4 ms·

It's a difficult part of recent history that is important to be known and understood.

by akoster 10y ago

yestoallthat 10y ago
I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards. We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change. Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary. Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.
- mercer 10y ago
  One way to look at it is that our civilized world is just a thin veneer covering up our animalistic, brutal nature. Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.), and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new abilities. Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'. But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on the amazing ways in which we did overcome our more brutal past.
fennecfoxen 10y ago
If we're looking for ways to meaningfully understand Nazi-ism, and actually look beyond "omg bad" and "death camps" into the ideals and philosophies and the sociopolitical situation leading to the party's rise... well, you could do far worse than to start with Harper's "Who Goes Nazi?" (1941). http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
- hackuser 10y ago
  Also, we need to look in the mirror. If we think of the people who were Nazis as somehow alien creatures, not ordinary people like us, we overlook a central point and a critical risk. Germany and Austria were a/the centers of science, culture, industry, and civilization; think of all those scientists, composers, industrialists, philosophers ... Humans - educated, modern people like us - did these things. A whole society provided all the services, political support, leadership, funding, engineering, manual labor, management, project management, architecture, transportation infrastructure and operations, IT (look up what IBM did), etc. etc. Imagine the scale of that project. Other whole societies helped or looked the other way; the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from its shores, IIRC; the Roman Catholic church kept its head down, at best. (And others resisted, such as Denmark and, IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox church.) The human genetic code hasn't changed; we're biologically exactly the same as the Nazis, and millennia of humanity before that. Unless you believe in a supernatural power (and what good did that do?), nothing prevents the same (or other evils) from happening again except us. It doesn't happen randomly or instantly; we have societal norms and institutions. But we need to protect those norms and institutions and make sure we don't get to the point of doing evil; it's too late to stop by then. Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good. I think of the people who built those institutions of freedom in the generations before us - in the U.S., for example, from Washington to Lincoln to MLK - making the world a better place. I think of the people who died in WWII - many 18 year old kids who died in pain - to give us the freedom we have today from Nazis, fascists, and religious oppression. What are we giving the next generation? (Sorry I got a bit carried away, but I don't mean it as a lecture; I feel pretty strongly about it.)
  - 10y ago

It's a difficult part of recent history that is important to be known and understood.

by akoster 10y ago

It's a difficult part of recent history that is important to be known and understood.

I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards. We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change. Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary. Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.

mercer 10y ago
One way to look at it is that our civilized world is just a thin veneer covering up our animalistic, brutal nature. Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.), and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new abilities. Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'. But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on the amazing ways in which we did overcome our more brutal past.

fennecfoxen 10y ago

If we're looking for ways to meaningfully understand Nazi-ism, and actually look beyond "omg bad" and "death camps" into the ideals and philosophies and the sociopolitical situation leading to the party's rise... well, you could do far worse than to start with Harper's "Who Goes Nazi?" (1941). http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/ http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

hackuser 10y ago
Also, we need to look in the mirror. If we think of the people who were Nazis as somehow alien creatures, not ordinary people like us, we overlook a central point and a critical risk. Germany and Austria were a/the centers of science, culture, industry, and civilization; think of all those scientists, composers, industrialists, philosophers ... Humans - educated, modern people like us - did these things. A whole society provided all the services, political support, leadership, funding, engineering, manual labor, management, project management, architecture, transportation infrastructure and operations, IT (look up what IBM did), etc. etc. Imagine the scale of that project. Other whole societies helped or looked the other way; the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from its shores, IIRC; the Roman Catholic church kept its head down, at best. (And others resisted, such as Denmark and, IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox church.) The human genetic code hasn't changed; we're biologically exactly the same as the Nazis, and millennia of humanity before that. Unless you believe in a supernatural power (and what good did that do?), nothing prevents the same (or other evils) from happening again except us. It doesn't happen randomly or instantly; we have societal norms and institutions. But we need to protect those norms and institutions and make sure we don't get to the point of doing evil; it's too late to stop by then. Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good. I think of the people who built those institutions of freedom in the generations before us - in the U.S., for example, from Washington to Lincoln to MLK - making the world a better place. I think of the people who died in WWII - many 18 year old kids who died in pain - to give us the freedom we have today from Nazis, fascists, and religious oppression. What are we giving the next generation? (Sorry I got a bit carried away, but I don't mean it as a lecture; I feel pretty strongly about it.)
- 10y ago