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Notes -
Hitler's Identity Politics, Part II
(c) Feb 19, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, with special focus on the woke ideology, and about how to combat such movements. The first four posts in the series were:
The current chapter is entitled Hitler's Identity Politics, Part II.
1 Introduction
The Nazi worldview, as definitively expressed in Hitler's Mein Kampf, has certain similarities with the pagan worldview, certain similarities with the Judeo-Christian worldview, and certain similarities with the woke worldview.
Like a pagan, Hitler is righteously proud of the conquests of other peoples by his people, and he credits these conquests to the greatness of his folk and their leaders. Hitler's glorification of Bismarck and the German military command in Vol 1 Ch 10 of Mein Kampf, for example, echoes the tribute to Shield Sheafson's mægen in the opening stanza of Beowulf.
However, unlike the pagans, but ironically following in the Hebrew tradition, Nazism also posits a transcendent, universal moral order. This seems an odd conjunction, and it is an odd conjunction, but the Nazi rationale is as follows: (1) the fabric of Nature has a fixed moral compass, and (2) as it happens, that compass inexorably points toward the triumph of the German Volk and Reich [people and state].
This Nazi picture of the world entails a theory of social justice rife with double-standards, and this is where it comes to resemble wokeness. In the Nazi view, those people and nations who stand in the way of German imperialism, or who make convenient targets of opportunity for German imperialism, are stripped of their would-be human rights by the Law of Nature. On the other hand, when the shoe is on the other foot and Germany is defeated (in World War I) and imposed upon (by the Versailles treaty), Hitler wails with righteous indignation that would make Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates look like trifling wanna-be's in the arena of victim politics.
2 The Competing Mythologies of Nazism and Judaism
This section compares the grand narrative of Mein Kampf with that of the Hebrew Bible in terms of (1) a vision of transcendent purpose, (2) their respective views of conflict and conquest, and (3) where they place credit and blame for national victories and national catastrophes. It may seem strange on its face to compare the Bible with Mein Kampf, but I believe the comparison bears discussing. Both books are manifestos of sorts, and both lay out ideas that nations have felt were worth fighting over.
My interest here is not in questions of who were the Hebrews, or who were the interwar Germans, or who was better than whom. I am less interested in comparing groups of people than in comparing ideologies -- that is, in the effect the Hebrew Bible had on the Hebrews and their cultural descendants, and the effect that Nazism had on the Germans of the Weimar Republic and their cultural descendants. Before they became Jews, the Hebrews were bronze age barbarians; before they became Nazis, the Germans were Western Christians like me. I doubt that any ideology is going to come along and make people like me act like the Hebrews in the book of Joshua; moreover, if there is an ideology that could do that, it isn't in the Bible -- because I've already bought into that one and I am still not interested in launching wars of aggression in the Holy Land or anywhere else. On the other hand, an ideology did come along and turn people like me into genocidal Nazis. So evidently these two ideologies have very different effects on their adherents.
I submit that key features of the Nazi ideology include the following:
Transcendent Purpose
The pagan worldview is one of shameless conquest of the weak by the strong. The conquest is naturally shameless because in the pagan view, Heaven, like Earth, is a theater of war between separate sovereigns. For example, the Romans presumed their gods favored them in battle (so long as the Romans had been properly pious), but they also presumed that their enemies' gods favored their own worshipers. Thus, the best the Romans could hope for from those foreign gods, as they prayed for in the evocatio, was that they would sit things out.
The Greek view was similar. Homer's Iliad depicts forces of Heaven engaged on both sides of the war:
In the Judeo-Christian view, by contrast, Heaven takes only one side. As Abraham Lincoln wrote,
While Hitler's Mein Kampf espouses an ethos of shameless conquest, Mein Kampf is decidedly not a pagan book. Ironically following in the Hebrew tradition, Mein Kampf extolls a vision of a singular, transcendent Higher Purpose. The first section of Vol I, Ch X contains Hitler's founding myth of the German Reich. In this section, Hitler mentions Nature as a singular, grand force in almost every paragraph. Moreover, Hitler casts Nature as a personified force: one which has goals, and which takes action to achieve those goals. For example, he writes,
For Hitler -- as for a Hebrew but not for a pagan -- Heaven takes one side in every conflict. In Hitler's view it is the side of the strong,
and Hitler tells us precisely who the strong happen to be:
So, the Nazi worldview holds that there is a moral compass woven into the fabric of the universe -- but instead of pointing North, it always points to Nazi.
Conflict and Conquest
The Hebrew vision, in contrast with the Nazi vision, is not one of eternal victory by the strong over the weak, nor of themselves over anyone else. It is a vision of progress toward peace. The envisioned peace is not ruled by the strongest tribe, nor by the Hebrews themselves, but ruled impartially by God:
The Biblical vision of a Messianic age of peace on earth stands in stark contrast, of course, to the Hebrews' narrative of their own national founding. When confronting their neighboring tribes, the Israelites are commanded by God, through Moses, to make them an offer they can't refuse, largely in the mold of pagans like of Pompey or Shield Sheafson:
Moreover, in case of the previous residents of the Holy Land, the Israelites are to make no offer and give no quarter, even to women and children -- more reminiscent more of Genghis Kahn, or perhaps of Hitler himself, than of Shield or Pompey:
Lo!
The Biblical stories of conquest and slaughter by the Hebrews are gruesome even for the ancient world. One key thing about them, however, is that they probably never happened. The rough consensus of secular historians is that the tales of ruthless conquest in Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua are legends and fables. The fact that that is the story the Israelites chose to tell about themselves tells us something about their culture -- but exactly what it tells us is subject to debate, and that debate should be constrained, first and foremost, by the facts of history. We know a lot about what the Nazis did, and it is reasonable to look for explanations for their what they did in their founding mythos. We know a little about what the Hebrews did, and it is reasonable to look for explanations for what they did in their founding mythos. What is not reasonable -- though it seems to be fairly popular -- is to speculate about the cultural impacts of those narratives without looking primarily at what their believers have done.
Unfortunately, we don't have copious records of what the ancient Hebrews did. However, if they had been conquistadors like the Assyrians or the Persians, we would know; ergo they weren't. The Hebrews may well have tried to subjugate their neighbors and failed in the endeavor. They probably would have if they could have. Why do I believe that? Because that is what everyone would have if they could have in the bronze age. We have no reason to think the Hebrews were different in this respect, Biblical or historical. But precisely because that was typical for the age, that tells us nothing about the effects of the Bible on Hebrew culture and morals, except that it didn't miraculously turn them into pacifists overnight. Surprise! The Bible didn't even turn the Hebrews into non-pagans overnight, and the Bible itself is clear about that.
What we do have records of, and very good records, is Hebrew law. Now if God came down from Heaven and cast a spell on the Hebrews to turn them all into superhuman moral geniuses, then we should expect them to have suddenly implemented a system of laws whose wisdom and insight meets or exceeds those of the most enlightened societies of today. That didn't happen (Surprise!). But the relevant control group against which to measure the ancient Hebrews is not the Kingdom of Heaven, or even the modern West; it is their contemporary neighbors. By that standard, I submit that Hebrew law was a deeply important and substantially unique departure in the direction of modern morality. I will make that argument at length in future posts, but here I will restrict the discussion to how the Biblical view of conflict and conquest differs from the Nazi vision.
In the Nazi story, as we saw above, the Reich was born in battle. In the Hebrews' account, their nation is born when God forms a covenant with Abraham (notably in direct contrast to Hitler's disdain for origins based on mere talk).
Having been brought up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is easy for us to overlook something in this passage, that to the pagan mind would have been quite puzzling: what's the point of blessing the families of the Earth? except maybe with the end of a spear, a la Pompey or Shield Sheafson?
To the point, the Nazis had no interest in being a blessing to all of the families of the Earth. Hitler's long-term vision, noted above, is eternal victory of the strong (viz., the German Volk and Reich) over the weak (viz., whomever is convenient to attack and exploit). In the short run, he has his sights set on the seizure of foreign lands, through wars of aggression, for the purpose of Lebensraum ("living space") for the German people. If there are others currently in that "living space" -- such as there were in the lands of the Soviet Union which he intended to seize and occupy -- Hitler held it is only right that they be killed or displaced to make room for better people.
