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Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
- vt85 2y ago[dead]
- kayo_20211030 2y ago> contempt mingled with envy (paraphrase) I reckon that's a good tell, even today.
- jmclnx 2y agoI saw this years ago. What strikes me is even though the author tries, it seems to me it has many stereotypes in it. Probably due to the year it was published (1941). So back then it probably got its point across fine.
- dkuebric 2y agoIs it anything but stereotypes?
- dralley 2y agoStereotypes isn't the right word. Archetypes perhaps.
- ticviking 2y agoWhat I find most interesting is how few of those stereotypes/archetypes are present in our media today. I still know many of most of them, but they've been replaced as our economy and demographics change.
- hprotagonist 2y agoMr. C. reminds me rather a lot of a current candidate for vice president.
- silverquiet 2y agoI had the exact same thought; it was actually a bit unnerving how well it described him.
- cafard 2y agoThis gets posted a lot, something like four times in two years. And I don't particularly buy it. It seemed to me to be something to comfort the Harpers readership with.
- aebtebeten 2y agoI had been surprised by Ezra Pound going (not Nazi but) Fascist, because I had thought he had translated chinese poetry in his youth. Then, when I recently discovered his "translation" process was to start from someone else's prose translation and re-poetise from there, it started to make more sense. (well, that and Il Duce pretty much said that he needed a poet who could rail against the global financial establishment, which is a line I could see many conspiracy-minded artists falling for)
- gradschoolfail 2y agoIt’s probably inefficient to deduce an author’s actual position from their [non-autobiographical] work. The more they think of themselves as artists, the more one has to try and read from their comparatively banal actions. See the following, it threw me off as well. https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/should-america-have-a-monarch/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/should-america-have-a-mo... > Yarvin is voting for Joe Biden at the next election
- 082349872349872 2y agoI currently have Yarvin in the "inconsistent" bucket (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41228601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41228601 ) so if you think he actually has a line, I'd appreciate learning what it may be.
- gradschoolfail 2y agoThe writing has gotten less focussed since he returned from Urbit, but … he’s been consistently denying the Reds. https://graymirror.substack.com/ https://graymirror.substack.com/ His line.. wants to be remembered as Machiavelli/Mencius by the Dems, for the Dems Not sure about the OP grumbling, seems resigned to not getting into the IP.
- 082349872349872 2y agoHaving just bounced off of three posts there, maybe it's just that I'm too "normie" to get whatever he wishes to communicate, but I find de Maistre (1753-1821) argues conservatism and monarchism far more lucidly.
- JieJie 2y ago"Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi." In my experience, "Secure people never go Nazi and are generally kind, good, happy, and gentlemanly."
- zer8k 2y agoMr. C is a counter-example to all of what you just said. Mr. C is an otherwise successful and intelligent person embittered by society doing him wrong. In literature Mr. C would probably be the anti-hero of an acclaimed revenge movie. He should be secure but he isn't because humiliation is a wound that doesnt heal. I think the statement "secure people..." is a really broad generalization that misses the point being made here. It does not take much to make someone insecure. There are thousands of examples: food, money, romance, work, housing, etc. Every person effected by one or more of these is a Mr. C. They simply just need the right catalyst to fully realize it. One may wonder if society in general wasn't so cruel to certain people would Mr. C even exist. To quote the article: > He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JieJie 2y agoI think I take your point, though that just sounds like another type of insecurity to me. I meant to turn what I took as the original meaning (personal insecurity as a character trait associated with goodness, kindness, happiness, etc.) around on itself by implying exactly what you seem to be saying about the point I missed. If you mean what I think you mean, well, we probably don't disagree so much at that. How to make society less cruel, eh? There's the rub. It seems that with that last quote you're agreeing with my point that people who have lost hope in achieving food, money, romance, work, housing, etc. (becoming insecure), would reach for tools in the authoritarian toolkit. I do wonder if maybe you misunderstood me.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y agoI don't know if I agree with the thesis, but that's bloody good writing, of the kind it's hard to find anywhere today. I think in the past the people who took writing jobs where those who had a certain natural inclination to education and culture, whereas today it's the people who have nothing better to do with their lives. ... oh dear. That's a bit mean. I'm sorry about that.
