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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 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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Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist."

This is not appreciably different from Stalin's view of "socialism", or Mao's, or Pol Pot's, to my understanding. I've seen no historical examples where theory was actually load-bearing in any sort of grand sense. Like, there's nothing actually in Marx that requires lysenkoism or any other specific evolution. Stalin beats trotsky and bukharin not because he has a better understanding of Marxist theory, but because he's crueler, more paranoid, and more vicious, and these are in actual fact the traits that Marxism rewards. The theory is word-game Calvin-ball; you can get from Das Kapital to whatever arbitrary power-structure you prefer, there are no actual constraints beyond momentary, relative expedience.

To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.

"We know how to solve all our problems. Problems that aren't solved are the fault of specific people with names and addresses." It does not seem to me that "Class Struggle" is appreciably more real in any meaningful sense than "race struggle", and they both boil down to fixing everything by purging the bad people. That's the obvious commonality between the two, and between them and the French Revolution as well.