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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.

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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.