6 ms·

WW2.

baud147258 7y ago
WW2 wasn't caused by white supremacy, it was caused by nationalism. It was part of the Reich's propaganda to say that they were waging war against the jews (and socialists and communists…), but they were doing this because they though that Germany was superior to its neighbor and was fit to conquer and rule them.
- fwip 7y ago
  Do you think it's possible that without the propaganda of white supremacy, the German public would have been less willing to go to war?
  - Faark 7y ago
    Also please be aware that you will see terms like "white" supremacy be used in these discussions instead of more appropriate terms like "Aryan" to make the topic easier to approach for an American audience.
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      I believe that's what is called "a distinction without a difference". You can argue that whatever your local xenophobic hatreds you have going on aren't technically white supremacy, because you have different historical and cultural understandings of race etc, but at the end of the day, your hating haters sure seem to hate basically the same people as our hating haters, so I'm not sure why it's worth arguing about the distinction between the two groups.
      - Faark 7y ago
        This is pretty much the point i tried to make... that there is no huge difference and it is totally fine to simplify to "white" in communities like these. But re-reading my comment, i can now see how it can be seen as nit-picking instead of approving of this idea.
        saalweachter 7y ago
        Apologies for misreading; hope there wasn't too much vitriol in my response.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    I think Germany could have probably managed some form of German-supremacist propaganda, instead of Aryan. It might have even worked better strategically if they managed to avoid driving away / killing a large portion of their engineers and scientists.
- RetroFuture 7y ago
  Jews were not their neighbors.
vinceguidry 7y ago
White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, but not for the war itself. The usual intervention after a major war was for a few hundred years to carve up the major belligerent into smaller states. This happened fairly regularly throughout the early modern period but curiously stopped being a thing after the Napoleonic wars. I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted. These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    Sure. But to say the Nazis weren't white supremacists because their ideology differs from today's white supremacists isn't really saying anything at all. It's still racism, just differently defined.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Shekelberg 7y ago
Comments like this show exactly why it is important to defend free speech unconditionally. As soon as society agrees that maybe one group of people (like nazis) shouldn't have free speech, you'll get an army of extremists from the other side trying to label anyone they disagree as belonging to said group in order to shut down all political dissent. This is exactly what is happening here, anyone who talks about the problems caused by mass third world immigration into Europe and the US is labeled as a nazi and accused of trying to start another holocaust.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
The war where a bunch of white and Asian people fought against a bunch of white and Asian people? The one where the Nazis said that the Japanese, Arabs, even Jews could be "honorary Aryans" when it was convenient for the cause?
- foldr 7y ago
  So the Nazis weren't actually racists, got it. It's amazing how many people actually think this, and how discussions like this bring them out of the woodwork. A couple of years ago I got into a pointless discussion with someone on HN who went so far as to say that Hitler wasn't a racist. (No, really.) This is why white supremacy is dangerous. The history of WWII and the rise of the Nazis is rapidly being forgotten, and a surprisingly large number of people have a massively inaccurate conception of it.
  - lugg 7y ago
    Thats not at all what they were saying. The thread states white supremacy was the cause of the wars. It historically and factually was not. It played a role. It was not the cause. Nobody is saying Hitler wasn't a racist (wtf.)
    - foldr 7y ago
      Rebelgecko's comment (which is what I was responding to - not the entire thread) clearly suggests that the Nazi's racist ideology was just for show, and that they didn't really believe it. I doubt you can point to any reputable historian of World War II who denies that the Nazi's racist ideology, and its expansionist tendencies, played a major role in the outbreak of WWII. Think Sudetenland.
      - lugg 7y ago
        Not at all what they were suggesting. Those things bloody happened. And again, nobody here is denying Nazis were racist. How can you say it played a major role in the outbreak of war when you can't even say it without tacking on the real causes with an "and" all while ignoring the USA turned a blind eye to the lot of it until Japan got involved? Nobody here has said it didn't play a role. And it did play a major role later on in WW2 but that's not what this thread is about is it? Did white supremacy cause WW1 and WW2. No. Did it play a part? Yes. Why are we talking about this? Because AP minced their words and should have just said nationalist racism.
nostromo 7y ago
WW2 was largely a war amongst whites and amongst east asians. It doesn't really map onto White Supremacy neatly. I'm surprised you didn't point to colonialism instead, which would be a better argument.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- foldr 7y ago
  The point is that the Nazis were motivated by an ideology of racial supremacy, and that this was a significant factor in triggering WWII. This isn't some kind of wacky revisionist history I'm putting forward here. Look at any historical account of the Nazi invasion of Poland (which of course precipitated WWII) and you'll find "Lebensraum" mentioned quite prominently. You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). But the current white supremacy movement has evolved in significant part from Nazi ideology. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on David Duke, for example, and you'll find such statements as "Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform." In short, if we're talking about racist movements within the US and Europe that are directly inspired by Nazi ideology, then whatever quibbles you might make about terminology, you can't deny that it's reasonable to project the dangers of the latter onto the former.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    > You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.
    - foldr 7y ago
      Yes, indeed. I think it's pedantic and missing the point in this context to nitpick over whether the Nazis were "white supremacists" in some technical sense.

