site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Can someone explain this thread to a confused Slav? I thought "are Slavs white" question was just an expression of good old-fashioned Anglo supremacism. And that it was aimed at our culture. But people here seem to be seriously discussing whether we are white, in literal terms.

What does it mean? Personally I am probably paler than most Anglos. Most people in my country are paler than Italians or Spaniards. What's going on?

deleted

It's almost as if culture matters.

In WN circles I have never seen anyone suggest slavs are not white. Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.

Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.

No, the plan was to culturally assimilate the more Aryan looking ones (huge genetic overlap between Czechs and Germans etc) and exterminate the rest.

With Russians, Germans openly planned to starve to death all Russian urban population as a food saving measures. (look up Hunger plan). They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.

They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.

This is not true. The so-called "Hunger Plan" is yet another fabrication that takes a grain of truth and spins it into a plan of genocide. That so-called "plan" just referred to an estimate for the number of deaths of starvation that would happen as a consequence of German occupation of Soviet territory until the end of the war.

This starvation was estimated as a consequence of provisioning their own army through the end of the war. For example, from the wikipedia article:

1.) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.

2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.

This is not even close to some secret plan to exterminate the Slavs because they were not considered Aryan. It was an estimate of the effect of provisioning their army to continue the war.

Edit: There is also the fact that the Germans fielded one of the largest volunteer foreign armies in history, composed predominantly of Slavs. The volunteer rate of Ukranians to the German side rivaled the volunteer rate of British for the war effort. I know it's fashionable to think that the Germans had plans to turn around and genocide the people that were helping them, but there's no evidence for that. The best the mainstream narrative can do is misrepresent things like the "hunger plan" to assert genocidal plans that did not exist.

Are you seriously claiming that reaching an agreement to not supply cca thirty million people with any food because it might inconvenience your homeland and bring back memories of WW1 rationing & recognizing this would cause these people to die isn't planning mass murder ?

The claim that is at controversy is that the Germans had a plan to exterminate the Slavs. Those documents do not support that conclusion. It shows that the Germans considered mass starvation as a dilemma to provisioning their army to continue the war. You can say they should have surrendered and they are murderers for continuing the war. That's fine. But to say that this estimate was part of a secret scheme to genocide the Slavs is just not true.

There was mass starvation in India and Greece as a result of Allied blockades and diversions of food resources. Nobody would call that a planned genocide, even if you want to call it murder.

The claim that is at controversy is that the Germans had a plan to exterminate the Slavs

I never said that.

What they had a plan was for killing millions of conquered Soviet urban dwellers on account of the tight food supply.

was part of a secret scheme to genocide

It wasn't 'secret' in the slightest. Maybe not discussed in public or propagandised much, but forced population expulsions of Slavs and Germanisation of the more Aryan looking ones was a plan.

I never said that.

Come on. This is exactly what you said:

No, the plan was to culturally assimilate the more Aryan looking ones (huge genetic overlap between Czechs and Germans etc) and exterminate the rest.

With Russians, Germans openly planned to starve to death all Russian urban population as a food saving measures. (look up Hunger plan). They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.

You said:

  • They had a plan to assimilate the Aryan looking ones and exterminate the rest of the Slavs.

  • As part of that plan, they planned to use hunger as the extermination method to achieve their goals.

  • The plan wasn't carried out due to lower level officers not following orders.

None of this is true. The reality is that there are some documents that assessed the logistical reality of the situation, and concluded that the Wehrmacht could only be fed from Russia in the third year of the war, and there was no alternative. This assessment soberly predicted mass starvation and regarded the situation as catastrophic. You can say that the Germans should have prioritized feeding the locals above feeding their army. Or that they should have surrendered at this point upon realizing the human cost of continuing the war. But that is all very different from the ahistorical claims you have made in your post.

These documents that historians use to spin a "Hunger plan" actually described the pragmatic concerns of the food situation rather than an implementation of some plan to exterminate the Slavs.

Lastly, Germany prioritized feeding locals based on those employed in the German war effort. Your notion that they went around giving food to those they thought looked Aryan enough and let the rest starve in order to exterminate them is a testament to the abysmal failure of mainstream historiography to move beyond ethnic hatred in interpreting history.

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

Planned for moving most of the Slavic population in eastern Europe to Siberia and assimilating the racially acceptable part.

There were also plans to just exterminate certain populations, such as Poles.

None of this is true. The reality is that there are some documents that assessed the logistical reality of the situation, and concluded that the Wehrmacht could only be fed from Russia in the third year of the war, and there was no alternative.

That's untrue; I've just finished reading a comprehensive economic history of WW2, and it wasn't that there was no alternative. It was simply deemed more acceptable to plan to starve millions of Russians to death than to scale back meat farming in Germany and thus reduce the standard of living.

Bullshit. Was their army powered by corpses? They (would have) died because the germans wanted them to die.

You’re doing a bait-and-switch by focussing on motive, as if a ridiculously small legitimate benefit makes the murder incidental and exonerates the murderer. ‘I didn’t kill him out of hate, he had 10 dollars in his wallet, so I had no choice’.

IIRC the definition of "aryan" was flexible and tended to widen over time, with groups that exhibited good military performance usually being defined as Aryan.

In WN circles I have never seen anyone suggest slavs are not white. Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.

This is where I begin to question your white nationalist credentials.

Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.

No, they definitely were not. Most Slavs were planned to be exterminated. The Nazis were even surprised at the number of Poles who looked "Aryan", and assumed that all of them were really just Polonized Germans.

The so-called "Generalplan Ost" referred to around 5 different iterations for plans of resettlement after German victory. Similar mass resettlements of ethnic Germans in areas conquered by the Allies also followed German defeat. None of these plans called for the extermination of the Slavs and none of those plans moved beyond the ideation stage. The mainstream historiographical interpretation of "Generalplan Ost" is one of many fabrications made by the Allies to post-hoc justify the destruction of Europe and Soviet conquests.

Alfred Rosenberg comes to mind as perhaps the most prominent Nazi racial theorist, and he regarded Slavs as Aryan. Slavs were even acknowledged as Aryan in law, i.e. in German racial laws:

Aryan descent (German blooded) is thus a person who is free of foreign blood, as seen by the German people. The blood of Jews and Gypsies also living in Europe, that of the Asian and African races and the Aborigines of Australia and America (Indians), are considered as foreign. For example, if a Englishman or a Swede, a Frenchman or a Czech, a Pole or an Italian, is free of such foreign blood, he must be regarded as Aryan, whether he lives in his native country or in East Asia or in America or he may be a US citizen or a South American Free State.

Two Slavic groups are used as examples of Aryan in the racial law: Czechs and Poles.

There is a popular lie that "Aryan" only referred to the blonde haired and blue eyed phenotype. The lie that "Aryan" only included ethnic Germans is just a weaker version of the same lie made for the same reasons as the other lie.

People attempting to carve reality at the joints, using the idea that race is both genetic and cultural and pretending it’s just genetic.

As someone who identifies as American, only belatedly and reluctantly as white, and not at all as White, I am grateful for this peek inside the racial mind in its attempt to steelman and convince. To quote Ayn Rand in her essay on racism:

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

I have a working theory that the reason that rootless cosmopolitans, late-stage capitalists', and various other flavors of socially atomized WERIDo seem to gravitate toward racialism, (be it of the CRT or HBD variety) is that they lack a sense of culture. They compare a McDonalds in Tokyo to a McDonalds in Manhattan and conclude that the differences between the US and Japan are superficial because they lack any wider frame of reference. They judge on skin color because skin color is easy to see/measure. It's the old streetlight fallacy.

They compare a McDonalds in Tokyo to a McDonalds in Manhattan and conclude that the differences between the US and Japan are superficial because they lack any wider frame of reference. They judge on skin color because skin color is easy to see/measure. It's the old streetlight fallacy.

This doesn't make sense. A racialist would interpret far deeper meaning to the differences between a McDonalds in Tokyo and a McDonalds in Manhattan than a liberal would.

Yes, that is what I said.

The reason that socially-atomized young progressive urbanites such as yourself gravitate towards racialism (be it of the CRT, HBD, or WN variety) is that race is visible, and being socially atomized they have no real sense of culture. They ascribe outsize importance to superficial details like race because, true cultural differences (IE a city without a McDonalds) is completely beyond their ken.

To clarify, the entire rest of the world places profound emphasis on racial differences, both implicitly and explicitly. You are one of the very few who can claim to not place strong emphasis on racial differences and treat them as superficial. You can let that be your legacy and cling to it until the bitter end, if you want.

Incorrect

The vast majority of the world places the primary emphasis on language/culture first with genealogy a distant second but you mistake it it for race because you can't see the cultural issues that underpin it. As other users have noted both Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa considered Japanese to be "white" which is nonsensical from a genetic stand point but makes perfect sense in a culture first model.

This is almost certainly true. In my experience, they compare their WEIRD acquaintances with WEIRD-mindcolonized non-Westerners and conclude that because everyone cares about Ukraine and climate change and reads and agrees with the NYT, regardless of nationality or race, we must all be the same on the inside. Next time you talk to someone who has "lived in China" or "worked in Tokyo for 5 years" consider that they may have never left their foreigner bubble or, even if they have, they spent time around non-Westerners who were Western-educated and, importantly, were the kind of people who preferred to hang around with Western foreigners.