I'm just building utopia bro".
To sum it up: he has no prestigious apologists, he wasn't deceptive about his intentions (german self-interest) and thus he is seen as a monster, while people who plotted world conquest but cloaked it in "utopia" are still often seen as heroes.
Also:
That's pretty much the logic national socialists used when it came to economic policy, hunger plans etc. (I recently read a book on the economic aspects of WW2)
The only hope for Germany to retain sovereignty into future lay in striking fast and conquering the entirety of Europe, including the Soviet Union.
Only then it'd have the food, the minerals and the industrial base to be competitive to the US. A theoretical alliance would have worked too, but it was simply not possible due to WW1, etc.
Also, Sneerclub is going to have a collective orgasm no doubt about your post. It has everything - religious belief, autism, rational behavior, Hitler.
It's only flaw is that it's too long.
I really don't get why Sneerclub still lives rent-free in some residents' heads even after getting off Reddit.
It's striking. They're mostly quite intelligent people but they are willingly, consciously into ideological circle-jerking and proud of it.
It's perverse and unforgettable.
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Agreed... its a putrid venue of the worst people engaging in the worst sort of intellectual cowardice and then rallying around to try and tear down anything interesting that might crop up. The very caricature of a gathering of last men... all reassuring each other something that questions their beliefs need not be debated, but mocked... bugmen reassuring themselves they can "sneer" at works and Ideas they themselves could not produce. That their unoriginality is principle, their compliance and cowardice: virtue.
every so often I check sneerclub... whatever they mock tends to be a "best of" of interesting takes and ideas.
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I don't know that that is quite accurate. See here. It is more that Hitler's utopia was an exclusive, zero-sum one, whereas the utopias promised by Mao and Lenin were theoretically universal.
I mean, communist societies were theoretically universal in the same way that Iran is theoretically tolerant of gay people because it gives them the option of getting a sex-change surgery instead of being executed for sodomy. Social class may seem like a category less intrinsic to the individual than race, but as far as adults are concerned I would argue that isn't so, and even to the extent that it was that in some cases liquidation of class enemies was even worse than genocide of particular ethnic groups because there was no clear stopping point and it was easier to keep throwing people into the meat grinder for increasingly arbitrary reasons e.g. wearing glasses in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
Not the societies.We are talking about the conceptions of utopia.
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Mao's and Stalin's utopias were "theoretically universal" in the exact same way that Hitler's utopia was: the future infinite population would be "good people", the "bad people" having all been exterminated.
...
The idea that some portion of the population were innately bad and thus needed to be liquidated was baked into the cake long, long before Stalin, and none of the revolutionaries were at all shy about saying so. These ideas go all the way back past Marx to the French Revolution, and arguably straight to Rousseau and the other founders of the Enlightenment.
The Marxist utopia -- a classless, and hence conflict-free, society was one which was theoretically available to people everywhere. The Nazi utopia was one which was available only to Germans, or perhaps Aryans.
But for Marxists, the elimination of counter-revolutionaries was a means to achieving the utopia, while for Nazis, the elimination of various undesirables was a component of utopia.
Note that I am not saying that one was "better" than the other, but rather that both aimed at achieving a utopia, but their visions of utopia differed.
The implication of your phrasing is that Marxists offered a Utopia for "people" generally, while the nazis restricted their utopia to a specific subset of people. But in fact, the Marxists did not offer a Utopia for "people" generally, but for a specific subset of people. People who did not belong to that subset were to be exterminated without mercy, a policy they stated quite clearly and followed through on with great enthusiasm.
There is no meaningful distinction between these two statements. They are isomorphic, and you can reverse them with no loss in accuracy or meaning: For marxists, the elimination of [bad people] was a component of Utopia, while for Nazis, the elimination of [bad people] was a means of achieving the Utopia.
Utopia being a thing that cannot actually exist, the specific visions of that imaginary thing don't seem terribly relevant. That being said, it's not obvious to me that the differences between their visions were actually significant. They both thought that they would kill all the bad people, and then they'd win forever and everything would be just the best for them and all the good people under them.
Huh? Of course there is a meaningful distinction: My version is factually accurate, and your version is not. The Nazi utopia is defined as one which only Aryans survive, or at least that non-Aryans are subservient. The Marxist utopia of a perfect equal and conflict-free society is not defined as one in which only one group of people exist, nor one in which one group oppresses the other.
Except that the "subset" re the Marxists was those who refused to get with the program. As noted by Weitz, one central assumption of the Marxist utopian project was the malleability of persons, but "[w]hen some population groups were perceived to be particularly recalcitrant, particularly resistant to the siren song of socialism, especially in the context of the huge social upheavals of the 1930s and the immense danger posed by the German invasion in the 1940s, the ideological belief in the malleability of human beings weakened and sometimes utterly collapsed." Hence, no group was defined as being outside the utopian project," in obvious contrast to the Nazi utopian project.
But, at this point, you are refuting your initial claim, and I am supporting it (which, if you look back, I largely did all along) You said: "his unabashed nationalism means he doesn't even have Lenin's / Stalin's / Mao's etc 'fig leaf' of 'I'm just building utopia bro'". I merely pointed out that Hitler had a utopian vision as well, but, as you correctly pointed out, his "unabashed nationalism" made it a German (or Aryan)-specific utopia. But now you are saying that they all had utopian visions, but the differences are irrelevant? That implies that your initial claim was incorrect, but it wasn't. It simply included a minor misstatement.
However it is defined, my ancestors under Bolshevik rule had to conceal their origins to avoid either severe multigenerational social sanction or death, in the exact manner that Jews might have tried to conceal their non-Aryan background under Nazi rule. Class can be a heritable defect in the actualized Marxist worldview. You are inventing a specious distinction which @FCfromSSC is correctly pointing out.
(Of course Nazis could also argue that 14/88 does not imply any general extermination or oppression of people of other races, and indeed some variants of Nazism say that nations/races, being intrinsically of equal external worth, ought to be merely separated to preserve their internal supremacy of whatever; which only strengthens the analogy).
Yes, everyone knows about Bolshevik behavior towards people with bad class background; the same was true in Maoist China
But, again, that is a claim about behavior, not about the nature of the two visions of utopia. Let's go back to the OP's original point:
In other words, OP is offering a hypothesis re why their reputations are different, even though their behavior was similar. So, pointing out that their behavior was the same in practice doesn't add anything; it is premise behind the phenomenon under discussion.
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Marx and his disciples absolutely believed that there was a future where only one group of people existed. This group had specific, definable characteristics, and people who lacked these characteristics were to be eliminated by various means, one the major means being mass murder.
Marxists had "class" enemies, and Nazis had "race" enemies. Class and Race are circles drawn around different sets of immutable characteristics, but they are both circles drawn around sets of immutable characteristics, and for people inside the circle, there was no room in the dogma for "getting on board". Who they were made them a target for murder. I am arguing that it is the drawing of such circles that is objectionable, not which specific features these circles capture. This is the essential nature of what both groups did, and this is why what makes them the same is vastly more important than what made them different.
And sure, Lenin walks it back a bit, in that specific instance, for reasons of perceived practicality:
...But Latsis' description is more accurate to how the Bolsheviks, including Lenin himself actually operated. They really did kill people en masse for their real or imagined immutable characteristics, from the beginning and for decades after. Lenin and Trotsky and the other "good" Bolsheviks killed millions, and then Stalin killed millions more, including a lot of his former allies. It worked the same way in Cambodia. I'm not entirely sure whether Mao went lighter on the direct killing and made up for it with incompetence and indifference, or if the incompetence and indifference just swamp the still-considerable killing, but it's probably some combination of the two.
Marx himself does not appear to believe that conversion was possible for class enemies. He did not even believe that true conversion was possible for class friends. He believed that the successful revolution would shape from birth new people, better people, who would inherit a better world once the current, intractably-flawed revolutionaries died off. Meanwhile, class enemies would never be capable of cooperating or conforming to the regime, and would have to be ruthlessly suppressed, eliminated, and at best allowed to quietly die off before that new world could be created.
...And of course the model he drew from was the French Revolution, which itself was predicated on mass murder. And of course, this is how his followers understood his theories, and this is how they implemented them. They actually did kill people indiscriminately, in massive numbers, due to immutable or poorly-defined characteristics.
Sorry, different poster, and I do indeed refute that claim. The differences between them are not significant, there is no fig leaf. They are the same problem, expressing itself in the same way, and the differences are irrelevant surface detail.
Only in the sense that all differences between groups would be erased, so that what once was several groups is ultimately one. Very different from the Nazi vision.
Ok, but then I am not sure if we are disagreeing because I dont know what your position is re OP's claim that Nazism's nationalist bent is what explains the differential response thereto.
The Marxist intent was that "differences between groups" was to be eliminated by eliminating several of the different groups, through intentional mass-murder of some of those groups, and ruthless oppression of others. That does not seem very different from the Nazis. In fact, it seems like an exact match to the generalization of the Nazi problem: it's a bad idea to try to make a better world by killing all the "bad people".
People treat them differently because they sympathize with the way the Marxists picked their victims, or because sympathizers lied to them about the reality of what actually happened. The latter is obviously less objectionable than the former, but neither is to be admired.
I disagree with it. It's not the nationalist bent that does it. People treat communists and nazis differently because we sent free tanks, guns and gasoline to Communists, and firebombed nazi cities. We did those things because Communists had significant penetration into our social and political systems, and Nazis did not. The details of the ideologies are largely irrelevant.
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Well the whole point of the war was to get all Germans within a single country (undoing the Polish Corridor and securing Danzig for example) and to make Germany a superpower like America. Hitler named his train America, he really wanted a huge expanse of land so Germany could be resource secure. This was to be found in Eastern Europe. Then he could greatly increase the number of Germans with pro-natal policies. There was also the importance of battling Judeo-Bolshevism, which Stalin had largely dealt with in Russia ironically. And there was also the strategic conflict with Stalin, who was doing much the same thing as Hitler, taking huge swathes of land and building a gigantic war machine.
A more apt metaphor is shooting your neighbour (who was given custody of your child by court order and has a long history of rivalry) and taking his house, plus waging urban war with the self-appointed police who ruled against you. And also shooting another neighbour because he's a threat and has lots of money you want. Yet this doesn't really cover what happened.
Metaphor breaks down when we try to simplify geopolitics. It cannot be expressed outside itself.
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You got me to register for TheMotte, after long-time lurking! I'll provide what I think on these matters, speaking as a Catholic.
First, the religious side of things:
I've always heard that if you're giving 10% of your pre-tax income, half to the Church and half to charities of your choosing, your charitable duty has been totally discharged. Less than that, I've been advised by priests, won't necessarily damn you either; 10% is a lot, especially in a world where we (or at least I) also lose about 30% of pre-tax income for taxes, which do include support for the poor. They generally recommend working your way up to 10%, and they realize that it's a tall order.
Giving more than that is a good deed but not a requirement. As a married father, you have a clear personal vocation and a duty to fulfill it; you have an active duty, the same duty that a priest or a monk has to the duties of his station in life, to do what can be done without sin (especially without mortal sin) to advance and defend your children, and to raise them virtuously.
Beauty is of course hardly evil either, and beautiful, well-made goods are often cheaper to own in the long run. Dressing neatly and cleanly is an act of respect for yourself and those around you; if it's a necessity for your job, it further rises to the level of a duty to be fulfilled.
