21–30 of 41 posts
The anti-Nazi propaganda always reads so much like the pro-Nazi propaganda. Good, honest, beautiful, happy people think like this...
Did you actually read the article? I wouldn't call it propaganda.
[deleted]
ITYM the opposite?
Very interesting to hear this from a contempory standpoint. Nazis as so often portrayed as purely evil that it's difficult to think of them as real people that willingly accepted that way of thinking.
Just turn on your favorite cable news station for US primary election coverage, and it won't be so hard to imagine.
Very interesting to hear this from a contempory standpoint. Nazis as so often portrayed as purely evil that it's difficult to think of them as real people that willingly accepted that way of thinking.
This is my biggest beef with most WWII movies/games. They most horrifying aspect of Nazis, Fascists, and tyrants is that they're made up and supported by real people. People with loved ones just trying to get by in the world. Given the right conditions, it genuinely seems that any culture or peoples could be turned into a place where concentration camps, genocide, and oppression are just part of making the trains run…
Very interesting to hear this from a contempory standpoint. Nazis as so often portrayed as purely evil that it's difficult to think of them as real people that willingly accepted that way of thinking.
Even when specifically attempting to refrain from doing so, it's impossible to speak of Nazi Germany without resorting to simplifying them into cartoon evil or as a moral object lesson from which to derive meaningful instruction and insight. The terrible truth is they were entirely normal people who followed an entirely normal path of self-interest. There is nothing remarkable about them and no special insight into h…
It's not too often I see /pol/-speak (or /pol/ usernames) on HN. >German Jews during the party's rise were also an inordinately powerful group in German industry, finance, and media. The German Communist Party had a very low percentage of Jewish membership. The Weimar KPD was only 0.7% Jewish in 1927. At the end of the Weimar republic, only about 1.5% of all officers were Jewish, and only one of the leaders was Jewis…
I view it in an epidemiological context. Yes, there is a certain susceptibility in the human mind, but we have much bigger second-order effects when it comes to groups of people, and organizations. Our own ideology is Liberal Democracy, which is more tolerant of multiculturalism. But the "psychology of the masses" can be a dangerous thing. It can cause a flint (three teenagers being kidnapped in West Bank) to escalate into a flame (war in Gaza where 1500 civilians die), or via escalating reprisals where "refugees" rape women and mobs of hooligans raid peaceful refugees, and so forth.
Human life is often lost in the greatest amounts when one ideology is "completing its revolution". Whether it is the Holodomor or China's Three Terrible Years man made famines, or the persecution of Falun Gong, the rights of human beings take a backseat to ideology. That's what I find to be most dangerous politically.
Although I fear actual viruses, bacteria, overpopulation and world-ending events more, an inflexible ideology + power is a pretty terrible combination.
Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. It's not Nazism that should occupy the thoughts of intellectuals. It's the underlying psychology of the in-group/out-grouping and jingoism. There's nothing qualitatively exceptional about Nazis. They were just one point in a spectrum of behavior within the range of possible human behaviors. The challenge to society is that socie…
You say people (or intellectuals, at least) should make a conscious effort to avoid the psychology and biases of in-group/out-grouping.
But what you are proposing is simply the creation of another in-group: "those of us who don't in-group," contrasted with the new out-group of "those who do in-group and out-group."
You advocate for everyone to join your in-group of "non-in-groupers," and condemn the out-groupers, those not aligned with your prescription for correct behavior -- exactly as all in-groupers have done before you, and precisely what you claim to be deploring.
It is thus a wholly and profoundly self-contradictory proposition, which cannot be admitted as logical or rational.
Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. It's not Nazism that should occupy the thoughts of intellectuals. It's the underlying psychology of the in-group/out-grouping and jingoism. There's nothing qualitatively exceptional about Nazis. They were just one point in a spectrum of behavior within the range of possible human behaviors. The challenge to society is that socie…
What you propose is inherently paradoxical and irrational. You say people (or intellectuals, at least) should make a conscious effort to avoid the psychology and biases of in-group/out-grouping. But what you are proposing is simply the creation of another in-group: "those of us who don't in-group," contrasted with the new out-group of "those who do in-group and out-group." You advocate for everyone to join your in-gr…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_%28logic%29
You advocate for everyone to join your in-group of "non-in-groupers," and condemn the out-groupers, those not aligned with your prescription for correct behavior -- exactly as all in-groupers have done before you, and precisely what you claim to be deploring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
It is thus a wholly and profoundly self-contradictory proposition, which cannot be admitted as logical or rational.
Ironically, this conclusion rests on nothing but logical fallacies.