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Are Jews overrepresented? Of course. Is that a problem? I don’t think so. Could that cause jealously? Naturally.
I think it's very fair to say it's a problem, much like it is for any successful minority. Because it breeds resentment and cliquishness.
The way around is to have successful minorities adhere first to a common set of principles and fuse them into a larger group where tribal loyalties are discouraged.
But if you don't do that, you will get sectarian conflict. It's not optional.
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This is a great example. Jews just exist in a form that is impossible to assign negative cause to. So the natural conclusion is that anyone who assigns them any negative cause is suffering from some ailment or pathology.
This is just such a transparent expression of ingroup bias. Like, it can't be that jews actually caused something negative to happen or are in any way instrumental in the proliferation of anything bad and that some people had a very natural and human reaction to it. I.e. not wanting to live with jews anymore. No, the Nazis were instead jealous of jews.
My point is that being successful is not a bad thing and therefore it’s weird to imply there is some moral failing by Jews being successful and thereby causing resentment.
Who implied that? I don't understand.
I just see your point being predicated on the idea that people can't take issue with what some jews were being successful at and/or how.
What issue is there to take with Jews being successful? Provided they weren’t stealing from people or doing something illicit it seems to me that anyone taking issue with Jews being successful is engaging in resentment.
No one is saying that jews being 'successful' is a reason to not like them except you.
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Claiming that certain Jews did things that you dislike is of course not necessarily pathological. However, blaming Jews as a group for things is certainly and in all cases a form of irrational, shoddy thinking. Not because of moral issues, but simply because it is inaccurate. "Jews" did not cause things that you dislike to happen in Weimar Germany. Some specific Jews did.
Frankly this is just a form of special pleading that only ever functions to try and thwart discussions of large-scale problems by shrinking them down to a series of individual decisions. It's de rigeur to talk of pathological behavior among white people, white communities, "whiteness", etc., and most people who sniff about "canards" of Jewish influence and malign behavior will not think twice before agreeing that white people bear collective moral, cultural and (especially) financial responsibility for a litany of supposed historical grievances. In many cases this is actually the law! The nuance that you insist upon is something that's only ever applied to shield members of an ingroup from criticism of that ingroup as a collective, so that no one ever gets to ask questions about whether your ingroup really is a malign influence on society - now, regardless of how large the problem is, you get to insist that it's just hundreds or thousands or millions of individual bad apples, nothing more. Where, precisely, is the boundary between "it's all just individual Jews making individual decisions" and "white people need to spend their lives denouncing previous generations of white people"? At what point does it become fair to make systemic criticisms of your ingroup?
In order to blame someone they’d have to have the power to do it. White Americans did, for example, push Native American tribes onto reservations. White Southern Americans passed Jim Crow laws. If you want to blame Jews for the fall of Weimar, they not only have to be there when the gun goes off, but have to be holding the gun. But, quite often it was other people. Hyperinflation was caused by the Allies demanding draconian reparations.
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Then why do I consistently get the response that it is? Regardless of anything else, my point stands. There is a very distinct and clear form of ingroup bias whenever the 'jews' are criticized. There's never a concession made or a 'rational' framework of cause and effect. In this very thread the act of killing a Nazi collaborator is framed as justified, not causal.
Is there anyone in the world who believes that every single jew in the world was doing the things the "specific" jews in Weimar Germany were doing?
What you are saying would have salience and some form of coherency if it wasn't for the fact that the entire modern world is based on the idea that there are nations of people. Like Germans. Who were paying, and are in some form still paying, for the actions of specific Germans during the war. Do we need to be able to trace the causal chain of how a specific German housewife helped the Nazi regime during the war, which justifies her and her offspring pay money to jews until the day they die and beyond? No. This nihilistic autism is only presented when someone makes even a vague generalization about jews having done something.
I mean, can we come up with some term that describes the specific jews that do anti-European, anti-civilizational, anti-society, anti-Christian stuff? You know, not the good ones but the "specific" ones and those that support them. Because I'm tired of people acting like they are explaining something to me when all they are doing is playing PR for their ingroup. As if I just can not fathom that the jew I played video games with isn't Magnus Hirschfeld.
There was a country of people, called Germany. It was this country that did various actions in WW2 that still partially (though, in truth, not as much as some people would like to claim) burden the successor country of that country. They do not, however, burden ethnic Germans who had, say, moved to the United States to form German communities there, many of which specifically fought against the country of Germany. People might claim Donald Trump to be a Nazi for various reasons, but it would be at the very least exceedingly rare to claim he is one because he's a German-American, or that his German heritage would make him directly liable for the actions of the Nazi government in the country of Germany.
During WW2, there was not a Jewish country. There is a Jewish country now, and the actions of that country burden the citizens of that country, making all Israelis in some ways liable for the actions of Israeli government vis-a-vis the Palestinian occupation and the human rights violations therein (at least the ones not explicitly resisting those actions). However, that still doesn't make all Jews everywhere liable for the actions of Israeli goverment.
German people were interned in the US following the US entry into the war. Plans were drawn up for more extensive internment of all German Americans but were scrapped since there were too many of them. Redefining things to be a 'country' is irrelevant. Getting down to brass tax it's about people. Everyone understands this when they are forced to act in reality.
Yet, to this very day, many jews harbor resentment towards Germans. Some going as far as they can in upholding the old anti-German boycott.
Maybe I am being too hot tempered and uncharitable here but I really can't fathom what your point of bringing 'countries' into this would be other than to obfuscate things. Jews did not need to be a country to act as a people. They knew of themselves as the jewish people, they grouped up as the jewish people and they made declarations and took actions as a people prior to Israel ever being a thing. In fact, the only way Israel as a country could come to be in the first place was because of jewish people acting as a group.
So to turn your thing on its head a little bit, and to attempt to highlight my issue with it; are jews liable for the creation of the state of Israel?
The difference is precisely that countries are legal units, while peoples are not. A "people" is a mellifluous concept without a fixed definition (and "Jews" certainly demonstrates that better than most peoples, considering how Jews themselves can't agree on who is Jewish and antisemites, as I stated below, have an extremely extensive definition of it); a country is a concrete legal unit.
Who did? Did all the Jewish people in the world take a vote and agree to be bound by its results, or something? Germans did take a vote to elect the Nazis (and parties that had already indicated they'd work with the Nazis, ie. DNPP) into power; that's precisely one of the things Germany being a country allowed them to do.
The country of Israel was very specifically created by one specific movement, the Zionist movement; as you surely know, there were a lot of Jews at the time who explicitly and expressly disagreed with the Zionist movement, its actions and its goals.
I don't really understand the references to "some Jews" continuing to boycott the Germany or whatever. That would just indicate that most don't, no? It just seems to demonstrate the difficulty that talking about "Jews" as a people as an equivalent to a country is; one can just take any combination of (usually negative) actions by some Jews and then assign blame on them to all Jews, generally. Some Jews unfairly boycott Germany to present day. Some Jews founded Israel. Some Jews started communist revolutions in Germany, and other countries. Same Jews? Usually not, but does it matter?
On the contrary, Germany, being a country, can begin a "boycott" of whatever country it desires (ie. the current Russian sanctions, for example), and that boycott immediately becomes legally enforceable and binding on all Germans and German businesses, at least in theory. There's nothing unclear about this, the basic principle does not require interpretation (though of course the details of the actual sanctions might require it).
No, just like not every German in Germany voted in the elections that got Hitler power. But jews did express themselves through thousands of organizations that convened and agreed that they would take action against Germany in 1933. They did not need to be a country to do this. Which displays just how contrived and argumentative your insistence on 'countries' is. As if these people can now not be responsible for their own actions because they don't qualify as a country.
So what is the ratio here that allows one to associate Germans being responsible for the holocaust but not jews with Zionism?
No, what was being demonstrated is that jews see no issue holding a negative opinion of Germans. Which would be equally wrong with regards to your post on what people should do. Demonstrating just how irrelevant your particular pontifications are with regards to my position, which is the same as the jewish position on Germans.
Except no one was talking about Germans as a country except you. If jews could not take collective action unless they were a country you would have an argument. But this is obviously not true, as jews can take actions as individuals and as groups. Like they demonstrated in 1933 and have demonstrated time and time again with collective action through organizations.
What I was commenting on is this:
It's the country of Germany that is paying money to Jews (not all Jews, mind, those who can lay claim to being mistreated by the country of Germany in WW2). This is, in fact, not the same thing as the "Germans", though of course there's a high degree of overlap (most Germans, at least if we go by German citizenship, live in Germany - of course by some other definition one might find most don't, considering the German-Americans and the like, and most people living in Germany are German citizens).
However, if a German citizen moves and starts working elsewhere, he no longer is contributing to German taxes and thus no longer is paying to the Jews, even if he was the grandchild of Amon Göth or Rudolf Höss. On the other hand, if I move to Germany and start working there, I'm now paying taxes that will go for the payment of Holocaust compensations. Hell, presumably I'll be doing that even if I just go to Germany as a tourist and buy a meal, since I'll be paying VAT on it.
Should Germany be paying compensation to Holocaust victims? Probably the direct victims but not their descendants, but that's the decision for the democratically elected German government to make, ultimately. Germany could, in fact, unilaterally decide to stop paying compensations. It might lead to international loss of prestige, but many things do. The reason why Germany doesn't do that is, ultimately, related to the domestic politics of Germany.
The reason why I harp on this is that it's really the crucial difference between talking about Jews being responsible, as a people, for whatever you choose to blame them for and Germans being responsible for Holocaust compensation. It's not, strictly speaking, Germans as a people - it's Germany as a country. Countries can be responsible for their past actions in a wholly different way from peoples, as legal units.
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Then stop saying "Like, it can't be that jews actually caused something negative to happen or are in any way instrumental in the proliferation of anything bad and that some people had a very natural and human reaction to it. I.e. not wanting to live with jews anymore. " and say i.e. not wanting to live with the specific people who did X. We can only judge you by what you say, so if you cast a wide net (jews) with your words, that's all we can respond to. If you mean to only criticise a subset of people who did X or Y, then say that.
That's why one of the part of the rules is: Be as precise and charitable as you can.
Be precise about who you want to criticise. If you don't mean jews as a group then define who exactly you are talking about. If there is some anti-European position you want to criticise, define it and who said it. If you know it "isn't all jews" then make that clear. Otherwise it looks like you are simply indulging in Boo-outgroup rhetoric.
It will also skip the whole back and forth you are right in the middle of now, where someone rebuts with, "well actually,not all jews", and you have to sigh, "yes I know it's not all jews, I don't think the guy I play CoD with is involved. I'm not an idiot!"
Define exactly who you are talking about at step 1 and you can skip steps 1A through D going back and forth until you define who you mean. It removes a derailment opportunity. It hones your argument and removes extraneous pain points.
The fact Germans are paying for anything is because citizens do in fact inherit the financial responsibilities their government has agreed to. It doesn't mean morally Brunhilde is responsible for the Holocaust, any more than the fact her taxes go to pay interest on the national debt means she is responsible directly for the government building an autobahn 10 years before she was born and thus the deaths of anyone who crashes their well engineered automobile at 200kph should weigh on her soul. But yet still her taxes go to help pay it off. The German government can decide that a moral crime committed by the German government demands recompense. And all German citizens therefore inherit the financial responsibility, but they do not inherit the moral responsibility. That is the disconnect in your example. They are different things.
Brunhilde is not morally responsible for Hitler's actions just as Bob the jew is not morally responsible for Fred the jew's actions. So if it is Fred's anti-European actions you have a problem with then criticise Fred, not jews. If you mean Fred but say jews then people will understand you to mean jews not Fred. And if Bob and Fred are BOTH members of "Ja, we hate Europe" then specify it is the organization JwhE that you are criticizing.
In other words if you are not being specific in who you are calling out, why should people responding be specific in return?
Maybe you could be charitable and understand that when someone says the Germans did something, they don't mean every single individual German. Maybe you can understand that when someone says jews have won a lot of Nobel prizes, they don't mean every single individual jew. I mean, of course you understand that. Everyone does. 'Jews have won a lot of nobel prizes' is not a statement anyone has ever taken issue with. It's just that when the implication is negative the ingroup bias of some gets activated and they start demanding special status for their ingroup.
I don't accept that jews are more special than others and I don't accept that I should use extreme and autistic verbal rigor when talking about the ingroup bias of some whilst freely ignoring it for others. I think people should be able to be charitable, see past their bias, and recognize what is being said without dragging everything through the mud of tactical individualism. Like I said in my prior comment, you don't need to prove how every single individual German helped the Third Reich when justifying they pay war reparations to jews. You don't need their tax returns to see just how much they were paying. You just draw a blanket group based judgement. They were German, they now have to pay. I'm making a similar judgement call. If one is jewish and one sees all of the negative stuff specific jews have done, why doesn't one have to own that? The Germans had to own all of their actions. They couldn't say that it wasn't them, but rather individual soldiers, politicians and the 30% or so that voted for the NSDAP in the 30's. Why should jews be allowed to not just disown all responsibility, but ultimately claim that these things aren't even jewish. It's like saying the NSDAP wasn't actually German.
Why do they 'inherit' that whilst jews don't inherit that specific jews in powerful positions who identified themselves as jews and representatives of jews, who identified their organization as jewish and who declared economic war on Germans in the name of their explicitly jewish organizations due to actions taken by specific Germans against jews in Germany?
Seems like we've erected a very one sided standard. Individual Germans take responsibility for Germans as a group. Individual jews don't take responsibility for jews as a group. Even when jews are explicitly grouping up and expressing themselves as a group. It seems like, in a negative context, there are only individual jews and they can never reflect poorly on jews as a group. No matter how much ingroup bias jews display. Yet here I am pretending that this just doesn't exist. That jews don't have an ingroup bias that they routinely express every single time someone is critical of jews.
Here's a thought, if people don't see themselves as jewish, stop being jewish. Say you're Italian or Romanian. But no. Even on the internet, where no one knows you are a dog, jews and people who ingroup jews take time out of their day to reply to group generalizations in the context of negatives about jews but let actively rely on them in other contexts.
I'm not saying anything about all jews being X. I'm pointing out a double standard. Other individual people have to own their group and how other individual people of that group have made that group look, especially if those individuals did something bad to jews. I could understand how a fervent individualist would not want to participate in such a thing, but people who act on their group biases are obviously not that.
Because a government is elected to be a representative of all German citizens. The Israeli government is likewise a representative of all Israeli citizens. If they think the government should not do X they can elect politicians to do Y. This part of being a nation state. This is of a different category entirely. If politicians elected by the German people decide that Germany is financially responsible for reparations then this is a different thing than Germans being forced to be responsible. You are conflating something that DOES make decisions for all X with a group that has no body that makes all decisions for Y. You are making a category error.
The reason Germans are responsible in your example is because Germans elected politicians to make that decision for them. They chose to be (financially) responsible (or at least a majority of them did, which in a democracy is binding on the rest). If they didn't do that then they would not even be financially responsible. It's a voluntary choice and they are entirely free to choose the other way, if enough of them agree. Perhaps they even should, but it is up to them, not me.
The point is there is no Jewish government in the same way there is a German government. Israelis certainly are responsible for the politicians they elect and the decisions they make, and if the Israeli government decided to pay reparations to Palestinians, all Israeli tax payers would be on the hook, but not all jews are Israeli.
I am white, but I am not responsible for what John Smith or George Custer, of the USA did. I am responsible for what Ian Paisley did as I voted for him to be my representative and the decisions he made had an impact on what I was responsible for. Likewise those in America who contributed to NORAID are responsible for what the IRA did with that money, but other Americans who did not, are not. Since I chose to move to the US, however I am now financially responsible for all the things the American government decides it (and therefore its tax payers) are responsible for.
For there to be collective responsibility there must be an organized collective. You yourself pointed out this was not the case with all jews. So my point is treating them like there was a collective government is wrong by your own admission. You want to knock the ADL and anyone who funds it, sure go ahead. You want to knock the Israeli government, then sure go ahead. If Joe Schmoe contributed to "Jews against white people" and they declared war against the German economy then blame Joe Schmoe and anyone else in that organization (jewish or not!).
And just to be clear if someone says white people are responsible for Nazis or slavery in the US or the Enlightenment, or the invention of haggis or whatever then they are also incorrect. Some white people would have been, but not white people in general.
You are correct that many people make bad arguments like that! But here we are supposed to try and do better and use the best versions of our arguments, not the bad ones that are used everywhere else.
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This is a nonsense argument. You may as well say that Nazis as a group don't share responsibility and that all evil done in the 3rd Reich was done by individual Nazis.
This outright denial of any collective responsibility is common among individualists, like myself, but it falls short on one condition: if people organize as a group, they are responsible as a group. Which is why we punish criminal conspiracies.
And if one concedes at least this, and they must, then the question becomes rather if Weimar had Jews organized and organized specifically as Jews. A question that is much less easy to answer in the negative than a clean reading of history would enjoy. Successful minorities are almost always so because they are organized.
Now of course this is where collective condemnation of an entire ethnic group falls short as guilt can only be shared in the confines of a specific organization (supposing of course it can first be established), but you can't defend this by claiming atoms acting independently, not seriously.
The “Jewish communists” derided as revolutionaries in Weimar Germany (they failed at revolution, so can’t be responsible for those issues, but still) certainly didn’t organize specifically as Jews - they were part of areligious communist and anarchist organizations that all had a substantial number of gentile members.
I must say I was not here thinking of communists but of the very much capitalist german-jewish economic elite, a group much studied by sociology, and in particular as to how Jewish its success and internal ties were.
I believe the answer to that question remains debated, but they are a clearly identifiable group with class interests and a significant say and influence in the direction of German society at the time.
The national socialist ideological tie between these people and the communist Jews to form some international conspiracy I believe is clearly faulty and fictitious, but both groups existed and had aims and power. Often at odds with one another, but not necessarily with a character that can be removed from Jewish ethno-cultural interest.
Incidentally, I do not believe such dismissals about atheism matter when we are talking about an ethnos. To give a clear example, atheists Jews have long had tremendous influence over the American film industry and nobody can seriously deny that this influence has a Jewish cultural character even as they are atheists.
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