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Far-right MP forces abandonment of Holocaust scholar’s lecture
- squarefoot 3y agoFar right extremism - call it with its name: fascism - is gaining traction every year in may EU countries, including mine. I have no idea if that's more the result of ruthless politicians speaking to people's bellies rather than their minds, which is a well known recipe for success among uneducated masses, or simply that more people don't trust progressive parties anymore (which could be explained by growing vote abstentionism in some countries), or both, but the result is anyway a worrying slide towards another backward destructive era which shouldn't find place in a modern civilized world.
- prohobo 3y agoNot sure how this is fascist. Explain?
- slaw 3y ago[flagged]
- nunobrito 3y agoYep. Perhaps people are simply tired of bullshit or propaganda. On this specific case it is even illegal to question the accuracy of their claims. Yet, these claims are repeated ad nauseam as unquestionable truths just like in the medieval times. Modern inquisition polices the social networks. Anyone who dissents the established facts is silenced by those who rule society. Are the citizens today really that different from humans in the dark ages? One thing is for sure, at least they only paid 10% taxes on their income.
- adfhoijionio 3y ago[flagged]
- squarefoot 3y agoForcing a lecture about holocaust to stop is not opinion, it is fascism pure and simple. Please don't use freedom of speech to justify negationism; it doesn't work like that.
- RicDan 3y agoNot sure what storming, disturbing and leading to the cancellation of an event that describes historical occurrences else is. A normal hobby? Surely not.
- Veen 3y agoLeft-wingers also storm, disturb, and try to cancel events, so it's not an exclusively "fascist" pastime.
- RicDan 3y agoDon't disagree, the wing doesn't matter, both can still apply fascist strategies
- rayiner 3y ago[flagged]
- agentgumshoe 3y agoA protest?
- n4r9 3y agoNot me, but OP seemed to be claiming that this brand of far-right extremism is better described as fascism. As opposed to claiming that storming a lecture is fascism. I sympathise somewhat with the claim. Fascism has evolved since political parties literally used it in their names and marched around in customised military uniforms. There are certain narratives continue to demarcate modern fascism from other extremist politics. A striking one is the focus on a pure nation or race, and the idea that some impure foreign invader is conspiratorially undermining that nation, and dragging it down from its purity and former glory. For Braun this is the gays and the Jews (as it was for Hitler); for Trump it's the Mexicans; for Farage it's the Romanians; for Orban the "non-Europeans"; for Bolsonaro the indigenous Native Americans, etc... This is pretty distinct from, say, authoritarian communist narratives, which are often about liberating the workers of the world from their capitalist masters.
- monopolyofpain 3y ago[flagged]
- RicDan 3y agoDo you have examples of ridiculous ideas? Maybe I'm in an isolated position, but I don't see anything ridiculous
- monopolyofpain 3y ago[flagged]
- nunobrito 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- slaw 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- nme01 3y agoThe problem with the scholar mentioned here is that a lot of his research is considered biased. This case is not so black and white. The MP mentioned in the article is considered by most Poles a freak at best (and a foreign agent by many).
- nme01 3y agoI’m quite disappointed that HN gets more and more political news here (which are not objective truths but are portrayed as such). Could we please keep it free of politics and more technology focused?
- jruohonen 3y agoThis is a very much on-topic post because of its relation to: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Wikipedia+holocaust https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Wikipedia+holocaust
- dang 3y agoIt's more complex than that. Some on-topic stories have political overlap and it would be neither possible nor desirable to exclude them. There's lots of past explanation here for anyone who wants to understand how we approach this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... (This is not a comment on the OP, which I haven't looked at.)
- arp242 3y agoThe Polish holocaust debate is rather interesting, because Polish people (as in, ethnic Poles) were both victims and perpetrators; millions of Polish were killed during the holocaust, and the plan was to kill up to ~85% of them and use the rest in forced labour (i.e. slavery, basically) to make lebensraum for more worthy people. Slavs weren't considered as bad as Jews, but still untermenschen. At the time same, it's obviously true that some Polish people were also perpetrators. It's interesting to watch the debate; it's not just far-right extremism or fascism that opposes the more nuanced view. There are a lot of emotions involved and it raises interesting questions about what it means to "be Polish", to "be a victim", group identity, shared national identity, etc.
- agentgumshoe 3y agoYou hit the nail on the head there with "that opposes the more nuanced view." It seems no one wants that in the current age of point scoring in the twitter-shout wars. I'm not so sure the powers that be aren't gleefully stoking these big topic arguments to distract us all from the atrocities and corruption going on in the background. Yes, everyone get enraged and shout slogans about birth control, race, gender, war, celebrities! Just don't check on all the deals we're making behind your back, that's misinformation.
- arp242 3y agoThere's no doubt some people using emotive topics such as this for "quick point scoring", and/or use it to distract the news cycle from other less favourable stories. But these sort of "distractions" do fall in to very fertile ground with the general public, so I'm not sure it's actually all that meaningful really.
- throw0101c 3y ago> Slavs weren't considered as bad as Jews, but still untermenschen. The plan to exterminate Slavs: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost was actually formed before the plan to exterminate Jews: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference Germany itself actually didn't have a large Jewish population (as a percentage), and would probably have been happy to simply have them leave (though they didn't make it easy for people, and no one was really welcoming): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan but when the Nazis conquered (half of) Poland, suddenly they had millions more to 'deal with', and so they needed something on an industrial scale. Generally, all the folks stuck between Stalin and Hitler had a bad time in the 1920s and especially 1930s: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands