"…it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.
Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attempting to do their part to usher in the chaos. "They" are the ones who have the most resources who will rebuild and control after everything goes to shit, like how Europe and the US thrived after WW2 because they were the winners/rebuilders. Currently the right wants to skip the messy war part required to take control of a government and skip to the implementing changes part. Whether or not that actually happens, well right now they're trying to push the left into drawing the line.
I have no idea where our current "line" is but it's not the same as it was last time and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.
The other day I watched this interview with Dan Carlin from 4 years ago and near the beginning the interviewer says something like "I don't think any of us want to draw any comprarisons to current nations and Nazi Germany"
that caught me, because why not? Of course no one wants to actually create parallels, but do we see any? maybe we didn't see as many then, and it was more of a worry in 2021 about even thinking about the possibility of tipping MAGA into that territory. but then again after January 6th we should have seen that they basically don't have a line and are just pushing it gradually. They don't really know what to do when they get the new power either, but the people who could stop it may not even realize it because they haven't had to deal with this kind of thing before. like invading Greenland? taking it from Denmark? how do you even create a response to a suggestion like that? so nothing happens and they see what else they can do.
The really interesting part of the interview gets going around the 7:50 mark, but here Dan talks about the options if you're an average citizen trying to figure out what to do. A litany of poor options if you're trying to pick a side right now really resonates with me.
The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil.
It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.
The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
This. If you read Reddit, a whole lot of comments go from Nazi parallels (which is partly justified, but as another comment points out there are also a lot of parallels with Orban's Hungary, Erdogan's Turkey, Putin's Russia, etc.) to 'Luigi'.
There are so many non-violent approaches that would be effective. First, there is the 3.5% rule [1]. Second, if 10%-20% of the general population would go on a general strike, pretty much all of society would come to a standstill and it would send a heck of a powerful message. One of the issues though in the US is healthcare tied to employment, combined with fire at will. It reduces preparedness of people to protest until it's possibly too late. So, it's simultaneously important to build/strengthen unions, etc.
Aside from that, and this is true for Europe as well, we need to heal as a society. People have divided themselves in stupid 'teams', fueled by politicians, foreign interference, algorithms, etc. Not woke enough? You are cancelled. Left-wing? You are cancelled (employer contacted and fired). We have to do a little less social media and go outside and talk to other people. Even if I disagree with people politically, there often a lot of common ground (we all want food, health, to be safe, etc.), we all like to talk about some sports match, and whatnot. We don't have to agree with each other, but we can at least try to understand and care for each other. Break the stupid tribe wars.
> First, there is the 3.5% rule [1]. Second, if 10%-20% of the general population would go on a general strike
FWIW, when the best case recommendations for a restoration of civil order and the rule of law involve very large scale society-wide civil disobedience...
...then maybe the comparison to Nazi Germany and authoritative dictatorships more generally are perhaps not as far afield as you're implying. Like, once your thinking goes beyond "just win the next election" things are kinda over as far as "democracy" goes.
(And FWIW I don't necessarily disagree: the existing regime's leadership, not just the White House, seem extremely unlikely to just walk out the door if they lose an election. It was tried four years ago and failed, the resulting loyalty tests have produced a very different cabinet this time.)
> Like, once your thinking goes beyond "just win the next election" things are kinda over as far as "democracy" goes.
Elections are not the only form democratic participation can take. We can take local action, coordinated action, talk to our representatives at various levels, and so on.
Your suggestions aren't really addressing the things people are actually worried about here.
If leadership-aligned politicians won't dare step out of line, and those opposed are systematically marginalized by the executive, other legislators, and the courts, then what good does that do? Deliberately neutralizing the opposition's power renders the opposition's ideas, efforts, and proposals useless, and the allied politicians will never disobey, so petitioning either of them to make changes is pointless.
I'm not saying any of that is completely true right now, but people are nervous that this is becoming true.
It seems abundantly clear that there will be no peaceful/rule-of-law transfer of executive power in January 2029 to anyone but a hand-picked Trump successor that wins an election. A democratic victory (or even a Republican primary winner that isn't appropriately selected) will be resisted at all levels of the executive, and... we'll just see. Whatever the result, the losing party will call it a coup and illegitimate, and such an administration will survive only so long as it can hold control of the government by authoritarian means.
It may even happen earlier. A lot of the kerfuffle around redistricting is being presented to right wing audiences in a way that would be very easy to spin as "cheating". What do we do if democrats win the house next year and Johnson simply refuses to seat the California delegation to keep power? Are we prepared?
Basically, the End of the American Experiment may have already occurred.
I'm not so quick to pull the trigger on that assessment. I think we're at point where the rubber band has ostensibly been pulled back nearly as far as it can go, and it may snap, or it might make a surprising move in the opposite direction in response to the tension. I don't think any of us peons has any meaningful control of which of those two things happens, but I think it will hinge a lot on how much big businesses are affected by the economic and political consequences of recent policy moves. No matter how much Trump might bluster about big businesses and such, he'll still fall in line if enough get pushed to the point of having to draw a line in the sand. Too bad it will probably be big business operating in pure self-interest and not some actual principled entity. Maaaaybe if there's enough economic pain among his base, that could point us towards a voter-driven repudiation to some extent. Even if they cement their power significantly, I don't think they could swing it with an outright rejection of their approach. I doubt that will happen though.
...then maybe the comparison to Nazi Germany and authoritative dictatorships more generally are perhaps not as far afield as you're implying.
Sorry, I was not implying they are far afield. We have seen this playbook in several nearby European/Asian countries in the last two and a half decades (I live in Europe). Of course, not all these countries did have a long democratic history, but they did show the fragility of democracy, you have to actively protect it.
Heck, even in the country where I live, which has quite a healthy democracy, a majority of parliament has just accepted a motion to request declaring antifa a terrorist organization because Trump did it as well (all Dutch experts, including former secret service personnel agree that antifa is neither an organization, nor terrorist). Some of them just to score a few points for the upcoming elections. Only a judge can declare an organization to be a terrorist organization, but it's all small steps in eroding the rule of law.
(Coincidentally, the next day 1500 right wing hooligans rioted in the streets of The Haglue the next day, burning police cars, damaging the office of a center-left political party and the parliament square.)
> Reddit, a whole lot of comments go from Nazi parallels to 'Luigi'.
oof. I certainly understand where Luigi came from, but I'd also say that Luigi represents an escalation that empowers the Trump regime. The general population's latent desire to see some "justice" metered out on the "elites" pushes those elites into cozying up to Trump. Because those elites know that if Trump chooses to go after them, even the masses against Trump aren't going to be terribly concerned with their plight.
This is why people say that "fascism is the failure mode of capitalism." When the rich and powerful get too fat off their structural advantages and society starts coming apart at the seams, capital will align with anti-democratic, anti-freedom, bigoted, and genocidal forces to suppress change rather than relinquish some wealth and power.
They would rather rule over ashes than join us in a little bit more of an equitable society.
I have nagging the suspicion that the knowledge that a good portion of the population wants them dead is a slightly more significant factor in pushing elites to the Republican side compared to the Trump administration's threats.
My point is they're not different factors, they're the same dynamic.
As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years? And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.
Meanwhile Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Part of the pressure are the populist memes that makes the masses unsympathetic to their plights, even though they are the structure of our society.
> As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years?
It's less about the murderer himself, and more about the high level of support he has. "Many of the rank and file in the Democratic coalition want you dead, but not to worry nearly all of them are cowards who'd never do anything about it." is cold comfort.
> And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.
Do I really need to go trough Reddit to find you people calling for the murder of "capitalists", right down to landlords and homeowners?
I'm sure the elites (if we could call them that) prefer to seem like they are being pressured by the Trump administration. It's better for business and it's safer that way. But their compliance comes a little too easy.
You seem to be trying to make this into a partisan thing by invoking some imagined attribution to Democrats, when the outrage against elites is clearly pan-partisan. Also if anything it's rightism that tends to encourage individualist violence (and I'm saying this not as a partisan slam, but as a libertarian who sees the virtues in both philosophies)
You've also completely sidestepped the fact that Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Sure, it's conceivable that some capitulating-institutional leaders were looking for an excuse to bring their institutions to heel, but it's not conceivable that they all were.
It seems like your goal is to absolve the autocratic authoritarians, and justify the elites cozying up to the autocratic authoritarians. So I don't see how continuing this conversation can be productive.
Social media is not real life. How many of those comments are bots? How many people say things online they wouldn’t say in person? The right and left are not as far apart as the internet would have us believe.
It's especially important to realize this when it's TikTok where most of that is happening, and where TikTok is the propaganda arm of China, a country that the US currently considers a frenemy at best, if not an outright enemy, and that considers the US in somewhat similar terms.
And when the algorithms on the rest of the media sites are used to drive maximum engagement for profit purposes, or maximum dissent because of the political leanings of their owner (e.g. X), social media is most definitely not the reality.
Wasn't there a group cheering in front of the courtroom when the judge dropped the terrorism charge? Those people were not bots.
> How many people say things online they wouldn’t say in person?
Ohh, so lovely of them. I wonder how Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and ultimately Paul Graham feel, to know that the only reason why a good portion of the population doesn't advocate for their death is taqiyya?
The case against has basically fallen apart already. If he’s a murderer why does he walk free? The prosecutors will keep billing hours those. They need a scapegoat.
This should be the top-voted comment of the whole thread. I used to teach history; it makes me roll my eyes when I hear comparisons between Nazi Germany and the current moment. It reflects both a lack of historical familiarity with the unique circumstances of Germany in the 1920s and 30s (including recently losing a world war), and also, as you say, a lack of knowledge of other more relevant historical examples — of which I’d also put Erdoğan at the top. It’s just a conversation-stopper and a rhetorical cudgel rather than a serious attempt at historical contextualization.
Surely the Venn diagram needs not be a circle for you to draw parallels, nor does the existence of a more direct comparison make other comparisons moot.
Surely the fact that the current ruling party has an influential faction who explicitly reference Nazi Germany as an ideal worth striving for is relevant to setting the current moment in historical context. Yes we're not LITERALLY Nazi Germany for a variety of reasons but that doesn't mean it doesn't paint a picture of what they want to do, regardless of how successful they will be or what that will look like in practice.
Personally I think the most apt historical comparison is the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, but since we don't LITERALLY live in the Middle Ages and have ethnic divisions between Greeks and Latins one might say that's not a relevant comparison either.
Some of it reminds me of the CCP, which I think is openly considered a model by some neo-authoritarians. Ubiquitous mass surveillance, social credit, and state capitalism with heavy control though regulatory pressure. I assume we will eventually see party men installed on boards of major companies, especially in media, tech, and entertainment.
The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize China right now.
I think the US has been spiraling toward authoritarianism since 9/11 personally. This did not start yesterday or with the most recent election, nor is it exclusively the result of the right or the Republican Party. A lot of people to the left have also abandoned liberalism and ideas like free speech. There’s been a broad based shift away from liberalism and individualism and toward collectivism, which always leads toward totalitarianism.
Right wing collectivism comes in the form of racism and nationalism, while for the contemporary left its identity-grievance politics and a resurgence of Marxism.
“Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?” is one of the questions I keep asking.
> Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?”
You mean in the aftermath of the great recession where most people were struggling economically and saw that the rules are only for little people? The 20-teens were the time of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party - I don't see how it can be
I think individualism increased, after the teens, in a "don't trust the experts, do your own 'research'" way. Regardless of one's politics, its hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when you see a conspiracy play out in front of your eyes, at your expense. You could draw a straight line between the GFC and the growth of the "burn it all down" contingents on the left and right - indeed, a lot of "Bernie bros" became Trumpers whole remaining true to that ethos.
I would recommend 'Adapt! On a New Political Imperative' by Barbara Stiegler. The movement away from classical liberalism has been going on for far longer and was by design. It is very important to explicitly separate traditional or classical liberalism from neoliberalism when discussing these things. And just to be pedantic the term liberal should also absolutely be avoided when discussing anything involve impacts from the "new left" movement.
>Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens
IMO they didn't - at least not explicitly. Individualism has been somewhat illusionary since the progressive era it is just finally coming home to roost. What happened is that the internet finally out ran the ability of the traditional media consensus methods at the national level as the internet generation aged in. So we are sort of in unknown territory where it is not clear any "expert" can play the designated role to drive the consensus required in the neoliberal system.
Where to go from there is an open question but her thesis is that the neoliberal system needs to be adapted in someway. Anyway that is largely the picture of the problem she paints. I'm not doing it justice but it is worth a read to at least place a lot of the problems people are observing in a mental and historical framework.
I think a good step is moving towards federating into smaller communities. The best of those ideas will get adopted by other communities. Basically the fediverse model applied to society. People already have this feeling intuitively and it is playing out with the push back against globalization.
Individualism started dying when it became clear the problems we face are now too large for any one individual to overcome. Massive institutions crush the individual. You can’t chase individualist dreams as easily as you once could. It requires a lot of money and luck, and luck has run out.
Social media also made it easier for you to be a group thinker and reap the benefits of that. Being an individual gives you no clout.
> Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
This is, is course, why it's the one preferred comparison.
> and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.
I don't understand mentions of "civil war" in the public lately (there's even a Hollywood movie about it).
There is only one party controlling the armed forces. I also doubt that any high-ranking officers would take the troops they command out of the command structure and then even order them to attack the government and other troops.
Not to mention that the new administration did some cleanup among the ranks already.
The chances for enough, or any, troops breaking away from the command are very low, no?
So who is going to fight that "civil war"? It looks to me like the government has overwhelming power. At most I see some troops refuse orders to shoot at the American people, or at other troops.
Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
We have several recent real-world examples of that not working out for the military. Assuming like minded people wont self-organize is a bad starting point, and jets and tanks have a tough time doing things like enforcing curfews. That's also ignoring that such a scenario would involve portions of said military force joining the civilian resistance, including those in leadership positions.
Besides, I've always hated this argument, because why fight the military when they can just target the politicians directly.
Let's see... military drones; satellite surveillance; comms surveillance; giant network of flock cameras vacuuming up facial, descriptive vehicular, and license plate movement data; small-scale tactical nuclear weapons; a huge fleet of hypersonic aircraft and extremely maneuverable helicopters; decades of urban combat experience; militarized law enforcement; the largest military in the world by orders of magnitude fighting on its own turf; complete control of utilities infrastructure, centralized resource creation for food, fuel and weapons; large stockpiles of modern chemical weapons that they wouldn't hesitate to use for a second if it was an existential threat... the world is a very very different place than it was in the 40s, and the modern US military is very very very very very different than any military was back then. Even if you can argue that our power has grown linearly with more access to guns or whatever, the US military's power has grown at a much much faster rate.
Well, I think you did a pretty good job of describing the resources that they are consolidating into that one party that controls the military. For now it's just the National Guard going into cities, but didn't they float the idea of sending Marines to LA? There's so much it's impossible to keep track of what's actually going on.
I've always been of the idea that 100 guys with guns gets wiped out with 1 bomb nowadays, so why do individuals arm themselves to the teeth and LARP in the woods? it is looking more like that's going to be a paramilitary arm, or "private consultants" to ICE and CBP. those resources aren't for nothing, and they certainly aren't for taking down the US military.
This is a WW2 figure who had a song written about him after he was martyred. It became the anthem of the Nazi party. I didn't ever hear about him in my many years in the US, until a few days ago on Wikipedia:
He already sent active duty marines to Los Angeles, and it was ruled illegal by a judge (after the fact) but it doesn't matter because no one with any real power cares what laws or judges say: https://time.com/7313929/trump-national-guard-la-los-angeles...
If the president shreds the constitution, there would likely be many in the military opposed to it.
While they are actively replacing cabinet positions with loyal outsiders that have little-to-no experience within the organizations they now run (eg Patel, Hegseth), I think it’s reasonable to assume that there remains career leaders throughout that would put country before king.
You also need to look at loyalty within the rank and file of course.
When I talk to conservative friends about this scenario they generally laugh; of course the military would choose country over king. At least for now I think there remains enough institutional integrity that this is plausible.
Hard to say. "About six-in-ten registered voters who say they have served in the U.S. military or military reserves (61%) support former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, while 37% back Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early September." from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-...
The military is not composed of constitutional lawyers and the danger is that they might persuade themselves that the best way to protect the country is to support whoever has at least a façade of legitimacy, particularly if it aligns with their political preferences.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying this is obvious and nothing needs to be done, or that I'm totally wrong or what? Or saying that I'm being a conspiracy theorist by seeing parallels?
> This is probably the most ironic post I read in quite a while. [¶] TLDR: brain washing is dangerous, we don't have headspace due to Trump oh and btw Trump is hitler.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. (But no, Trump isn't Hitler — even though they do share some characteristics.)
It doesn't matter if Trump is Hitler or not (what does that even mean?)
Stop paying that much attention to people, they mostly do not matter. Think instead about the circumstances.
What matter is that the USA in 2025 is not Germany of 100 years ago, today economics is not the same as the great depression, there is no threatening civil unrest due to a massive neighboring country which just went through a social revolution, nor due to decomposing colonial empires.
That’s what makes this scarier. If a political party can drum up this much social unrest when the world was largely prospering, then that shows just how much people have forgotten about the real hardships our parents and grandparents suffered, and how quickly we could end up back there through greed.
That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany.
Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
As much as I lament the quality of leadership at the moment (and not just in the US) I am not sure that we can equate Afghanistan with Germany.
It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.
Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.
That could explain the success of rebuilding Germany, as it shared a lot culturally with the US, but what about Japan? Japan was, and to a large extent still is, a very alien culture, and yet the US rebuilt it extremely effectively.
The underlying theory that the GP is getting at is that Japan and Germany were easy to rebuild because they had existing institutions and a society that trusted institutions. The idea is that it is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy; germany and Japan will "remember" how to be civilized, but under different leadership, Afghanistan and Iraq cannot revert to that.
It leans heavily on assumptions about countries and institutions.
East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1] It had catched up at around 1970. Since 1970 the two were roughly equivalent: some years one was ahead some years the other.[2] However, Germany is now considerably ahead of the UK in terms of per capita GDP measuered in PPP (ie. adjusted to local prices: aprox. 20% now, or 10 to 15 years (depending on your reference point).[3]
> East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1]
Germany was behind the UK even before WW2. Just the UK outproduced Germany in (e.g.) aircraft production, and that was even before the US got involved.
It’s something of a red herring. Britain got the largest slice of the Marshall Plan money, they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire. One thing you’d learn from the book is Germany definitely wasn’t in a good shape in 55.
I suppose it's easier to achieve "growth" in percentage terms when you're starting from a low baseline (because your entire country got flattened by invading armies.)
It turns out that the British were one of the allies and about 380,000 of them died fighting the Nazis, so they have a good claim to having defeated Germany, with help from their friends.
Yes, I am not downplaying the role of the British and hoped no one would take it that way. The British were the first on alert as far as I know, and without them it would have been a whole lot worse.
USA swoops in towards the end (a large cost as well, but not as much of it and not on their doorstep) and takes a big role in creating the new world.
I'm not saying they didn't. But Britain didn't defeat Germany alone, and certainly didn't get the entire share of control after Germany was defeated. And after that the further decline of the UK showed that the power was shifting into the hands of those with wealth anyway, and here we are.
