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Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

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51–60 of 132 posts

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#51
post #26

It's been a while since the last big, successful, popular, dictatorial, charismatic movement like Nazism. Putin comes closest, but he came to power as an insider, with Yeltsin supporting him. ISIS is religion-based, (even though it was designed by a former Iraqi colonel who wasn't very religious [1]) and those work differently. There are warlords in sub-Saharan Africa, but they're usually not popular leaders. Remembe…

Just to nitpick John, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg. The nazi party never won an election in their entire history.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#52

I love the idea of reading articles from this time period on this topic. This article though, with Mr A/B/C/... was bit much to handle though. Just felt much too speculative.

I would bet a barrel of reichmarks that these were real people. In fact, I'm absolutely certain that "Mr. C" is the "saturnine" Lawrence Dennis, a former State Department diplomat and Wall Street advisor considered the guiding intellect of 1930s American fascism.

Fascinatingly, Dennis didn't grow up "Southern white trash." No, he actually was a famous African-American child preacher, a background that he did hide successfully (though, reading between the lines of the article, not perhaps to everyone) as he disavowed his family, appeared at Exeter on scholarship, and traveled in the upper reaches of American society and eventually to the far fringes of American, Italian and German fascism. It is a surpassing irony that his hatred of Jim Crow segregation and contempt for the democracy that allowed it led him to be welcomed inside the sanctum of those men who would have imprisoned, shot or gassed him had they known the truth of his background.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#53
post #9

This article is especially interesting, given it was written before the the US entered the war and before the full extent of Nazi atrocities was known. I'm reminded of C.S Lewis's speech about the Inner Ring (1944): http://www.mit.edu/~hooman/ideas/the_inner_ring.htm

I wonder what would have happened if Hitler (who apparently didn't give the matter much thought) hadn't declared war on the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...

Hitler admired the US. One of the reasons to attack Russia was to colonize Eastern Europe the way America was colonized to stand a chance in the future with more agricultural land.

With the support of facist governments against communisim around the world after WWII - especially in South America - indeed one could wonder how the US would have reacted without the Pearl and the German War declaration, or a much later German attack on Russia. Not sure it would have taken the communist side some years later.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#54
post #42
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how feminism annexed academia ... why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially No axes to grind here, hmm? (Hint: there's a huge difference between civil rights movements -- those demanding equal respect -- and the fulminations of the privileged who think life's a zero-sum game and anyone else making up ground means that they're losing out. Alas, you don't seem to get it.)

Actually, I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense.

Not much of an effort apparently.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#55
post #42
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how feminism annexed academia ... why Occupy failed but why BLM could grow exponentially No axes to grind here, hmm? (Hint: there's a huge difference between civil rights movements -- those demanding equal respect -- and the fulminations of the privileged who think life's a zero-sum game and anyone else making up ground means that they're losing out. Alas, you don't seem to get it.)

Actually, I make an effort to be sufficiently even handed that only a committed partisan could take offense.

Reading what you wrote, and this comment seems to translate as:

> I make an effort to insult everyone therefore if anyone is insulted they must be a zealot. It's certainly not possible for reasonable people to take offence to an insult so long as I also insult the "other side" of the debate.

I'm not entirely sure that the "social math" you're attempting to use here actually works in real life.

But to digress further, even if this "social math" worked out, statements like "Trump is popular" are not necessarily contested even by people that disagree with Trump, while statement like "feminism annexed academia" is a much more inflammatory and contested statement.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#56
post #11
post #5

The essence of any totalitarian strategy is to seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. The secret is to then reward people from the majority for denouncing and replacing members of the minority for not being zealous enough, so that they…

seize some resources, invent a necessarily preposterous myth, then in exchange for demonstrating belief in the myth, re-distribute the resources arbitrarily among a minority of people who are easily replaceable and know it. Startups? how these assholes seize power. It's through charismatic promises of future rewards Startups.

To a point. Startups aren't about wielding totalitarian power. The crappy ones are more about the short con of trading lottery tickets (options) for labor, and using the myth of magical genius to sell stakes to bookies and rubes.

There are great businesses out there that respond to real market needs, but a lot of tech companies only seem to exist in the window of lag between collapsing marginal cost and eventual market saturation.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#57
post #26

It's been a while since the last big, successful, popular, dictatorial, charismatic movement like Nazism. Putin comes closest, but he came to power as an insider, with Yeltsin supporting him. ISIS is religion-based, (even though it was designed by a former Iraqi colonel who wasn't very religious [1]) and those work differently. There are warlords in sub-Saharan Africa, but they're usually not popular leaders. Remembe…

The problem with "big, successful, popular, dictatorial, charismatic" is there's also an implied addition of being against us, which naturally (LOL) implies they're evil.

Otherwise your big five is just Obama, as a recent example. By the full seven criteria obviously Obama doesn't qualify of course.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#58
"Dorothy Thompson (9 July 1893 – 30 January 1961) was an American journalist and radio broadcaster, who in 1939 was recognized by Time magazine as the second most influential woman in America next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and as one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. She is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism."

- Wikipedia

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#59
post #49
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people than just the right believe things to be a zero-sum game, else you would not see the kinds of things expressed in the Github diversity slide-show you saw in this article [1]. This is the main slide [2]. And, one could argue it is, for every man hired, that's potentially one fewer woman hired and for every one white woman hired that's one fewer minority woman or man hired, if you look at things from an ind…

I just cannot believe what's on some of those slides. Here are some snippets -- imagine if you were to swap the races around, and replace every 'white' with 'people of color', every 'asian' with 'white', and every 'people of color' with 'asian'. If you do these mental gymnastics, some of these slides will seem incredibly offensive -- so how is it that they're acceptable at all , regardless of what the races are. Here…

Yes, if you change the words in a sentence, the sentence's meaning can change.

Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

#60
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The myth is easier to identify: that there's campaign of murder by police officers targeting blacks. It's part of the broader myth that minorities in the US are being kept down by the powers that be There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address. And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantle…

> There's substantial evidence for both of these though, which you're not going to address. You seem very sure about what I will and won't address. Why don't we find out? What is this evidence? > And minorities were kept down by force of law until at least the 1960s; have the systems put in place to do so been fully dismantled? I'd say yes. The right to vote is firmly protected (as for voter ID laws, I think they're…

> The War on Drugs is disproportionately hurting minorities

Agreed.

> I don't think you can frame it as the machinery of minority oppression.

Erm, what? So you're saying that, while the War on Drugs disproportionately hurts minorities, it's not a machine of minority oppression? I can't wrap my head around that.

Any discussion I hear about race always takes me back to the old Atwater quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Atwater_on_the_Sou...

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