Note that a pagan would not need a pretext for conquest, but a Nazi -- on the view of a transcendent moral order -- does. In service of this pretext, Hitler uniquely dignifies and uniquely and humanizes the Aryan race:
By contrast, he expresses relative disdain for the Slavic people of Russia and Eastern Europe, whom he intends to attack and kill or displace. Hitler's disdain for the Slavs takes on special significance in the context of an "eternal victory of the strong over the weak", and of Hitler's imminent plans for war:
And of course Hitler spews venomous hatred toward the Jews, whom he would like to extirpate from the Earth.
I am afraid many readers will have trouble stepping outside the Judeo-Christian moral waters in which they swim, whether they profess belief in God or not. So, at the risk of being redundant, I repeat that a pagan wouldn't need a pretext for conquest or slaughter; a pagan conqueror would not need to disparage his victims, and a pagan conqueror would have no need for Hitler's view that might makes right. For a true barbarian, might makes might, might is enough, and "right" need not enter the picture.
The Hebrew Bible has many verses that give Jews special status in their own country, which celebrate their victories (real or imagined) over foreigners, and which warn against mixing in marriage with foreigners. But none of that makes it unique. What makes it unique is that it contains verses that point toward equal human rights under Natural Law, with repeated emphasis on equal rights for non-Jews. For example,
Neither pagans nor Nazis entertain this idea of equal treatment under law for mere human beings dwelling among them, even as an aspiration.
The Hebrews are commanded to conquer the Holy Land and kill its inhabitants. That is bronze age business as usual. What is not business as usual is that they are specifically commanded not to attack their other neighbors, nor to take so much as a cup of water from them without paying for it, even though they have the power to do so. For example,
Pompey would just be befuddled by this, and so would Hitler.
In summary, Mein Kampf and the Hebrew Bible are both narratives of a transcendent purpose, but the consistent purposeful vision of Mein Kampf is domination by the strong of the weak, forever, the strong being Deutschland (uber alles). The Hebrew Bible has sprinkles of jingoism and chauvinism as well, and to expect otherwise would be ridiculous; but it also contains sprinkles of other things, that are mostly if not wholly missing from the pagan worldview and the Nazi worldview: equal treatment of mere human beings under law at home, and a far future vision of peace on Earth abroad. In the sweep of history, the fact that so many people even view these as good things is relatively new in the world -- but Germany consciously relapsed from those aspirations under the Nazi rule.
Credit and Blame
When the Germans win, Hitler credits this to the greatness of the German people and their leaders:
By contrast, in the Hebrew Bible, it is not the Hebrews who are said to be mighty, but their enemies:
Whereas the Nazi narrative credits their victories to the German Volk and Reich, the Hebrew story credits the victories to God:
Lest the Hebrews dare to think they earned God's favor because they are such good people, their Bible makes it clear that they did not and are not:
So the Nazi and Jewish views of who gets credit for their national victories are quite opposite. But so are their accounts of who gets the blame for their national defeats. On those occasions where the Hebrews are defeated or oppressed, the Hebrew bible -- particularly in the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- places the blame squarely and somberly on the Hebrews themselves. In a twisted sense, this is the one point of agreement between the two ideologies: Nazi mythology places the blame for the German national catastrophes on the Hebrews as well. I could quote Hitler ad nauseam on this, but I don't think the fact is in dispute, and I don't care to repeat Hitler's words on the subject.
Ѻ
To summarize, the Nazi ideology is distinguished by
3 Hitler and Plato
In Vol 1, Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the moral and economic decay of Germany that he believes led to its defeat in World War I. Echoing the narrative of Plato's Republic, Hitler describes a state which has regressed, in his view at least, from timarchy (military rule), to oligarchy (unrestrained greed and rule of the wealthy), to libertine, Marxist-leaning populism. The parallels between Mein Kampf and Plato's Republic Book VIII are too close to be ascribed to chance -- though Hitler doesn't mention Plato, and I do not know whether Hitler had read Plato's Republic, or whether he and Plato witnessed similar turns of events two thousand years apart, or both.
Like Plato, Hitler views the transition from timarchy to oligarchy to be driven by moral decay, and in particular by a cultural shift in what is held in esteem. He writes,
Both Plato and Hitler write that after the descent from timarchy to oligarchy, the greedy predation of the oligarchs gives birth to a class of ruined men, who then form a cohort of non-working poor. As Plato puts it,
Hitler tells a similar story of exploitation and inequality:
For Hitler as for Plato, the oligarchic state soon degenerates into one of class division, moral libertineness, anti-nationalism, anti-meritocracy, multiculturalism, and general half-heartedness in all attempts to keep order. It then further degenerates toward leftist populism of some form (communism for Hitler, and dimokratia for Plato).
There is one point, however, where Hitler and Plato part ways. For Plato it is all about values; for Hitler, it is all about race. Hitler's final assessment of the root of his country's problems is this:
On this score Hitler diverges from Plato, and more closely resembles another noted thinker of the Western canon.
4 Hitler and Ibram Kendi
A colleague of mine at a certain university (which will go unnamed) once described certain bureaucrats of that university's administration as Nazis. What he meant was that they were ruthless, tribal authoritarians -- which they were -- but something about the metaphor struck me as wrong. It took me a few seconds to put my finger on where the comparison broke down, after which I blurted out in protest, "Nazis were effective".
There are many disparaging charges that could be rightly leveled at Hitler, but pipsqueak is not among them. Ibram X. Kendi -- author of the woke manifesto How to be an Antiracist -- is, by contrast, a poster child of pipsqueak. For that reason among others, it feels strange to analogize Hitler to Kendi. Nevertheless, the calculus of ideological similarity puts these two on the same plane in several key respects.
For starters, both Hitler and Kendi hate capitalism. Hitler writes, for example,
and for Kendi:
There is some nuance to Hitler's views from the standpoint of terminology: he is both fanatically anti-capitalist and fanatically anti-Marxist. For many readers, "capitalism" and "Marxism" are ideological polar opposites, but Hitler's ideological emphasis is different from that of most readers. For him, both Marxism and capitalism are tools of an international Jewish conspiracy to exploit the Aryan people, with national socialism standing in direct opposition to both. What Marxism and capitalism have in common for Hitler, besides their association with Jewry, is their materialist, individualistic, and anti-nationalist character. In any case he uses "Jewish", "capitalist", and "Marxist" all as slurs, often together in reference to some tripartite conspiratorial hydra:
Both Hitler and Kendi identify predatory capitalist oligarchy as the immutable genetic characteristic of a certain race. Hitler of course identifies it with the Jews:
Kendi has a different race in mind:
The similarity is quite remarkable. Whites for Kendi, like Jews for Hitler, are a race of (1) genetically disposed (2) deceivers and (3) capitalist (4) exploiters. They just can't help it.
It must be pointed out that Kendi's statements here are beyond the pale even for woke pundits, and most notable SJW's would not follow as far in Hitler's ideological footsteps as Kendi does. It must also be pointed out, however, that Kendi's comments were well known for years, and he was seldom if ever denounced for them by the woke left -- so, while unusual, these statements were not particularly unwelcome. If a right winger had said any such thing, about any group of people, you can be sure that woke cancel-culture would have unearthed the offense and kicked into high gear over it.
Like Hitler, Kendi sees his people as the heirs of a glorious past with glorious leaders:
And he holds that it remained glorious until the capitalist exploiter race stepped in and ruined it all with their underhanded backstabbing:
Even Hitler doesn't blame the Jews entirely for the German defeat in WWI. He actually says the Germans brought it on themselves by.... wait for it... tolerating the Jews and their capitalist exploitation in their midst! Similarly, Kendi gives a nostra culpa [our fault] on behalf of his people, blacks. The problem with blacks, says Kendi, is that too many of them feel they are to blame, instead of whites, for their lagging outcomes:
5 Conclusion
Hitler claimed that the Jews had undermined the German war effort in World War I. In truth, there were probably a lot of people who contributed to Germany's loss in WWI and its subsequent economic collapse, and of course some of them were Jews. But in all likelihood, most of them were not Jews, and there was no massive program to exterminate those people, either as individuals or as members of any group they belonged to. On the other hand, around 30,000 Jews won medals for bravery fighting on the German side in the WWI -- and yet many of those very men, along with their families, perished in Nazi death camps under the pretext that they were somehow enemies of the Reich.
In particular, Hitler said he despised Jews because of their penchant for Marxism. It is true that Marxist leadership, in Germany and elsewhere, was populated disproportionately by Jews -- but if you want a litmus test for likely Marxists, current or former member of the Communist party is a pretty good one, and yet there was no systematic effort by the Nazis to exterminate them, of the sort that was directed against Jews (who merely might be Marxists). These obvious failures of the shoe-on-the-other-foot test, once we think to apply it, tell us that the stated reasons for the Nazi persecution of the Jews must have been quite different from the actual reasons. That is the nature of group guilt, aka social justice.
Hitler claimed that the Jews of Europe needed to be exterminated, war heroes and all, because they were a menace to his people. Alright then, Austria and Prussia had been a menace to their neighbors in Europe for hundreds of years, and their union in the German Empire was a greater menace after that. By Hitler's logic, the Allies would have been within their rights to implement a final solution to the German problem while they had Germany at their mercy following WWI. In hindsight that would have saved the allies a great deal of blood, toil, and tears. If the Treaty of Versailles were a Jewish conspiracy (as Hitler loudly charged), then Germany should have expected Old Testament justice out of the deal. But the Versailles treaty, while it caused significant hardship for the German people, was no Holocaust (not the same ballpark, not the same sport). And yet how did Hitler respond to it? Vae victis [woe to the vanquished] in the eternal triumph of the strong over the weak? No. What did we do to deserve this? Not really. He wailed that it was an unfair, unjust, absolute abomination against the Natural Order. Poor baby. That is the nature of double standards.
Group guilt and double standards: that is the nature victim identity politics.
What would you think of posting these in their own mega submission, instead of the CWR? Or separate individual submissions even.
I am not sure. The unifying theme of the posts is in the main theater of the culture war, but some of the essays don't have any visible connection to it as stand-alone posts. Any input would be welcome.
I'd personally appreciate it if you removed them from CWR one way or another (but feel free to put them elsewhere, like I said). To me, they're too long and single purpose for the amount of visibility in the CWR thread. But, you get engagement, so it's not at all obvious to me that others would agree.
As far as my imaginary vote goes, I prefer the ability to decide for myself what posts are interesting and what posts are not. Moreover, most of the utility of this place is in the discussions. I don't see the point in having to trust someone here to decide what post is likely to generate good discussion or not, when we can just wait and see.
To that extent I'd personally appreciate if you stopped asking posters to not post, and instead just clicked the - on the left.
I did not in fact ask that this poster not post. I asked their thoughts about posting outside of CWR.
This is...very much not the same as my intentionally ban-worthy douchebaggery from a bit ago.
Edit: hm, my "I'd personally appreciate" is closer to asking they not, but still better than than the consensus building antagonism I rightfully ate a ban for.
I think this is also essentially (or entirely? I don't care enough to read too much of their user history) single issue posting, which is against the rules. Iirc copy pasting in a whole substack is also frowned upon, and it's adjacent to that. So, I'll report - but I think discussing with someone about their posting is more direct and productive than just clicking report.
And, OP has -12.
I am doing exactly the same thing, minus the report. To that extent we agree.
I don't know what this means. I already see moderation here as way too user dominated. I'd prefer it if the mods weighed the quality and effort of the post put forth rather than buckling to dislikes and mass reports. Though that seems to be the opposite of what they are doing.
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While my criticism of your entire thesis from your last chapter applies to this one as well, probably even more so, one point I want to (again) make is that Slavs were considered Aryan according to Nazi racial theory and Nazi racial law.
Hitler's project was pan-Germanism, which he is delineating as exclusionary of Slavs. That does not mean Hitler did not consider Slavs to be Aryan. The Nazi hatred towards the Soviet Union was foremost driven by Communism and not any belief that Slavs are non-Aryan or sub-human.
In contrast, the Nazi racial theory on the Aryans has essentially been vindicated by recent genetic analysis showing all European cultures descend from a common Indo-European culture. They call that culture "Aryan", but all European cultures descend from it according to the theory, and that theory has been confirmed by more recent genetic and linguistic analysis.
Hitler's writing here is also cogent- rejecting the notion that "Germanization" means teaching an Arab or Chinese person the language and having him vote in a German election makes him German, which is the theory that has been forced onto Europe since the defeat of Hitler, to catastrophic consequences.
Aryan or not (and I'm skeptical of that pictographic source), Hitler considered the Russian people, aside from their aristocracy, to be congenitally inferior to Germans. Do you dispute this?
For example, in Mein Kampf he wrote,
That perspective has nothing to do with Hitler's political objectives or animosity towards the Soviet Union. Hitler acknowledged racial inequality even within the German people has well. I also think even many HBD-aware Russians would be sympathetic to the suggestion that the Russians seem to have less capacity for constructive politics... certainly the evidence is stacked against them on that question, with the eternal dysfunction of Russian politics and the bright spots being disproportionately associated with leaders of German ancestry...
Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union is not based on the Slavs it's based on Bolshevism. It's a dishonest reading of Mein Kampf to pretend otherwise. He could not possibly be more clear that he regarded Bolshevism as the ultimate enemy, but you somehow manage to entirely elide Hitler's self-stated reason for his animosity towards the Soviet Union in his own work, which is the traditional approach taken from the mainstream perspective. That animosity was not derived from his plausible claim that the Russians have less capacity for constructive statecraft, or some claim that the Slavs were not Aryan even though they were explicitly considered Aryan in German racial law.
It's worth pointing out that Hitler's theory he applies to the Russians here he applies to the Germans as well:
Hitler's theory on this front is also not related to his hostility towards the Soviet Union, it's Bolshevism which he makes abundantly clear.
Edit: i.e., from Mein Kampf:
But somehow, without fail, the mainstream seems to interpret Hitler's animosity towards the Soviet Union as being related to Aryan racial theory relegating Slavs as subhuman. It's an intentional lie to hide the actual reason he was hostile to Russia.
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No, none of that is in line with Nazi ideology. Hitler had no plans to exterminate the French despite them being a massive thorn in Germany's side. He wanted to weaken the French state significantly such that they'd not be able to contest German dominance of Europe but the French people had a place in the New Order. And he wanted an alliance with Britain the entire time. According to Hitler, Western Europeans were basically fine, just misguided. Western Europeans/Aryans were not supposed to be going around exterminating eachother.
It was in the East where peoples were going to be compulsorily removed from their land, enslaved and treated harshly in various ways. And even there there's room for moderation. The Allies planned initially to treat the German nation harshly post-war in the Morgenthau plan but then moderated their stance in peacetime when they concluded it would be unhelpful.
The argument doesn't depend on Hitler wanting to exterminate the French. The Jews had no plans to exterminate the Germans; they were just a threat of some sort. Hitler's axiom is that threats to your national safety can be preempted by genocide. Germany was a threat of far greater magnitude to the Allies in 1919 than the Jews ever were to Germany, so by Nazi logic the allies were entitled to exterminate the Germans in 1919.
It would only be unhelpful if it didn't go far enough.
..are you trolling?
Morgenthau plan leaking led to the war taking a month more according to front line commanders.
The plan itself would have ensured a pro-Soviet revolt in Western Germany.
It was a remarkably idiotic idea, impractical, odious and worst of all a public policy.
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This just isn't how Nazism works. Why didn't they exterminate the French? Because they were not in favour of 'exterminating anyone who is a potential threat to your national safety'.
You can't generalize Nazi anti-semitism out like that. Jews were considered specially, different from every other people. They didn't launch a boycott of French shops in Germany, they didn't enforce various discriminatory laws against people who married French. They didn't mark out French people in public. Jews were seen as subversive and extremely dangerous, in part due to the revolutions that Jewish communist leaders launched in 1919. The Spartacists and the Bavarian Socialist Republic for instance.
You can't understand Nazism without getting to grips with the special place that anti-semitism has in Nazi ideology. Whenever Nazis looked out at the world, they saw a global network of Jewish financiers and media working against them. Paying off Churchill's debts: Henry Strakosch. Behind Roosevelt, Harry White and Morgenthau.
I think I understand that tolerably. The question remains what is the rationale for this antisemitism? My only assumption is that it rests on the alleged threat the Jews pose to Germany. Am I missing something? If it doesn't rest on that, what does it rest on?
There's a difference between an enemy-for-the-moment who might have been and might in the future be a friend and a straight-up defectbot who is permanently hostile regardless of context.
To take the debate to safer pastures, 40K Orks are bad. They are all bad. They are genetically programmed to be bloodthirsty killers and are inherently incapable of peaceful coexistence or advanced civilisation. They are not and can never be in a moral community with humanity, will always be dangerous regardless of social context, and as such they are djur in the Ender Quartet typology, the "dire beast that comes in the night with slavering jaws" and they should be exterminated down to the last gretchin because that is the only way to end the conflict with them while preserving humanity.
I don't know all that much about Hitlerian ideology, but if he considered Jews to be in a similar category to Orks and Frenchmen to not be so, well, there you go.
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I would quibble with this. Between the Commissar Order and Barbarossa Decree, great latitude was afforded to German soldiers to kill the political elements of the Soviet state. Certainly the default approach to any captured Soviet political agent was summary execution. General guidelines for troop conduct, as well as orders circulated by corps and army commanders, all emphasized that the goal of the war was the destruction of the Soviet state and the eradication of Bolshevik influence. Furthermore, the degree to which Nazi propaganda conflated communists and Jews meant that in practice they were often viewed as one and the same and treated accordingly.
Within Germany and other occupied countries, having been a former member of the communist party was plenty enough to secure your arrest, and very frequently your execution. (Ironically, during the Great Terror, it was also very bad to be a former KDP member if you were living in the Soviet Union.)
Thanks. I changed this to:
Upwards of 20% of the KDP (communist party of Germany) in Germany were killed by the Nazis so I think this is fair to say.
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This is a somewhat one-dimensional interpretation of Ancient Judaism IMO. We have plenty of examples of Jews discriminating against groups of people seen as enemies, and excluding them much like the Nazis originally wanted to exclude Jews:
Deut 23:3: “No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation. For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you."
Ezra 9: “After these things had been accomplished, the leaders approached me and said, “The people of Israel, including the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the surrounding peoples whose abominations are like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites. Indeed, the Israelites have taken some of their daughters as wives for themselves and their sons, so that the holy seed has been mixed with the people of the land. And the leaders and officials have taken the lead in this unfaithfulness! When I heard this report, I tore my tunic and cloak, pulled out some hair from my head and beard, and sat down in horror.”
Joshua 23: “ The LORD has driven out great and powerful nations before you, and to this day no one can stand against you. One of you can put a thousand to flight, because the LORD your God fights for you, just as He promised. Therefore watch yourselves carefully, that you love the LORD your God. For if you turn away and cling to the rest of these nations that remain among you, and if you intermarry and associate with them, know for sure that the LORD your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become for you a snare and a trap, a scourge in your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the LORD your God has given you.
We have examples of ethnic narcissism, similar to Nazi Germany:
We have a genocidal drive against the Amaleks, whose entire seed needs to be genocided because they attacked Israel when they were weak:
The punishment for belonging to a different religion in Ancient Israel was death, something considerably worse than camps before exportation to Madagascar:
Jews often blamed their troubles and defeats on allowing foreign people and their customs, or marrying foreigners. It’s not quite correct to say that ancient Jews did not attribute victories to themselves. The God is themselves, it is their own priestly class who sacrifices to God, it is the organization of their whole peoplehood. “Israel is rewarded for her faithfulness” is functionally identical to “we deserve this land for our righteousness”, it is just cloaked in religious language so that the priestly class and hierarchies are justified. If Ancient Israel had a group of foreigners with foreign customs living amongst them, God (by which I mean priest and prophet of the Israelite community) would command them to be slain, and probably their whole family, and all their animals as well. I suppose if they converted, they would be allowed to participate socially after the eleventh generation, depending on how a Rabbi wanted to interpret Deut 23:3. But when you read “God says these people need to be driven from the land because they are evil”, it’s a little silly to interpret this other than “the Jews believe they deserve the land for not being evil” — it is just rendered in a justifiable and humble way by the priests.
The Ancient Israelite “rendering” of their superiority is significantly better and more prosocial than Nazi Germany, and much more sophisticated. But IMO it is still identity politics. It reminds me of a Spanish Conquistador “compassionately” conquering Mexico for God, because God is their God too, and God wants them to be Christians and to be guided by God’s representative on Earth, the Spanish Crown. This is just poetic identity politics.
I edited the post, specifically the section called "Conflict and Conquests", to address this.
Basically I think you are comparing the Hebrews to perfect angels based on their mythology, whereas I am comparing them to Nazis and pagans based on their laws.
As you said,
What we disagree about is that I think that difference is exactly what is important, and that it is so large as to be rightly considered categorical, regardless of anecdotal counterexamples.
