site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28901 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Are you trying to defend Nazi Germany here?

The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)

The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.

Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.

Not OP, but I'll defend 'Nazi Germany' every day and twice on Sunday if you like

They were fighting for a homogenous high trust society that was self-sufficient and built to last. They fought against communists and liberals who wanted a centralized global order with bland global materialism. They defended Europe from Stalin and their loss is turning western Europe into North Africa/middle east. Germany would not be in severe demographic decline with large scale third world immigration if they had won. They wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism and bland American consumerism.

They wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism

Cultural decay? Stalinism was well known for pushing classical art, music, literature, theatre and ballet to the masses, whether the masses appreciated it or not.

and bland American consumerism.

LOL. Whatever pure Aryan kulchur would victorious Reich produce, it would be as helpless in face of American art and music as Soviet culture was.

As long as you have the will to send to concentration camp anyone caught with unauthorized radio or bootleg negro music records, you can stop the tide with brute force. As long.

Counter-point, in order to establish a high trust society one must establish trust, a resource that Hitler and friends seemed to be particularly bent on squandering.

turning western Europe into North Africa/middle east

The whole western world. In 1950, Europe was twice the population of Africa. Today it's half. I have a friend in a fairly high position who told me how they're worried about what happens when the gigantic populations of sub-Saharan Africa start migrating to more temperate climates. Racism, climate change and replacement migration - the blankslatist-economic/progressive-moralist logic is clear. They've basically made up their minds about what's supposed to happen. They see it as their role to manage migration, ensure things don't get out of control - there's no concept of saying 'no' - that's too far-right, it would be too hard to oppose all the civil society NGOs, there'd be judicial review if you want to send them back...

You can see it in Biden's crowing about how the European descended white population of the US fell below 50% back in 2017 (US defines white more expansively), how this was the source of their strength. No more white European civilization and that's a good thing. Same in Eastern Europe. You've got the US embassy in Estonia pushing multiculturalism. Poland's fertility is well below replacement and they're in the EU - they're not going to be spared.

Allied victory in WW2 cemented the blankslatist-progressive ideology as the official doctrine of the Western world. Even China and Russia give it lip-service. It's ironic, there's an entire book of letters from British servicemen, (Unknown Warriors) most of whom bitterly regret how things turned out. They resent how the nation they fought for was replaced, how Britain's full of ungrateful foreigners and violent selfish yobs, how the politicians betray them with constant doubledealing and corruption. Reaping the spoils of victory!

Even China and Russia give it lip-service.

you seem to miss that for decades, communists in those countires were pushing blankslatism, it is very recent that USA went further than them

This sort of romantic neo-nazi image is ridiculous. The Nazis were not high trust. In fact they were the total opposite, a heap of the most venal, odious, dishonourable bandits to ever come out of Germany (which is saying something). They had no concerns for honour or trust or mercy, no respect for the traditional religion of Europe, no respect for the ancient peoples of Europe. They started vast wars over money and land, lied habitually, ran a horribly corrupt state built on exploitation and outright slavery, and slaughtered millions.

Nor was their state really ever intended to be self sufficient. From the start, the intention was to loot, conquer and subjugate their neighbours. Indeed, the German nationalist project was mostly complete by 1938 with the annexations of Austria and the Germanized regions of Czechoslovakia, and scarcely a peep from the Allies. But the Nazis dreamed of imperial domination and glory, not self sufficiency. Instead of rallying the nations of Europe against Bolshevism ( an easy task), Hitler squandered his credibility. By the end of WWII even anti communists like Churchill were drinking with Stalin, and it was left to the US to establish an anti communist front in Europe - well, the half of it that was left.

It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.

It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.

It's darkly funny that the first thing Franco did after (according to Franco) preventing a communist revolution in Iberia was implement a disastrous, ideologically motivated economic policy, causing a massive famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people and miring Spain in dire poverty for two decades. It's like that Spongebob meme where they're celebrating while the city burns in the background, "we did it, Hitler, we saved Spain from bolshevism!"

I don't know about famine. I knew the autarky years were very rough for Spain, especially coming after years of civil war.

Franco didn't have that much of a choice after 1945.

The policy discussed was implemented from the late 1930s, not 1945.

Well, yeah, thank you very much, you’re indeed correct that Franco’s austere policy of economic self-reliance and self-reinforcement was akshually implemented from the beginning. I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure that a liberal economic policy of free trade, foreign investment, wide-ranging reforms and growing interconnectedness isn’t feasible when a) the entire continent is engulfed in all-out war b) you are an isolated and detested pariah in international politics because Hitler and Mussolini militarily assisted in your seizure of power. I didn’t state this in detailed terms because I assumed most visitors here understand this, and I didn’t want to post a verbose reply. Again, excuse the snark please.

