It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
81–90 of 134 posts
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't get that from the article at all. I think this sentence in the last section of the article is the central point: > Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. That Nazism is a product of cruelty, unhappiness, and insecurity. Fascism is about dominance. About being a part of the group to which the other is subordinate. Which is something that appeals to people who are deeply bitter, delight i…
Fascism, for the people who shape it as such, will be pushed forward by some of the kinds of people the article mentions. However, Germany was and is and always will be peopled by mostly reasonable, kind, stout folks, because most people everywhere are reasonable, kind, and stout. Even the cream of a country can be goaded and led and pushed into fascism, as the tide sweeps across a frightened or depressed people. The…
Compare how Germany was treated by the world after WWI, and after WWII. Big difference in treatment, and consequences for that treatment. Fortunately the lessons of WWI hadn't been forgotten when it came time to cleanup after WWII.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#83It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on, what are you actually arguing for? I thought blaming politics on genetics was what you were upset about in the first place. Are you actually saying it's immoral to say that the circumstances of a person's upbringing can affect their adult behavior? Because that goes way beyond just misinterpreting the article.
You wrote: "She says repeatedly that Nazism is not genetic." I'm asking you to provide evidence for that claim.
Would you please stop? This is a pointless flamewar and now it's going in circles.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't get that from the article at all. I think this sentence in the last section of the article is the central point: > Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. That Nazism is a product of cruelty, unhappiness, and insecurity. Fascism is about dominance. About being a part of the group to which the other is subordinate. Which is something that appeals to people who are deeply bitter, delight i…
> Fascism is about dominance. About being a part of the group to which the other is subordinate. This is utterly correct. > Which is something that appeals to people who are deeply bitter, delight in suffering (of their own or others), or lack a sense of self-identity. This is absurd, and does not follow from the first part. Here's the truth (and you do get this from the article) : anyone who rises a lot in the world…
Charlottesville. A rich Republican president says 'Some Very Fine People on Both Sides' about people who self described themselves as Nazis and chanted Nazi slogans. Yes many other Republicans distanced themselves, but nevertheless he has not poisoned the well too much for them, because he's still useful otherwise.
Birtherism to me is Nazism. It is his original sin entering the political scene, and the party did not do anywhere near enough to repudiate it. The passivity was tacit acceptance of it. That's not a bastion.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like basic opportunism... fits well in line with OPs comment.
Yeah, but I don't think most ordinary people are just looking for excuses to murder people. Somewhere along the way, these "ordinary people" were convinced that innocent men, women, and children were enough of a threat to slaughter them. By the end of the war when they realized that they'd lost, they might look to absolve themselves, but that doesn't explain the mechanism causing that behavior in the beginning.
If you think that’s the only opportunity involved, then OK sure, but authority hierarchies offer much more. A feeling of control is what most people are after, and many other things they don’t want to readily admit. But whatever they want, I agree it’s unlikely to be ‘harming others’ but most people get what they do want from life by flattering authority. Different people want different things but most people get those things the same way, which is what matters here.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#87It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is a quote from the article, hence why it is italics. How is this unsubstantive? It's the last lines of the article, it practically answers the title question. It's satire and a polemic.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
"[…] it turns out that being a Nazi, does not save you from the Nazis." That depended on your level of devotion, I suppose. See e.g. Emil Maurice, he was a Jew and a founding member of the Schutzstaffel (SS member #2). "Hitler compelled Himmler to make an exception for Maurice and his brothers, who were informally declared 'Honorary Aryans' and allowed to stay in the SS." More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Maur…
See e.g. Emil Maurice, he was a Jew One of his great-grandfathers was Jewish; he was not.
Yeah, these are less puzzling when you realize that nazi defined Jewishness by blood and thus many assimilated people who considered themselves Germans and believed same things as other Germans got catch in net too.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#89There is something ugly about this piece, about the idea that you can see into someone's soul and just know that they'd be a Nazi if they could. To be honest, the tone of it reminds me of the stereotypical pre-Anschluss German who privately scrutinizes the faces of party guests for hints of Jewish or Roma heritage, and flatters himself for his keen eye in discerning their inferiority.
For what it's worth, when the article’s author Dorothy Thompson was in her twenties, she was a fiery activist for women's suffrage, which was deeply intertwined with the temperance movement of that era. (Many temperance groups shared the same leadership as women's suffrage groups, and both shared a core idea that women were inherently less coarse and crude than men and that the burden fell on women to transform the debased, violent world men had created.)
Thompson toured New York state giving barnburner speeches promoting women's suffrage, and promoting temperance figures as well, like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, a popular keynote speaker for the New York Woman Suffrage Party and prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The W.C.T.U. is the political organization most responsible for bringing us the 18th Amendment prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages in the United States. The Volstead Act passed to enforce Prohibition ultimately resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens who were gunned down in the crossfire of speakeasy raids, or who drank liquor poisoned deliberately by the Feds.
Not quite Nazism, but government agents murderously enforcing philosophies of moral purity are perhaps not so far away, either. All this was going on in 1919; Thompson moved to Europe in 1920, the year Prohibition came into effect, leaving behind the violence and chaos she'd helped bring to power.
It's doubtful she wanted things to turn out quite the way they did. She meant to support only the good people and the good idea of women's suffrage, yet somehow some bad people and bad ideas came along for the ride. Indeed, some of the good people with the good ideas were also the bad people with bad ideas.
There might be a better moral in this than the notion that Nazis are a separate breed of people we can know by second sight.
Re: Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
#90I get what the author is getting at. Not sure I agree. Many years ago, I read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland", which analyzes interviews with the actual men performing the slaughter of innocents at the end of the war. The conclusion that book drew was different than this article, and makes more sense to me — that it's not "mean people 'go nazi'", but ordinary people who '…
> The men didn't feel they bore a moral duty to disobey, because these things just had to be done, or so they were told.
That is how they were raised. That kind of thinking was traditional and Nazi school system and propaganda were designed to produce people like that.
It is also not true that anyone would pull the trigger. Even in Germany were many people who having choice participated to the minimum or did not joined groups doing worst things when they could. It is interesting that another popular glib is that "ordinary people who don't fight back are responsible". But people who looked away or were passive should be better off morally then those who could not participate but did (not everyone could avoid such duty).