Look for thrift and efficiency in all these areas, of course, but I think you know that already; you don't sound like the sort of person who casually squanders his money. You also don't strike me as the sort of person who would buy steak for his children while your neighbors dreamed of rice and beans; in a crisis of that intensity and immediacy, I think you would share with your neighbors once your family had enough.
Catholicism distinguishes between the deserving and the undeserving poor, although the liberal wing of the modern Church downplays or rejects that distinction. Review the Biblical quotations elsewhere in this thread, especially 1 Timothy. You should also read the Didache, which summarizes the teachings of Christ as those who knew Him personally understood them; you might not be surprised to learn that the Didache is well to the right of certain modern interpretations of the Bible. (It even contains a ban on abortion!) On the subject of almsgiving, the Didache says the following:
"'Give to everybody who begs from you, and ask for no return.' For the Father wants His own gifts to be universally shared. Happy is the man who gives as the commandment bids him, for he is guiltless. But alas for the man who receives! If he receives because he is in need, he will be guiltless. But if he is not in need he will have to stand trial why he received and for what purpose. He will be thrown into prison and have his action investigated; and 'he will not get out until he has paid back the last cent.' Indeed, there is a further saying that relates to this: 'Let your donation sweat in your hands until you know to whom to give it.'"
So I like to give to charities that are making progress over time, or that face very clear need about very clear, direct problems: pro-life women's shelters and aid to the Middle East, where the need is immense but the situation on the ground is slowly improving. I'd recommend looking into the Catholic Near East Welfare Association or the Knights of Columbus' Christian Refugee Relief -- or even into the secular United Palestinian Appeal, since if there's one people on Earth whose problems are not self-inflicted...
I give politically too, but generally as one-time donations in response to particularly urgent situations. Politics is full of grifters, incapable of changing the culture but very good at making things sound urgent, who will be answerable to God for the money they diverted from more useful things.
Giving to a local food bank is also traditional and important; this can sometimes be in-kind donations as well as cash, and it's not the worst place to volunteer.
As far as long-distance food aid for chronically poor countries goes, Edward Feser's discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas on patriotism -- https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-virtue-of-patriotism.html -- will answer a lot of your questions. You do have duties to people closer to you that don't apply to those further away; you don't have to deprive your own children to feed starving children in Africa. If you include such aid in your 10% to charity, you've done what you should.
I'd also recommend something like Heifer International rather than something like Food for the Poor, or indeed just giving to a crisis-relief agency. Fertilizer is cheap and abundant these days, thanks to fossil fuels and the indispensable Haber Process (Hitler treated Fritz Haber absolutely shamefully; read Five Germanies I Have Known by Fritz Stern, a family friend of Haber's); the main things Africa needs are education, political stability, and a little seed capital. Dambisa Moyo's book Dead Aid argues that current aid patterns are actively counterproductive.
Going back to Aquinas and countries, I think he would also say that you have a duty to your nation -- to your fellow Irishmen if you're Irish, your fellow Germans if you're German, and so on -- that you don't share with other nations. That duty would be smaller than your duty even to your country, and it would obviously not excuse concentration camps or any other mortal sin (or any sin at all, for that matter); but I don't think Aquinas would condemn a scholarship for Polish-Americans, endowed by a successful Polish-American businessman, as an evil thing.
You should also look up St. Clement of Alexandria's sermon, "Who is the rich man who shall be saved?" (https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-richman.html) I was particularly struck by the question, "For what harm does one do, who, previous to faith, by applying his mind and by saving has collected a competency?" That is to say, if you work for a living and reach financial independence, you're not doing anything wrong. St. Clement is also fine with inheritance; what counts is where your heart is, and yours sounds like it's in the right place when it comes to your children.
If it bothers you that you're too much like Hitler, revisit the books of Judges and Samuel; there's nothing wrong with rebuilding a fallen nation with morally licit means. Now, admittedly, Hitler was using morally illicit means even before he annexed Czechoslovakia (Roehm purged in 1934, Blomberg-Fritsch affair in January 1938, Kristallnacht in early November 1938), but history has forgiven and forgotten similar offenses when the offender didn't go on to do worse. If Hitler had died after he signed the Munich Agreement but before he broke it, and whoever succeeded him hadn't started a war or slaughtered the Jews, he would be remembered as "Bismark with a moustache," or perhaps "Franco with spittle-flecked hysterical speeches," rather than having the reputation he does.
Second, the cultural side:
I was going to write a full post on my theory for Hitler being uniquely intensely repudiated, but it's already been 2 hours since I set fingers to keyboard. The long and short of it is that Hitler crushed invincible France like wet cardboard, and there was a period in 1941-42 when Britain genuinely thought that the Allied Powers were going to lose. Stalin and Saddam were evil, but they were never a serious threat to the West (while Napoleon was outright part of the West); Hitler was both evil and scary. The last figures to threaten the West (meaning the narrow Atlantic West of England and France) as seriously as he did were Queen Isabella and her great-great-grandson Philip II, who are also remembered in the English-speaking world as practically demonic figures.
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If not for knowing how the subject brings out resident contrarians, I would be half inclined to think this is another rdrama experiment. I'm willing to indulge a bit then.
I think you're getting something here. I think you're a bit confused about some of the details - post-war Allied blockades starving Germans? But I think you're broadly correct that the hunger Germans experienced in the last year of the war was a very impactful historical trauma. I know how a similar hunger in '44-45 shaped the worldview of my grandfather. All questions of morality become mooted when you have a tangible sense of genuine food insecurity that most westerners can't even dream of. There have been a number of books written on exploring food insecurity as the driving cause of the mass violence in Eastern Europe from 1918-1945, (Black Earth by Timothy Snyder is one I've read), and I think it's a useful lens.
I would disagree that Hitler "held the best interests" of Germans at heart. He had a sort of egomaniacal view of Germans; they were great when they were bringing his visions to loftier heights, but when they proved unable to win the wars he started he was quite spiteful. He of course privately disparaged Christianity and various other traditional elements of German culture in private, but really I don't see how you can reconcile some unselfish love for the German people with his behaviour in 1944-45. He would've gladly condemned every last man, woman and child to oblivion for the failure to see through his designs.
(Also for the record the Soviets did not kill more people than the Nazis, let alone "so many more.")
Hitler was willing to send endless Germans to die in Russia for him. He was willing to very literally to throw the lives of young boys away so that he might live a few days more. He set Germany against the world in a crusade for his own vanity. You interpret his actions as being meant to save Germany, but no one more than him worked to bring about its destruction. It was his actions that literally split Germany in two. Hell, if not for the threat of the Soviets you hold as the real evil who knows how far the retribution might have gone; the Morgenthau Plan gives you an inkling of to what extremes the United States might have gone to to prevent the rise of another like him.
The grand irony is that you are projecting all these kindly, fatherly attributes on to Hitler as a contrast to your "degenerate" enemies in the present. Yes, those debased products of modernity whose faults you neatly list: childless, infertile, more caring to dogs than humans, emotionally unsuitable to raise a family, and not even respectful of borders! It was here especially that I was wondering whether this was one big prank, but because you didn't add that they were all short-tempered drug addicts convinced of their own intellectual superiority I figured you must be genuine.
On the blockade, I took this to mean the blockade after World War I, in the period after the armistice and before the Peace of Versailles -- especially where he mentions this as one of the things that occurred before Hitler came to power.
@Unsaying, are you familiar with Alexander Mitscherlich? His book The Inability to Mourn theorizes that Hitler was a big-brother figure rather than a father-figure: someone who led his gang of boys, got them into trouble, egged them on to do some pretty extreme stuff... and bolted as soon as things got bad, whereupon the gang of boys dropped him like a hot potato. This, he thinks, is why the Germans were so eager to forget Hitler after the war, in contrast to how Napoleon and Bonny Prince Charlie were so long remembered.
Imagine how differently things would have gone if Hitler had surrendered in 1944, when the Western Allies were on the border and the Soviets in Poland, but Germany itself was still intact. Hitler would certainly have been hanged, and Germany would've surrendered unconditionally; but there's a world of difference between an unconditional surrender while the country is still intact, and one only made after the country has fought to the bitter end, exasperating its enemies in the process. A father will die for his children as well as live for them; if Hitler had seen himself as the father of the Germans, then... then he would've stopped after Munich, but if he'd had a change of heart late in the war, this would've been the thing to do.
I mentioned in my main post that Hitler scared the West; but I think he also demoralized us. I think he demoralizes everyone who reads about him, seeing all the less-evil things he could have done, but did not. "There but for the grace of God go I," mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is a very relevant thought, but I think another one is "I wouldn't have done that if I were in his shoes..."
An astute IMO and one that I feel is both underappreciated and ties into a number of the other replies here. The Hitler and his followers chose evil and ultimately chose their end.
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Which one was that? The first four “good emperors” didn’t have sons to succeed them, and the last one famously handed over the empire to his degenerate offspring.
I like the story of Romanos Lecapenos, but that was more an aborted dynastic usurpation since his own sons were seen as less legitimate than his co-emperor. Still, that mustn’t have been easy, and that fat pedant Constantine VII had the gall to be ungrateful about it.
Hitler thought he was saving his people from inevitable starving, by way of ‘shrinking markets theory’(not enough land to feed his people if the entire world industrializes.). Lenin and Stalin thought their people would inevitably starve under capitalism. There was a tiny flaw in their thinking of course, but they thought they were good people saving the day.
How do you figure? You’ve got famine of 21 , 3 mil (although civil war doesn’t really count), famine of 32, another 5 mil , gulags and executions 3 mil, versus jews 5-6 mil, soviet POWs 3 mil , polish and soviet civilians 3 mil, without getting into military deaths (16 mil) which imo count towards hitler’s score as aggressor.
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You were going somewhere good, or at least interesting, until you had to make a hard turn. Caricaturing your enemies as moral mutants has never been appropriate. Neither from a Christian perspective nor from the standpoint of this community.
Also, I guess I disagree with you about Hitler.
Why does he capture the imagination? Why is brushing against the imagery of his movement instant social suicide? Why is he the mark against which every tinpot dictator and overbearing personality must be measured?
“There but for the grace of God go I.”
Not “I,” personally, but our society. He took those appealing, admirable aesthetics of loyalty and duty and he took them further than they ever should have gone. Ideals and people alike were tools, applied in service to the state and then discarded. By welding everything to the apparatus of his government, he created a very, very specialized machine.
Hitler represents the closest we ever came to a boot, stamping on the human face, forever. And we know how he did it. We’ve all felt it. That righteous anger, that burning indignity. Christianity tells us to stay our wrath, for ours is the kingdom of heaven. Liberalism, following in its wake, reminds us that by lashing out, we risk others doing the same unto us. The Golden Rule was the greatest invention of its age.
Nazi Germany taught us exactly how far we could get by shunting all that petty liberalism aside. It was an object lesson in the rhetorical value of an Other. Me and my tribe against the Polish, the French, the Jews, the World.
Isn’t that seductive? Don’t you think the Nazis, for a brief, beautiful moment, felt like rightful kings?
They were wrong. Hitler’s machine was no generalist. It was unfit to make peace, and it was even unfit to handle war. No good father leads his children to their deaths. He does not lie to tell them they are invincible. The full arc of fascism ends in collapse as it spirals out to new and unconquered horizons.
That’s why, whenever a demagogue starts to gesture at the Other, we think of Hitler. He demonstrated that full arc, from growth to apex to disaster. What can fascism do? How does it fail? And knowing both, why would anyone choose it? Hitler’s story provides succinct answers to all three. It speaks to the revanchist in all of us, and it reminds us just what there is to lose.
He also more or less tore up an awful lot of the...gentleman's agreements, written in blood, that let people live in relative peace without slaughtering each other. He was brilliant: I will give him that. Without his intelligence he would have been unable to do so much evil.
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Amazon, is all-in on globohomo.
You could buy from the Chinese directly.
Michael's has a selection but no unicorns.
I try to avoid spending money with businesses that hate me or would tell my daughter it's ok to be a whore.
I try, to love my neighbor as I love myself. It was difficult to love myself when I accepted with a shrug my own moral failings. Demanding more of myself has led me to expect more of of others. We're not expected to enable the sloth or sin of others.
Are your neighbors children orphans?
2 Thessalonians 3:6-15
1 Corinthians 5:9-13
1 Timothy 5:1-13
Yes, prioritize Michael's, a publicly traded company beholden to activist shareholders over the thousands of disaffected right wing weirdo independent sellers on Amazon.
Actually, I second buying from the Chinese directly, even as a disaffected right wing weirdo independent Amazon seller.
It's my perception, possibly misperception, that Michael's is less globohomo than Amazon. They're a local option for many, as they have a large physical retail foot print.
I think the few art smocks we own are from IKEA, which are both globohomo and Nazi, so maybe it's a wash.
What do you sell? Do you have a non-Amazon storefront? Do you use FBA too?
I'd like a webshop exclusive to disaffected right wing sellers.
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You're touching on a whole lot of things here in a very scattershot fashion. I don't really mean that as a criticism. Just that you seem to be wrestling with a great many moral questions at once, and I don't have the verbosity right now to give you the lengthy response you deserve.
Let me just try to tackle the main question you raised: why Hitler? Why is he the Ultimate Evil, the Biggest of Big Bads, in the contemporary mindset?
Your hypothesis is:
I don't think this is correct at all.
You touched on a couple of other valid points - that Hitler was not, in fact, an inhuman monster or the very personification of evil, just a dictator who started a war and did a lot of damage, but no worse than many other dictators in history, except perhaps in raw numbers. The idea that Hitler was human, undoubtedly had some good qualities, and did not see himself as evil but thought he was doing "the right thing" for his people is hardly a novel observation. You could say that about most other dictators too. (Though maybe not - what little I've read about Stalin suggests he probably was a vicious sociopath who genuinely enjoyed being brutal and cruel and didn't really give a shit about his people. The same was probably true about Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, and many others.)
And questioning the narrative of the Holocaust as The Worst Most Evilist Thing in History is also not new. I'm sure our resident deniers will be along shortly to talk about the Jews controlling the discourse yada yada, as you say.
My take: the Holocaust did, in fact happen, and it was in fact really, really bad. We can debate raw numbers, we can dispute the human skin lampshades, etc., but if you don't buy the denier argument that it basically didn't happen, then it's hard not to look at those concentration camp photos and conclude that the Holocaust was one of the most awful things to happen in modern history. If it captured the public's imagination and revulsion more compellingly than many other 20th century atrocities because of "the Jews controlling the discourse," it's still, in raw numbers and design, a genuinely horrific thing that happened and doesn't need much more justification than that for it to be a big big black mark in history. And Hitler drove it, which makes it easy to label him as a Very Bad Man. I don't think you need to look at either Zionist conspiracies or upside-down morality to grasp why.
What you suggest, above, is that society has turned towards a suicidally self-sacrificing worldview whereby we are expected to sacrifice ourselves and our children at others' expense. I don't agree this is the case, but even if it is, I don't see it as a factor in despising Hitler. There are perfectly good reasons to despise Hitler, you don't have to be "fooled" into thinking that he was a bad man rather than a Good Father. You seem to be reaching for some kind of Grand Unified Theory of Why My Enemies Are Wrong that will simultaneously explain all their behaviors that disgust you (like abortion and wokeness) and their hatred of Hitler, and I think you're reaching too far.
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