- pixelready 2y agoThere are a few nuggets of useful insight scattered amongst the flat caricatures here, but the reason this not a useful guide to our modern affliction of growing fascism is it frames Nazism as a foreign invading ideology with the subtext of “who among us will bend the knee if those monsters invade and win” rather than an organically homegrown response to certain conditions of our societies. Fascism is a cancer of the body politic. The ideas that form its foundation as a philosophy are there in every society, and each culture manages them the way most bodies contain pre-cancerous cells that will never metastasize because the body is healthy enough to maintain itself despite its underlying flaws. The far more interesting question than “who”, for me, is “what”? What are the conditions and triggers that cause the cancer of fascism to overwhelm the counterbalancing philosophies. To fester, grow, and ultimately become terminal to a healthy society.
- MaxHoppersGhost 2y ago> What are the conditions and triggers that cause the cancer of fascism to overwhelm the counterbalancing philosophies. To fester, grow, and ultimately become terminal to a healthy society. Probably many of the things the fascists complain about?
- pixelready 2y agoFascists are famously unreliable narrators. Scapegoating is core to the philosophy and fascists are typically entirely focused on winning power and asserting dominance over competing factions rather than understanding, explaining and fixing underlying societal ills.
- zamadatix 2y agoScapegoating isn't just spouting "redheads are horrible" it's identifying some common problem and giving that fake but easier outlet for it "the only reason you don't all have jobs is because the damn redheads came here and took them". The more apt the problem is to people the more likely they will go along with blaming a group for it. After a good long while of deep acceptance of fascism this can start to evolve into an ever wonkier list of reasons as ever more wood is needed to stoke the fire but at the core it's usually built around a very apt summary of the biggest unsolved problems of the time.
- commercialnix 2y agoIn an America where fascism seems to be on the rise, we must understand history so to avoid repeating it. Adolf Hitler FULL SPEECH in ENGLISH AI Reconstructed Audio 'Freedom or Slavery' (No Music) https://odysee.com/@SpAIke:9/Adolf-Hitler-FULL-SPEECH-in-ENGLISH-AI-Reconstructed-Audio-'Freedom-or-Slavery'--(No-Music)-(1080p):e
- keernan 2y ago>>more susceptible to Nazism than most people Any implication that external forces put people in positions that cause them to be 'more susceptible to Nazism' ignores the certainty that for every 1,000 people in the exact same position, some become Nazis while others do not. The external conditions are irrelevant. No matter how you change the conditions, there will always be a portion that 'become Nazis'. It is my belief that is because there is something inside them that makes them Nazis to begin with. The external conditions simply present the opportunity for their inner Nazis to express itself.
- Unbefleckt 2y agoIs this nazism or simply extreme ideologies in general? I think more people than we would like to admit will rally behind whatever they're compelled to by authority or culture.
- poulsbohemian 2y agoI don't have time right now to go pull the multiple books on this topic I have sitting on my bookshelf, but the scholarly work has been fairly consistent that there are two main demographic groups easily exploited into authoritarian ideas. First, you've got an entrepreneurial / business owner crowd that are often the backbone of their communities. They are drawn to authoritarianism because they feel like they've worked hard and have earned their place and more or less want to protect it from "those" people, whoever they might be. They are your civics committee members, your civics club members, not necessarily "the elite" but the people with means who want to pull up the ladder and protect their status. The second group is the disenfranchised and undereducated. They see a family they've never had, acceptance, opportunity, and a way to rise above people they feel have wrong them or looked down on them. Over the past few years as I revisited a lot of the scholarly material, what struck me is how easy it is to look around your own community and how these demographics resonate regardless of era and location. For example, I've got a retired banker friend who is very active in the community. She describes herself as a moderate, but when you actually hear her talk, it might as well be out of the Nazi playbook - and she has no ideas she's doing it or how easily she's manipulated by modern political propaganda. And that's the insidious part that Ahrendt talked about - how mundane evil really can be. EDIT: Reading the article now, these archetypes line up perfectly with many other post-war research sources.