This part, however, I think is self-evidently incorrect:
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You go from
to
This sounds contradictory - were the pagans and Hebrews meant to be the other way around in the latter?
More generally, if I read this as a book, I think certain parts of it would strike me as failure to maintain the professional detachment (or maybe just copy-editing?) I expect from them: the opening of Section 2 seems to jump back and forth between something like dry passive-voice academic writing ("This section compares the grand narrative...") and overly personal ("I believe...", "people like me into genocidal Nazis"), which is jarring and gives me the impression that you are trying to write in a voice that is not yours and you are not fully comfortable with. If I evaluate it as a mottepost, it feels like a manifesto smuggled in through the "review my book chapter" backdoor: the idea that the SJW and Nazi identity politics are the same is not new, and I'd want more thoroughness (Do you expect the wokes to start opening concentration camps soon as well, or is there an important way in which they are different? Do these commonalities you identify apply to other movements in history, and how did they fare?) and less gratuitous emotional appeal and polemic ("Poor baby.") from a repeat treatment here at this point.
Yes that was a typo. Thanks for pointing it out.
I think it's funny that you expect books to have a tone of "professional detachment". Plato didn't.
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi?
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Well, there is at least one book by the woke left denouncing those statements - "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi, where Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views and uses it as an example on how, in the course of being an antiracist, one should not be an anti-white racist, either.
I read Ch 10 of How to be an Antiracist and did not find what I expected, from this post, to find there. I don't see him walk back the contents of his 2003 Famua article; he says you shouldn't hate white people for being white, but he was already expressing that position in 2003. Can you quote him on retracting and/or apologizing for the 2003 article I quoted?
He calls it a "fallacious idea" right there.
More to the point, though, it's best read within the context of the entire book which, as said, is Kendi using examples of his own life as examples of fallacious ideas in general in the process of confession and self-contrition.
Kendi clearly retracts “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,”, but this is in the context discussing the crazy idea that white people are literally aliens from another planet. In the book, he recounts his friend Clarence pushing back against that:
and then, in the next paragraph, says he was wrong to think whites are a "different breed of humans". Ok, Kendi believes white people are homo sapiens; that's a relief. The rest of the paragraph could be read as backtracking substantial parts of the 2003 article, but it doesn't do that explicitly. Maybe he retracts it more strongly somewhere else, but if this is all there is, my guess is that he doesn't really want to distance himself from it, but has realized he was talking like a Nazi and wants to manufacture plausible deniability. If I had once said what he said, and wanted to retract it, I'd be pretty clear about it. Is this quote the best there is, to your knowledge?
This really sounds like nitpicking and goalpost moving, setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.
Kendi's clear message in this chapter is that his youthful views are bad and it's bad to hold views like this. He could have very well chosen not to include a chapter on the book on why anti-white racism is bad, and yet he chose to include this. Furthermore, to my knowledge, it was only after this book that people even started to pay attention to what he said in 2003, so he was almost certainly the one doing the most to even publicize the fact that he had held these views in the first place - why would you manufacture plausible deniability to something you are promoting yourself?
So, to be clear, this is the strongest retraction of the 2003 article he makes, to your knowledge?
You wrote:
My standards came from the expectations I had based your description:
Yes, especially within the context of the book, the chapter is indeed an act of self-flagellation over having held views of the described sort in his youth. I'm not sure what sort of a further retraction than what was described you're looking for here.
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Well, darn. I tried to piece the contents of that book together from snippets without reading it, because I don't want to buy it on principle and I couldn't find the full text online. Now I have to spend Saturday at the book store reading it in an easy chair.
Thanks for the info. I will make appropriate edits when I have time.
Check out a website called Anna's Archive. You have to get pretty obscure before they don't have a free full download of a book.
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Thrift Books has preowned copies from $5.29.
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There's a short summary of the book's chapter, including chapter 10 that discusses the anti-white racism part, here
I'm sometimes convinced I'm the only person to have actually read this book or DiAngelo's White Fragility. The latter is complete empty-headed twaddle mixed with obvious bait for grifting (ie. not-so-subtle promotion of DiAngelo's course on this), the former, while not high lit, is at least interesting in the sense of being built around Kendi's personal narrative and continuous course of absolving himself of his past racism/sexism/homophobia etc. through the act of confession and self-contrition.
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