Since around Nixon (maybe?) there has been a gradual post-WW2 deregulation that really accelerated under Reagan and now with Trump its accelerating again. More and more keeps shifting into the hands of unelected, wealthy individuals who see that their power keeps growing and growing and as far as I can tell, won't stop until they have it all. It doesn't make any sense to me why that looks like a stable world to them, but the one thing that is certain is that there is no 2nd amendment that will stop the billionaire club.
No it doesn't.
They didn't "invest", they took everything that wasn't bolted to the ground, and then they took that too. A third of the country was taken away and millions of Germans displaced.
My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.
The Marshall Plan was a real thing.
My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.
hollerith says >My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.
The Marshall Plan was a real thing.
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So damned funny!!8-)) The phrase "Grasping defeat from the jaws of victory!" comes to mind.
The challenge with long form texts is that they are so often picked apart, each piece quoted and analyzed on its own, without regard for how that small piece fits into the whole, often veering from a far more nuanced argument or portrait of life.
Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)
There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:
They say that life's a carousel
Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It's Heaven and Hell, oh well
And they'll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It's Heaven and Hell
>Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free.
That depends on which are the ways in which they are not free.
Government influence is categorically worse because of its very nature, but I'm trying to think of a more consequential influence in the US than the leftist hegemony in universities and coming up with nothing.
Universities will not be safe from government meddling until they comprehensively stop taking money from the government first. Until such a point, they run the real risk of censorship and becoming the agents of the very thing that they are warning about.
Worth drawing a distinction between governmental support for science and for the humanities.
The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).
The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.
Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.
In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.
So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.
And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
It’s my understanding that the humanities doesn’t get much in government grants to begin with, but when the sciences have a finance problem, they cut the humanities for some reason.
I'm not aware of humanities getting get to fund the sciences, at least in the UC system. But in many places with highly complicated accounting, the sciences can sometimes indirectly fund humanities through the overhead rate that universities charge. These are highly negotiated rates between the government and the universities, so there has to be a bit of confusion on what money keeps which buildings going.
The problems at the University of Chicago seem especially bad and I don’t entirely trust this article, but for what it’s worth:
> The reason today’s Dean of Humanities wants to send students to other universities to learn subjects that she would like to cancel, or use ChatGPT to teach subjects tomorrow that humans teach today, is to drive the “marginal cost” of teaching students from 20 percent of their tuition down to 10 percent. Future applicants should know that the University plans a further expansion from around 7,400 students to 9,000 ... and has simultaneously announced an intent to hold the number of research faculty constant. Perhaps we can drive the cost of educating students below 10 percent? Perhaps that is what the president and provost and dean of humanities mean when they say that we need to position ourselves as leaders in the field.
By "UC" I was referring to the University of California system, which is massive, and generally what UC means in the scientific world is travel in.
The University of Chicago is a very prestigious institution due to its historical reputation, but the administration in recent years seems to have both ruined its future with terrible financial decisions, even before the pressures of Trump.
It's not the case that the government is necessarily run by authoritarians cracking down on speech they disapprove of at colleges by threatening to withhold other funding. This is a novel development.
We can surely go back to funding schools without such strings attached.
This kind of reasoning works for private companies, not for the government.
It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them.
But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent.
But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.
I don't know why you think financial independence would free them from government meddling. That happens to be an easy tool that Trump has used, but it isn't the only one available. Ultimately the government can simply pass laws to make Universities do whatever they want.
monasteries were financialy independent. when the "government changed" and the new rulers had no use for the church, all of them were raided and plundered.
it's very dangerous to have resources and not be politically positioned. you become a target more than a fortress. it's the one thing preppers don't get.
universities are facing the same problem as monasteries faced. they are huge bags of money already. excluding the UCs they are already rich and take government money more for the associations than the actual money.
I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.
I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people and even political movements were just as slippery then as they are now. But you may come away with something completely different. It’s an odd but interesting book.
> an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.
Yes! I recently read this book and was pretty shocked by how much was chalked up to the German character.
I came away feeling neither comfort nor increased panic relating to the current US situation. I read the book because I was hand-wringing about how complicit I am just by getting on with my privileged and comfortable life right now. I didn’t really come away with any resolution to that question or clear ideas about how I should change my behavior.
Anecdotally, having lived in Germany for a couple of years recently, there is a perceptible national character. The best way to understand it is to ponder the difference between a drag race and a rally race - in one, success means going as fast as possible; in the other success means getting to navigation points within a window of error. Or, with beer: in America success is discovering a new beer with a different flavor profile. In Germany, success is figuring out a way to even more precisely and consistently conforming to a centuries-old brewing standard. This, along with a kind of blunt speech that presupposes the listener to have little in the way of vanity or ego (or challenges them to not express it), is the "German character" as far as I can tell.
I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.
Eh, I think that's a bit overblown. In theory, Germans are famously methodical and precise, in practice the rail network is falling apart, a major bridge in my city recently collapsed due to lack of proper maintenance, and "made in Germany" is mainly an encouragement to buy local, rather than buying for quality.
My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany.
I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states.
All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.
While reading about history can always be enlightening, I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong and what your behaviour should be.
Yes, I do read books to give me different perspectives on life that help me form my beliefs about what is right, wrong and ethical. The suggestion that’s a bad idea is pretty incredible to me. Where do you think I should go for such things?
The entire purpose / point of this book is that the overly-oppressed majority is easily susceptible to becoming "NAZIS," and why National Socialist mentality ought to be actively DISCOURAGED.
But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies.
Good work /s
If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...
To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.
This is my problem with a lot of literature and movies. The Nazis are always unfathomably evil, when in reality, most of them were just people doing their jobs.
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
a lot of the western world learns only speaks about ww2 (let alone ww1, americans civil war, etc.).
there has been countless western and non western wars with slightly different patterns and a taste of "winner writes history".
one i find interesting is the french revolution. its also fairly recent, but not as tampered with as ww2 history. for example, there still are records of how terrible and cruel the revolutionaries were, how everyone was a royalist that needed to die and how the populace started to be ready to revolt - again - right after the change of power. thankfully, things eventually calmed down - as they were cruel, but not dumb.
either way I'd basically recommend expending the reading curriculum a bit.
so what are you suggesting causes, for example, the French to strike more often than other Western countries? or Japan to typically have particularly low inflation? or Argentina to typically have particularly high inflation?
History? Geography? Specific laws? Particular parties in power?
There are a lot of things to look at alongside mystical notions of a collective national character of a people, especially now that most of these countries have significant immigration and exposure to ideas from elsewhere.
all of the things you listed make up or result from national character. besides some short interludes, for example, Japan has had the same party in power since 1955. it's a weird thing to deny the existence of. different nations act differently. it's not heresy to make generalisations, particularly in the age of nationalism when many/most people actively try to set and follow their country's norms
Unless we disagree on the meaning of "national character", isn't that easy to come up with 100 other reasons to explain those economic/political differences?
Waiting for the country of people who fly out of their mother's wombs or whom are born in a sack on their father's backs and further those who mentally convince themselves to pass through walls.
so there not being the difference between a human and a kangaroo or a frog and a bat means that the difference between an Argentine and a Japanese person isn't real either? literally meaningless analogy
We're seeking narrative to explain how and why these things are happening when narratives are how they are happening. When a species relies on inferior and limited tools, it suffers from their use. When the tool is seamless with the problem, it destroys us without us becoming aware.
This article is all we need to know about fascism, the candidate admits this is the central tool they use on the path to gain unlimited power, even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially: "In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio."
The central problem is epistemological, the coding of explanations in mythological thought, which is narrative. The myth is the primary causal illusion. That causes that. When we add intent, which is elusive and reduces meaning subjectively, it robs any event of the true meaning load, we create propaganda without knowing it. There's the rub. If we wee the burning bush as just a brushfire, we are sane. See it as the voice of God, we're doomed.
The phrasing was matter of fact. And there is nothing inherently wrong with reposting. Certain other websites have developed a culture opposed to it, but I have yet to see that here.
Agreed, I actually tried and go back to change the wording to exactly that, but unfortunately it was already past the editing grace period. But lesson learned for next time.
I listened to the audio book a few months back - probably the last time it appeared on HN, I'm not sure how else I would have stumbled across it. It's well worth the time.
I remember particularly the teacher's statement that (paraphrasing, it's been a while) "if I could not resist, it means that anyone else of my station or below could also not resist".
The idea that an admission of impotence is not just a personal note, but also an observation of an actionable waterline that anyone with fewer means will also be unable to rise above...
"If I am unable to do X, who else is unable to do X?" is such a powerful question to consider.
Who gets to rule, then, and why? Your position that the masses shouldn't rule is at odds with a government legitimized by the consent of the government. Why should I or anyone else obey a government I don't consider legitimate?
Five essential questions of democracy (Tony Benn):
“What power have you got?”
“Where did you get it from?”
“In whose interests do you use it?”
“To whom are you accountable?”
“How do we get rid of you?”
His observation is that the last question fundamentally defines a democracy - not the ability for the people to give someone power, but to dispose of that power via accepted protocols. It is also the reason people with power so commonly hate democracy: properly answered, these questions limit their use of that power, and threaten to remove their access to it completely.
The upside to large countries is that they are economically and militarily stronger, on average. This is leads to a high resistance to outside influence. The downside is large enough (arbitrary) populations encompass multiple ideologies and understandings of the world, which lead to infighting and ultimately destabilization. Note the 3.5% rule, among cultural drift and competing economic incentives.
On the flip side, a small concentrated population is more stable internally, but is fragile to outside influences.
The short answer is the masses are precisely who should rule. The long answer is that they can't if you want the nation to be independent. I posit, there is no optimal balance. There are only different choices that ultimately lead to ruin.
> "How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
The experts, people that have dedicated their lives to understand authoritarianism have already given the alarm. Well, a specialist has even moved to Canada for god's sake.
And well, criticizing democracy is fashionable again. High profile figures started saying out loud that "maybe democracies are overrated. maybe democracies cannot deal with the world as it is now". Just listen to what people are actually saying instead of what you think they meant when they say it and you'll hear they saying that an authoritarian leader is what america needs now.
By all means criticise the implementation but definitely don’t criticise the idea! America’s democracy would be greatly improved by being made more representative through electoral reform.
Yeah, but this is not what they are saying. They are saying that debate stiffle innovation. They are saying that we should get rid of all this mess and let the wise man govern.
I think about least 3/4 of the anti-democracy rhetoric I've seen here has been from people opposed to this administration.
So I wouldn't conflate opposition to democracy/embracing authoritarianism with one particular man if that is what you mean by "let the wise man govern."
It's broader than that and more worrying because there are multiple authoritarian factions who agree mainly on democracy being the enemy.
In that sense it's a similar sort of set up heading into WWII
I think it has been happening for a while now cancel culture had a very negative effect on academia Jordon Peterson and Warren Smith being examples of that. I much appreciate Dr. Sam Richards who walks the fine line of trying to be centerist but he did comment recently how he does gets hate from both sides. Now I know this is going to be down voted because some will say I am both sidesing this when it's clearly one side right now. This is true I think that's however not a great argument to start a conversation. the founding fathers gave us a great foundation to work with it just takes open dialogue to convince enough of the other side that their is an actual good counter argument. The violence we have seen in the past couple months is only going to entrench positions because each side will want the result of that violence to have been meaningful furthering solidifing the separation. Currently I think American agree on the vast majority of things social media just does it's best to highlight our differences but the average person has mostly the same culture and the same day to day issues so I actually am hopeful.
The US has always been a very moralistic country. From banning alcohol and burning witches to its long struggle to accept differences (in skin color, gender or even the definition of freedom). “Cancel culture” is part of America since its foundation. It’s a moral tug of war.
It’s a different thing altogether to have the government itself weaponize “cancel culture”, however. As much as right wing people like to scream that “democrats are the same”, there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge (“if the left cancels, I can cancel too”). It’s a flight from moral infighting to authoritarian rule.
> there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge
If you think that, you've not been paying attention. Both sides doing it is disgusting and I think the right does it more than the left (at this point in time), but the left DOES do it.
> little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse
You not looking for it doesn't mean "little evidence."
It's well documented that the previous administration pressured social media to silence views it didn't like, as well as instances of debanking conservative organizations.
That's not to say this administration doesn't throw its weight around, too, but to think it's only one side make you complicit in the problem.
Some individuals from the previous administration asking a donor to do something is not exactly the same thing as the president FORCING someone to do it and demanding bribes or else they’ll impose fines on the business (which he then proceeds to do anyway, eg with Nvidia)
You’re quite literally a character from the book in this post, if you think they’re equivalent (your argument is verbatim what one of the nazis interviewed uses to justify having supported hitler)
Reading this, you can see how the political ideology of trumps supporters was so easily manipulated, and how effective the radicalisation of the right has been.
I know this is made to be an analogy with America, but people there still think much about politics at least at this moment, despite the recent chaos slowly becoming expected and mundane. I think the point of the passage is not to allow things to slip and not to simply accept the chaos, but the good news is there's still time, for the most part.
Everyone in this thread is reading this in relation to the current US government. But some other interesting parallels are the current Israeli government, and more speculatively, A(G)I.
IR is more complex. They know very well what it's leading to, since it's part of their founding history. Half the population do go out on streets to rotest, while the other half go out to protest the protests. So it is the opposite of the lack of awareness/too busy with life and changes etc the article talks about.
meanwhile, this is very pertinent to USA current climate. But interestingly, people will repost this, comment, vote, but nobody will ever think of discussing impeachment.
He’s been impeached twice already and the GOP has chosen party over constitution and country twice. The handful of token GOP senate votes for conviction don’t matter. With a GOP house, an impeachment stops there without going to the Senate, there’s already been a House vote to impeach this year that failed. A bunch of Democrats voted against it.
One man had the chance to make the Jan 6th impeachment stick. If McConnell had maintained his integrity, I have no idea who would be president now, but it wouldn’t be Trump.
The part I found relevant for Israel was the bit about how war is a catalyst that lets the leaders justify anything on the basis of necessity, including things they wanted all along for ideological reasons.
> Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong.
Sort of pertinent for any boiling the frog or salami tactics situation where something profoundly negative is gradually introduced into society so as not to raise alarm.
People say to me, "Donald, I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say." And they're right! They right! They said nothing, they thought of nothing to say.
The vast majority of them do their jobs, pay their taxes, and consider themselves patriots and good people because they help their families and motherland, and are polite and well-meaning.
While their jobs help the military machine that murders thousands of innocent people every week, their taxes fund that machine, and their complacency keeps the system stable for decades, costing not only their enemies, but also themselves and their own kids their futures.
When starvation, war, and political terror come, they will consider themselves innocent victims of another unearned, unavoidable political tragedy - not understanding their own decades of inaction brought it on them.
And America isn't that far behind.
Not thinking objectively, living unconsciously, engrossed in short-term matters - is the worst sin that leads to all the other sins. It's how it happened in Belarus, Russia and it's how it's going to happen in US.
The shocking thing isn't that fascism would come back. The shocking thing is that the people I thought were smart would allow it to normalize so fast and give up without a fight. And that even some people I know are apparently fascists at heart - they just needed "permission" to show themselves.
For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.
I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.
Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.
The excuses are worse than the stupidity.
I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still
I have it on my shelf. Fascinating to read the perspective of regular citizens who organized themselves to do something terrible. Likely to remain relevant for as long as people can read it.
There really needs to be a Second American Revolution. It should be bloodless and as simple as 90% of the country showing up to take back the wealth that was stolen from the middle classes during the neoliberal assault. The popular momentum exists for this project in both the MAGA camp and lefties that support Sanders. It seems like the only alternative is liberal authoritarianism which we're seeing from Vance and Peter Thiel. We still have a chance. Let's use it.
This isn't a drill. Let us assemble the Rebel Alliance.
Ah yes, the syllogism of thieves strikes again. - You have it. I want it. Therefore you must have stolen it from me and I am justified in taking it "back".
Have you read history at all? "Revolutions" by entitled thieves who feel that every transaction they agreed to is somehow retroactively unfair because somebody else has more money is the surest way to kill an economy. Nobody wants to do trade with cannibals.
You talk like it's the case that people with wealth never actually stole it. Yes I've read history thanks, and there are plenty of cases where it turns out for the better for the majority of people. Judge each case on its merits instead of citing fatuous truisms.
This line of reason is actually becoming more frequently used to justify things. For years, the right wing propaganda machine has been establishing the concept that conservatism and America as a whole is besieged by authoritarian leftists and their smug out-of-outch enablers the liberals.
THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat, our methods are justified. THEY have been doing this to us for years, now this is our chance to fight back.
Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view?
When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings.
I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said “leftists” and the other “fascists”.
My only question who is pushing the messaging and who does it benefit?
In what way are democrats (or, “leftists,” if you must) authoritarian?
Requiring face masks in a pandemic (which happened under the trump admin, in case anyone forgot) is not the same as masked goons throwing brown people into vans.
As a libertarian, I see authoritarianism as the imposition of top-down control, often fine-grained, onto individuals' lives. The reflexive reaching for government/law to solve problems. The war on drugs. Mass surveillance, regardless of its goals or who is in charge. The crushing weight and lack of justice in the criminal justice system. The draconian copyright regime.
This makes the Democratic [establishment] bureaucratic authoritarians, while the current Republican [establishment] are autocratic authoritarians.
Obviously I would prefer anti-authoritarianism - a goal of reducing government control in our lives (including corporate de facto government). I think so would most people, but for being lured in by partisan messaging. Authoritarian singular-perspective narratives always sound so simplistically compelling.
But while the autocratic authoritarians weren't in power, it was all too easy to point to the bureaucratic authoritarians as a creeping problem. So now we have autocratic authoritarianism "good and hard". Between the two, I'd prefer bureaucratic authoritarianism as it at least keeps the worst impulses in check (eg the capricious tariff taxes, the naked corruption/bribes, politicizing departments to go after political enemies, wanton cruelty against immigrants for circenses, etc). The only real question is whether at least some of our institutions will hold out so that we can collectively decide to change course, or if it's just set now.
As far as the mask issue, I want to live in a world where they weren't mandated, but yet most everyone wears one out of enlightened self interest. The traditional Republican message would have been "wear a mask to protect yourself". The fact that it was self-harming contrarianism instead has more to do with edgelordism and foreign influence campaigns.
You must separate actions from words, and government actors from private citizens, and powerful monied interests from powerless randos.
If you don't do this your brain will remain cooked.
There are no "Leftists" in government. No, Bernie and AOC do not count. Soc Dems are nice, don't get me wrong, but the vanguard they are not.
There is no "Leftist" billionaire funding propaganda, no the boogyman 'Soros' doesn't count. He's very much a 'liberal' capitalist, just ask the UK.
There is no major US media outlet or platform owned by a "Leftist".
If you insist that actually Biden, Obama, Clinton, Schumer, or Pelosi are leftists, please please just stop talking about politics.
Again, I'm begging you to separate "things pseudonymous people say online" from "things government officials say and do"
Let's try an example:
"Fascists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies"
or
"Leftists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies"
Now we have 2025-? stare censored social media. Of all the hypocrisies, people screaming "but what about THEM" while ignoring what people in power NOW are doing is the most insufferable
I think the appropriate response to a lack of due consideration to the bill of rights should be doubling down on the bill of rights. not setting it on fire as show of oneupmanship
The US constitution is outdated and vulnerable. Modern constitutions like Germany’s basic law are a lot more resilient. We are watching the US constitution fail right now, it didn’t even take smart men to start dismantling it. I hope I’ll be proven wrong, but what indications do you see right now that the US constitution is performing as intended?
I’m unfamiliar with German basic law, but considering the lawlessness we’re seeing play out in the US right now, I’m curious how/why modern constitutions are less vulnerable?
By this I mean: it’s not as if the things we see playing out are lawful. Is there a structural difference that somehow prevents the same kind of lawlessness?
Put another way, what stops a movement that decides to ignore Germany’s constitution from ignoring it should they somehow gain power?
Constitution is just a social contract, it’s not a law of physics. Without people wanting to preserve it, it’s just words on a piece of paper with no real power. With a majority in the Supreme Court, the Constitution can be interpreted however one wants.
It’s not all new with Trump (governing by executive order, ignoring duly enacted laws, strong arming media companies, etc.). But while earlier administrations might have done those things on the margins, Trump takes them to 11 (in the spirit of the new Spinal Tap) and makes them the central and primary means of administration.
With the norms destroyed, we potentially lose our nation of laws, and become a plutocracy with different juntas every few years.
1. There's barely any normal republicans left, its all MAGA now that would hang Pence like they wanted to in 2021.
2. Likely true, but they don't really need the military as ICE which now employs all the armed racists they need, like Jan 6 people.
3. He's floating the idea, even talking about not having elections if they're in a war like Ukraine, even though its not in the constitution. Either way they're going all in on rigging elections so Vance will take over.
The US Constitutional government is meant to be slow, methodical and gridlocked. It is supposed to take enormous compromise to get any decision created into law.
There are clearly very many countries that tick most of those boxes. Including some that i wouldn't necessarily define as fascist. Prominent examples are China, Russia, Iran North Korea and other middle eastern countries. I'm not saying this list is incorrect, per se, but it is vague to the point of uselessness.
I mean, as far as fascist states go China, Russia and North Korea are pretty up there?
In the original "14 points" [0], the author explains this is not an exhaustive checklist that makes something fascist if it ticks all of the items, and gives motivation for such a list. Go read it if you have time to, it's rather short and well written.
> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
> But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
1930s fascism can never occur again. It was a product of its time.
But the psychology behind fascism stems from deep human quirks and is something eternal.
All those nations, except perhaps China, share the DNA. If we didn't already have names for their systems, we probably would describe them as fascistic.
What Trump has turned the American government into is closer to Fascism than to Liberal Democracy, no?
In future highschool textbooks Trump Fascism will have its own name ("Trashism" perhaps?) but it will be placed in the same chapter as the others.
It's inaccurate to blame Trump. He is a greedy egotistical idiot. Blaming Trump is like blaming a rock that hit you in the head. Look up and pay attention to who threw the rock. Blame them.
The Trump presidency is the culmination of a roughly 45 year campaign to return the United States to the Gilded Age, and to ensure it stays that way until it's bled dry and nothing remains of its corpse. The political and social problems that led to his second election have been a long time coming.
What's interesting is that the gaps in our political system that allow him to do so many illegal and distasteful things have always been there. The framers of the constitution never anticipated all three branches of government colluding together in alignment and bad faith, with the vociferous support of roughly half the voting population.
That's the nature of fascism, it molds itself to fit different societies. German fascism would never have worked in America, American fascism is draped in the flag and holds the cross.
I have come to conclude that there are both reasonable and unbalanced individuals on the extreme ends of both sides. When Obama was elected I had paranoid relatives telling me he was going to pilfer their 401k and bankrupt the country. Well, that never happened. When Trump was re-elected it was, “He is going to tear down democracy! He’s going to put gay people in concentration camps!” Last I checked we still have free elections, and nobody cares whether you’re gay. And we see political violence targeting both major parties. This also is not new. So I think this isn’t a result of anyone’s politics, but rather individual temperance; the voices we choose to amplify and listen to.
> "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better.[...]"
I read this book a few years ago and I can't stop thinking about this line of discourse (there's more of this subject in the book). I've felt this exceptional frustration and disgust towards the (in my opinion) wildly underreacting non-fascist millions in the States, more so than the fascists themselves, which seemed contradictory.
The closest I've come to communicating why is that one group is on script while the other isn't. For example, a deadly airborne disease is awful, but the truly scary thing to me would be witnessing doctors and immunologists just kind of shrugging their shoulders.
I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom. I always admired that. I remember thinking it was a feature that they're so quick to protest and make a scene. I had, without any doubt in my heart and soul, anticipated total disaster. I was expecting to see protests and riots and fires and further uncelebrated but deemed necessary violence in response to the slow ablation of freedom and liberty.
It's quite possible that I'm wrong and that total disaster is premature. But never before have I felt this certain about an "everyone else is wrong" belief. It's scary and somewhat lonely. Reading this book made me feel much less lonely, and much more scared.
The right in the US has convinced people that the only way to protect their own freedoms is to let them take the freedom from everyone, and allocate out appropriate permissions to the right people afterwards.
There's also a spirit of "I don't care as long as they get hurt more" that's stronger than ever.
The party of self-sufficiency and pulling yourself up into a better life with minimal oversight from government has become the party of cutting off your nose to spite your own face.
Americans do not fuck around with loud proclamations but actions are harder. Don’t doubt that there are actions, though. But our media landscape is extremely fragmented and successful organizations of people are not covered. There are plenty of loud, mass protests happening everywhere in the country. But also understand that successful organizations that do get media attention are cracked down on. Not so long ago Los Angeles had mass demonstrations against ICE raids and the federal government literally sent in the military against its own people. Particularly conservative media covered these protestors as anti-American for their protesting, and this narrative made it so far as brought up repeatedly in spaces like Hacker News. Somehow optics of the protestors matters more than the actions of the government.
The people are fractured, the people who are trying to fight for their fellow Americans are depicted as anti-American and enough Americans are buying it that the fractures continue.
It's basic primate psychology, status is the key. It divides the society well-enough that if a majority are not inconvenienced, then the doublespeak creates a denial at all scales. Even things that are obviously absurd like vaccine denial aren't about across the board policy, the exclusive high status can still gain them. The policy and others are used as a political wedge to create eugenics, racism, whatever the underlying status-bias curve that gains them the weird pluralities to maintain a semblance of power.
Humans are dark matter communicators. We code all the top-down biases seamlessly in news stories, speech, novels, movies, always as a by-product of social and virtue signaling. Even altruism comes with a handicap principle. Ultimately we are followers, not leaders, or adventurers, that would be chaos. If the leaders can fool the populace by mixtures of narratives, and sleight of hand oppress on behalf of enough pluralities status, the audience id placated and inert.
> I was expecting to see protests and riots and fires and further uncelebrated but deemed necessary violence in response to the slow ablation of freedom and liberty.
To what % are you confident thst you would be one of the first participants in these, were the same to happen to your own country?
I’m not sure that’s all that relevant other than thematically. And I’m not sure anyone can have confidence in that. I suspect most people are very overconfident. But I’ve been to pretty much all the major protests of my life (I’m only 6 hours from Ottawa and 2 from Toronto) (except Québec referendum rally: I was 9), and I’ve given an average of 1% of my income to Ukraine these past 3 years. So I’d like to hope I would be one of the first. But nobody can be sure how they’d actually respond, right?
> I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom.
This is exactly the problem. Americans see their own country as perfect example of freedom and liberty, and the idea that they might be wrong never crosses their minds. When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.
One of the things that Trump is doing is pointing to general "wokeness", "cancel culture", and so on, and labeling them as censorship. The trick is that he's not exactly wrong. Most Americans have their entire livehoods tied to their employers, which usually are emotionless corporations that can fire said Americans at will. This means that, if you express an undesirable opinion, you can and will be fired, and self-censorship is a vital element of American culture. Many Americans celebrated this as a feature that allowed them to maintain social cohesion. Now that the tide has shifted and the list of socially acceptable opinions has changed, same Americans are suddenly very upset because they cannot voice their opinions.
It's not that Americans suddenly stopped valuing freedom and liberty. They never did, but you never noticed, because you never tried to cross the boundary. You can interpret this in two ways - either be sad that your vision of America isn't real, or be happy that for all bad things that Trump is doing, it's not a fundamental change in American society.
I imagine one example is the imposition of their values on LGBTQ/trans/etc. It’s very much a “stop you from having personal freedoms” padded with very, very weak strawman arguments for why they’re protecting themselves or kids from imaginary bogeymen.
Thank you for illustrating my point. I dedicated entire following paragraph to explaining that you're not free if exercising your lawful freedom costs you your job, but you didn't even read it. It's not that you didn't understand it, you didn't even read it. Literal syntax error.
To answer your follow-up question: I understand "freedom" as "freedom to". This trivially includes "freedom from" through "freedom to choose not to participate in something".
I think this is interesting, but perhaps for reasons other than intended. I think it shows the formation of the post-war mythology that Germans used to explain to themselves how their family members or parents were good people, and did not deserve any punishment, despite the involvement in the most genocidal movement in modern history.
When you read these accounts, it always feels like no one had any agency or knowledge what's going on, that Hitler was basically a lone wolf who installed himself in power against the wishes of the nation, that had some outlandish ideas that no good German believed in, and that then he and a small band of his supporters somehow forced everyone to comply.
And to be clear, it was a totalitarian state, but it also wasn't North Korea and no Soviet Union. If nothing else, you could always leave. Many countries wouldn't take fleeing Jews, but as a dissenting German, you'd be welcomed with open hands almost everywhere.
So yes, of course there were people who hated the regime, and just decided they didn't want to or couldn't rock the boat. But a significant portion of the population approved of what was happening. Hitler was wildly popular. Millions of people enthusiastically bought into what he was selling. Germany perceived itself as a wounded lion after WWI. They felt they had a rightful claim on their "living space". And antisemitism in Europe needed no marketing. Tellingly, purges of Jews continued even after the war in the Soviet sphere of influence.
My point is, for every person who genuinely had no choice, there were ten who definitely had it, who more or less approved what was happening, and who would have been proud of it had Germany won the war.
If you’re interested in this topic, I really recommend reading How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley. [1] It’s a remarkable book - slim, easy to read, and enlightening. What was most astonishing to me was that there is a playbook: ever wonder why these regimes always target LGTBQ people, for example? It’s explained here, along with everything else you need to know about the mechanics of prosaic, predictable type of government.
> According to a New York Times review, Stanley's book—a "slim volume"—"breezes across decades and continents" and says that Donald Trump "resembles other purveyors of authoritarian ultranationalism."
The problem is that essays like this are always written, preserved and propagated with the benefit of hindsight, producing the mistaken feeling that an actionable lesson is contained within.
"A bad thing happened. We had been a little uneasy, but did not act on it. Well, of course it was hard to act on mere unease. Still, if only we had acted on it sooner...". And thus, what we take away is a simple lesson and call to action - are you feeling uneasy now? If so, it is time to stop and work to derail society from whatever track it is on.
Something that never makes it into these essays are all the times when people felt uneasy and overwhelmed, and yet nothing happened that in our backward-looking perspective ought to have been prevented. Were those feelings of unease distinguishable, to those who had them, from those experienced by the protagonists of this essay?
Something that is discussed even less are all the instances where people experienced the same unease and alienation and did act on them. The story of Nazi Germany is told as one of evil purpose-driven agitators, their evil enabling cronies, and a whole host of good people who were vaguely uneasy but did nothing. A parallel story unfolded throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, though. Germany had lost an existential war, and was under crushing pressure from the victors which wanted to be paid their dues in flesh. Society was tearing at the seams, the massive country to the East had fallen to a totalitarian revolution and rumours of repression and atrocities were trickling in every day even as their sympathisers engaged in street violence and made no secret of wanting to establish the same system at home. First the global financial crisis destroyed whatever semblance of stability and prosperity was left, and then government was paralysed due to lack of majorities even as a repeat loomed. Then, too, good people were vaguely and then increasingly uneasy - and then they decided to actually do something about it. That something was a last-ditch stabilising effort by setting aside factionalism and forming a unity government of anti-communist parties. The rest is history.
As far as more modern comparisons are concerned, I find it difficult to read this essay and not draw a comparison to the COVID years. "Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "Believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand"? "or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"? Unfortunately, for the Terminally Online, that period has now receded into history as a cute extended staycation that normalised remote working. This obscures the extent to which, right now, the US may be experiencing the results of good "big men" (on the other side) having decided to act on their increasing sense of unease.
> Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "Believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand"? "or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"
It's awfully funny that your comparison is to the COVID years! There were a million deaths from COVID. It's almost as if those people don't exist anymore, all those people that died, that their lives were nothingness and not worth fighting for.
Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?
Nothing was faked with COVID, it was all out there in the open. People who actively lied and spread misinformation got tagged as doing so on some but not all platforms, but they could still speak just fine and have their views weighed against the warnings of the platform which was giving them the means to communicate their misinformation. It's not like a popular broadcaster who said something that the President disliked would get fired because the executives were getting strongarmed into firing the person.
I find your comment quite disturbing, and it is making me reassess just how far down the hole the US has gone. We are far closer to Nazi Germany than I had assumed. That a person that can form full sentences like you do, in paragraphs of thought, and still type these thoughts out. Perhaps its because I was a scientist and could evaluate all the information that was out there in the public, it wasn't a mystery, the basis for decisions was 100% transparent and open for anybody to see. For others, that listened to lies and never got the information or disregarded it as unintelligible, perhaps what you describe might make sense. But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.
There's little point in retreading all the old arguments about COVID here (whose mind is going to be changed at this point?), but just to illustrate the sort of things I am talking about, there was the early whiplash in government messaging about mask-wearing[1], where the relevant officials outright stated after the fact that they were issuing instructions that were at least deliberately vague about the motivations in order to further an interest (prioritising supply for medical professionals) that was not communicated to the public; and the argumentative contortions[2] to exempt certain classes of political protest from the restrictions that were imposed on everything else.
I'm sure that if you were tapped into certain strands of "the conversation" on Twitter at the time, you did not feel like any of these decisions were made behind your back for inscrutable reasons! I'm also sure that all the way from 1918 through to 1945, there were certain strata of society that were looped into the decision making and never once got the feeling that they were being governed "by surprise". In neither of those situations was this the case for the majority of the affected population, though, and appealing to your own rarefied status as a "scientist" hardly helps the argument that your own experience is any evidence that government during COVID happened by consent.
> Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?
Editing to replace a section here, because I was unhappy with the (lack of) clarity in my original text. I am not just meaning to make a two-way comparison between COVID and one or another of the German periods. We are looking at four distinct situations here:
(1) The Weimar interbellum (1918~1936). Well-meaning people were beset by a creeping unease over instability and communism (which by 1933 had already killed on the order of ten times your COVID figure). They chose to act on it by enabling Hitler's rise to power.
(2) The Nazi era (1936~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of communism, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease, but they did not act upon it. Bad outcomes.
(3) The COVID period (2019~2023?). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of COVID, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease. They chose to act on it by enabling Trump's rise to power.
(4) Trump II (2025~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Well-meaning people are beset by creeping unease. (What's next?)
Looking at the first three cases where outcomes are known, do you actually see some pattern that looks like it'd yield a good rule for when unease should be acted upon by well-meaning people? Given these examples and your alignment of course you would be tempted to say "when they are left-wing", but it's not like we can't find relatively left-coded examples similar to (1), or right-coded examples similar to (2). I would go looking to spin a narrative around the French Revolution, or the two phases of the Russian Revolution (which might well be parseable as a case of left action against the Empire, followed by a case of right inaction against the Bolsheviks), but this would require some more research to do at a reasonable level of quality.
> But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I am not American or in the US anymore (though I spent many years there as a PhD student, including through the COVID years).
"when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."
Remember that, then they attack the immigrants, the woke people, the trans gender and the leftist...
This book's cover/spine features swastika — definitely controversial on a bookshelf, but can lead to some aggressive questioning ["why own this?" e.g.]. Unfortunately this detracts from the truths within this book (that National Socialist Ideology is attractive to the majority in a fascist regime change-over; you cannot fault ill-informed "nazi citizens" for their patriotism).
Instead of me rambling on about this for the dozenth time, I'm just going to provide some of my favorite passages from the book:
>"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends ... they were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it." —xiii
>"Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, 'the democratic part.' The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it." —p47
>"In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread." —p32, quoting a 51 baker, Nazi party manager, in 1933
>"When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, 'Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.' " —p47
>"The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security ... what does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing ... so things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?" — p48
>"...'in 1938, during a Nazi festival ... the entusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' " —p51, quoting an anti-Nazi German imprisoned for hiding Jews
>"The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere." —p56
>"You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community's. But are the community's attitudes respectable? That's not the point." —p60
>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69
>"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164
>" 'Many of the students—the best of them— understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today ... the young people, and yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those [earlier] years ... it is a very dangerous mistake, to think ... that Germans came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonesense that passed for truth' " —p192, a teacher reflecting on students
>" 'Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I belonged ... still—I didn't want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia ... it hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them.' " —p200
>" 'It is easy these days to say anti-Nazi and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.' " —p201
>" 'You say Totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so it is easy for you to say, Totalitarianism—no. But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.' " —p223
>"The six [most] extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, 'That was wrong' or 'That was going too far,' as if to say, 'The gas oven was somew2hat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.' My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life." —p183
>"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consuqence, not the cause of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists." —p277
>" 'It doesn't matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.' The sensitive cabinetmaker ... and the insensitive bill-collector ... said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one." —p284
>"There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build ... how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. 'Strategic bombing' was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit ... houses" —p296
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There're dozens of typos above, typed while drinking my morning coffee.I hadn't skimmed through they thought they were free [author's styling] since first reading this extremely challenging book, six year ago.
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Whenever I've recommended to IRL friends (seeing "the book on your bookshelf with a swastika on it!"), nobody wants to read about Nazi's... but this book is about why such ideologies are so attractive, and why ought be avoided.
Read this book, but if the topic interests you Ordinary Men by Chris Rush expands much further on this topic, following a geriatric brigade of conscripted laymen "Nazis."
> I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' "
It pays off to point out that actual Jews and opposition left completely different writings and opinions. They did not felt free, in fact. By the 1938, they were thoroughly victimized and fully aware of it.
There was a lot of fear in Germany itself.
The above are opinions and feelings of Nazi, basically. It make sense to write and analyze those, but they dont speak for non-nazi germans, they dont know former opposition, Jews or minorities actually felt and thought.
Correct, the above quotes are from a book which uses German citizens' POVs to explore the dangerous allure of National Socialism to a majority-in-crisis (some using Nazis' own words). A Jew recommended this fantastic book to me [if that matters to you] after he and I had discussed Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
>"if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!" —p51, an anti-Nazi German, imprisoned for hiding Jews, quoting a Jewish girl he'd overheard telling her own mother.
Was there a reason you cited that particular quote..?
It's interesting, from that of certain famous Jewish POVs, that both Albert Einstein & Henry Kissenger also lamented similarly, well into their old ages (only being Jewish because of birth into Its customs).
I'd love to have real conversations [which is something this book assists readers with, regardless of "Nazi perspective only" as you somewhat-erroneously proclaim]. This is a book about ending hate.
This is a very intense piece, but misses some critical points. Germany after WWI was suffering terribly under reparations that European Allies and the US insisted on. Previously wealthy professionals went broke and begged in the streets for scraps. When Hitler swept aside reparations there was a great economic updraft as Germans rebuilt their economy and got back to work. The politics of the time was driven by the economy. The US appears to be entering into a period of stagnation and a breakdown of global trading upon which it had become dependent and that is a very different situation with economic factors hitting politics in ways unlike past crises.
The German economy was a house of cards waiting to fall, there was no real economic boom that could be sustained. When they annexed Austria they looted their gold reserves and continued to do so through Europe to sustain their economy.
This has been true in the USA since approximately 1965, at least. Analysis has shown the general public has absolutely no say in policy making; literally everything is for this or that influential “special interest.”
This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.
Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.
It's 2008 and Barack Obama was just elected to Office.
In the year prior, the major Press institutions had pronounced him to be Communism Incarnate.
Running up to the inauguration, high level intelligence agency personnel and the Press, in alliance with a foreign intelligence service, concoct a narrative that would continuously threaten Obama with prison, undemocratically hamstring his presidency, and whip the populace up into hysteria for four years.
All defining Obama's presidency, and creating immense domestic tension in the country.
The Press and agencies advance the notion that since some voters may have had read foreign government published information about Obama, from one specific foreign government but not others, that this meant that the election itself was fundamentally invalid.
This adds to the national hysteria as well as catalyzes institutional anti-free-speech initiatives.
The culmination of those initiatives is CISA, who employ anti-Obama personnel to force censorship of social media running up to the next election in 2012.
In this period, it is impossible to observe a single Obama supporter being interviewed on a televised show or major podcast. Outside of the only sometimes pro-Obama channel. Virtually everything televised about Obama and his supporters are the views of Obama's detractors.
This exclusion adds to the hysteria.
As the 2012 election draws closer, the Press cherry-pick the story of a White drug fueled career criminal, who died while being arrested by a Black cop for robbery, to support the launch of nine months of violent terrorist riots by anti-communist Brown Shirts.
The Brown Shirts terrorize the entire nation for months, in their neighborhoods and on television, ostensibly for the cause of the White career criminal; in a manner that strongly communicates that this will all stop if the populace doesn't again elect Obama.
The Press, local governments, and the Obama-opposed bureaucracy demand that the Brown Shirts be given political cover against significant law enforcement opposition, arrest, and prosecution.
In total, almost thirty people would eventually die in the riots.
At the same time, a never before seen virus spreads across the World from a USG funded lab in China.
The Brown Shirt supporting system establishes national-level political pressure to the effect that all individual movement be restricted except for that of the Brown Shirts.
Given that most of the political apparatus that would be in charge of controlling movement is in support of the Brown Shirts, this demand is self-granted.
The Brown Shirts, aligned at with months of televised - and experienced - open terror in the country, protest outside of the trial of the Black cop. Whose Blackness is a factor in the trial.
Instead of using this jury-intimidation as basis for a mistrial, the judicial system and media ignore the jury-intimidation.
The Black Cop is convicted, and is a short time later almost stabbed to death by White Supremacists in prison.
Everywhere, statues and murals are created in the image of the dead White criminal.
Later, a young man attempts to stand in opposition to the Brown Shirts. Do do this, he stands with a long rifle. The Brown Shirts chase the man, in an effort to disarm him and then who knows. The man ends up variously killing or wounding the Brown Shirts chasing him.
The man is put on trial for murder. Obama supporters breath a sigh of relief when the man is acquitted.
The universal movement-restriction of the rest of the populace creates the excuse to enable the universal use of mail-in-ballots in the upcoming election.
The election comes and goes, and the "not a communist" candidate is elected instead of Obama.
Immediately, the Brown Shirt riots stop.
Various "reasonable center" aligned pundits proclaim that this is for the best, because a presidency under Obama is entirely too chaotic.
In total, Obama was impeached twice in his first term. With the assistance of the "reasonable center" that did not act against the Brown Shirts.
Obama supporters, traumatized from the months of chaos and pressure from the Brown Shirt riots, show up at the US capitol to protest the election's legitimacy.
Predicated on perceived mail-in-ballot fraud, leaving aside the general terrorized environment of the election-season.
Also falsely interpreting that the unprecedented riot-permissiveness for the Brown Shirts would also apply to them.
One female Obama supporter is shot in the head and killed.
The "not a communists" openly celebrate that killing, and continue to do so.
Brown Shirt individuals film themselves dressing in Obama supporter identifying clothing, prior to event at the Capitol. Laughing and joking.
The "not a communist" government pursues every single person that they can identify who attended the event at the Capitol, and charges and imprisons every one that they can. Over 1200 people, to my knowledge.
Many of those officials and Press who propagandize for this effort are the same who supported the actions of the Brown Shirts.
At least one Obama supporter commits suicide. Grandmothers are imprisoned for being on the grounds of the Capitol. An Obama supporter is imprisoned for the riot, even though he was no where near the Capitol at the time.
A "bipartisan" government committee is formed to investigate the Capitol event. Comprised of Right wing officials, who supported the Brown Shirts, and officials who were strongly aligned with the anti-Obama Left since prior to the 2008 election.
The Committee's purpose is to legitimize the USG mobilization effort to prosecute anyone involved in the event at the Capitol, as well as to attempt to have Obama charged with sedition.
The Committee later ends up destroying most of its collected evidence and is granted pardons by the outgoing "not a communist" president.
Obama supporters maintain that the national presentation of the Capitol event is intentionally and severely distorted in a tightly controlled information environment.
President "not a communist" opens the borders to the illegal ingress of tens of millions of White Brown Shirt supporters.
The open border is, itself, the invitation and reason that they come. The "not a communist" faction well-knows this. Regardless, the "not a communist" group claims that an investigation needs to happen as to the reason that they came.
Government CISA and other agency involvement in social media censorship inspires a billionaire to purchase the most significant social media platform.
Four years pass - Obama is elected for his second term.
Obama pardons most of the the people imprisoned for the Capitol event.
The Press immediately starts up the anti-communist hysteria engine.
Obama policy positions that are defined as being anything other than extreme right wing are evidence for the Red Scare. No matter how intolerable the policies of the extreme right wing are to the sensibilities of the Obama voters, and no matter how obviously socially harmful and unprecedented they are.
My next paragraph of writing would be to create an inverted scenario for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In order to avoid issues, I'm going to skip that step and continue to write in the context of it.
Also assume that one was written for the Brian Thompson assassination.
One assassin writes Brown Shirt words and symbols on his bullets.
This assassination will make it impossible to be as politically successful as before, for the Obama coalition.
After the assassinations, the Brown Shirt supporting populace openly sides with and celebrates the assassinations.
Approving of them when openly possible, or when they don't care as to how that approval is received.
Or stating an obviously performative disapproval, before qualifying the death by litigating the victim's worth in the immediate follow up sentence. Which widely reads as justification.
In the exact time period when the Obama Administration and supporters are trying to decide if they are dealing with a lone DVE or an entire opposition party that supports DVE events.
Obama's FCC Chair legally threatens a Brown Shirt supporting late night host for insinuating to his Brown Shirt supporting audience that one assassin was not "not a communist" affiliated but in fact was Left Wing.
Likely in order to prevent that misinformation from stopping de-radicalization for a widely DVE supportive populace, in an immediate period of highly concerning political instability.
In response, the "not a communist" institutions and "reasonable centrists" widely proclaim that Obama's effort is verification of their Red Scare all along.
They claim that repatriating the tens of millions of mostly White Brown Shirt supporters, which came here illegally under the last administration, is evidence of the same.
An old article entitled "They Thought they Were Free (1955)" is discussed on Hacker News.
I'm curious what you believe is the point of your comment. For one, it's remarkably lazy compared to the previous poster's efforts in illustrating the inverted scenario. Two, do you believe he or anyone else is going to be convinced or 'seek help'?
The common ground Republicans and Democrats can find is that neither wants the power of government used against them or their rights. The best way to stop the government from being used against either party is to shrink the government until it is a threat to neither party. Lower taxes, less spending, and no regulations infringing on rights or freedoms.
This is one solution to the problem. But it isn't as if its the only solution or one that has no downsides.
I mean from a very trivial point of view, government spending constitutes a large amount of GDP.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is the question of democratic allocation of resources and labor. Most people believe that there is a role for democracy in the allocation of resources and labor, which is to say that we think that certain societal goals (for example, defense, the care of the elderly or the poor, etc) should not be allocated to by markets but by democratic will.
This seems to be something almost all Americans agree on (though what things should be handled this way and how is contentious).
But to simply shrink the government away has the effect of decreasing the power of democracy to allocate resources, transferring that power to (in an ideal case, anyway) markets.
The fact is, most people do not want to live in a pure free market society, as far as I can tell. They want government services, they want safety nets, they want the air they breathe to be clean and safe. They want the power to decide that sometimes its worth spending money on stuff even if no one accumulates profits in the process.
The system you describe is majority rule, which often abuses minority rights. It is better to have a constitutional democracy with very limited government powers.
No, they noticed. 90 years ago, 2/3 of the world's books were in Germany. They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening. Germans were acutely aware of the reality of the day to day situation and their previous history in WW1.
