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You are acting as if there is a category of the "the governed" that can "consent" collectively somehow.
The nation is an imagined tribe... not a one of these social intuitions actually worked in theory or practice once the modern nation state came about and actively started hacking people's communal instincts to start regulating people, not at the level of the village or town of the hundreds or thousands, but at the tens of millions strong nation... this is why the birth of modern bureaucracy was so horrific and killed so many tens of millions of people, people kept behaving and acting as if they were part of a social organ capable of sane joint decision making when they weren't.
Every cultural group and nation went insane in its own unique ways in the socio-cultural drift, and the only reason civilization didn't break down entirely in SOME places is because they had a unified culture that just so happened to ape the mad vision they imagined they were enacting.
There is no 300 million strong category of "the governed" that is somehow capable of making decisions and "consenting"... Your brain is simply hacked by tribal instincts that worked and produced effective social morality when your ancestors were navigating social relations of a few thousand.
"The system" and "the Governed" and "the consent of the governed" can go haywire and murder 10s of millions of people at a moment's notice for no reason at all outside of pure cultural inertia and no sane intuition or person would at all be capable of stopping it.
You are adrift on black seas of infinity, lost in a unstoppable collective dream that could turn to a nightmare at a second's notice for reasons barely intelligible to the dream itself, with figures and institutions appearing before you in the poorly stitched skinsuits of your friends and loved ones saying "Come give grandmother a hug" or "If it isn't my old comrade. Let me shake your hand" and for the moment they hug back or shake the hand, and encourage you to follow them further up the road, and you say "Of course I'll follow they're my dear friends and family" whilst everyone who's noticed the nightmarish miasma. and that the ground is not wet with mist but blood, is screaming "FOR GOD'S SAKE LOOK AT THEIR TEETH!"
...and you are acting as though it would matter if they didn't exist. Why? What makes you think that this the case? or that if it were that it would be remotely valid as a rebuttal if it were?
All tribes are "imagined" in much the same way that all words are "made up". They only exist in so far they are agreed to exist and while you are free to believe that things like a shared religion, shared philosophy, shared culture, or even shared personal affinity are no basis for social coordination. The people of history are under no obligation to abide by what you might consider "reasonable" "rational" or "real". When push comes to shove the definition of "tribe" is simply the Venn Diagram of those you're willing to bleed for and those who are willing to bleed for you. Appeals to constructs like "race" and "economic class" are the purview of the socially atomized urban narcissists who being unwilling to bleed for anyone but themselves and thus have no tribe of their own.
You say that I am "adrift on black seas of infinity" but you're wrong. I am not "adrift" I am sailing, and If were feeling uncharitable I might suggest that you are only able to hold the beliefs that you do because you've never ventured beyond the shallows of your safe first-world middle-class existence. @FCfromSSC speaks the truth, true freedom, the kind that comes from clear-headed understanding of what "freedom" actually entails, is fucking terrifying and not for the faint of heart.
As for the implied accusation that it is people like me who pave the road to oblivion and concentration camps, I would point out that between the two of us, I am not the one who has recently been writing apologetics for the actions of men like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.
I've never written one apologetic for a single one of them.
I compared them to Lincoln and the great leaders of history... You applied the Modus Ponens that I was therefore saying they weren't as bad, when I claim the modus tollens "They're all fucking horrifying beyond comprehension"
You believe in a Christian world where good and evil exist, and even if not in balance, the good is not wholly outweighed by the bad, whereas I believe in a Lovecraftian world where we are adrift on the nightmarish black seas of infinity.
Sorry is I have to be insufficiently condemnatory of our cultures collective boogeymen to beat it into peoples fucking head that the worst human beings who ever lived, and the people they think of as great leader, statesmen, and heroes,, or even just mediocre politicians are VASTLY closer in both degree and kind than ANY are to ANYONE that any person should consider remotely praiseworthy.
What do you call this then?
As other users in that thread have pointed out, it's a pretty massive leap to go from "the Nazis were not uniquely evil" to "aKshUallY the Nazis were heroes of western civilization"
Not a quote.
My claim was for the majority of western civilization Hilter would be considered a "National Hero" such as Napoleon for the French, Alexander for the Greeks, Ceasar for the Romans (and later italians) Vlad Tepest for the Romanians, and Ghengis Kahn for the Mongols, or Lincoln for the Americans.
All war criminals who killed 100s of thousands if not millions and pursued explicit genocides in most cases (ask the Native Americans about Lincoln), but who are praised as heroes of their people by said people.
The fact people use a juvenile definition of the word "hero" thanks to Hollywood divorced from both its classical and early modern usage does not mean I am going to stop using that valuable and specific technical word. Not least because its positive affect accurately captures the socio-cultural esteem it describes.
I'm watching the japanese series right now Legend of the Galactic Heroes its an incredible military series with tons of classical allusion and political insight.
Do you think its title would be better translated as "Legend of the Galactic really swell guys" or "Legend of the Galactic Esteemed Military Conquerors"
potatoh potatah
Its a very big fucking distinction and you understand it perfectly.
One is an attribution of moral quality and virtue, the other is a description of how I think people in the past would have described a character hundreds of years ahead of their time.
They are vastly different things. Do you think my values at all align with a roman, Napoleonic Frenchman, or 19th century Ameircans? NO?! Then why the hell would you take my statement "People in the past I disagree with would like this figure" to mean "I like this figure"
You should assume from my statement "Normal people would like this" that I probably don't like it... given the general contempt I, and anyone with a braincell, hold 99% of the people who've ever lived in.
No it's not, you are deluding yourself.
If I said an Aztec Priest would like the film Martyrs have I said anything about what I think of Martyrs or if its a good film? Its gorey and has to do with human sacrifice.
You're being ridiculous.
The beer hall Putch is 100 years old in November. Boomers and Progressives getting bent out of shape and unable to decouple around the nazis is as ridiculous as if in Hitler's day people were moved to conniptions by insufficient denunciations of Bonapartism.
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