I didn’t mean to ‘akshually’ you, it was more that I wanted to say that the cause of Franco’s disastrous early agricultural policy (mainly price controls in a poorly-imagined attempt to achieve autarky) wasn’t the war, but ideology. It’s not clear that the war would have made it impossible for Spain to import food, particularly from the Americas.

The difference is that Franco learned from his mistake and Spain converged with western standards of living over the latter half of his reign.

So did the Red Chinese but I wouldn't give them props for that.

I would, actually, give deng credit for economic growth, although less than Franco because he never caught up with his neighbors. The gulf between the PRC and Japan/South Korea/Taiwan is much bigger than the pretty small Spain/italy gap.

bland global materialism

[...]

bland American consumerism

Evidence for Benjamin's claim that fascism is the "aestheticization of politics"?

If there is inevitably going to be a pop culture it would be better if it were cultivated with a purpose by some kind of class with a proper education and righteous intention to direct the people in a particular, intentional way.

The reality that this 'eureka moment' of great truth inevitability leads us all to getting thrown in gulags instead of creating a utopia driving the culture in 'purposeful' directions is why we're all here talking about exactly this.

While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.

German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.

For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.

So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.

Before the sailors' mutinies and revolutions of November 1918, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, made the proposal, or so I've heard, for the emperor to abdicate in favor of his son, to negotiate a ceasefire, and to reach out to the US government to sue for a separate peace, as a first step of terminating the war and salvaging a defeated nation. This was probably the only conceivable path to preventing the ensuing national catastrophe, but the emperor decided against it. And from then on, the republic that came into existence only had enemies in the country, save for small-r republican Social Democrats, who were always a political minority. And this republic was never going to be a European bulwark against American and Soviet hegemonic tendencies. This story was always going to end in disaster, I think.

I think the Weimar republic would have survived if Gustav Stresemann had been able to turn the DVP into an effective centre-right party. Crucial to the fall of Weimar is that all the right-wing forces except the DVP (which never moved beyond a niche party for eccentric rich people) and the Bavarian regionalist BVP (which didn't organise outside Bavaria) wanted to destroy it.

Building an effective centre-right party after the Versailles dictate is implemented is sort of difficult.

I appreciate that you have to feel this way because you are German-German, but because I have the luxury of being German-a-few-generations-removed, allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'

Was JFK an 'unhinged gangster' because his family were literal mobsters and he was constantly high on painkillers?

I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.

As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.

I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.

Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.

And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

Edit: This wasn't meant to seem curt - sometime though brevity is the soul of wit. Yes, perhaps if the Junkers or some other more traditional conservative faction had risen to power rather than such a reactionary party, Germany may have done X, Y, and Z. But it seems crass to me, almost prideful, to look at the 'unhinged gangsters' who 'volunteered' to beat the Spanish communists and then got the band back together in the Rhineland, Osterreich, the Sudetenland, Danzig, etc to give the Bolsheviks a genuinely good go and say 'if only!'

Yes, they lost, but they fought! By Jesu they fought. And it's just as easy to say 'it would've been better if they hadn't' as 'it would've been worse.' Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero). But he chose to go! He chose to fight! That he happened to drown when someone else might've not and (swamped the saracens) instead doesn't make him an 'unhinged gangster'

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

It would be pretty hard for Churchill to declare war in 1939. You might not know as much about WWII as you think.

Hitler declared war on Poland, in the face of explicit threats by Britain and France to join such a war on Poland's side. He could have just, y'know, not done that, and if he had he'd be remembered as the second Bismarck for the Anschluss and Munich.

Calls to mind the old joke about how if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle. Today we're used to the idea of a tiny shriveled ball sack-in-cold-weather Germany without a Baltic presence, but at the time, saying "just forget about the Germans in Poland" (which had just reappeared as a political presence for the first time in like 400 years) was a non-starter

was a non-starter

That doesn't stop it from being Hitler's choice. "I want to do X" is difference from "I was forced to do X."

More comments

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

That's certainly a take, and a depressingly common one around here it seems.

Setting aside the fact that Churchill didn't even become prime minister until May of 1940, I'm just going to reiterate what I said the last time this topic came up a month ago.

Hitler's diplomatic position in August of 1939 was essentially that of a belligerent drunk at the bar who keeps getting in people's faces and asking "Oh Yah? Watch'ou goanna do about bro?" and then acts surprised when someone decides to "do something about it".

The Nazis were already on thin-ice for continuing their territorial expansion post Munich, rebuking the Anglo German Naval Agreement, and harassing neutral shipping in the North Sea wich the British regarded as their back yard. If they didn't want a war with the British, they could have easily avoided it by not doing any of those things and more critically by not aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks against a country that both the British and French had a security agreement with.

Edit to add: That last bit in particular also demonstrates that all that talk from current year nazis about "racial brotherhood" and "opposing communism" is a crock of shit.

For all the talk condemning "brother wars" Prussians seem particularly prone to engaging in them and as much as I want to make a joke about Martin Luther being to blame I'm worried about someone falling into the same trap I almost did with @Southkraut's comment down thread where I almost chewed them a new one before I realized they were being facetious.

We can, obviously, have it both ways and more than one thing can be true at the same time. Ethnic germans really were getting persecuted in newly-Polish territories. Maybe their diplomatic position was that of a belligerent drunk too.

We can, obviously, have it both ways

No, no you can't.

More comments

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero).

Are you even a German? You talk like an American with some far off German ancestors, who has no real connection to the country or it's culture. You also idealize Germany, and attack the Anglo world, like someone who knows the faults of the Anglo world first hand, but has no real understanding of what Germany was like then.

/u/johnfabian /u/netstack I may be a few generations removed from the old country but I sure as shit aint Chinese

Also Heil Hitler, we must have a bratwurst and save the Fatherland

it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"

Eh, whether or not the OP has any credibility, I’d like to avoid this brand of mockery.

Germany could have not invaded Poland.

Because I live up on a hill in a big house with a nice moat of acreage in a very safe place, this is both true and hilariously similar to the conditions of Putin and Eastern Ukraine in contemporary times.

Had the Polish not been feeling their oats from their victories over the Soviets and actively persecuting Germans in their recently acquired territories shrug

this is both true and hilariously similar to the conditions of Putin and Eastern Ukraine in contemporary times

And Putin's invasion of Ukraine was also a strategic mistake.

More comments

This would suggest that Hitler and Co's priority was not combating Bolshevism but expansionist German nationalism. Glorifying Hitler for fighting against the Bolsheviks ignores the series of anti-Boshevik states that he destroyed on the way to Russia. Poland, as you note, had just come off fighting a war against the Soviets.

Hitler was never really very anti-Bolshevik, never moreso than he was anti-Slav. Had Hitler aligned with Poland and the Czechs against Russia, things might have gone differently, n'est pas?

More comments
  1. Rightful German Clay, had to protect the German minorities.
  2. They attacked us first! Remember the radio station!
  3. Had to be done to push the starting positions of the inevitable anti-bolshevik war further East.
  4. Lebensraum. We needed space to live.
  5. It was just an anglo puppet and we had to call them on their bluff.

Alright, alright, I'm just fooling around here.

Yes they fought, but their having fought no matter how much and how well doesn't save the Germany of today. We can trace our unmaking right back to them. Barbarossa, for all of his ineffectual campaigns and fruitless labors, left the Germanies roughly in the state he found them in. The Nazis took a struggling Germany and, for all the little glories they won, burned it right down to the ground and left the withered remains to the mercy of the victors. Certainly perfidious Albion had its schemes and probably quite a laugh at our fate, perhaps on can believe that Hitler himself would have preferred peace with them, but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

Unless you subscribe to some school of thought that completely denies the significance of consequence, I find no way to absolve the people who had complete authority over the country from complete responsibility for its destruction. Whatever our enemies might have done, however justified any given aspect of German military campaigning was, given that kind of authority those kinds of results speak for themselves.

And so as to not neglect the Unhinged Gangsters bit - I stand by that. Something like the Night of the Long Knives is decidedly ungerman.

but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

No! That's the point! England is a rotten mess of God only knows what and they're the one's who won!

That's true enough, but it wasn't so in 1945.

More comments

Churchill was not prime minister when England and France declared war on Germany.

It doesn't take a Churchillian titanic view of history to understand the trends and forces of the war were beyond the scope of who happened to hold office at the time. Churchill and his ultra-conservative faction had feared the rise of German naval power for half a century - unabated after the Great War - before their promise to Poland gave them the necessary excuse to smack Germany back down. And what happened to Poland after the war?

Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

You think if the Republicans had won in Spain this would somehow have led to the Red Army conquering all of Europe Command and Conquer style?

More comments

allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'

I'd suggest that at least one was.

I like Hitler and think he was genuinely kind of a nice fella

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats