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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   9769 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

(...) rather than merely exposing them to some "glossed over" forbidden information.

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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