site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4461 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I found this stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_certificate

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1 (the official holocaust encyclopedia)

Popularly, however, it continued to be used inside and outside of Germany to refer not only to Germans, but also to other European nationalities, such as Italians, Norwegians, and Croatians. Although Poles, Russians, and some other Slavs suffered brutal persecution under Nazi rule, they were considered to be "Aryans." Race scientists and anthropologists too considered Slavs to be composed of the same races, including Nordic, as Germans. They were deemed to be of related blood.

However in Mein Kampf we find:

By handing Russia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed it existence as a state. For the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race. Numerous mighty empires on earth have been created in this way. Lower nations led by Germanic organizers and overlords have more than once grown to be mighty state formations and have endured as long as the racial nucleus of the creative state race had maintained itself. For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper stata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated....

I think the questions are, “did Nazis consider Slavs more inferior than was normal to the 20th century,” “did Nazis consider Slavs sufficiently inferior that their conduct in war was motivated on racial superiority”. You probably have to also consider that dehumanization is common to war. Even today, Israeli politicians are calling the Palestinians “seeds of Amalek”, and both Ukrainians and Russians are dehumanizing each other, and Americans pretty much dehumanized the Pashtuns as barbaric savages stuck in the past.

The most famous alleged product of anti-Slavic literature is supposed to be the 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch. Despite the fact this pamphlet is widely cited, it's nearly impossible to find an English translation. Figures. I was only able to find a partial translation here.

It doesn't mention Slavic peoples at all. "Subhuman" is a mistranslation, and is not used here in a racial sense but in a cultural sense. It's meant to be more of a Nietzschean "underman" concept than the modern day notion of a racial subhuman.

The narrative of that pamphlet is similar to what you mentioned: a German elite brought a Culture to Eastern Europe, and Bolshevism is the modern-day representative of the "underman" threatening the light of civilization.

So just as the plough, modern tools and the concept of hearth and home helped to form human society and create the family, the people and the state. So then must mankind become good and great, rising above all other living creatures. Dwelling in the realm of God!

However, along side of mankind dwells the subhuman. This subhuman hates all that is created by man. This subhuman has always hated man, and always secretly sought to bring about his downfall, first like a thief, and then like a brazen killer.

The subhuman is united with his peers. Like beasts among beasts, never knowing peace or calm. The subhuman thrives in chaos and darkness, he is frightened by the light. These subhuman creatures dwell in the cesspools, and swamps, preferring a hell on earth, to the light of the sun.

But in these swamps and cesspools the subhuman has found its leader – The Eternal Jew! The Jew understands the desires and needs of his fellow creature. The Jews endeavors to corrupt and manipulate this horror of inhumanity until they are rallied towards a common goal in the destruction of true man.

Beginning as early on as the destruction of Persians, the Jew has glorified this destructive nature. Even honoring it and declaring the holiday Purim that celebrates the organized mass murder of 75,000 Aryan Persians, who died as victims of Jewish hatred and evil.

Even now world Jewry still glorifies this terrible act - as its greatest religious holiday. The eternal hatred of the subhuman for mankind exists; they envy the clean and noble character of man. So they have tried to destroy what they hate, and from out of the vast deserts and endless steppes they have gathered hordes of their Huns whose leaders Attila, and Genghis Khan descended on western civilization bringing with them violence, fire and death, to every part of Europe they came.

The subhuman hordes would stop at nothing in their bid to overthrow the world of light and knowledge, to bring an apocalypse to all human progress and achievement. Their only goal is to make a desert wasteland of any nation or race that shines with creativity, goodness and beauty.

The only goal of the subhuman is chaos.

So for millennia this law of nature, the conflict between man and his anti-man, the subhuman has occurred. Over and over a new Attila, and new Genghis Khan, appears at the gates of Europe attempting to wreak havoc and destruction on mankind and his creations.

But today Bolshevism is the new Attila, the personification of the subhuman horde and its destructive power! But Bolshevism not a phenomenon of just our time, not a product of our modern era. Neither has Bolshevism evolved within the framework of human history.

Bolshevism is as old as the Jew itself! Lenin and Stalin are only two who have prepared the way for this new horde!

"Subhuman" is a poor translation of the "Untermensch" term which would be better to translate as "Underman" or a foil to the Nietzschean Overman. The fact this was used in a cultural/intellectual sense rather than a racial sense is clear throughout the pamphlet where modern art, Zwei Untermenschen ("Two Undermen"), is contrasted with Zwei Menschen. The pamphlet also regards Roosevelt and Churchill as Untermensch, also pointing to a Nietzschean interpretation rather than a racial classification of "subhuman" as is commonly claimed.

