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George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

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Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#171

Post by fennecfoxen »

tobiasu wrote: post #164
robryan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is really a factor, nukes only really come into it if you have an irrational regime that would rather be destroyed themselves than outright lose.

Russia has strategic as well as a tactical nuclear weapons. They have repeatedly stated that they will use tactical weapons to make up for any shortcoming in conventional forces. An example could be nuking a large staging area or aircraft carriers. There's nothing irrational about it, once war progresses this far.

Heck, part of NATO's defense strategy against the USSR was to have squads with Davy Crockett missiles stationed along the eastern front. If you're not familiar with those: it's a shoulder-launched device bearing the M388 atomic round. Range: around a mile. Kill radius: around a quarter mile.

The premise is that when the Soviets decided to invade they'd lob a few of these at their forces and pin them down for a little while, so the rest of NATO could mobilize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#172

Post by notahacker »

_up wrote: post #157
reitzensteinm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "euthanasia" actually began in September 1939. October was when the law was passed, which was backdated to September 1st. This isn't just to be pedantic, I'm currently reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans, and this is an instance of the Nazi emphasis on appearing as though they had a legal basis for their actions, even well into the dictatorship. It's one of the most bizarre parts of the story to m…

I think is it a lot easier to convince people what they are doing is ok or not so bad, if it is "legalized" by law. NSA also insists that everything they do is covered by the law or at least their secret interpretation.

This kind of legalism is particularly puzzling in cases like the Khmer Rouge, which avoided enlisting sympathetic intellectuals and foreign backers to help build bureaucracies and theoretical justification for their actions and instead massacred them whilst being deliberately obscurantist about their aims and beliefs, but still kept meticulous records of their prisoners and the "confessions" they extracted as if they believed such evidence procedures had been followed correctly would assure history judged their actions kindly.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#173

Post by BugBrother »

reitanqild wrote: post #150
lisper wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Conservatism doesn't send people to concentration camps Doesn't it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...

Last I checked Gaza were nothing like a concentration camp, and calling it that is an offense to anyone who experienced any real one. When did foreign journalists have access to ccs? When did ccs have markets in broad daylight? Where is forced labour? (I didn't mention starvation etc because those ones are contested but still.) I literally don't like to bring this up as it isually brings downvotes but letting people…

Let me add a couple of points re calling Gaza a concentration camp:

1. Gaza has among the highest population growths on the planet. Anyone implying organized murder is ... well, to not be impolite I also have to say: "is an offense to anyone who experienced any real [concentration camp]".

2. The borders were quite open to Israel, until the murders of Israeli civilians really started. It was common that people commuted to work in Israel and Israelis drove the car over to Gaza to have it fixed. Some problems are self generated.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#174

Post by jahaja »

waps wrote: post #113
anigbrowl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm continually astonished at the ultraconservative meme that Hitler was left-wing (which seems to originate with a book called 'Liberal Fascism' by Jonah Goldberg, although it has doubtless been floating around for much longer). Point out that one of the very first things that Hitler did on attaining power was have all the trade unionists arrested, and you might as well be talking to the air.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_the_Soviet_Unio... Both the extreme left and the extreme right are very much opposed to unions. Ergo making a difference between them on that basis seems impossible. It worked on the other side of the fence as well : Nazi Germany restricted or outlawed trade and business organisation just as it did it unions. They went after the Church too. They restriced universities. The…

What is the extreme left for you? Stalinism isn't extreme left, it's just an totalitarianism promoted as socialism to gain credit. Just as north korea ain't a democracy even though they call themselves that. What I usually associate with "extreme" or far left is the "autonomous left" or similar where trade unions are certainly a fundamental part of the organisational idea.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#175

Post by BugBrother »

Intermernet wrote: post #155
pdonis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so by this definition, Stalin was certainly not left-wing, since he exterminated and enslaved minorities, which you appear to agree is not supportive of social equality. Yet Stalin is used in the same Wikipedia article as an example of left-wing activities. Also, if pacifism is left-wing, then the Obama administration is certainly not left-wing or anything close to it, since he has repeatedly authorized military…

Please note, I'm not arguing your overall point, I agree with it completely. This comment is really just nit-picking over terminology. I'm pretty sure that Stalin has been post-categorized into the "Left-Wing" camp as he stood for "Socialism". That one label is about the only thing about Stalin that could be classified as "Left-Wing". There has been an enormous amount of jostling amongst all "Left-Wing" political par…

>> "Socialism" is now very different from Stalin's view of it

Didn't released documents after 1989 show that most of the West European communist parties took orders directly from Moscow/Stalin?

IIRC, it was a big shock that the reason the Italian communist party was so reasonable after WW II was because it was orders from Moscow. (Stalin wanted to split Europe in two.)

I remember that the Swedish communist party used to be staunch Stalinists until Moscow told them he was wrong. Is that where the different view of Socialism came from? :-)

(The Swedish communists (SKP/VPK/V) claim to have stopped taking orders in the 1960s and have been critics of Soviet since 1989.)

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#176

Post by e12e »

ehmorris wrote: post #70
scrollaway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the matter but since you work at genius, can you talk to the geniuses (sic) who thought that hijacking text highlight was a good idea? A lot of us speed readers use text highlight to read along. It is easier on the eyes and the brain. So please don't hijack it.

For technical reasons: we want to allow users to annotate arbitrary segments of text, so what better (or other) way is there than adding an annotate button to highlighted text? For philosophical reasons: genius is about annotating text, and as a result, about close reading. We'd rather optimize for a close read than a speed read.

Would be nice to just add a toggle for the annotations? I rarely use genius for the various annotations, but with the wealth of song (rap) lyrics, I often end up on the site. Being able to switch off annotations would be great.

[edit: Come to think of it, I'd love to see three modes: the current highlight, none, and footnotes (which one might hoover/click). Whenever I read annotated texts, I rarely care about all annotations -- I only look up the things I need to look up. And the highlights are really annoying when reading a text.]

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#177

Post by jokoon »

sytelus wrote: post #163
jokoon wrote: post #153

I wonder if hitler is studied in political sciences. Especially his speeches, rhetorics and strategies, and why they worked out how they did. I hate to feel that hitler is somehow still a little controversial today. I don't really want to watch his speeches or read what he was saying because it's a little depressing and painful to think about, but understanding how he politically convinced people, and the underlying…

Hitler used very simple formula that had been often repeated: You have a nation of people defeated and stripped of wealth and pride. A leader comes up with a extremely strongly held view that these people are the greatest thing on the Earth and they will rise from the ashes. He quickly gains followers, boldly breaks rules and obtains initial victories that fuels his next moves in self-feeding way. Mein Kampf actually…

I still wonder if the more a country is in a financial depression, the more it's vulnerable to extremism, and how do you measure it, and do you avoid it.

I wonder how much anyone care about not going in to war, deep in one's heart, to not let crazy type be in control, especially nowadays politicians.

I believe democracy and moderate, boring, slobbish politics are still the key in having a peaceful civilization. If the CIA is conspiring to assassinate potential war-mongerers, I would feel fine about it. Conspiracists have a point that peaceful and consented exploitation is a sad situation to be in, but it's far better than the many past horrors of conflict.

The more WW2 gets old, the more people don't realize what war really is. Short conflicts in the middle east or vietnam are not the same than when a conflict comes at your doorstep.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#178

Post by Zuider »

sexmonad wrote: post #72
ekianjo wrote: post #65

The comparison with Naopoleon in the text is inappropriate and anachronistic. Napoleon WAS fighting against destiny. France was then attacked on all fronts by foreign kingdoms who wanted to crush the republic and restore the monarchy. Napoleon was the one to rise to defend the nation against foreign powers. It had nothing to do with Hitler agressing other countries around.for the sole purpose of establishing a larger…

I don't see the parallel as intended to put Napoleon down, but instead to attribute the same force of personality to Hitler. As someone who never met either man (perhaps that's obvious :), I'm not sure the connection works with me.

The German philosopher, Hegel had quite the man-crush on Bonaparte.

"I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it."

Similarly, Hitler saw himself as being the concrete expression of the soul of the German people. He may not have been aware of the quote, but the ideas it expressed were strong themes in the German romantic movement.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#179

Post by breadbutt »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #171
tobiasu wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has strategic as well as a tactical nuclear weapons. They have repeatedly stated that they will use tactical weapons to make up for any shortcoming in conventional forces. An example could be nuking a large staging area or aircraft carriers. There's nothing irrational about it, once war progresses this far.

Heck, part of NATO's defense strategy against the USSR was to have squads with Davy Crockett missiles stationed along the eastern front. If you're not familiar with those: it's a shoulder-launched device bearing the M388 atomic round. Range: around a mile. Kill radius: around a quarter mile. The premise is that when the Soviets decided to invade they'd lob a few of these at their forces and pin them down for a little…

> One of the most fervent supporters of the Davy Crockett was West Germany's defense minister Franz Josef Strauss, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Strauss promoted the idea of equipping German brigades with the weapon to be supplied by the US, arguing that this would allow German troops to become a much more effective factor in NATO's defense of Germany against a potential Soviet invasion. He argued that a single Davy Crocket could replace 40–50 salvos of a whole divisional artillery park — allowing the funds and troops normally needed for this artillery to be invested into further troops, or not having to be spent at all. US NATO commanders strongly opposed Strauss's ideas, as they would have made the use of tactical nuclear weapons almost mandatory in case of war, further reducing the ability of NATO to defend itself without resorting to atomic weapons.[7]

It seems that even at that time, the US wanted to keep the conflict nuclear-free as much as possible.

Re: George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)

#180

Post by breadbutt »

ehmorris wrote: post #70
scrollaway wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the matter but since you work at genius, can you talk to the geniuses (sic) who thought that hijacking text highlight was a good idea? A lot of us speed readers use text highlight to read along. It is easier on the eyes and the brain. So please don't hijack it.

For technical reasons: we want to allow users to annotate arbitrary segments of text, so what better (or other) way is there than adding an annotate button to highlighted text? For philosophical reasons: genius is about annotating text, and as a result, about close reading. We'd rather optimize for a close read than a speed read.

You can just display the "annotate" dialog outside the main text. Also it's pretty annoying that it wants me to click just to take me to a login screen. Fuck this.
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