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We need to have a discussion some day about what was the actual bad thing about the Nazis.
Was it the Hugo boss uniforms?
The music?
The German language?
Swastikas maybe?
Is nationalism itself bad?
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
edit: guys I'm being a little hyperbolic here. Of course the atrocities of the Nazis went substantially beyond just the holocaust. I'm saying that it wasn't the uniforms, or the colors red black and white, it was the violence. When people call Elon Musk, for instance, a Nazi, it comes across as stupid.
I keep seeing people get called “Nazi” for like…waving at a crowd? Which is very clearly what Steve Bannon, an explicit Zionist, is doing here.
I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of him taking. I like Steve Bannon quite a bit. He is definitely not a “Nazi” in any meaningful way that aligns with anything the Nazis did which was historically significant. Bannon is a pro workers rights, anti big government, anti CCP, Christian Nationalist. The first speech he gave after prison was about how the justice system is racist against black people and we need to fix that. During the summer of Floyd he was taking about George Floyd as a victim of globalism, and while he obviously condemned the riots, he was sympathetic to that exact same things the rioters were upset about.
When Ukraine was invaded, he gave a long monologue about how Zelensky was being brave and defending his people, and how the US was leading him down the primrose path towards the place he is now.
He literally went to prison for his principles.
Bannon is one of the good guys. Hard to put into any of the buckets commonly talked about around here. He was definitely not giving any sort of Nazi salute here.
People don't get mad at Nazi salutes because they think the salute itself is bad. Likewise the swastika isn't arcane magic that can cause harm, and Hugo Boss is just a fashion brand. Most left wingers have few issues with the modern German state and it's language. Nobody is confused about this.
Context matters. When you're a politician (or other political public figure) giving a speech , making an unironic Nazi salute communicates a message. And that message is typically "I support the ideals of the Nazi Party".
If you don't want to send that message don't make a Nazi salute. Not even accidentally. You should know what it represents.
Essentially nobody is confused about if the Nazis are bad. I'll grant that there's arguments to made about exactly how bad they where, or how also bad the Allies were, but that doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't use Nazi symbolism if you don't want to be accused of being a Nazi.
It’s still a map territory error, and I think that the salutes are aimed at ironically reclaiming the most common sneer aimed at every conservative leader since probably Reagan. Every last one of them, no matter what they actually did was gasp a Nazi. Both Bushes were, Romney was, Trump is. And this wasn’t based on anything they actually believed and did. It was just governing as a conservative makes you a Nazi. It’s hardly surprising that after nearly 50 years of “opposing democrats makes you a Nazi”, people do the Nazi thing ironically and say “fine, if not being a democrat makes us Nazis, we might as well throw up the salute.”
I keep going back to one question to answer the “are they actually Nazis “ question. Forget the aesthetics, forgot the words, forget the tweets, what actual policies are happening that are fascist? The best sterlman I have of them going Nazi is the mass deportations. Other than that, I can’t put anything they’re doing in that “literally Hitler* box.
It’s not surprising. We’ve been turning Nazis into cartoon villains since the 1960s. Nobody knows, outside the holocaust, anything they actually believed or did. In modern America, it’s just a sneer term meant to get people to stop supporting those+labeled with the sneer.
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You can't "not make a Nazi salute accidentally". First of all, by definition, an accident isn't done deliberately. Second, it's easy for a motivated leftist to find Nazi salutes everywhere; it's impossible to not do something that with the appropriate camera angle and out of context still image can be called a Nazi salute.
What I'm saying is that making a Nazi salute during a speech is a little like running a red light while driving. Sure, doing it accidentally is better than doing on purpose, but you should be more careful. One of the reasons you should avoid it as much as possible is precisely because it is easy to take out of context.
There's room to debate how annoyed we should get at people accidentally making the gesture - I feel much more strongly that deliberately making the gesture is clearly wrong, and that most people understand why.
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None of this contradicts the idea that he intentionally made a Nazi salute to draw attention to himself.
It's like saying "this person can't be a commie because their parents are rich" as they're waving a hammer and sickle flag on video.
