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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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You really can't think of any reason why the West, a civilization whose left-wing intellectuals cast the Holocaust as a mortal and unique sin in the 60s, would make lots of movies about the Holocaust but not as many about a civilization they don't belong to?

And what is the reason that that civilization's left-wing individuals elected to cast the Holocaust as a mortal and unique sin? Pure coincidence?

They were Marxists who believed that what had happened was completely unacceptable. That they were Jews certainly drove them, but their arguments are done with reference to Marx and that whole web of ideas. And what else is a Marxist going to cast as the greatest sin but the genocidal actions of a fascist regime?

Edit: My apologies, I misunderstood the question.

I would agree with the idea that Jewish groups in the 1960s were responsible for making the Holocaust the most important thing in that group's cultural history. My point is that you do not need to point to Jews in Hollywood as an explanation for why you get so many Holocaust movies. People make WW2 movies because it's a big part of our history, and they would do that regardless.

Yes it's not Jews in Hollywood, it's Jews in academia, government, the media and Hollywood.

As Joe Biden puts it:

“Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense.

There's a disconnect between the existence of Jews in those areas and the accusation that it's the relevant identity. To do this, you would have to argue that the motivations and thought processes are distinctly about being Jewish. Your own article notes the following.

...while Jewish opinions run the ideological gamut, they have clustered heavily on the left end of the political spectrum.

So now you have to demonstrate that left-wing Jews are being motivated by their religion, not their political ideology.

To do this, you would have to argue that the motivations and thought processes are distinctly about being Jewish.

Yes they are. Or at least it's something that Jewish people have that led to such an over-representation of Jews in these movements. Not that other people cannot have these traits/motivations.

So now you have to demonstrate that left-wing Jews are being motivated by their religion, not their political ideology.

That influential Jews have clustered heavily on the left-wing side does not mean that religiousness is the cause of their left-wingness. Perhaps there is something about the population of Jews that makes them likely to become left-wing.

Of the revolutionary, government-destabilizing kind. After all, Jews as a population always had a tendency to support at least one minority ideology, which was that unlike everybody else, they would only marry Jews.

From an intellectual point of view, one could see how individual Jews could historically be perceived as thought-criminals compared to the rest of the society they lived in, that followed different customs and different (religious) values.

I didn't talk about religion, I believe it has to do with biology. Being Jewish is about ethnicity, about the 'Early life' section of wikipedia.

Jewishness is transmitted by the mother, hardly ever through conversion, the traits that are stereotypically associated with Jewishness such as 'high verbal IQ', 'academic prowess', 'accumulating wealth', and some other ones are probably inherited or influenced by some inherited factors.

The religion itself has an impact as well, as it's a supremacist religion, but because it shaped these populations over centuries by evaporative cooling, similarly to the Amish, the religion is not a requirement. Many Jews that identify as atheists still hold jewish supremacist views. The nationalism arose from religious precepts but became a custom.

For example Albert Einstein was an ardent zionist but not very religious afaik.

So I would say that while the religion was the historical driver of jewish nationalism/supremacism, over time it led to selection of traits that result in nationalism/supremacism/minority-driven revolutionary movements that do not necessarily require religious beliefs.

These days many Jews seem to be driven by the meme of the Holocaust as a uniquely awful tragedy more than traditional religious beliefs.

But the fact that these less-faith-driven Jews still are a fertile ground for strong political activism over such memes may speak to certain qualities that they've inherited without the faith: the tendency to believe themself a chosen people that is unfairly targeted, uniquely persecuted, utterly unable to assume any blame for any possible reason...

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