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The SS was highly college educated, particularly in the officer corps (especially prior to 1939 when they started watering down entrance requirements). 30% were university graduates, compared to 2.5% of the general population of Germany in 1962. Half of those present at the Wannsee conference had doctorates. Likewise with Einsatzgruppen and Kommandos, a majority were headed by officers from an intellectual background. 18/23 defendants at the Einstazgruppen trial in Nurnberg were university graduates.
There are long and complex debates over to the religiosity of the SS and it's uncertain. A fair few of the more notorious officers claimed that killing thousands of Jews did not sin against the Commandment of Love, that they were raised as Christians. Others seem to be agnostic or atheistic, or 'spiritual but not religious' in a volkisch sense. There are a fair few Christians and non-materialists here + the whole simulation crowd. I recall reading someone talking about tithing.
I think it goes without saying that the SS had a strong and pervasive belief in identity politics and oppression/oppressed dynamics.
So was the SS a progressive organization? In a certain sense of the word yes. They had their own definition of progress. But that definition does not really match our definition of progressive, given that both would consider themselves totally and irredeemably opposed to eachother. And both are pretty different from motte users!
I don't think you can carve a neat dividing line through Western civilization and say 'all people who want radical, fundamental change are on the same side'. There's a lot of internal variance here!
Take Rousseau. There's the conventional progressive position that society causes all these problems of violence and inequality so we need to change or abolish elements of society. Or the SS-progressive position, where we need to change society so we're better at inflicting violence and inequality on others, honing our society to the peak of its competitiveness with eugenics and discipline.
Yeah? There seemed to be plenty of people who thought otherwise at the time.
At the time, sure. But now? The modern progressive is not favorable towards eugenics.
*Cole_Phelps_doubt.jpg*
This just seems obviously false to me. It's not conservatives that I see arguing that babies with disabilities ought to have been aborted or that we should to be euthanizing the mentally ill. It's guys like Justin Trudeau, and edgy kids on theMotte. To the degree that Eugenics seems to enjoy any support at all in [current year], it seems to me that it's coming from progressives.
Trudeau doesn't frame euthanizing the mentally ill on eugenic grounds. 'Edgy kids' on the motte is a pretty inappropriate descriptor too.
Progressives are at the forefront of advancing rights for babies with disabilities and the mentally ill. They call for more funding for them, more care, less stigma, including these people in jobs. They have these qualms about curing deafness since its sort of like genociding the deaf community! I've read papers about this, it's a real thing.
Then there are people who actually want to genocide the deaf community by sterilization or other methods.
If you include people who want disabled people killed and those who want them expensively supported by the state in the same group, it becomes almost meaningless. These are diametrically opposing visions of progress! An 1850s Democrat and a 2020s Democrat are very different ideologically, even if they have the same name. If you classify the average SS officer, the pink-haired leftist university student and the right-leaning mottizen all as progressives, what good is the definition?
Why should that matter? Between "dogwhistling" and "systemic X-ism" progressives reject the idea that the grounding needs to be explicit, in order to be criticized as grounded in X.
They're all for reducing stigma, and throwing money at them, but there's actually very little talk helping them resolve their mental health issues. Call me crazy, but destigmatizing something combined with subsidizing it looks like you're trying to create more of it.
The definition is useful if the groups actually have something in common, despite their differences. Whether @HlynkaCG can successfully articulate the commonalities is another issue, but he openly admits that he's struggling with that because of the inferential distance.
Take religion as an example. Progressives tend to be atheist, conservatives tend to be religious, so how can Dissident Rightwingers, who also tend to be religious be progressive? Well, as someone familiar with the psychology of the last group I can tell you that they're the kind of people who convert because they got convinced religion is good for society. That's not how normal religious people think, though! That's precisely the sort of thing that marks you as a progressive.
But grounding is still important. There's also context to consider. Suppose I hypothesized that Trudeau was a eugenicist. I'd look to see if he was encouraging wealthier or smarter people to have children - he's not. His reforms to family spending are progressive in the sense that they help poor people more. The very definition of the word progressive in this economic sense means favoring the poor. Is Trudeau sterilizing the mentally ill? Not in any clear way. Is he banning immigration from low-IQ regions? Not at all, he's encouraging it! Thus I conclude that Trudeau is not a eugenicist.
Well, I too agree with the 'if you subsidize something you get more of it' line of argument. I agree that our treatment of mental illness isn't actually effective but I'm confident that progressives think it is, that therapy and anti-depressants or whatever is good. Anyway, there's a clear distinction between subsidizing disabilities and Aktion T4. That certainly doesn't encourage mental illness or disability!
I deny that dissident right wingers are progressive. There's a concept of progress, certainly. There's a desire for social change. But the people who dominate the word 'progressive' have a specific direction in mind. Likewise, the people who dominate the phrase 'national socialist' bring in anti-semitism automatically. You can be nationalist. You can be a socialist. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist and a socialist for instance. But he wasn't a national socialist.
I'd create more categories. You have your atheistic progressives. You have your church-going progressives who go 'who am I to judge' about homosexuality, believe they should do more to help other races, everyone born equal. You have religious conservatives too, or secular conservatives, agnostic conservatives. But you also have religious rightists - the SS official who sees nothing wrong with cutting down Jews Commandment-wise. Or they might have some kind of alternate spiritual viewpoint, Pierce's Cosmotheism or Japanese Shinto nationalists. Or they could be atheistic. I'm sure you believe that there are such things as Christian progressives, so why not religious or irreligious rightists?
The cleaving point is internationalism vs nationalism, concepts of race and hierarchy IMO. This is how we distinguish the SS officer from the pink-haired university student. Both want major changes to modern civilization. But the former wants more nationalism, extensive racial purity laws, military dominance over other powers, sexual deviants removed from society. He might also be in favor of economic equality in the sense that we're all ____ans and so the nation will be stronger without any internal divisions or envy. But that's not the key thing. The pink-haired university student wants more internationalism, more cooperation with other countries, class war at home such that the oppressive billionaire class is crushed, everyone to breed with eachother such that race is abolished (I heard this in person once, not a strawman), sexual diversity celebrated, to avoid wars unless they're with enemy regimes that pattern-match to the above type.
They might agree on things like a national health service but for different reasons - improving the health of the nation makes it stronger, vs people having a right to health. In most areas, they're opposed.
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Granted, instead he frames in in terms of "minimizing costs", "maximizing Potential", and "reducing suffing". My position is that it all boils down to the same shit. That the claim that there is a meaningful difference between 1920s democrats and 2020s democrats is a lie that has been sold to us by a media-establishment that is allied with the democrats.
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"Identity politics" and "hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics" seem to fit the nazis quite perfectly as well.
Stalin and Trotsky (and Zinoviev, and Bukkarin, and many more) were all totally and irredeemably opposed to each other, eventually. Being willing to fight to the death is evidence of conflict, but there are many forms of ideological conflict, and many forms of non-ideological conflict as well.
Eventually is doing a lot of work here! Those guys were all in the same party together for a long time. The Nazis kicked out Strasser, who was very socialist. But he was also very nationalist and anti-semitic. Rohm might've been gay buy he was also a keen nationalist, militarist and anti-semite. Both men participated in the 1923 putsch too, they had a necessary disdain for democratic norms. But at no point would the Nazis have let in anyone like a modern progressive. Go directly to Dachau, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Modern progressivism: gay rights, trans rights, privileges/equality for non-whites, anti-authoritarianism, anti-militarism, anti-anti-semitism... you can see the SS officer clenching his pistol
At no point would the Soviets invite Ayn Rand into the Communist Party, at no point would Ronald Reagan join up with Pol Pot. Just because people got purged for power or other reasons, it doesn't mean that they're totally and irredeemably opposed.
I don't think it takes away from your overall point, but Reagan actually very much did support PolPot for many years. That was a real thing that happened.
Damn, that does rather undermine my argument. I suppose there's a distinction between using someone weaker than you as a disposable tool and a genuine alliance. I originally thought of contrasting Reagan vs the Chinese Communist Party but considered that they were working together throughout the 1980s against the Soviets. Obviously the plan was to turn China later on, along with Cambodia for that matter. On a strategic level, strange bedfellows... things are somewhat purer on an ideological/political level.
I don't think it does undermine your point, just a funny coincidence. There's a world where Che and Castro are fighting alongside Kennedy against the great Brazilian fascist menace, or something like that. Things like that are contingent, I think your larger point stands; though it should be noted the ideologies are themselves contingent. Ho Chi Minh was a communist because he needed the help. There's no reason gay rights and anti capitalism are considered allied; they're natural enemies.
How so?
Gay Rights only co-occurs with Advanced Capitalism. There are no traditional feudal countries with gay rights, there are no communist countries with gay rights, not now, not historically. The closest you get is specialized roles for catamites in certain traditional Asian, Muslim, and Greco-Roman societies. The litany of Marx is always relevant here:
Capitalism is the universal solvent, and one of the things it has most thoroughly dissolved are the religious, cultural, and moral strictures on human sexuality.
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