Yes it is kindof like that. To take it further it would be a bit like saying: "you can't be a communist if you explicitly argue against communist ideology and start a podcast and spend 3+ hours per day arguing about why communist ideology is bad."
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It is their preference for out-group-misery over in-group flourishing.
For all their faults, previous govts have never taken this much joy in hurting their outgroup. Bannon doesn't care about the flourishing of white people. He cares that America doesn't facilitate the flourishing of non-whites (non-natives?). Elon clearly cares about empowering his lackeys and winning, more than facilitating a good life for Americans at large.
I agree that Bannon isn't a Nazi. But, I have yet to hear him recommend policies that would facilitate positive change.
He can point out problems all day. No solutions. No appeal to positive change. No optimism. Just finger pointing and loud gestures.
That's Nazi mentality. Germany can't flourish until the jews are genocided. What fiscal policy will enable a pure-Aryan Germany to flourish ? Who cares. We need to get the jews out first. We'll figure out the big solutions later. Ofc, this mentality horse-shoes quite hard. Bernie, AOC, Stalin & Mao have similar traits, with different outgroups. (with varying degrees of severity)
Centrists look incompetent because nothing happens. But, gridlock can be feature too. Decision by committee means that no one group gets a raw-deal. In a functioning nation like the US (richest country), the govts job is to preserve processes, not uproot them. Drastic actions make more sense in completely broken systems like Ecuador, Argentina or places with no systems like newly independent Singapore.
Now America isn't perfect. Many of its systems are broken and deserve to be disrupted. Healthcare billing is broken. Border enforcement is broken. Accountability for military spending is missing entirely. The zoning and urban planning setups are broken. I have yet to see Elon do anything towards disrupting [1] any of these truly broken American systems. Leads to me suspect that disruptions are chosen with the goal of hurting enemies rather than fixing systems.
[1] I have heard whispers of LVT. That would be a welcome change. I have yet to see anything substantial on it. Until then, my point stands.
There is nothing clear about this, and I'm not sure what other option you have. Tariffs work to subsidize domestic industry. Tariffs allowed Japan to make cars. They work on steel, on manufactured goods, on everything.
They don't work in a month, and if your timeframe is measured in months then of course they're never going to work.
If all it took were Indians, then India would do it. They haven't, and they can't, because Indians are neither necessary nor sufficient. The same with Russians, and the same with Chinese.
That's a mild way of putting it. There were millions and millions of brown foreigners imported in the last administration for the purpose of displacing the native American population, again. It's worse now than than it was with the Italians and Irish, and those were as bad as you've ever heard. No Irish Need Apply was good, actually, and an appropriate reaction to importing foreigners to displace natives.
This is also why
in the first place. You're complaining about problems, but don't believe in the solutions, so you pretend they're not being offered.
They "work" on steel in the sense that they make American steel competitive at the cost of making stuff made out of American steel not competitive. It also happens to be the case that making stuff out of steel employs a lot more people than making steel. Solve for the equilibrium.
Every economist likes to pretend you can have the dirty raw material processing happening elsewhere and keep the fun, clean, super-profitable stuff for yourself. The problem as I see it is:
This is why successive countries in Asia were able to move from 'raw processing and cheap junk' to 'serious manufacturing contender' to 'holy shit, everything's made in X now'. It's also why places like the UK or the Rust Belt no longer do even advanced manufacturing for the most part.
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Quasi-Keynsian war economy with Konzern characteristics. The Nazis absolutely had plans for all sorts of things beyond just getting rid of the jews - not necessarily good plans, but they were there, largely in advance of taking power. The communist party also had lots of plans. Its quite typical of totalitarianism really. Very few political movements ever had as little plan as Trump I, which is precisely why he didnt do a whole lot. This idea that that makes it extra dangerous seems to be entirely a just so story.
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To the people who lived through the evils of Nazism, there was no doubt that the worst thing the Nazis did was start the most destructive war in human history (and thereby lead their own country to defeat, conquest, ruin, and misery). "Aggression is the supreme international crime." That is the words of the Nuremberg prosecutors relegating the Holocaust to Hitler's second-worst crime - and this was not controversial at the time, and should not have been given the destructiveness of the rest of WW2. The only country for which a majority of the dead were Holocausted Jews was Czecholslovakia. And it isn't clear why the Holocaust doesn't itself count as an incident of the aggressive war - after all only about 200,000 Holocaust victims were from Germany.
Intelligent people who compare Putin to Hitler are doing it because he is engaged in the violent pursuit of lebensraum, not because he persecutes gypsies and homosexuals.
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The bad thing about the Nazis was that they started WWII. Everything they did before the start of WWII was within the envelope of typical right-wing authoritarian governments. Most people would cite the Holocaust as the bad thing about the Nazis, and yeah, it was bad, but the over-emphasis of it ironically plays right into the Nazi Propaganda that WWII was a war launched against Germany for the benefit of the Jews.
"Who started WWII" is more ambiguous than that. WWII started with England and France's declaration of war on Germany. Germany had a reasonable casus belli on Poland, and England was pressuring Poland not to negotiate with Germany. Even more important are the many peace proposals Germany offered England, which entailed Germany fully pulling out of France, and Churchill not only rejected them but even hid them from the public. Ultimately Churchill and the United States would set the only war aim as Unconditional Surrender, which is what ultimately led to the mass murder and destruction.
Furthermore the tall tale of Germans tricking millions of Jews into walking into gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms is a fantasy meant to justify this one-sided WWII narrative. Incidentally, Grok 3 is the first LLM I've seen explicitly take the Revisionist side of a core argument regarding that narrative, even going so far as to criticize the Narrative's sole reliance on witness testimony over any other form of evidence. Also first that has accurately summarized the mainstream position on an issue, accurately summarized the Revisionist position on an issue, and explicitly concurred with the Revisionists that the "official claim is not plausible under scrutiny." The days of that narrative are numbered, and other WWII Revisionism is going to come along with the collapse of that narrative.
Germany's war on Poland provides no justification for England and France to ally with the Soviet Union in a catastrophic war aim of unconditional surrender on Germany.
On that note, normalize the Roman Salute. It's just a cool pose. It evokes emotions in people and that makes it powerful.
This is the second time you've made this comment. I know you're not a complete fucking mongoloid, but obviously you think the rest of us are. So tell me again: how did the Soviet Union end up allying with the UK? Did Germany, say, do anything to the USSR that made them break their alliance?
Your talking to someone literally names SS. I suspect you may not get edifying answers from him on this topic.
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Less antagonism, please.
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You are pretending like their hands were tied, when they could have remained neutral or even allied with Germany against the Soviet Union. Hitler pleaded for either of those two options, offering to pull out of France for peace with Britain. But Britain wanted to restrain Germany from becoming the greatest European power, so they allied with the Soviet Union and destroyed Europe to make it happen.
And then after they destroyed Germany they were desperate to make them the front line against the Soviet Union.
What are you referencing?
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Leaving aside for a second the more odious points of this comment, this is preposterous. Britain had no justification for attempting to stop Germany attempting to make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest? Almost as if it was the guiding principle of the British to prevent such a state of affairs emerging for centuries prior. This was precisely the argument Napoleon tried to give at various - Britain had no need to meddle in continental affairs rather than attending to its overseas possessions and trading activities and had ruined itself for the sake of a conflict it had no interest in. It was preposterous then and equally so in 1939. And indeed the conduct of Hitler and the and the Nazi government before and during the war proved that they could never be tolerated as a major element of the European order.
This is the Revisionist position. And no I do not think it had a justification to do so with the threat of the Soviet Union and the human and cultural cost of destroying Old Europe in a war of unconditional surrender. And ultimately Britain lost its own Empire. But yes Britain did start WWII in order to prevent Germany from becoming the pre-eminent power in Europe. That's the real reason WWII started and Britain allied with the Soviet Union to make it happen. It wasn't over Danzig, all of Poland was conquered by Britain's ally at the end of the day.
The Treaty of Versailles was an attempt to make sure Germany never become the pre-eminent power in Europe. But it was unenforceable. So they waged war ostensibly over Danzig, but then retconned it ultimately to be about the Holocaust narrative to try to post-hoc justify the war and solely blame Germany for the utter destruction and death.
Very funny that Britain makes the claim Germany wanted to "make itself the pre-eminent power in Europe by conquest" over Danzig. Germany offered to fully evacuate from Western Europe for peace and England said no.
But yes, the real reason for the war was Britain didn't want Germany to become the largest power in Europe. No that is not at all a justification for their alliance with the Soviet Union, the demand for unconditional surrender, and mass death and destruction of Europe to realize that objective. Germany is today arguably the largest power on the European Continent anyway. No it was not justified.
As @johnfabian said, you must think we're complete fucking mongoloids if you expect us to buy that.
Contemporary articles have Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden both drawing parallels to Napoleon and the 30 years war in thier opposition to appeasement, and you can find speechs from Churchill about the German/Nazi Menace going back the early 30s. There's also the 390 years of observable foriegn policy between the end of the English Civil War and the start of World War Two.
Might makes right, i dont think the historical semantics really matter. Who ever won the conflict would have gone down in history as the "justifed" one.
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The narrative in the US really focusses on that to the exclusion of everything else. I'd say the bad thing they did was to take a peaceful and democratic if troubled country, force a totalitarian (in the textbook sense of the state meddling in every aspect of life to align it to its purpose) reorganisation at breakneck speed, oppress and kill all internal opposition, promulgate an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanist (in that it assigns most humans zero to negative value based on innate attributes), and finally start a massively destructive war of conquest and annihilation against almost all of its neighbours.
The comparison of anyone in Trump's orbit to that is of course massive, ridiculous exaggeration, but I don't think the assertion that Trump's second term has echoes of it is so far-fetched. The two main goals the administration is currently pursuing are firstly the "anti-woke" thrust, which they understand as a mandate for sweeping top-down action to purge parts of society of enemy elements that until then were more organically entrenched than directly installed from above, and secondly "America first", which surely is nothing other than a call to assign lower value to non-Americans than whatever value they are currently assigned.
From what I understand, Bannon is still bannished from the inner circles of the administration, and critical of it in a way that could be glossed as "Fifty Trumps". I think 50 Trumps, in the sense of cranking the above thrusts up fiftyfold, could in fact start looking somewhat like one Hitler.
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When has Bannon advocated for white people?
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Don't be obtuse - unless you aren't being, in which case this betrays a spectacular lack of imagination. In the first place, outside some extremely niche corners of the internet antisemitism it still entirely unacceptable in mainstream society or left-wing politics. Even the more vociferous critics of Israel who may stray, in some people's view, into antisemitism would still openly condemn the latter (and indeed might even riposte with their own accusation that conflating Israel with Jews is antisemitic). In any case, even if one entirely discounts that there's still plenty left to find 'detestable' - what most of the comparison are gesturing towards is authoritarian government. That is, though for now institutional guardrails are up to the task of preventing such circumstances from arising, Trump wants total deference from all levels of culture and media, and thinks that liberal democracy is a scam which keeps power out of the hands of the Real People of the Nation (even if his conception is not racial in the same way), for whom he speaks and therefore any result which is not a victory for him is necessarily illegitimate.
This means nothing though. Plenty of racists will openly condemn racism, because it's obviously the smart thing to do. Defending someone or yourself against charges of antisemitism by saying they/you condemn anti-semitism is particularly weak, now there's the convenient label of "Anti-Zionist" to hide behind. I think even Hamas are claiming they're not anti-semitic these days.
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Surely when the online left calls people Nazis they mean "white supremacist" and not "anti-Semitic" (not that the hypocrisy of the statement isn't absurd)
And of course "white supremacist" has also lost all meaning. Do you want to enforce laws? Do you want kids to learn to read? Those are literally white supremacist beliefs, according to the online left.
We don't have to care. We need to simply ignore these people and route around them.
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