WW2.

WW2 wasn't caused by white supremacy, it was caused by nationalism. It was part of the Reich's propaganda to say that they were waging war against the jews (and socialists and communists…), but they were doing this because they though that Germany was superior to its neighbor and was fit to conquer and rule them.

fwip 7y ago
Do you think it's possible that without the propaganda of white supremacy, the German public would have been less willing to go to war?
- Faark 7y ago
  Also please be aware that you will see terms like "white" supremacy be used in these discussions instead of more appropriate terms like "Aryan" to make the topic easier to approach for an American audience.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    I believe that's what is called "a distinction without a difference". You can argue that whatever your local xenophobic hatreds you have going on aren't technically white supremacy, because you have different historical and cultural understandings of race etc, but at the end of the day, your hating haters sure seem to hate basically the same people as our hating haters, so I'm not sure why it's worth arguing about the distinction between the two groups.
    - Faark 7y ago
      This is pretty much the point i tried to make... that there is no huge difference and it is totally fine to simplify to "white" in communities like these. But re-reading my comment, i can now see how it can be seen as nit-picking instead of approving of this idea.
      - saalweachter 7y ago
        Apologies for misreading; hope there wasn't too much vitriol in my response.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  I think Germany could have probably managed some form of German-supremacist propaganda, instead of Aryan. It might have even worked better strategically if they managed to avoid driving away / killing a large portion of their engineers and scientists.
RetroFuture 7y ago
Jews were not their neighbors.

vinceguidry 7y ago

White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, but not for the war itself. The usual intervention after a major war was for a few hundred years to carve up the major belligerent into smaller states. This happened fairly regularly throughout the early modern period but curiously stopped being a thing after the Napoleonic wars. I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted. These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.

0815test 7y ago
> White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Sure. But to say the Nazis weren't white supremacists because their ideology differs from today's white supremacists isn't really saying anything at all. It's still racism, just differently defined.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Shekelberg 7y ago

Comments like this show exactly why it is important to defend free speech unconditionally. As soon as society agrees that maybe one group of people (like nazis) shouldn't have free speech, you'll get an army of extremists from the other side trying to label anyone they disagree as belonging to said group in order to shut down all political dissent. This is exactly what is happening here, anyone who talks about the problems caused by mass third world immigration into Europe and the US is labeled as a nazi and accused of trying to start another holocaust.

Rebelgecko 7y ago

The war where a bunch of white and Asian people fought against a bunch of white and Asian people? The one where the Nazis said that the Japanese, Arabs, even Jews could be "honorary Aryans" when it was convenient for the cause?

foldr 7y ago
So the Nazis weren't actually racists, got it. It's amazing how many people actually think this, and how discussions like this bring them out of the woodwork. A couple of years ago I got into a pointless discussion with someone on HN who went so far as to say that Hitler wasn't a racist. (No, really.) This is why white supremacy is dangerous. The history of WWII and the rise of the Nazis is rapidly being forgotten, and a surprisingly large number of people have a massively inaccurate conception of it.
- lugg 7y ago
  Thats not at all what they were saying. The thread states white supremacy was the cause of the wars. It historically and factually was not. It played a role. It was not the cause. Nobody is saying Hitler wasn't a racist (wtf.)
  - foldr 7y ago
    Rebelgecko's comment (which is what I was responding to - not the entire thread) clearly suggests that the Nazi's racist ideology was just for show, and that they didn't really believe it. I doubt you can point to any reputable historian of World War II who denies that the Nazi's racist ideology, and its expansionist tendencies, played a major role in the outbreak of WWII. Think Sudetenland.
    - lugg 7y ago
      Not at all what they were suggesting. Those things bloody happened. And again, nobody here is denying Nazis were racist. How can you say it played a major role in the outbreak of war when you can't even say it without tacking on the real causes with an "and" all while ignoring the USA turned a blind eye to the lot of it until Japan got involved? Nobody here has said it didn't play a role. And it did play a major role later on in WW2 but that's not what this thread is about is it? Did white supremacy cause WW1 and WW2. No. Did it play a part? Yes. Why are we talking about this? Because AP minced their words and should have just said nationalist racism.

nostromo 7y ago

WW2 was largely a war amongst whites and amongst east asians. It doesn't really map onto White Supremacy neatly. I'm surprised you didn't point to colonialism instead, which would be a better argument.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
foldr 7y ago
The point is that the Nazis were motivated by an ideology of racial supremacy, and that this was a significant factor in triggering WWII. This isn't some kind of wacky revisionist history I'm putting forward here. Look at any historical account of the Nazi invasion of Poland (which of course precipitated WWII) and you'll find "Lebensraum" mentioned quite prominently. You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). But the current white supremacy movement has evolved in significant part from Nazi ideology. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on David Duke, for example, and you'll find such statements as "Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform." In short, if we're talking about racist movements within the US and Europe that are directly inspired by Nazi ideology, then whatever quibbles you might make about terminology, you can't deny that it's reasonable to project the dangers of the latter onto the former.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.
  - foldr 7y ago
    Yes, indeed. I think it's pedantic and missing the point in this context to nitpick over whether the Nazis were "white supremacists" in some technical sense.