Although usually considered to have been coined by the Nazis, the term “under man” in the above-mentioned sense was also used by American author Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[8] It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book’s German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[9] The German word “Untermensch” itself had been used earlier, but not in a racial sense, for example in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane. Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, “Untermensch” is usually translated into English as “sub-human.” The leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European “under man” to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that “this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the ‘under man.'” [“…den Lothrop Stoddard als ‘Untermenschen’ bezeichnete.”][10] Quoting Stoddard: “The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives.

So even what is supposed to be considered the most iconic Nazi propaganda demonstrating their belief that Slavs are subhumans doesn't even mention Slavs at all. The menace is unambiguously Bolshevism, which is compared to the Huns threatening Europe, with propaganda throughout contrasting conditions under Bolshevism with "Aryan Europe." And Bolshevism is regarded as Jewish throughout. Russian Women are portrayed crying, as victims, before the last line "Wehr dich Europa!" - Defend yourself Europe!

It's obvious why it's so hard to find a translation for this pamphlet: it actually disproves the conventional wisdom that German aggression towards the Soviet Union was driven by the belief that Slavs were subhuman and proves it was always about German opposition to Bolshevism, which was widely regarded as Jewish, even by Winston Churchill himself by the way.

The mythos surrounding WWII is lie, after lie, after lie, after lie.

I was with you until the last line. There's no secret conventional wisdom about it, nefariously upheld. I read all of Eric Tolman's biography of Adolf Hitler, and it's manifestly clear that anti-Communism was a strong motivator for quite a bit of Nazi beliefs. Other historical works of any seriousness all conclude the exact same thing.

If we're talking about popular understanding, however (a significantly lower bar), wartime propaganda was of course quite mixed when it came to this, due to the first sorta-enemies and then sorta-allies and then sorta-enemies again relationship between the US/UK and the USSR. Of course popular historical understanding got a little distorted in the political Cold War aftermath of WWII. The popular mythos about WWII doesn't attempt to grapple with the USSR, or communism at large, almost at all. You could call that a lie by omission, I suppose.

However, Nazism being anti-Slav is not a narrative I remember ever seeing as a focus. For example, the Minority Victims of the Holocaust page identifies only Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, people with disabilities, and to most casual observers (i.e. mythos subscribers), Nazi racism is indistinguishable from the Holocaust. Note that Slavs do not fall in this list. Of course, that's not to say that conflation is not present at all. This wikipedia section seems to do something similar to the conflation you are upset about. But I think the popular narrative of "why did Hitler invade Russia" has more to do with a desire for power and a hatred of Communism than some racial agenda. In fact, if you simply Google this question, you will see that racial theories do not feature very prominently. Well, to be precise, a lot of answers put reasons such as food and oil and such first. They sometimes mention "subhuman Slavs" like you point out, but it seems to me that usually there's also a connection to "Jewish Bolshevik overlords" right there alongside, so I don't find it particularly counterfactual.

I do not give a fuck what nazis wrote in their pamphlets given they managed to conquer Poland and did what they did.

This doesn't explain why millions of Soviet PoWs died in German hands instead of being treated like human beings and provided with food and medicine. This doesn't sound like Hitler wanting to liberate Slavic brothers from the Judeo-Bolshevik menace and bring back the light of Aryan culture to them.

The Wikipedia article on the so-called "Hunger Plan" includes this part:

The most reliable figures for the death rate among Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity reveal that 3.3 million died of a total of 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945, most of them directly or indirectly from starvation.[20] Of these 3.3 million, 2 million had already died by the beginning of February 1942.[21] The enormous number of deaths was the result of a deliberate policy of starvation directed against Soviet POWs. The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war, i.e. roughly the same number as during the Battle of France in 1940.[22] The number of French, Belgian and Dutch POWs who died in German captivity was extremely low compared with deaths among Soviet POWs.

Based on the last two sentences, it seems to be that this case of mass starvation was due to two erroneous assumptions based on faulty and insufficient military intelligence data, namely that the Red Army is much smaller than it actually was, and that it can be defeated in 8 weeks, that is, before the autumn rain season begins in 1941, rendering most roads in the Western USSR practically impassable.

Well, if you believe that all German war crimes on the Eastern Front were actually malicious lies made up by Jews and it was really all sunshine and roses, that contradiction resolves itself quite easily.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats