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Notes -
Hitler's Identity Politics, Part I
(c) Feb 10, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first three posts in the series were:
The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics ,Part I.
Introduction: Cargo-Cult Political Science
No one else is considered the face of modern evil like Hitler. That is peculiar, because Mao Zedong murdered far more people than Hitler did, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance. The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source]. Moreover, Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, the man who was Mao's practical model of success, murdered just as many as Hitler, and, unlike Hitler, founded a regime that transformed his country into Mordor for generations.
Yet a statue of Lenin, sans head, stood in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas for years. One stands in Seattle at the corner of 35th St. and Fremont as of this writing, and that one has the head on. It is not unusual to hear people quote the allegedly wise sayings of Mao and Lenin on their merits, even while being aware of their crimes. People say things like, As Mao Zedong said, women hold up half the sky. Joe Biden repeated this quote in 2021 in a commencement address at the US Coast Guard Academy, though he did not mention Mao. It also once happened that Trump unknowingly quoted Adolf Hitler, and you can compare the news coverage of those two events by looking at the results of this google search in terms of news coverage compared to this one.
While I believe that Mao was a man consumed by evil, I also believe that when Mao said women hold up half the sky, he identified an important truth and put it in a memorable and persuasive way. Is it OK to quote Mao on that, on the merits of the saying, in spite of the fact that he killed tens of millions of people? Some think it is and some think it isn't, and I honestly I don't know. But I do know that nobody (outside of a skinhead rally) begins a paragraph with "As Adolf Hitler said, ...". That is even though Hitler was a more cogent writer and speaker than Mao -- and, like Mao, or Lenin, or any other tyrant, some of what Hitler said had merit. Even a blind, evil pig finds an acorn once in a while. I also know that there aren't any statues of Hitler in Las Vegas or Seattle, with or without the head -- and no one would put one up because it would make them a social and economic pariah. So why is Hitler completely demonized, in a way that Lenin and Mao are not?
I submit there is a great deal of cargo-cult science surrounding Hitler. The phrase cargo cult science comes from Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address, where he related the following story:
The moral of Feynman's story is that when you look at something to see what makes it tick, the features that matter are not always the ones that meet the eye most easily.
For example, in the broadest strokes, Hitler was a far-right national socialist. Many people hold that since Hitler was "far right", the more right-wing you are, the more like Hitler you must be. And many hold that, since Hitler was a nationalist, the more nationalist you are, the more like Hitler you must be. But, for some reason, vanishingly few people hold that the more socialist you are, the more like Hitler you must be -- even though, if one actually reads the Nazi platform, it has about as much for Bernie Sanders to love as it has for John Birch. But at the end of the day, saying that Hitler was essentially defined by his right-wingism, or his nationalism, or his socialism, just because he was a right wing national socialist, is no more logical per se than saying that what defined him was his distinctive style of moustache. Accepting any of these uncritically, from the nationalism to the socialism to the funny little moustache, is what Feynman would call cargo cult (political) science.
Beyond the question of what made Hitler and his ideology so evil, there is widespread uncritical acceptance of the proposition that Hitler was evil in the first place -- even radioactively evil, in a way that even Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong are not, though the latter were more prolific mass murders. As a kid growing up in America in the 70's and 80's, I naturally accepted that Hitler was evil. It did not have to be explained to me in any detail what made Hitler count as being evil; duh, he started World War II and murdered six million Jews. Of course anyone who launches a war of conquest is pure evil. Like Hitler. Or James K. Polk. No, wait a minute; that can't be right. But of course anyone and orchestrates a genocide is evil. Like Hitler. Or Moses. No, wait a minute; that's not right either. Weights and weights, measures and measures.
Branding Hitler as evil without being able to cogently say why is dangerous for two reasons. First, it makes it more likely that we might be following in his footsteps without realizing it. Second, it increases the risk that our children will reject our assessment of Hitler when they see that we have made up our minds for no good reason -- and that could make them more vulnerable to jumping on the bandwagon if another Hitler comes along, especially a Hitler in sheep's clothing. For both of those reasons, it is important to understand what made Hitler Hitler in deeper than cargo-cult fashion, so that we can better recognize whatever that thing is in other contexts -- most importantly within our own hearts. Or do you believe that, whatever made Hitler Hitler, it can't happen here, or that you have none of it in you?
I will argue that what makes Hitler literally Hitler, first and foremost, was not his nationalism, or his socialism, or his right-wingism, or his wars of aggression, or even his penchant for genocide, but his identity politics. I define identity politics as the embrace of a caste system with different moral standards for different groups, based on demographic characteristics such as race, religion, and ethnicity. Hitler practiced identity politics of two substantively different forms: one form to rationalize his wars of aggression (primarily against Slavs), and another to rationalize his attempted genocide of the Jews. These will be discussed in the following sections.
Pagan Views of the International Order
Not everyone who launches wars of aggression, even copious wars of aggression, is trading in identity politics. Consider, for example, the opening lines of the Anglo Saxon epic Beowulf:
Note that in the Saxon mind, Shield Sheafson was "one good king". Why? Because he drove men in terror, not from their trenches, not from their fortresses, but from their bar stools, where they had presumably been minding their own business before he showed up -- and because he did this far and wide, making war on and subjugating, not one, not two, but every neighboring tribe, and exacting tribute from them like a schoolyard bully on an indefinite basis.
Note also what these lines do not say about Shield. They do not say that he settled some ancient score, or imposed cosmic justice on his tribe's historical exploiters, or even that the clans "beyond the whale road" deserved what they got because they were lesser men than the Danes. Sheafson's greatness lay in his sheer will-to-power and the macht to impose it on others. Moreover, the hero of the passage is not a member of the poet's tribe: Shield was a Dane, while the poet is a Saxon. If Shield Sheafson was a historical person, the author's ancestors may have been among his victims -- and yet the poet esteems Sheafson's mægen (greatness) impartially. Even if Shield was not a historical person, this glimpse into the Saxon mind tells us something important about them: if they glorify a Danish king for his rapacious imperialism, they certainly wouldn't need a moral pretext justify their own kings waging wars of aggression -- such as that targets had it coming because they did it to us first, or even because they were lesser men than us. The greater men they were before we whipped them, the better. Lo!
For a second example of the pagan view of warfare, consider Homer's Iliad. The Iliad tells the story of the beginning of the Trojan War. It is a tale of heroism and excellence on both sides -- but also, as much as anything, a lament for men caught in a bloody struggle whose making was beyond their control. If you had to pin the blame for the catastrophe on a single person it would be the Trojan prince Paris -- but he is more of a self-indulgent simpleton than a villain; his bumbling takes place before the story begins, and is barely deemed worth mentioning by Homer. In Homer, there are no black hats and no white hats, for individuals or for groups. Though the story was written by a Greek poet, and was a national epic of ancient Greece (comparable to a book of their Bible), it could have been written by a Trojan with much the same perspective, even if with far less craft.
Considering Beowulf and the Iliad side by side, we see that whether the story is written by the winners or the losers, there is no need in the pagan mind to cast international conflicts as matters of right and wrong, or of who is entitled to what (in stark contrast, for example, to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people in modern times). We should be careful not project part of our own worldview onto Homer or the Beowulf poet, and ascribe to them the belief that "might makes right". In fact, they would find that view alien. Their view of international relations is not that might makes right, but that might makes might, and right barely enters into the picture. Lo!
For a third example we will consider the Roman Republic. In 61 BC, in honor of his 45th birthday, a monument was erected to the Roman general Pompey bearing this inscription:
There is no indication, in the inscription or anywhere else, that Pompey was seeking vengeance or justice, or that the Goths and Gauls he subjugated, enslaved, and killed were scumbags, or even bad folks.
The Romans did think of barbarians as lesser men than themselves, but they did not feel entitled by a sense of cosmic justice to rule over them on that account. On the contrary, the Romans believed that Heaven as well as Earth existed in a Hobbesian state of nature: an amoral war of all against all, or what we might call the "law of the jungle". While the Romans believed that their own gods favored Roman victory and imperialism, they also believed that foreign gods, just as real as their own, favored their barbarian adversaries in much the same way. Thus before battle, the Romans prayed not only to their own gods, but sometimes to those of their enemies as well. The Roman prayer to the gods of their enemies was known as the evocatio, and a version of this prayer, said during the siege of Carthage, is recorded by the Roman historian Macrobius Theodosius:
The Romans did not share our modern idea of human rights. Human rights, in the modern sense, are rights granted equally to all men by natural law. The Romans had a sophisticated code of due process, but the rights of the accused -- e.g., to stand trial and cross examine witnesses before being deprived of liberty or property -- were in their view not human rights granted to all men by natural law, but Roman rights granted to Romans by the state of Rome! Acts 22 relates the following:
The passage records that under Roman law, jailing and flogging a Roman citizen without a trial was strictly forbidden, and must have carried a rather grievous penalty -- but jailing and flogging a mere human being without a trial was allowed. Even if this account is not fully historical, it must have been intended to be believable to its contemporaneous audience -- which could only be the case if that was indeed the Roman policy.
In the Roman mind, when Caesar conquered Gaul, he was not violating anyone's "human rights" -- for there were no "human rights" to violate in the first place. Does this mean that the Romans were engaging in identity politics? On the contrary, it means they were not. Identity politics is not merely protecting your own people and exploiting others; it is protecting your own people, and exploiting others, and then wailing and moaning in righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. Identity politics is when Ibram Kendi complains about the Atlantic Slave trade and the exploitation of Native Americans America while turning a blind eye to the vicious enslavement of a million whites by the Barbary Pirates. But hypocritical, self-righteous wailing of this sort was not the Roman way.
Consider, for example, the Roman reaction to the worst defeat in the history of the Republic, in the Battle of Cannae at the hands of Hannibal Barca. Around 60,000 Romans were killed at Cannae in a single day -- far more than the number of Americans killed in the whole of the Korean war. Additionally, between 10,000 and 20,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoner, and Hannibal sent ten of these to Rome to plead for ransom for the rest. And what was the conversation in Rome over this event? What an affront it was to the Natural Order for Romans to be defeated by barbarians? How Rome had been stabbed in the back by traitors from within and without? How it would never have happened but for the weather? As the Roman historian Livy relates the events, no to all of that. There was resolve to continue fighting, and a somber debate over whether to ransom the hostages. The decision of the senate was to not ransom the hostages, because this would only fill Hannibal's coffers and enable and encourage further aggression. The ten Roman soldiers who had come as a delegation to Rome were sent back to Hannibal under Roman guard -- because they had given their word to return to whatever fate awaited them at the hands of the foreign general. Even the law of the jungle is a law, and fair's fair.
The Hebrew View of the International Order
The ancient Hebrews were not pagans, and their view of tribal conflict was fundamentally different from that of pagans. The Hebrews held (and still hold) that the universe has an immutable and impartial moral compass, that points in the same direction for every man and every group of men -- and that therefore, when two tribes go to war, one must be in the wrong and deserve defeat. But the Hebrews were not fundamentalists; in the scads of wars that show up in their own historical account, half of the time it was the Hebrews that were in the wrong. More than half the time, actually, by my recollection.
As an illustration of the Hebrew view, consider the book of Isaiah. The backdrop is that the Hebrews have been defeated and enslaved by the Assyrians. It is a tale of privation, defeat, and despair. Here are a few snippets from Chapter 9 [KJV translation]:
And why is this happening? Chapter 1 explains why, and almost every chapter thereafter reminds us: because the Jews have done wrong.
The conquest and subjugation of the Hebrews by the Assyrians was a historical event, and these verses were written by a Hebrew priest within living memory of it. Moreover, the attitude expressed in the book of Isaiah is not a one-off; it is characteristic of Hebrew culture over long periods. The books of Ezekiel and Jeremiah were written over a hundred years later, under similar circumstances of defeat and enslavement for the Hebrews, this time by the Babylonians. In all three books -- Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- the Hebrews humbly accept their fate of defeat and cruel exploitation as a penalty for the error of their ways. The book of Daniel, while focusing more on a single individual captive in enemy hands, takes the same tone of humility and forbearance in defeat.
So the Hebrews teach that they are God's chosen people, but they are not chosen to rule the Earth. God does that. The Hebrews are chosen to receive God's law and proclaim it to the world, and in doing that to be held to a higher standard -- being especially blessed when they do right, but also especially cursed when they do wrong. It turns out people of every sort, Hebrew or otherwise, do wrong often enough this is no enviable bargain. As Tevye (Jewish main character in "Fiddler on the Roof") said, I know, I know, we're the chosen people. But once in a while, could You choose someone else?
Now here is a riddle for you: How is the book of Isaiah like Hitler's Mein Kampf? Answer: Both are stories of national desolation and defeat, told poignantly by one of the defeated -- and both blame the Jews. The next chapter will compare Hitler's view of the international order with the pagan view on the one hand, and the Hebrew view on the other, as well as with that of the woke movement.
Press X to doubt. Prior to the retcon positioning the volcano god of war as the only god (elohim) they so were. Guess why one of the commandments is not to worship other Elohim above the big G. I'd argue they still are with all the pagan tier rituals they love so much. Spinning a chicken to transfer your sins to them before killing them? C'mon.
The fact that it is doubtful is itself of first importance, because it is beyond doubt that, say, the Romans were pagans, if "pagan" means anything. On the other hand if "pagan" means anything, there must also be religious practices that are or were not pagan.
Most predicates outside math and the hard sciences are fuzzy, that is, matters of degrees -- and finding threads of truth to "x satisfies P" is always easy but also therefore always uninformative. The questions in this case are (1) is "pagan", as opposed to non-pagan, a meaningful (if of course rough) categorical distinction among religious practices? (2) if so what are its characteristics, and what are its alternatives and their characteristics? and (3) do the Hebrews fall inside or outside of the "pagan" cluster, by comparison with its paragons such as Rome and pre-Christian Scandanavia?
Are you saying yes, (something), and yes? If so I'd like to know what the something is. That is not the commonsense answer so you owe a good argument, beginning with an explicit answer to (2): what is it to be pagan, and what are the alternatives?
I'm not about to start defining pagannes, but for one if you're polytheistic you can't claim not to be a pagan faith. If you're doing stupid voodoo-woo-woo tier shit you can't claim not to be pagans.
I don't think I am obliged to pay much attention to your claim that the Hebrews were pagans, when (1) it is against common sense, and (2) you decline to give a definition, along with what you feel are clear examples and non-examples, of pagan religions.
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Not to do a driveby on your post, which goes into a lot of topics in fine detail, but it feels like you are falling into a quagmire of interacting with the 'post-war consensus' too earnestly.
Simply put: It's an either or. Either you believe in the 'post-war consensus' 1 2 and you have a pocket theory for why Hitler is justifiably considered the master of evil, or you don't believe in the 'post-war consensus' and you recognize the satanization of Hitler as a function of human psychology interacting with propaganda that is necessary to justify the overarching moral narratives of the winners of WWII and the cold war. Nothing proves 'We are the goodest guys' quite like 'because we triumphed over the evilest evil'.
The most obvious way to tell the belief in HitlerSatan is downstream from propaganda is that nigh everyone, apart from the fringes, has their own pocket theory of why Hitler is satan and not any of the other guys from histories greatest hits. There's no strictly objective metric at play that people can latch on to. It's literally every single reason it can be, all at once. This works since we are not dealing with rational thought but post hoc verbalizations for the emotions that have already been instilled in people.
These emotions are not there because anyone directly told people to have them. They are there as a necessary logical consequence of our informational environments and how our minds deal with not just information but the implicit question of why we are seeing the information. We know Hitler is the most evil because we learned about him the most out of anyone. That's where the association is made. Why did we learn the most about him and his reign in school? Why are there so many movies made about those guys and how bad they were? Obviously because he is the most evil. Why else would we have been learning about him the most? It's a feedback loop in your brain.
At risk of getting too deep into 'generative anthropology', we can only hold one primary victimary narrative at a time(with some caveats). The victimary narrative of our age is focused on the iewish people, their suffering and why it was a result of HitlerSatan and his evil beliefs.
To make a long story short, the answer to the question of what makes Hitler into "literally Hitler" is not found by digging deeper. It's found by throwing away the shovel and leaving the hole of the post war consensus.
I don't agree with this bifurcation. The form is ((A & B) or (~A & C)), so obviously it isn't a tautology, and I am not interested in B or C. More specifically, I am not interested in whether or not Hitler is worse than Mao, and I am not (here) interested in why Hitler is so strongly demonized in popular culture. My interest in this post and the one that will follow is discuss, propaganda aside, what actually is distinctive about Hitler's ideology.
And what was being argued by me was that the pursuit is flawed from the start, and that the reasoning given here:
is just another misstep by fault of the post war consensus permeating everything. It's all 'identity politics', always has been. We've only been pretending it's not for the past century whilst the rest of the world watches in befuddlement and takes advantage. Hence why questions about Hitler and his allegedly distinctive ideology are flawed to begin with. We're passing judgement and pontifications from a historically abnormal ivory tower that's writhing and ready to fall.
But that might very well be presumptuous and unfair of me to say given there is more to follow, though I do feel compelled to defend my originalg post say that what I wrote does pertain to what's been written so far, even if it's just a driveby on a small part of a greater whole.
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I think "Hitler killed millions of Jews" is a bit too common a reason to call Hitler Satan, for it to count as a pocket theory.
I upvoted this but I think the commonsense reason is even stronger: Hitler tried to murder all of the Jews of Europe and he nearly succeeded.
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Why this person and these people in specific warrant recognition over all the others is where the pocket theories come into play.
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The thing with Hitler as the new Satan is that the narrative has been a dominant narrative because it’s a very good origin story for the Rules Based International Order (RBIO).
That story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, there was an Evil German guy named Hitler. He was mean to everyone, invaded several countries in Europe, killed a bunch of political enemies, and genocided Jews and Gypsies. This is all of course very bad. He was winning for a long time, and hope was fading, until all of the Allies banded together to fight this very evil man and his very scary regime full of soldiers wearing Hugo Bass. And the allies won! The world was saved from German Nazis (and Japan, who was actually equally bad if not worse, and never apologized, but just ignore that) rebuilt by the RBIO into a peaceful prosperous place.
This does a few things.
First, it’s a post-Christian system of morals and ethics. It’s secular and makes no reference to any religious beliefs. This is critical because religion tends to get in the way of things people really want to do. You can’t quote scripture to justify doing one thing without bringing along everything else in that text. The Bible forbids being gay, excessive interest, exploiting the poor, among other things. And people don’t like some of those rules. But it’s a lot easier to make a case if you can just point to New Satan and say “you know who else didn’t like gay people? Hitler.”
Second, it provides an easy justification for war. Basically, if you can point to something the Nazis were doing being done by modern states, you get to bomb the crap out of that country, you get to invade, you can impose sanctions on them, anything you want. It’s insane to me how often such stories are told about countries we wanted to invade. Iraq, Russia, Serbia, Iran, Israel and Palestine (depending on whose side you’re on in that conflict) and so on. If you hear comparisons to Nazi germany, chances are that Theres going to at least be sanctions, if not an invasion.
Third, it’s a message to unaligned countries that you want to be on our side. After all, we defeated the Nazis, and therefore we can protect you from anyone who’d invade your country. We have the manpower and the will to protect shipping lanes, and we can solve disputes with the UN.
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I would note that this is both a very high number (almost certainly an overestimate) for Mao's body count and similarly a rather large undercount of WWII's, which is pretty conventionally estimated at ~70-75 million.
I think it would be worth softening the language here.
Just a note that I haven't forgotten about this and you are probably right. I just need to do some reading to see what to change it to. Thanks for the comment.
Yeah, you have to be a bit careful because the nature of these sort of things make it hard to pin down a certain number (especially because some methodologies include prevented births), and then you have another layer on top of that where partisans for whatever group will use that ambiguity to play Genocide Olympics. This of course ends up in deliberately misleading blogposts and youtube videos and wiki edit wars.
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Sources?
I’m seeing 53M here and 60M here. Not much info on methodology. Wikipedia’s higher numbers are supposedly based on more accurate research from after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but I wasn’t able to find an actual paper dealing with more than one country at a time. So your numbers there are plausible.
Is it possible that @johnfabian was using a statistic that included wounded? Those would still count as casualties.
I do think the Mao numbers are on the high side. Here and here are articles with significantly lower numbers for the Great Famine despite no friendliness towards Mao. 40M is given as the upper bound.
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Feels like this analysis is suffering from a lot of presentism. Or is including a lot in order to achieve it's political goal; singling out identity politics as a unique evil. I don't think this really holds up on closer examination though. The holocaust's identity aspects weren't unique to Nazi Germany. Jewish pogroms had already been common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and weren't seen as especially noteworthy. It's true that ancient people didn't have the same justifications, but they lacked knowledge of genetics. Really Nazi Germany was just an evolution of the same feuds you cite, incorporating newer ideas about identity, namely genetics, along with industrial advances that led to a much larger scale war and much larger scale pogrom.
The concept of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil wasn't even really a thing during and shortly after ww2. After the war things were more pragmatic, we needed West Germany to oppose the USSR and we even recruited Nazis via Operation Paperclip. The Nazis as a unique evil was mostly spun due to it's utility not due to any morality. This happened later, around the 60s and 70s. That's when a lot of holocaust documentaries and the modern beliefs about the holocaust and Nazi Germany as the most evil of evils became more widespread.
The US was fully embracing its role as empire at this point and tabooing white identity politics served these interests. Also had the civil rights movement, Hart-Celler and all that garbage happen around the same time.
Few characteristics outside mathematics and the physical sciences are unique to anything, but the matters of frequency and severity are what set things apart. Can you give some examples of pogroms you think are comparable to the Holocaust in scope and severity?
I don't think identity politics rests on a quantitative understanding of genetics. Everyone knows what tribes, races, and religions are.
Can you support this, or any of the claims in the last two paragraphs?
The one I've seen mentioned occasionally is the pogroms associated with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the mid 17th century.
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Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it.
As far as I can tell, Karl Marx knew that a classless, stateless society would get rolled by a central state immediately if capitalism still existed. So, the plan was to seize the state and implement socialism, and wait for every other society in the world to dissolve their states at once. Anyone who is really thinking could tell you that that would never happen, especially looking at the pathetic state of any genuinely central government behemoths of socialist states at the time. And yet, all kinds of Marxists, probably except for the anarchist movement, want to stack the bodies to create this ideology that will never work and is unfalsifiable, and will end up stacking even more bodies, accidentally and intentionally.
There are any number of posts on /r/LateStageCapitalism where they express their utter disdain for liberals. Every post on /r/TheRightCantMeme has an automod message that says that the subreddit is a far left one, and that liberals can fuck off. But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.
More than anything, it's the biggest slap in the face that accusations of communism or marxism are laughed off, when the share of open Marxists has seemingly increased exponentially in the last couple of decades.
Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?
The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.
Yeah, workers' coops are an actually possible thing in America, but this is ignored.
I think anarchists are about the only faction of communism that realizes that they could just start communism with each other, in the form of workers' cooperatives and in communal villages, voluntarily. I think they are a far less harmful version of the ideology, and if all of the Marxists were instead anarchists, all the better; now you just have a bunch of people who vote left to shift the Overton window left without actually planning on doing anything nefarious (or doing much of anything at all, considering the anarchists I have interacted with).
Since anarchism is voluntary, the idea is that the commune shows people how things could be, and everyone slowly realizes the way things could be and join up themselves, I think. If the commune reaches a certain size, reality will check it and check it hard, so this bastion of freedom doesn't live very long and doesn't convince anyone who wasn't already a deviant. I consider that more benign, because it only disadvantages accountable people who willingly joined in.
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Is this perception not an artifact of awkwardly projecting onto a 1D left-right axis? To the Western normie, "more left" now means "more LGBTQI+ and environmentalism" - if pushed on it they might actually contend that tankies and Bernie bros can very well be enemy because they are actually to their right. This in fact tracks with some local instances of discourse I have seen - there's often a sense of betrayal when casual SJWs learn for the first time what old-school commies actually believe, and how even though they were sold as the legendary leftiest of them all the positions of theirs that the normie cares about actually reek of "fascism" and "right-wing disinformation".
Yes, I suppose it could be due to that kind of motivated reasoned mental mapping of where "left" and "right" are. You see this with the right wing in the exact same way: some righties say that actually the Nazi Party was socialist, see, it's in the name, Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party! To me, it reads as a cope (our side is just, and those other guys that got it wrong weren't actually our guys), but even if it was true, it is just proving horseshoe theory correct.
Well, the mistake is in thinking that "left" and "right" as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all. The true extensional definition, as I understand it, is that "left" means that you imagine yourself as a rebel fighting against an oppressive system, and "right" means that you fancy yourself holding the line against chaos and decay. These are constraints on form, not on content, and even the form is merely a constraint on mythology that can survive a lot of friction with reality (so Trump's unpredictable bulldozing of norms and institutions still can be perceived as "right", and the SJWs' reliance on the same and treatment of their opposition as a wild element that needs to be dealt with by managerial techniques is "left"). However, the Left can never rest easy without believing in the existence of a greater, more powerful and more organised enemy they are fighting as underdogs against, whether it is the Patriarchy, Trumpism or international capitalism; and the Right needs to believe that its enemies are less structured, more unstable, and ultimately incompetent.
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Certainly this is 61 BC?
Thanks. fixed.
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I would just like to make the point at this time that Lenin, Stalin, and Mao had power over larger populations than Hitler.
Stalin and Mao also ruled for longer.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1146/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/256318?context=8#context
Evil Peak vs Evil Career Counting Stats
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I think the point that Hitler has an unjustifiably outsized reputation as the face of evil isn't unsubstantiated, but a far better example of a communist regime that far outstripped Hitler in terms of proportional body count would probably be Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge at large, who killed approx 25% of their population (among working-age men, the primary targets of the genocide, this figure rises to an astonishing 50-70%; very smart choice to absolutely decimate your main worker base in a primarily subsistence agrarian economy) while having power for less time than the Nazi Party.
They also grabbed infants by their legs and smashed their heads against chankiri trees to stop them from taking revenge after their parents had been killed, practiced Unit 731-like human experimentation including vivisecting people alive and injecting coconut juice into victims' veins, etc. It’s almost comical how exaggeratedly evil they were, and all these factors taken together probably makes them a very strong candidate as the worst regime in history. In this light, the fact that communism has a better reputation than fascism in the current day is beyond ridiculous - McCarthy, ironically enough, really did a great job inoculating them from criticism.
EDIT: Additional, unrelated thought: The Khmer Rouge were highly influenced by French communist schools of thought; many members of the party studied at the Sorbonne. I always wonder how the intelligentsia who promulgated such ideas managed to live with themselves upon seeing the fallout. Frankly, imagining myself in such a situation makes me viscerally understand the appeal of seppuku as a practice.
I will concede that the Khmer Rouge were at least as evil as the Nazis, if not worse. (Given certain proposals of the more extreme Greens [the term 'Khmer Vert' has been mentioned among certain climate dissidents], this puts Elongated Muskrat's disputed gesture in a different light.)
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My theory for why Hitler is seen as a unique evil compared to Stalin and Mao was because the western powers were allied with Stalin and Mao and made war against Hitler. Then it would follow that the way we see Stalin, Mao and Hitler today is poisoned by the propaganda of the past. But I guess that would not explain why Pol Pot is not seen as uniquely evil because the west fought against Cambodia.
The west (well, mostly the US) fought against Pol Pot taking control of Cambodia, but even the US opposition was incidental enough that we don't even think of it as an American war; we were mostly bombing the hell out of North Vietnamese logistics routes plus any Cambodians unfortunate enough to be in the blast radii, and none of it stopped the Khmer Rouge from taking control in the end.
The fight which took Cambodia away from the Khmer Rouge was accomplished by, of all nations, Communist Vietnam. I'd like to imagine that this proves the existence of a "what the fuck are you doing with those babies" red line that even most Communists don't want to see crossed, but I think the reality was more like "territorial disputes got violent and that snowballed". Regardless of Vietnam's motives, at this point for obvious reasons the west was giving them no support, and a little political resistance, and so when it turned out that Chomsky was wrong we didn't exactly have any reasons to be proud of or want to talk about the whole affair.
This was essentially what occurred, yes. Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam initially had an alliance, but the Khmer Rouge harboured a belief that the VCP's goal was to start an Indochinese federation with Vietnam at the helm, so they started purging their own Vietnamese-trained members and attacked Vietnam multiple times in fear of their expansionism. These acts of aggression by Cambodia was what got Vietnam to take action, it was not because Vietnam was so appalled by the behaviour of the Khmer Rouge that they did not believe it could be allowed to stand. Keep in mind also that the VCP did participate in persecutions (though not to the same degree as Kampuchea) and was so hell-bent on collectivising the means of production that they almost let it starve their nation.
In general, with regards to these things it's helpful to assume they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's all realpolitik and always has been. Communist nations are often prone to mutual distrust and territorial infighting in spite of the shared ideological well they draw from - another great example is Ethiopia and Somalia. Despite the fact that Somalia is often brought up to take unearned potshots at libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism, if you look at the history Somalia as it is now was actually created by the infighting of two dictatorial communist governments - the Derg (Ethiopia) and the Somali Democratic Republic, governed by Siad Barre. In short Barre attempted to invade Ogaden on the basis that Ethiopian administration of the region was essentially tantamount to an African colonial occupation of a primarily Somali-occupied area, promulgating a war which he couldn't win once the USSR backed Ethiopia. This defeat, coupled with a refugee crisis created by the war and extreme disregard on Barre's end toward the Isaaq people (who were largely the ones who bore the cost of the crisis) was the catalyst that resulted in the blossoming of a full-scale civil war and the complete disintegration of Somalia.
Man from what I can tell this is one of the most bruh moments in all of history. As I recall, Vietnam had, essentially, overwhelming firepower over the Khmer Rouge (particularly since the Khmer Rouge were systematically eliminating their own manpower base) but the Cambodian regime still insisted on randomly invading and wiping out villages along their borders until Vietnam got fed up with them and overthrew the government.
Then China threw a hissy fit about it and invaded Vietnam in retaliation.
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The particular disreputation of Hitler is not just due to his evilness, but also due to the fact Germans are Western. Communism gets to largely write Khmer Rouge off its reputation because most people don't seem to care about third-world Asians (Chinese less so, but also, owing to how numerous they are) massacring each other. As the meme goes, "emperor Ching Chuang Hong declares minor border war, 100 millions dead".
I think that’s most of it, but I think Eddie Izard also had a good point that Pol Pot and Stalin “killed their own people, and we’re sort of fine with that.”
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No, no, the meme goes more like "In 924, Emperor Quan sat on the throne. 392 million would die."
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I agree, good post. Hitler is not complicated.
Hitler's goal was to increase the strength of the German people by uniting them and conquering more land to settle. Land is the base of national strength. You need lots of good land if you want a large population and a strong country. He wanted this because Hitler conceptualized the world as a competition between nations, the state is a suit of armour for the nation. That's what identity politics is. It's the belief that politics is about using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people. It's about creating the biggest, toughest suit of armour that can brush aside any physical or psychic attack in a dangerous, bloody world. And you are allowed to strike first, if necessary.
This is totally against the concept that politics is about doing good in some universal sense, or leaving people alone.
The libertarian sees the state as a bikini that should only provide the bare minimum of protection, provide the maximum freedom of movement. They think that the world and other peoples are fundamentally good, the environment is pleasant and danger is rare. If you're on a tropical island why constrict yourself with clothing?
The moralist sees the state as a fashion statement, a social statement, a political message, it's about ensuring that the poor textile workers received a fair wage. Thus the state can be bound by international law, clothing is bound by fashion. The international community matters, those judging eyes are watching. Trendsetters should be followed. Getting one's hands dirty is to be avoided, you don't want to get blood on these jeans!
I think the Statist and Libertarian approaches are naive in opposite directions. Libertarians tend to be naive about people abusing the lack of control to exploit the weak. Statists tend to be naive about abuses of power.
So a libertarian wouldn’t worry too much about things like the power differential between an employer and employee, or between a strong person and a weak one. Or between a teacher and student. And they assume that no one would exploit a knowledge gap to make more money. So they don’t see a need for any government intervention in those things because employers would never exploit an employee’s desperation for a wage to get them to accept unsafe conditions or longer work hours. A pharmacist wouldn’t give you a substance they knew was addictive just to get a repeat buyer.
On the Statist side, they tend to assume that anyone in government is protected by magic good-guy dust and thus would never use their power to reward friends, punish enemies, or enrich themselves. They assume that no cop ever abuses power over a person he assumes is a criminal.
Sure, but this is just re-iterating that statists/moralists are conflict theorists and work on a zero-sum mindset (where resources they need to survive are gained by manipulating other human beings in various ways) and libertarians are mistake theorists who work on a positive-sum mindset (where resources they need to survive are gained by manipulating reality directly).
Mindset difference- if you think you can always find another one, or are skilled enough that you can find another one, then your outlook on life is going to tend toward liberty. If you don't think you can do this, or are not competent, then you bend toward moralism because you need to convince someone else to protect you from the harsh reality that you may need to pay more for a service than you would like to afford (typically couched as "abuse of power"- the libertarian answers that you can't abuse power you don't have, the moralist answers that this actually means "protecting the useless from the useful", the libertarian asks "why do the useless deserve that?", and that's why they're as far away from each other as they can get on the political compass).
I don't think it's a conscious thing for a lot of people; they instinctively know where their strengths, weaknesses, and interests lie, and their worldview emerges from those initial conditions. And the people who are conscious of it tend libertarian anyways (because if you're capable of that you tend to be smarter -> benefit more from liberty than the average man).
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I don't think this is true. I think libertarians tend to have a fairly negative view of humanity, as they think that people generally cannot be trusted with power, and that power itself almost inevitably leads to crimes and catastrophes. The Ron Swanson "everything before 1776 was a mistake" view of history is one of the most pessimistic views of man one can conceive of.
To a certain extent sure, but it's usually only very sheltered peoples that embrace libertarianism. The British avoided the need for a large standing army because of their geography. The US enjoyed the luxury of having no strong powers in their entire hemisphere. Neither power ever really suffered at the hands of any foreign forces like the less fortunately positioned countries.
If you tried libertarianism in central Europe or Asia, then you're in for some really bad experiences. Germany - 25% dead in the Thirty Years War. Unity is strength, be the hammer not the anvil. Poland -- annexed because they weren't strong and autocratic enough. Decisive, central leadership has its virtues. China - massive crises and disasters with tens of millions dead whenever the state shows weakness. Don't show any weakness.
What is the libertarian response to a bunch of bandits coming over the hill? There's more of them then there are of you. They're bandits, they're professional robbers and you're an amateur homestead defender. You need numbers, you need preparation, you need professionals, you need a state to fight them off. The only way to be without those things is if people are benign and don't decide to repress you in the first place. In fact the bandits could make their own state as stationary bandit. They become the nobles that own all the land that you pay taxes to, they provide protection. Either way you lose freedom if there are enough bad people.
Ackchyually, the hammer tends to break first.
All the blacksmithing demos I've ever seen have some serious ritual about how you are not supposed to hit the hammer on the anvil. Only with the workpiece between.
Of course, but misses happen.
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Well, this depends on how you define "libertarianism" and famously each libertarian has 3 - 5 competing definitions. I agree inasmuch as the ideology itself is a product of the modern age and makes modern assumptions, and by historical standards most all modern peoples are very sheltered. However if you look at people groups with libertarian characteristics (low state capacity, egalitarian attitudes, primacy of the individual or family, emphasis placed on individual rights) you tend to find the opposite – libertarian attitudes thrive in places like the Anglo-Scotch border region, the Comanche tribes of North America, I hear perhaps Somalia. These places are places of constant conflict, not sheltered places.
What time period do you have in mind here? The British were fairly consistently menaced by outside invasions (from Scotland, from France, from Spain, from various Viking invasions, etc.) and they raised huge armies (and ran up massive expenses) to deal with some of these threats.
Those regions produced libertarian thinkers like Frédéric Bastiat and of course most (in)famously Ayn Rand (idk are we counting Russia as European or Asian here?)
Germany is the heartland of the Anglo-Saxons (who, if memory serves, were noted in antiquity for their egalitarian attitudes) and (almost) the geographical home of the Austrian school of economics!
This also describes China whenever the state shows strength, does it not?
I agree with you that low state capacity (particularly after the Industrial revolution) is potentially a critical weakness in a society, but I would suggest you don't understand how this interfaces with the libertarian impulse. The libertarian impulse arises from a condition where self-reliant individualism is an adaptive capacity, not places where it is maladaptive, and I think historically it is often adaptive in frontier regions that are high in violence and low on population and trust.
Probably to airstrike them? In my experience libertarians are very often former military personnel and are better equipped both psychologically and otherwise to deal with a bunch of bandits coming over the hill than most people.
(An aside – , I can't speak as much for other places, but in the United States, the "bandits coming over the hill" (Indians) were often better dealt with by locals (for instance, the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty) or state forces (e.g. the Texas Rangers) than the strong arm of the centralized government, in this case the United States.)
More fundamentally, though, "bandits coming over the hill" is a quintessential example of a situation where libertarians are quite happy to look to the state. I don't think you understand the way (if I can speak broadly about an ideology or movement as prone to infighting as "libertarianism") that libertarians think about state capacity. Libertarians take a very Hobbesian view of the state (going back to a low view of human nature). For them, the state is fundamentally a killing machine that enjoys the monopoly on violence. Thus, they want the state to have capacity to deal with
None of this inherently implies any sort of weakness when it comes to military affairs. Libertarianism arguably is inadequate to 19th and 20th century industrialized warfare because internal state capacity translates to military prowess. But this is due to the intersection of culture and technology, and of course in World War Two the more libertarian regimes (the United States of America, the U.K.) were actually superior to regimes with ostensibly stronger state capacity like the USSR and Nazi Germany. There's nothing inherent in libertarian philosophy that requires a low state capacity for dealing with external threats, and I don't think the correlation between internal state capacity and wartime state capacity is quite as strong now as it was in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution.
That is a good, thought-provoking response. My primary concept of libertarianism is pursuit of a smaller state which just does less in all domains generally. The Britain of 1900 vs the Britain of 1950 for instance. One of the most important liberties strikes me as not getting dragged away by draft officers, heading off to fight and possibly die in a trench somewhere. Or having to pay high taxes (which are needed for powerful armies). Reason-magazine libertarianism might be seen as inauthentic by other schools of thought I guess but it does seem like libertarianism.
With regards to state-capacity libertarianism, I have fewer complaints. It does lead to an increasingly expansive definition of military capacity though. You obviously want to have state arsenals and dockyards, that expands out into investments in steel and chemicals, support for heavy industry and power plants, technical education in schools... At some point it merges with a nationalist state's military-industrial complex. It's a basically continuous spectrum. But at the far end you end up with China's five year plans to develop strategic industries and huge state investments to reorient the economy on autarchic lines, inculcate patriotism and nationalism into the youth and it can hardly be called libertarian. They've clearly passed some key threshold a long time ago.
Was the Anglo-Scottish border really that bad? It was bad by British standards. Most of Britain was pretty peaceful. There was long-term low intensity violence. Likewise with the American westwards expansion.
But it was not extremely severe violence. The Native Americans could not produce 80,000 troops seemingly out of nowhere and ride up to besiege Boston like the average steppe horde circa 500 AD. Cities weren't being razed to the ground. It was not the kind of violence that threatens national extermination if you lose - it was that for the natives, not the Europeans. In Eastern Europe you had cities getting razed and countries getting wiped off the map all the time. In Asia you had steppe nomads showing up and exterminating whole countries. Or they'd install themselves as the leaders and conduct humiliation rituals. Small kin groups and decentralized defence works against a small tribe of natives but will not hold back the Mongols, Goths or Manchu.
I think there's a certain kind of sympathy Anglos think we have with the Eurasian powers. In Australia we have ANZAC Day and bands playing The Last Post, there's a lot of mythologizing. In the US there's supporting the troops and so on. But our wars are nearly always fought overseas and/or against much weaker opponents. In WW2 we lost 0.5% for Australia and 0.3% for the US. Not 17% like Poland or 13% like the Soviet Union. That is a totally different kind of warfare.
Doing what the US did in WW1/2 and switching from huge civilian industry to wartime industry when war arrives is a privilege of geography and size. In 1941 the US Army was smaller than the Portuguese army, that just wouldn't work in Eurasia. The most important thing for winning a huge struggle like WW2 is being big, industrialized and resource-rich, military efficiency and ideology is secondary. If the US had to cope with having negligible oil production like Germany, a population 50% lower, shortages of iron, nickel, chromium and just about everything except coal... German victory in Europe would be hard to avoid.
Germany is also the home of Prussian enlightened absolutism and militarism, von Schleicher's Military State, Marxism and national socialism itself, I don't think it can necessarily be claimed as a bastion of libertarianism. It's certainly not a very libertarian state today and wasn't historically, aside from the Holy Roman Empire period.
Thank you.
Libertarians often but not always coalesce around some form of the Non Aggression Principle, which is that you shouldn't initiate violence. This seems uncontroversial but libertarians try to apply it to the state, which is inevitably and frequently violent to varying degrees.
And this, I think, is interesting, because it explicitly was understood in the American conception of liberty that this was part of the bargain – you would pay for your freedom with blood. I think libertarians are divided on this today, but it's not inherently at odds with very libertarian ideas (not that I am claiming early America was libertarian per se, but it is common for libertarians to look up to it, I think).
Worth considering that the most powerful nation in the world, militarily, outsources the vast majority of its defense needs (perhaps too much for my personal liking) to private contractors (including "direct action" work). I don't think libertarianism is necessarily opposed to a state military-industrial complex, but I also suspect there are probably strange and radical uh "free market solutions" to defense that have not been tried, or not been tried for some time, for a variety of reasons. Maybe we'll get to see how letters of marque work soon...
I'm really not sure how it stacked up to its peers. But let's just accept for the sake of argument that England was "fairly peaceful" albeit with long-term low intensity violence – we'll stipulate that the many campaigns in France, Scotland, Ireland, etc. count as closer to this than existential industrialized warfare. But I think that long term violence is better for creating martial peoples than short-term high intensity violence. I suspect it has some failure modes, but while I don't have a good grasp of Asian history I get the impression that in places like China and maybe at times India it tended more (especially on a per capita basis) towards short term high intensity violence with periods of stability in between, and the result was that smaller states with a history of constant, lower intensity warfare rode roughshod over them – not merely the Europeans, but also the Japanese and, as you mention, the Mongols. My understanding is that to this day in China and, e.g., Korea, the military is a low-status profession (whereas here in the United States it is extremely high status in some communities and high enough status generally that speaking of it as low status is to risk cancelation, although doubtless it is considered low status in some quarters).
However again I will cop to not having a good idea of Chinese history, so maybe I am wrong! But England's long-term low intensity violence certainly did not do it a disservice when it came to conflict; first Britain and then her culturally similar and (even more so) geographically privileged American offspring absolutely dominated the world, and this was not merely due to superior industry and firepower but also due, I think, to superior martial prowess.
The Comanche, as you say, were too low in numbers to seriously threaten the United States or the "Mexican nation" as a whole but they were a serious enough threat that they pushed back the border during the Civil War and used northern Mexico as a sort of loot farm for decades – and all of that with extremely low numbers. Probably fewer than 1,000 Comanche were part of the Great Raid of 1840 and they overran and burned two white settlements; Linnville was never rebuilt. The problem with the Comanche was simply that they didn't have the numbers, and they also seemed to suffer from what I think is a fairly common problem of premodern conflict, which is that they would bail on skirmishes that weren't inevitably going there way instead of risking taking casualties. Which meant, incidentally, that smaller groups of settlers could and did hold off larger groups of Comanche. I think that this plays into my general suggestion that libertarian "tendencies" arise among individualistic peoples, which often arise in relatively low-population-density high-conflict regions, although I suspect that's not all of the picture. Libertarianism itself as an ideology I think arises in part as a reaction to the atrocities perpetrated by high state capacity actors – it's not an inevitable outgrowth of libertarian tendencies, I don't think. But I'd suggest it's precisely the sort of people who have to fight a group of bandits coming over the hill that develop the individualized tendencies that can easily manifest as libertarianism or similar ideological leanings.
Didn't the Mongolians take over China and then peter out when facing the comparatively less populous and decentralized Eastern Europeans? I realize that wasn't the only factor there, but I'm not really sure that necessarily cuts in favor of large hierarchical states instead of numerous decentralized ones. If, as I suspect, long-term violence breeds killing machines, it would make sense that the Mongols (a people known for long-term low-intensity conflict) would run roughshod over the Chinese (who as I understand alternated between high-intensity warfare and periods of peace) but met their match against the fragmented Eastern European monarchies. However, I suspect that's at best a huge oversimplification of what actually happened.
Casualties in the American Civil War were very large. Sure, not einsatzgruppen-levels of ethnic cleansing kill-counts, but World War One levels of per capita casualties, especially for the South. (Incidentally, the South was the much more "libertarian" of the two polities if you don't count owning human beings and it caused them more than a little grief at managing the industrial war. However, they outperformed their larger counterpart as a fighting force, coming out of the war with a superior "k/d ratio" despite being the smaller force and losing the war).
To your point, the United States emerged from the conflict a much more centralized and less "libertarian" regime, which served it fairly well in cleaning up the frontier (what we might now refer to as "ethnic cleansing") and getting in conflicts overseas.
Yes, I agree with this, more or less. But Germany would have been better served by embracing libertarianism than fascism in the 1930s, so perhaps it's not as maladaptive in Central Europe as you think!
I certainly wouldn't claim it as a bastion for libertarianism today. But in antiquity my understanding was that it was "more libertarian" than, say, the Romans and I think some of those tendencies carried through to the Anglo-Saxons, then the British (and perhaps the Scots) with their conception of liberty and liberalism, and now with the American liberal, "conservative," or libertarian tendency – which in many ways is ascendent.
'twill be interesting to see what we do with it.
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I actually don't agree with this, and it is a central subject of my next planned post. The belief that politics is about "using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people" is what I would call the pagan view, but in my next post I will argue that Hitler was not a pagan. He doesn't want Germany to expand and flourish because they are his people, and he would not gracefully tolerate the same view from other tribes. Hitler wants Germany to expand, flourish, and conquer because they are the best people, in an absolute sense -- and that their flourishing and conquering at the expense of others is the only course in harmony with the one and only Natural Order.
That's fair. I suppose that's another way of looking at his Anglophilia. I see it as 'Germans and English are basically the same people, let's work together' but you could go 'the English are also a top-tier race (plus China/Japan), let's work together'.
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This is entirely wrong, as the Hebrew conception of God is simply a metaphorical and symbolic representation of themselves as a tribe.
Hebrew teaching is that they have a divine mission to heal the world, and it so happens that "healing the world" means driving out all worship of all idols offensive to Yahweh. Yahweh is a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people themselves. Their Chosenness is not a cosmic burden, it's a declaration of ethno-supremacism that coheres them in the face of ethnic conflict.
You get close to identifying a real differentiation between pagan and Hebrew worship. Pagan worship did entail baseline respect for the idols of foreigners whereas Hebrew lore does not. The Hebrew mission is to destroy the idols of everyone else in the entire world in favor of sole worship of the Jewish tribal god Yahweh above all else.
I see where you are going with this, that German National Socialism is more Hebrew in spirit than Aryan in spirit. That could not be more incorrect, but I'll wait until you actually present that argument to respond.
Nice thesis statement.
What I would be interested to see is evidence in the sacred texts of other religions, or in the histories of other tribes, of humble laments of the sort found in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- in contrast with the "them's the breaks" tone of the pagan texts, or the "we got stabbed in the back by vermin within and without" tone of Mein Kampf. Of course I haven't read every mythological treatise of every world religion, so maybe you can teach me something.
With respect to "humble laments", sure there are plenty of Roman myths where the god, and by extension the people the god represents, are humbled in some sort of way. And in terms of literary tone and prophecy Virgil's Aeneid has some similarities.
But ultimately you are misinterpreting Isaiah as being foremost self-criticism and "humility and forbearance in defeat" while leaving out the most important part of Isaiah, which is the prophet Isaiah professing the coming of the Messiah and the destruction of Babylon. Isaiah is another chapter in the Hebrew motif of Yahweh coming into conflict with Civilizational Order, with the Babylonians being the Civilization of the era hated by Yahweh... Another among a very long list: The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Europeans...
Mein Kampf is less like Isaiah and more like a Babylonian who read Isaiah and pieced together that the Jews want to see Babylon destroyed. Or sorry, I guess according to @4bpp it was just God's will that Babylon gets destroyed, nothing to do with the will of the Jews themselves. Prophecies are very real insofar as they symbolically represent plans and wishes.
Isaiah is relevant because it provides literary justification for the Yahweh versus Civilization dialectic that is endemic in Hebrew lore and also identified in Mein Kampf, only in the latter case interpreted from the side of the Babylonians- the side of Civilization, the side of the Romans, or the side of the exasperated Pharaoh who expelled the Jews after they wrought plagues onto civilization and murdered the first-born sons of the Gentiles...
Isaiah is not about forbearance, it's about plotting the destruction of civilization.
This also gets to the heart of the difference between Indo European Paganism and Hebrew religion. The former was meant to organize society into expansive Civilization with a clear hierarchy and social order, and the latter is meant to represent a resistance to the former.
I think we've reached a terminal point in this thread of the discussion, where we are at what Sowell calls a "conflict of visions". I have read Isaiah in its entirety, and I presume you have as well. There is no more data to collect, but we see the data through the lens of different concepts and different values. The truth is, you aren't going to convince me of your reading of Isaiah through dialectic, and I'm not going to convince you of mine, even if we are both being honest and logical. The denial of that truth is a chief delusion of the so-called "Enlightenment". A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the way side...". That's life.
I wish you would have given an example of a source. I'm skeptical of this (that any Roman myth has the tone and general purpose of Isaiah) to begin with, but if it comes without a source on the first stab, I'm doubly skeptical.
Sorry, I don't accept "agree to disagree" when your analysis ignores Isaiah's prophecy of the Messiah and the ultra-violent genocide of Babylon:
Humble forbearance indeed!!!
OK I see, you are quoting Chapter 13 not Chapter 3. Looks like the Babylonians are in for some Old Testament justice.
This is something I will address at greater length in my next post (note that it was me who first brought up Moses in connection with Genocide), but long story short is this: if we compare Mein Kampf and Isaiah, one is self-righteous, entitled, and enraged, and the other his humble, repentant, and resolved. Jamming on the enemy in itself has nothing to do with identity politics.
There is also an important question of fact here. The moral axiom that connects Judeo-Christian foreign policy , so to speak, from the bronze age to the 20th century is this: like a police officer making an arrest, you are obligated to handle your enemies with the lightest touch you safely can -- but no lighter, and them's the breaks. As a matter of fact, in the bronze age, the lightest touch you can safely use, when bordering a near-peer ruthless belligerent, may be enslavement or genocide (what is your other option? "I guess that war is over; whew; you can all go home now; better luck next time wiping us out and raping our wives and daughters "). But I do not believe Jews per se were threat to Germany at all -- even if Marxism was a threat to Germany (which it was), and Jews were disproportionally Marxist (which they were). The 30,000 Jews who won medals for bravery in WWI were certainly not a threat to Germany -- but many of those very men, and their families, perished in Nazi death camps all the same.
Now how did Hitler think when the shoe was on the other foot, and his own tribe was being a pest and got their asses kicked? If the allied cause was a Jewish conspiracy like Hitler charged, then he should have expected Old Testament justice at Versailles. Austria and Prussia, and their union in the German Empire, had fought bloody wars of aggression against the allies with whom they sought terms at Versailles, and in some cases against their fathers and grandfathers. So by Hitler's own logic, the allies would have been within their rights to push for a final solution to the German Problem while they had the upper hand. But the Versailles treaty, hard as it was on Germany, was not the Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport) -- and yet what did Hitler say about it? Vae Victus? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not exactly. He said it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination. Poor baby.
And that's identity politics: group justice with double standards. It is holding that your people are entitled to prey on others whenever the opportunity presents itself, and whining in self-righteous indignation when the shoe is on the other foot. The Hebrews didn't do that, and neither did the pagans.
Of course it does, the friend/enemy distinction is the essence of identity politics. When the Hebrews do it it's just "Old Testament justice" but when Hitler identifies Jews as adversarial then it's identity politics? Give me a break.
I'm sorry but this just shows a total ignorance of the Hebrew bible, which consists exactly of cycles of the Israelites genociding people according to the will of Yahweh and then acting like whiny victims when the shoe is on the other foot. Jews to this day still publicly celebrate the mass murder of the first-born sons of the Gentiles in Egypt. And don't get me started on Purim...
It is also just a plain fact that US intelligence shortly after WWII regarded Jews as a security threat to the United States. And of course nearly all Communist spies were Jewish. The idea that the entire notion was just "Hitlerian Identity Politics" is total bunk. There was more of a 'there' there.
Overall your analysis too heavily relies on these extremely high-level characterizations of Mein Kampf. If you are going to cite books from the Bible can you also cite passages from Mein Kampf that demonstrate your point rather than your over-reliance on super high-level characterizations of that work?
I've been accused of a lot of things -- but total ignorance of the Hebrew Bible, that's my new favorite.
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This is the same org that recently said right wing extremism is the greatest threat to US national security. I never took them seriously as you seem to, but maybe I should have another look.
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When the Hebrews do it it's "this is something written in a book, secular historians don't think it actually happened, and it's not something to do today".
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At least cite Isaiah correctly, you are missing a 1 in front of your chapter numbers. You are thinking of Isaiah chapters 13 and 14, not 3 and 4.
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What are the references to? They don't seem to be from the book of Isaiah. For example you have
But Isaiah 3:14-16 reads
This is all about God's judgment upon Israel, and in any case doesn't match the themes of fleeing, slaughtering, prisoners, or infants.
Putting part of your post in quotes and googling leads me to this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/11a4ttc/isaiahs_prophecy_of_the_destruction_of_babylon_is/
which misquotes Isaiah over and over. Did you check those with the original source (the Bible) before you posted?
Of course I've read the original source, that provides a good summary. The summary is less annoying than pasting the verses, but here you go: It is Chapter 13 and 14:
Any reader can compare what is actually Isaiah with your tripe about Humble forbearance. I cited a summary of the claims as I already knew about the prophecy. The chapter given is wrong, but the point is not misrepresented anybody can read it himself.
Funny, that was going to be my argument, too (except for the word "tripe").
I think Thomas Sowell is hands down the most notable right-leaning political thinker of our lifetime, and Conflict of Visions is Sowell's favorite Sowell book. I hope you'll read it if you haven't.
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lol. What does you not accepting it look like? Whatever it is, knock yourself out.
I can't agree to disagree because I don't even know how you incorporate Isaiah's prophecies into your analysis. You just ignore them and then end the conversation when they are brought up.
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This is not an interpretation I have heard before. What do you base it on?
The counterexample that immediately comes to mind is Atenism which during its brief life went full iconoclasm on the normal Egyptian religion and afterwards got eradicated in turn. Occasional Chinese persecution of Buddhists also comes to mind. The Romans also had little respect for Celtic religion.
Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?
It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.
If only they integrated the people who worshiped those idols.
They did, modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from intermarried Jews and Romans.
Since the descendents of these unions became the modern ashkenazim, that means it's a case of Romans (Roman women, specifically) leaving the Roman demos, rather than Jews joining it. If the Jews had integrated in, then their descendents wouldn't be Jews today.
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Many modern people are descended from the interbreeding of masters and slaves. What I mean is, if only they had incorporated conquered people into their society having the rights of citizens.
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No. I think you are stretching interpretations to force your hobby horse. There are plenty of examples of tutelary deities among pagan religions, including ones that were reused. Do any of the number of deities that the Aztecs believed they had a personal responsibility to keep fed with blood lest the universe get destroyed count as a representation of the Aztecs themselves, even though other Mesoamerican peoples were found to have the same gods with etymologically related names and the same attributes? Were Greeks worshipping Athena worshipping the city of Athens, even as they waged war against it? What about Apollo, who the Spartans considered their tutelary god with the lexical connection being less obvious?
This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism. Therefore intolerance of foreign gods is not a uniquely Hebrew feature, and can't be used to distinguish Hebrew(-lineage) religions from pagan ones.
Both Athens and Sparta were indeed worshipping a people represented by Athena and Apollo and the ideals they represented. It was an Indo European religion, those figures represent the Indo-Europeans themselves and cult worship of them functionally entailed worship of Indo-European forbearers and founders.
Athena and Apollo represent Indo-Europeans, Yahweh represents Jews. And in any case the Athena cult existed before Athens. Athens was named after Athena. That is nothing like the Mosaic covenant that features in Exodus. If the origin of Athena as a goddess was that she chose Athens as her city then it's unlikely it would have ever been a pan-Hellenic cult. But the pan-Hellenic cult came first and then the name of the city came later. Whereas the Mosaic covenant is the very origin of the Jewish religion and worship of Yahweh.
Can you please provide your interpretation of the blood covenant? Do you think it's literally true? If you don't think it's true, then how could you have any other literary interpretation than the god portrayed in Exodus is a symbolic representation of the people he has Chosen? The covenant is even inherited genetically, it's a tribal representation.
Yes, one of the weaknesses of the word "pagan" is a lack of clarity- I was referring to Indo European religion which does have this quality.
I’m curious about your spirituality (not a gotcha question). I mean you flirt, in these posts, with some kind of genuine spiritual belief in Indo-European paganism that goes beyond just ‘it was good social technology’.
It basically boils down to "it was good social technology" but why it was good social technology is important. Like the Hebrew bible, it was not just about moral lessons it was about cohering the identity and racial consciousness of people who followed the religion. And using that racial consciousness to change the world. Worshipping Apollo was worshipping a racial ideal just like it is with Yahweh.
I also think humans are innately religious, and religiosity is essentially a personality trait. I do think having some pro-European and pro-Civilizational religious revival is essential, and that means moving beyond Yahweh and Hebrew lore. I don't think that revival will be a reform of Indo-European paganism although I think it would have some similarities in spirit and aesthetic.
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I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?
The attempt of medieval European royal houses to appropriate Yahweh as a symbol of their lineage falls flat precisely because of the Hebrew bible. If Exodus entailed God choosing the lineage of Alfred the Great, then it would absolutely be cogent to identify the God portrayed in that mythos as representing the people chosen by him. You sure as hell wouldn't be saying "oh the worship of that god started because the Saxons claimed that god selected them as his favorite among all the nations, who knows what the god is supposed to represent! Nothing, probably."
You aren't recognizing the difference between the mythological impetus for the cult itself being the Moasic covenant, whereas it has not been in any single other case you have tried to cite as a point of comparison. You have just continued to point out that gods representing people is a thing that happens all throughout history, except for Exodus I guess! Yeah right.
The Yahweh cult is rooted in the Mosaic covenant. Yahweh is a symbol of that people. If some other cult emerged on the basis of a blood covenant between a god and a people you would certainly recognize that as plainly obvious.
Except it is true that countless Christian countries, particularly in Europe, and countless other Christian movements believed that they were chosen by (the Christian/Jewish) God for greatness, for fortune, for special favor. What’s more most also believed that the Jews had lost his favor and/or were now heretics, and that they were their inheritors.
The only way you seem to suggest this is untrue is in the argument that there is some kind of inherent, intrinsic spiritual bond between Abrahamic religion and the Jewish race, despite the fact that for the overwhelming majority of the last 2000 years the great majority of believers have had a negative view of practicing Jews. Some Christians do believe this (like Evangelicals), but that’s because they believe deeply that the whole thing is real. Since you don’t believe it’s real, I don’t really understand why you think that connection is so inherent and so immutable. Clearly it hasn’t prevented antisemitism or guaranteed philosemitism, in either the Christian or Islamic worlds.
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I still can't discern a single argument that any of the gods discussed is supposed to symbolise the people that worshipped him or her. You just keep asserting that it is so and must obviously be so, against a wealth of literature that is replete with claims of those gods symbolising all sorts of things but people, and not a single example of anyone ever understanding worshipping the god to entail worshipping the associated people. There is of course a trivial sense in which they do, in that people who both believe in the god and in the story that a particular group of people are the god's chosen necessarily will treat that group in a special way, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the latter belief follows from the former, or that this amounts to worshipping the group as synonymous with the god.
Ask any adherent of religions in the Judaism-derived family and they will probably tell you that yes, they worship the exact same god as the Jews do, no, that god is not a symbol for the Jews, and no, they definitively are not expected in a symbolic way to worship the Jews. They will probably also tell you that the thing about the Israelites being god's chosen for some reason or another does not apply to modern-day Jews, and they are just confused. Even the Jews themselves make a point of not requiring non-Jews to believe the part about the covenant.
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I’m increasingly starting to believe that counting famine deaths as murders is epistemological hogwash. If we’re going to blame Mao and Stalin for their famine deaths, then we need to blame Churchill for the Bengali terror famine, Prime Minister John Russell for the Irish Holodomor, and Franklin Roosevelt for maiming 2 million Americans with pellagra during the Great Depression. And in all three of those examples you can point to sketch things that make them look intentional. During the Irish famine, the British government was actively taking food out of Ireland for export even while people were dying, they refused to allow American foreign aid to Ireland (just like Stalin did), and various British thinkers and high-ups were muttering darkly about how fewer Irish was probably a good thing. Churchill specifically routed supplies away from India claiming it was necessary for war reasons. Roosevelt was paying American farmers to burn entire crops while people went hungry.
Asking as an ignoramus about this subject: isn't the pellagra part too far-fetched to include in this list? I imagine there were still sources of food aid available in the US, at least compared to cases of famine you mentioned.
There are only about 120 recorded deaths per year from starvation in America during the Great Depression. Pellagra and other nutritional deficiency diseases were already endemic in parts of the country even before the Great Depression. In North Carolina alone in 1929 there were an estimated 23,000 malnourished school-age children. There were a lot of malnourishment-related deaths from disease during the Great Depression that, had they occurred in any other country, historians would probably count as famine deaths.
I see. But pellagra did occur in many other countries in those times as well, didn't it?
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ChadYes.jpg?
It seems to me that the proper thing to do is distinguish between intentional deaths and deaths via mismanagement. Probably Roosevelt did not intend to give people pellagra, but I think it's fine to blame him for the result, even if we don't consider it the moral equivalent of mass murder.
On one hand, I think the Holocaust does read differently if the exact same victims died of plausibly-deniable famine: it's seemingly unique on the basis of the deliberate industrial murder, even though accounts generally count malnutrition and exposure deaths. On the other, this just incentivises malicious incompetence going forward, and doesn't necessarily reduce actual body counts. I'm not sure exactly where I'd put it, but IMO there is a line past which incompetence should be assumed to be malice when it comes to mass murder.
"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
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It's a fair point that famines are far more complex than straight up shooting your political opponents - but I think you're making a historical error to include things like the Bengal famine and even the Irish potato famine in with the holodomor uncritically - especially using the same term for both Ukraine and Ireland.
The Irish potato famine has lots of history - but basically it was the confluence of the potato blight interacting with a growing industrialization (meaning people no longer had craft activities to fall back on) and pressure from population with limited land rights (their small plots could only grow potatoes on the marginal zones at yields to support their families). The economic and support system at the time was "laissez faire" - although there were some direct transfers from British during the first blights, this dried up later in 1847/48 ish as a liberal government came in during a time of recession (I think, it has been a while since I read about it all here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315708522/famines-european-economic-history-declan-curran-lubomyr-luciuk-andrew-newby). Interestingly the areas that kept exporting typically did better: support was paid out of the wealth of local landowners and those who were exporting higher value cash foodstuffs (cattle for example) could afford to cover the cost of importation of famine relief foodstuffs - the exports weren't typically the key issue. The real key issue was the laissez faire attitude of the British in general to social support at the time leading to little support from Westminster, the changing economic model giving people no diversified income and the fact that both the central government and local landowners had little connection to those they ruled. They didn't need their votes (they didn't have any), there was a local surplus of labor and they didn't feel a brotherhood. It was horrible, but not a holodomor - it was pretty medieval attitudes to smallholders and those you rule over hitting industrial realities.
Churchill and the Bengal famine we don't have enough time to cover in detail, but it does seem like he's unfairly smeared - unlike the governor at the time (Victor Hope) who deserves serious sanction for taking the word of others that everything was fine and not being at all proactive. Contrary to routing supplies away, Churchill did the reverse, constantly raising it with Roosevelt, unfortunately the pressure from the Japanese and the ongoing demands of Operation Torch (the US landings in North Africa, which needed huge logistics) meant that he didn't get much help and British shipping was tied up or depleted. However, again it was a case of failing to divert enough aid to the region and act fast enough, rather than requisitioning food out of hungry mouths. The central source (I think only?) for Churchill being a shit in the crisis comes from the private notes of Wavell - who took over and was really annoyed at the lack of action. We only have his account, which might be accurate but it doesn't seem to match up with what we have documented about Churchill's actions and that Wavell didn't know about, for example how much effort was going on behind the scenes to bring grain in - although too little too late.
The Ukrainian Holodomor however is much worse than those two examples above, and represented something between a complete indifference to millions of deaths in order to secure export earnings and a deliberate attempt to use famine to break the resistance of Ukraine and other zones to the Soviet Union. Soviet agriculture was a mess, they wanted to industrialize and needed money for that but the prices they were paying to farmers didn't encourage them to sell, which led to things like the "Scissors" crisis of the early 1920s where they just stopped selling to cities given the prices the Soviets offered and they couldn't be compelled via force, they could hide the food or plant less. On top of that, Ukraine and outlying regions were more anti Soviet, especially in rural areas where industrialization was non existent. Once the Soviet state was powerful enough to force the issue, Stalin collectivized the farmers (pushed them all onto standard plots where output was more legible). This reduced sharply reduced yields for several reasons, but meant that everything was controlled and could be seized, from now on the famines fell on the countryside rather than the cities, and famines became much more common. Then, the real killer was the forced export targets to earn foreign currency, which were impossible to meet in bad years of which there are many.
We can argue if the holodomor was genocide (many of Stalins actions were - like to the Crimean Tartars), but it's using famine as a tool to break political opposition and knowingly creating one to achieve a target of industrialization, unlike those above where it was a failure or indifference of a colonial authority to provide enough aid to a region rather than using famine as a club. Both the Bengal and Irish potato famines were a serious black mark on the British empire, the Irish one was a large rallying cry for independence (Bengal less so, Indian elites at the time looked at their share of the blame and didn't think it tactical to focus on at the time) - but they weren't premeditated like the Holodomor and efforts were taken to offset them, just badly.
However, the colonial cases point to the fact that people who lack representation and who the elites just don't need are in a really shit position famine wise (one of Sen's positions), and conditions like theirs combined with a technological shift can create terrible results. Hopefully never relevant for AI. Hopefully.
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I explicitly did not count famine deaths as murders, but counted them separately on top of murders. Note (with emphasis added):
Huh, I hadn't read about the Laogai death rate, and was under the impression that the Cultural Revolution was in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. Thanks for spurring my education!
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I don't think the point about Hitler's identity politics is as surprising as you make it out to be, given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret. In fact, this is what the difference in their assessment often openly stems from - Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil. If you wreak murder at an inconceivable scale in the service of evil goals, you are a particularly insidious (because effective) kind of evil; if you however wreak murder in your pursuit of good, you are seen as closer to something like a tragic or merely misguided, even antiheroic figure.
It's easy for resentful right-wingers to see this as a simple case of who/whom thinking being conveniently weaponised against them, but unless you specifically subscribe to (or want to no-enemies-on-the-right) Hitler's brand of identity politics, you are not actually the [antonym of beneficiary]. In the grand scheme of things, most murderous movements in history are actually tolerated, including ones that would unambiguously code conservative in the modern eye - nobody bats an eye at Genghis Khan branding, and even crusader chic is still on the menu (could you imagine a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings II, but modelling the political tug-of-war between Hitler's Gauleiters?) despite their portfolio including religiously motivated rape, murder and land grabs against people further down the progressive stack, use of child soldiers and much more.
Not exactly a secret, but not nearly as embedded in our cultural consciousness as those caused by Hitler. You should try asking 30 young adults who the most prolific mass murderers of the 20th century were. I did that experiment several times in the 90's. Stalin was rarely mentioned, and Mao was never mentioned once. Hitler was always the first name on the collective lips of the class. The situation is probably a little different now, but I would be very surprised if perception has caught up to reality.
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At least with hitler, as long as you weren’t… a jew, a slav, a jehovah’s witness, a political opponent, a homosexual, a cripple… you were sort of safe cravenly heil hitlering your way though the war-torn hellscape. Whereas for the khmer rouge, the entire present population was fair game. It was all about the future. And if the present clay wasn’t molding fast enough into the ‘new man’, throw it away and try again, as many times as it takes. They went beyond identity politics, there was no ingroup left.
My eye does twitch involuntarily when people say genghis khan's empire 'opened up trade lanes' and 'travelers had never been so safe'.
I don’t believe in the hierarchy of motives. If you had offered to take the ‘undesirables’ off hitler’s hands, he would have happily agreed, just like the communist only wants successful reeducation for capitalists. The deciding moment comes after the original optimistic plan fails. You can then either give up on the idea, or find that you “have to” apply more force for reeducation than you thought, and so tragically break a few eggs in the process/ murder everyone out of convenience. The relevant moral lines are broken here, not on the higher level of goals.
I agree with you that Nazi persecution was more predictable and narrowly targeted than that of the communists, but you left one important group off your list of those who were marked for death by the Nazis: people who would not keep their mouth shut and their tail between their legs. The fact that there were so few of these is a testament to how ironically wrong Hitler was about the alleged greatness of the German Volk. Hitler pointedly lambasts sycophants in Mein Kampf, but he hypocritically demanded it of his vassals and subjects, on pain of death. Hitler reigned over a nation of Spucklecker (spit lickers; his term for sycophants) -- and if they hadn't been, he couldn't have.
I don't think spit-licker is too unkind a term for someone who professes Christianity, and yet silently, passively watches the Nazi persecution of the Jews. I have never done anything so brave as stand up to a murderous tyrannical regime, and so I cannot claim that I would have done anything different than what most Germans did, even most of the ones who recognized Hitler as a ruinous, berserk tyrant. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't. What I am saying is that those of us who are (or might be) spit-lickers should recognize those among us those who demonstrably aren't, such as Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, as better men than us in the most important way. In the words of Solzhenitsyn,
I'm not a Christian, but my first thought was: Did either of these men have children? I tried to look it up, Wikipedia says Bonhoeffer did not. It doesn't mention any children for Niemoller either--do you know?
My mom is a fan of this Vietnam-era song:
I'm reminded too of that E.M. Forster quote: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."
IOW there are more potential loyalties someone could have than just to their principles, religion, country...or self. (That Forster quote could be used to support either "side"--"Betray your country, whose government has been taken over by evil people, for the sake of your friend, who is a good person targeted by those evil people"; or, "Betray your principles, in this case the desire to save your country from its evil government, for the sake of your friend (and family and self).")
I agree it that it is much easier to be a Martyr if you aren't the head of a household. So it is reasonable to expect more heroism for God and country from single men than young married men, for example. On the other hand, I also think that does not excuse the behavior of German so-called Christians at large under Nazi rule, by more than a smidgeon.
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Not to be all atheist, but one of the things I find most discrediting to the Church’s claim of providing moral guidance was its shameful compromising with hitler. Even though it was clear to church leaders that nazism was both generally evil, and opposed to the power of the church as such. Unlike the german people, who were more bribed than threatened into compliance with the regime (so can be said to be morally corrupted, and complicit), the church’s behaviour reflects pure moral cowardice.
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They are deontologically evil, I've brought this up before though on a different subject. Star Control has an origin story for a comically evil race be the pursuit of the perfect good. They achieved it, but then overdid it, resulting in the ultimate evil. Same principle.
I assumed we are talking about the beliefs of typical people rather than us assorted degenerates haunting the Motte, since we are trying to explain why the general populace is more comfortable with Mao/Lenin quotes than with Hitler quotes. If you do not actually believe Hitler quotes to be less appropriate to quote approvingly than Mao/Lenin quotes, then your moral beliefs on the topic are not particularly relevant.
Then isn't the simpler explanation the years of propaganda they go through in public schools, or all the media portraying him as the ultimate evil, while the ins and outs of communism are mostly glossed over? It's not lime most people are doing an in-depth ethical analysis of each system and the ideas behind them.
I'm surprised this has not been the go-to explanation in the discussion. The clue is not that Hitler is stigmatized, but the pattern of the what Moldbug calls the "cathedral" minimizing and excusing communist atrocities even after they became known. I think this pattern is obvious.
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At least at the German school I attended they covered in sufficient detail the beliefs associated with communism and the various skull mountains associated with it, but apart from the one token card-carrying neonazi kid (who wanted to become a tank driver but I think grew up to be a ski instructor instead) everybody still walked out with the standard differential assessment of the two. Of course morality rarely spontaneously materialises out of nowhere and people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on, but all I am saying is that this is the deontological moral package that most people wind up with, and given that package the conclusions that they arrive at are correct in the sense that no amount of additional information about communism or Hitler is likely to change them. If you want to rehabilitate Hitler or throw communist leaders in the pit with him, there is no shortcut around convincing a majority of people to actually change their morality, rather than merely exposing them to some "glossed over" forbidden information.
I don't think this accurately describes our shared common moral sense. If people in a black church take up a collection to send money to hungry children in Zimbabwe, that they could have sent to even hungrier children in Ukraine, then they are advancing their race at the expense of others and few people have a problem with it, and I wouldn't have a problem with it. On a similar note using religion instead of race, if two people were taking up collections, one to aid persecuted Christians in Pakistan and one to aid persecuted Muslims in China, I would preferentially donate to save-the-Christians, and I think that is OK too, and I think it also accords with common sense (and that the push for "effective altruism" defies common sense).
What is wrong in our moral common sense is not advancing your people at the expense of others; it is advancing your people by violating the negative rights of others. Which is what Hitler (and Lenin and Mao) did, of course.
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People rightly intuit that we live in an anti-fascist civilization with WW2 as a founding myth. In that myth, the Soviets are flawed allies but ultimately on the side of good.
For people to reliably recognize all forms of totalitarian socialism as equally evil, we'd have to live in a society that considers virtue as distance from totalitarian socialism, not distance to fascism.
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You're right, I shouldn't have phrased it as "ins and outs" of communism, because it's not a question of not knowing about some event. Many people have knowledge of the shenanigans of Genghis Khan, but they won't have a similar reaction to him as they do to Hitler, even though the scale of his atrocities is comparable, and he doesn't have much of a deontological footing either.
Rather than information, it's about the constant reinforcement of the message that Nazis == Satan, and the Germans are absolutely unrivaled in that. Even some of the nations that were victimized by the Nazis are not so uptight about it. If you stop hammering that message, I doubt Hitler will be seen as any worse than Stalin, which you can even see in the attitudes of people in countries like India.
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What was Hitler's stated goal, in your view?
The Communists' stated goal was to make a better world by killing everyone who didn't fit into it, a number they generally estimated at ~10% of extant humans.
That is not remotely the goal of Communists. Especially stated. The goal of Communists is to maximize personal freedom and prosperity.
...And of course, these quotations describe the policies Communists actually used when they seized power. The idea that identifiable classes of humans were evil by nature and would need to be exterminated to secure Utopia was explicitly baked into the ideology from the start.
And? Doesn't change what I said or the fact you're objectively wrong. The goal is to help people grow stronger.
Obviously "Communists" are not childish idiots with a terminally naive utopian pacifism. Almost by definition they are self selected from the more hardcore and roughneck of the greater socialist umbrella. They are willing to do what must be done to survive and thrive. But if everyone woke up tomorrow willing to work in peace and be a "Communist," or at least friendly, there would be no need for fighting nor an iota of desire for it - and the overwhelming majority would soon become richer and more prosperous with net utilitarian gains. It's a very prosocial ideology. It's generally right-wing ideologies that are characterized by a desire to mass murder the different.
Like, those 1918 quotes are from a period of straight up revolution and civil war, which they did not start nor desire. The initial Russian coup was fairly bloodless, but certain people weren't having it and were willing to kill and drag the country, if not world, into war and chaos to make sure it didn't happen. Do you oppose law & order, or the right to defend yourself? Do you think people shouldn't commit to war?
Again, and? Do you think there or no evil people in society? Or is this just rank hypocrisy where those you perceive to be evil of course deserve to be suppressed if not eliminated, but when other people do it... And you're wrong, the thing about class is you specifically don't need to exterminate anyone nor is it by inborn nature. This isn't HBD. You can simply cast off the clothes of a class and you'll be fine. The nature of Communism guarantees dignified proper livelihood regardless of your personage, even if you're no longer a 1% elite.
See the case of former emperor Puyi and that one movie The Last Emperor, as a visual example.
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Citation?
The early Soviet communists were explicitly pro-terror and against "Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life", but I was under the impression that they were imagining a world where a relatively small amount of terror and murder would be sufficient to make everybody else fall in line. Maybe my recollections are muddled with later leftist movements, but I could swear I recall even early Communism being very pro-equality, to the point of having theories of psychology where people are all basically the same underneath and the fact that some of them eventually want to be evil capitalist oppressors is just because they got an evil capitalist upbringing. Maybe I'm wrong, though - "reeducation camps" were a feature of lots of later strains of Communism but the Gulags didn't really bother to put on such an optimistic "we're trying to fix you for your own good" facade.
Early Communism was indeed very pro-equality, but it also viewed humans as the output of social forces, presumed that bad social forces could make bad humans, and was not shy about advocating that bad humans should be "liquidated". Once Communists gained power, this sort of liquidation was routine wherever they gained power.
I was wondering if maybe your citation would be nutpicking, and worried when I didn't recognize the name, but shame on my ignorance. The "chairman of the Communist International from 1919 to 1926" is a pretty solid reference. Thanks.
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I think you specifically would've been around last time I had a similar discussion, but Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies). For better or worse, most people consider such a goal already more evil than the same thing with people selected by socioeconomic status, but that's neglecting that the communists' stated goal as commonly understood does not mandate killing or even displacing any fixed set of people (that's why they ran reeducation camps).
Having to kill capitalists rather than being able to brainwash them all into becoming good workers was presumably seen by most communists (with the exception perhaps of outliers like Cambodia) as a failure and unfortunate compromise with reality. If you conflate "do terrible thing to everyone who doesn't fit in your world" and "do terrible thing to everyone who you can't reform to fit in your world no matter how much you try", then everyone supporting law and order in the US could also be said to want to make a better world by brutally robbing the liberty of everyone who doesn't fit into it, a number that is bounded below at ~0.5% of the US population.
Can you point me (or us) to Hitler's statements on this?
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