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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence?

Rhymes with "Yahtzee". The last notable time white nationalists gained power did not go so well, and it is generally agreed that it did not go so well, so people with opinions that resemble that generally want to clarify that their viewpoints do not end up in that generally-agreed-to-be-bad place.

As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.

As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.

I mean, in part because we're much closer, politically, to communists than we are nazis. The idea of uplifting the poor, equality for all, the will of the people, etc, are things that modern americans and communists share. Whereas the nobility of war, a duty to serve the state and its leader, the superior races pushing out the inferior, jews being bad, etc, aren't something we share. Communism is noble but misguided in practice, naziism is evil.

This means communism 'goes down easier' than fascism, so people have a much stronger visceral reaction to fascism. The fascist then has to compensate for that, e.g. by rejecting violence

As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists?

A suggestion from a video interview with Tom Holland on his book "Dominion" was that the Communists were equal-opportunity murderers; they didn't pick you based on skin colour or perceived ethnicity, while the Nazis had a very clear plan in place about that. So Communists are seen as slightly less awful.

Then working backwards from that, Communists don't feel the need to disavow violence because (1) well it's revolution, comrade, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and (2) hey, at least we're not Nazis!

They picked you based on perceived social class instead.

Indeed, but they didn't care if you were white, black, brown, yellow or red as they sent you to die in the Gulag! So they're just a teeny bit not as bad as the Nazis! So they don't have to disavow violence, comrade!

The nazis murdered a lot of europeans who they painted as threats, so they were much more German supremacists than white nationalists. Those european countries targeted were actually run for the most part by european nationalists who did support their people's continued existence, that is peoples who were white. Most victims of the nazis were in some regard european nationalists. So you need to be very careful here, as it becomes ghoulish and genuinely offensive to use nazism that harmed so many Europeans and their nations to double down on harming Europeans.

Let me provide a comparison. The Japanese imperialists who were Japanese supremacists also promoted the idea of pan-Asianism and that they were those fit to lead the Asian race against European colonialism. But of course they also were rather racist against particular Asian groups and commited nasty attrocities. And the existence of the Japanese imperialists does not justify screwing Asians from their homeland because the Japanese have done atrocities to both Asian and also the whites who fought them in WW2. It was also better that the Japanese were not taught to hate thier nation as was done to the Germans. Japan after WW2 respected it self and avoided attrocities against non Japanese. Win - Win. That they did not engage and "face" with their WW2 history is probably better than the German alternative. Like South Africa's "truth and reconciliation" what we get is neither truth nor reconciliation.

The nazi card being used against Europeans who suffered under both Bolshevism, Nazism and now cultural marxism is diabolical.

Those who fought the nazis fought for their people against an enemy, not for them and their descendants to be treated as nazis which is extremely immoral and an enormous betrayal.

One could claim that extreme antinationalism towards groups painted as threat that disallows their existence is the pervasively dangerous ideology instead and one you are helping perpetuate. Not respecting other nations having a homeland. This genocidal imperialism then as an ideology comes in many forms.

If anything, the more dominant white nationalist ideology has been in the anglo sphere.

Nationalists concerned about their native groups prosperity have ruled over many countries including european ones, including at the time of nazis and opposed them, and afterwards. In europe post WW2 has worked well actually with modern european nationalists who opposed migration having countries that avoided both the violence and hatred at expense of their people.

They are nationalist enough for this ideology not to be tolerated by the modern liberal left and people like Soros and similar.

So moderate nationalism in general that has an element of respecting the golden rule works well and a necessary aspect of the only sane internationalism that worked. Nationalism that is greedy and does not respect the rights of others doesn't work well for humanity. But the nationalism of this form that is more dominant today is not white nationalism, but nationalism of groups of the progressive stack.

Indeed even in the USA in part decades there have existed people who identified with their white group who even thought southerners were too tough on the blacks.

What is going is that far leftist extremists and racist tribalists for other groups did take over certain institutions.

And the right which did have some more hardcore views (hell the national review supported seggregation originally) adopted increasingly their framework.

Now, nationalism as I have argued can go too far and there is that element too, so I do think due to this fact and yes history too, it would have made sense to put limits on white nationalism, just like it should be doen for non white nationalism and the marxist nationalism that has infected liberalism is an example of this extremism. In fact, perhaps the movements that are moderate on nationalism do not actually call themselves nationalist. That might be one way to see it.

But we don't have a movement that is about just opposing extremism here. If we had that, I would be more in line to respect it, although such a movement should focus today much more about other extremisms than white nationalism like for one example the black nationalism not only of blacks but even promoted by non black liberals. Which relates to the attempt to promote afrocentrism and promote narratives about black romans, black English in history and so on.

This agenda was imposed by those who marched in institutions and by force. Its not a mystery why there isn't objection to it, its because the far left promotes deliberately the association of nazism with anything that isn't far leftism and pathologizes opposition to the far left as extremism. Even though plenty of those who oppose it aren't extremists and even supposed extremists can and did oppose bad far left extremism too.

Those who have compromised too far with certain racist ethnic lobbies and the far left, do not represent a moderate reasonable center. A moderate reasonable center will include space for white tribalism, but would also put limits to it, and would do likewise with other tribalisms.

It would also definitely focus to punish the "nazis/slavery/confederacy/colonialism/holocaust happened so your group have no national rights" ideology and those perpetuating it, and focus to promote a history that is more nuanced rather than one sided blame game against particular ethnic groups or the political right. There is in history enough facts against this falsity. The milking of history to paint certain ethnic groups as eternal oppressors is the kind of thing that is the most potent poison to our discourse.

So I would teach first about this movement and how it is a bad one, and how we should not allow them manipulate us by respecting their act of milking history as a respectable endeavor. However I would also frame nazism, slavery as bad things. WW2, slavery, etc are not the only things of history that matter and in fact the movements that have milked them are far more relevant to us today than them and remain actual entrenched factions that keep doing this trick. It only works if we accept their attempt to milk history and use it as a winning card against their outgroup. So we should care far more about the activists promoting this than any of the groups that operated 80 years ago.

We should definitely make the "more holocaust/slavery/left wing victimhood narratives" a taboo. We need much less of that in fact. So yeah, I think the way to fix the damage done by these movements and reach behavior that is closer to the sweet spot is intolerance to the "truth and reconciliation" supporters. The influence of shaming native nationalism for Europeans has been so much and the influence of respecting the rights of others so pervasive among say groups like the French who a) oppose what happened in France with mass migration, and believe France should stop it. b) still oppose fascism, that the end result of removing those who perpetuate these narratives from influence would certainly be more moderate than what we got now.

Edit: I do think that pan whiteism and Pan asianism and universalism imperialist can bring actually genocides against groups. But the threat should not be utterly focused on those outside, as is convenient for anti-europeans. There are ethnic differences among broader groups too that rise the question of how those who aspire to lead the whole group would behave. Communist genocides do relate to the elite there finding certain ethnic groups to be obstacles and finding their nationalism a threat to the project, and the general antinationalist extremism. In the case of nazis their idea of being the leaders of Europe was not incompatible with extreme racism against certain europeans and Japanese with Asians against Asians So that is another lesson to take from WW2 that doesn't fit the narrative of the one sided promoters of particular guilt. But it is an important one. This idea that you should unite either the world or a race under your leadership can of course lead to such problems.

The people who claim the aspersion of lack of tribalism (whether universally or towards people of their own race) can find it easier to mistreat other ethnic groups under their rule than they claim. The wise issue of national self determination arises in WW2 as a relevant. I recall reading a quote by Eisenhower who thought that lack of homogeneity in Europe was related to WW2 as a conflict by the way.

I mean this is a way to see things that isn't popular among hardcore white nationalists neither, but it is actually one of the insights one can get from WW2 if they don't see it from particular partisan glasses. Now, what about the EU? Well the EU can do attrocities out of a more cultural marxist lens, which still relates to an elite who don't identify with an ethnic group mistreating it due to seeing them as threat, but now for muslims, or blacks or Jews, or for the tribe of "antitribalists". As a union of European nations, if lead by moderate nationalists who respect their general heritage but also their specific nations, and don't have a predatory mentality towards the worl it is more likely to work well for everyone than by the cultural marxists who mistreat Europeans and have a problem of antieuropean racism. If it lead by groups like the historical nazis, attrocities against certain Europeans and their nations would be a likely scenario. So this is an example of taking correct lessons of history, instead of being manipulated by one of the guilty factions such as the cultural marxists.

One of the ways to break the spell of "nazism milking" used by anti european racists, is to realize how much harm nazis did to europeans as well. But of course that harm was 80 years ago, and others are the more primary perpetrators of harm afterwards. And the victory of this racist anti european faction can feed into a certain grass is greener effects by some looking at ww2 history.

That still doesn't change the utterly obscene nature of using the nazis who murdered so many europeans and had an authoritarian culturally genocidal agenda (they explicitly were against nationalism by said nations) towards many non german european nations, as the way to support cultural genocide, extinction and racism against europeans today. We need to punish pathologizing moderate nationalism that is so tied to the legitimate rights of existence and non mistreatment of ethnic groups and the nazi comparisons are deserving of ire most of all.

I think it’s power dynamics. The Nazis lost badly and had no institutional support after the war. So they were held to account by their enemies and every crime was exposed and recounted in mass media. Nazis were tried publicly for their crimes. Communism has institutional support in government, in media, and in the academy. They never really lost. They faced no public reckoning for their crimes. I think if you reverse that, have the communists lose badly in a war, lose institutional support, and the leadership face a media backlash exposing everything that went wrong, they’d have the same need to distance themselves from Soviet era communism.

This seems plausible to me.