I just read the book last week. What you said is not true in any useful sense. “Germans were acutely aware…” tries to reduce an entire population and years into one statement. Reality has much more color.
For the germans interviewed in the book, it seems to be true that many had read or heard about the camps or other atrocities, but (1) not the “final solution” which was not in the press and (2) there seems to be heavy desensitization from 1933-1955 when the book was written.
Aside from the tailor that had started the fire at the synagogue, the other 9 interviewees had not directly witnessed atrocities being committed, and instead focused on their personal hardships during the war.
Even though they may have been literate, the people in Mayer’s book were ignorant of the specific realities. Perhaps willfully ignorant, yes, but the nazi regime really did not give any opportunities otherwise.
—
not an expert, just reporting my notes from the book.
i highly recommend all americans read it, its not a long book. it feels eerily familiar, even though many circumstances are drastically different.
Mein Kampf was published 1924 and distributed broadly.
There was not much hidden, the goal of making a big war in the east to conquer new land for the Aryans was there in big letters in the open.
His views towards jews likewise.
So they knew. Maybe largely did not wanted to know. And they did celebrate the victories of the german army as their own. They only stopped celebrating after the victories stopped happening and it was more and more clear that the war will be lost.
" Each
animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the
titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the
field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc."
(from Mein Kampf, Chapter 11)
But if no one would have taken him serious, there would not have been a problem.
But people did take him serious, they seriously believed he was some kind of messias send from god to save his troubled great country.
In their defense, there is an inexhaustable supply of "take over w my ideology material."
This is a confluence of many conditions. Some long-focused efforts, some architecting and annealing of interests, some individual greed, some long-lasting effects of trauma, and some massive ignorance.
One of the only good points is that the American people are stubbornly allergic to authoritarianism. Yes there are exceptions, but mainly carved out by people trading it for self-interest. Many good surprises like Tucker Carlson's opposition to squashing free speech and the Republican's long-lasting distaste for pedophilia are still out there.
The post above pointing out how we're diff to Nazism is on point. There have been many more authoritarian plays since then. Americans remain conveniently ignorant of them.
Also we're being economically crushed and everyone feels it. Although racism is a powerful tool by this movement, it's actually centered around impoverishing everyone and the dizzying egos of its leaders.
What I took away from the book was that all these people were very eager to say variants of 'das haben wir nicht gewusst' when at the same time they also describe how the jews were systematically removed from their society and every part of civil society was taken over by the nazi's.
I would add to your statement that almost everyone should read it. It's unnerving to read how 'normal' all these people were in some way and how 'easily' it all happened because the population generally disliked jews.
Based on history books I read (mostly from Richard Evans), they knew. Nazi violence and concentration camps were public knowledge, because the regime needed to generate the fear. Germans prior war were in fact scared a lot.
This particular book is a out what nazi sympatizants and nazi themselves were saying after the war. It is what it is, but there was real motivation to not have own culpability in destruction of Germany in the open. (Which is what they have seen as tradegy, not the holocaust itself all that much)
You don’t know and you can’t know what it was like. The least you could do is try to listen to the people who were there and perhaps do at least a little bit of introspection and consider what you could’ve done differently, knowing what the consequences for troublemakers were. But that seems to be beyond you?
I think OP is talking about the rise of the Nazis rather than the period where the Nazis were already in control and resistance was much more difficult. Although, in fairness, Hitler was already chancellor ‘90 years ago’.
Did you even read the article? They explicitly point out that it was the learned class that was so busy with their other important things that they missed all of it. The whole thing is about how that played out.
"They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening"
can be hard, it's happening right now, and a lot of people are really all in, love it. or ignoring it, or sinking into streaming services to distract themselves.
Take your average house frau today, and they think Trump rounding people up is just good old law and order.
People aren't thinking everything through, that's how the overwhelming distractions work.
It is western propaganda. Germans were simply supportive of Hitler and, for the most part, Hitler did well by the Germans. Most people do not question actions when these actions do not affect them, let alone oppose them. And most people will not get involved in politics if the upside is negative.
Hitler didn’t do well by the people. Real wages declined throughout Nazi reign. Their lands were destroyed. They were responsible for allowing genocide.
Source: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The article shows how he lulled them step by step and diverted them from knowing this was worse than before. Sound familiar USA?
They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different. We can hate the guy but he was not going to conquer Europe with the Germans and then sit at it empty.
No, not just. There were pre-war downsides and hardships for the people. read the book above, it’s clear the common German had a worse life before the war came, to say nothing of being drafted, being killed, losing a family member, or being incinerated.
One of the reasons they specifically lost the war was because Hitler was such a fuck up that he was decimating the German economy. When you look at how the war was progressing, the only outcome for the Nazis at the time was either defeat or collapse. Combined with the endemic usage of Pervitin and other drugs at this time both to fuel soldiers and keep the citizens relatively placated they were burning up everything both at the frontline and at home.
Bingo: the story of WW2 is that the Germans started with an effective army, and the Nazis ran it into the ground.
The saddest thing is subsequent decades of bizarre interpretations of this result because people got too excited about some effective German industry that they took Hitlers various wonder weapon attempts as planned engineering projects rather than engineers trying to put form to a mad man's rantings.
Hitler loved the idea of super heavy tanks, so the Germans kept trying to build them even though they were unreliable, ineffective and vulnerable.
Meanwhile the Sherman got a reputation for breaking down a lot...mostly because it kept surviving and being fixed in the field and continuing to provide effective armor support, whereas German tanks just died.
"Hitler did well by the Germans" is a weird way to describe taking over a state by violence and propaganda and then leading it into a humiliating military defeat and committing some of the most morally repugnant acts in recent history in its name, but ok, I guess.
And only from reading Chinese history and how the Chinese inteligencia see's it can you get the full wieght that what to them is an inevitable and unstopable cycle. They go so far as to describe the stages and symptoms of each stage, along with specific societal conditions that we continue to replicate with a mechanical precision they gave the name "The turning of the dynastic wheel"
The chinese with there long history, and pragmatic introspection have codified things like this in there pictographic written language, where the symbol for disaster is derived from combining the two symbols for danger, and oportunity.
Are they wrong though? On our side, people like Spengler also model societies as pseudo-organisms with lives that go through birth, adolescence, adulthood, senescence, and death. There's a lot of merit to viewing history as cyclic and decay inevitable even if the details change from iteration to iteration.
Similar conditions produce similar outputs. Perhaps the linkage isn't quite as direct and repeatable as the Chinese think, but they have a point.
I have a chinese friend who said something similar to this, she believes much of the culture in the modern west is influenced by some shady chinese government attempt at controlling the speed at which said wheel turns, through Tiktok and stuff. While Id normally dismiss her as a nut, we do have rioting in the street arguing over a miniscule group of people wearing clothes dsigned for the opposite sex.
We also had rioting in the street over this in Berlin, 1933-05-06 (four days before the famous bonfire). Occam's Razor says that shady Chinese government intervention is not needed.
This could only possibly be true if, like the Nazis, you exclude Jews, Gypsies, gays, disabled people, women who value their sexual and reproductive freedom, etc. etc. from the category ‘German’.
And even then it’s still not true, as others in the thread have pointed out.
It’s disturbingly frequently that I see this weird nudge nudge wink wink kinda-sorta Nazi apologism from high karma accounts here. I’m willing to believe that there aren’t fundamentally bad intentions behind it and that it stems mainly from some kind of reflexive contrarianism, but boy is it weird and disturbing.
That's an insanely stupid claim. Jews were systematically stigmatized and eventually sent to extermination camps. What we now call LGBT people and political opponents got the same treatment. Syndicalists too: one of the first thing Hitler did was make unions illegal. And even the "aryans" that supported him, saw their work hours get longer and longer and the pay smaller and smaller.
And let's not speak of the millions dying in a pointless war that ruined Europe.
"…it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."
Well, that resonated just a bit. Oh well, back to doomscrolling.
Excerpts from this have popped up in Reddit comments quite a bit the last few years. At first it did feel out of place, but now I'm going going back and listening to Dan Carlin talk about the headspace of society before something like Nazi Germany happens. With all the Executive Orders and lawlessness from the Executive Branch and throughout our federal government with this new regime, it's pretty clear they're attempting to do their part to usher in the chaos. "They" are the ones who have the most resources who will rebuild and control after everything goes to shit, like how Europe and the US thrived after WW2 because they were the winners/rebuilders. Currently the right wants to skip the messy war part required to take control of a government and skip to the implementing changes part. Whether or not that actually happens, well right now they're trying to push the left into drawing the line.
I have no idea where our current "line" is but it's not the same as it was last time and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc
The other day I watched this interview with Dan Carlin from 4 years ago and near the beginning the interviewer says something like "I don't think any of us want to draw any comprarisons to current nations and Nazi Germany"
that caught me, because why not? Of course no one wants to actually create parallels, but do we see any? maybe we didn't see as many then, and it was more of a worry in 2021 about even thinking about the possibility of tipping MAGA into that territory. but then again after January 6th we should have seen that they basically don't have a line and are just pushing it gradually. They don't really know what to do when they get the new power either, but the people who could stop it may not even realize it because they haven't had to deal with this kind of thing before. like invading Greenland? taking it from Denmark? how do you even create a response to a suggestion like that? so nothing happens and they see what else they can do.
another edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpWvz0dR3wc&t=570s
The really interesting part of the interview gets going around the 7:50 mark, but here Dan talks about the options if you're an average citizen trying to figure out what to do. A litany of poor options if you're trying to pick a side right now really resonates with me.
The number of different national and international situations that get compared to Nazi Germany seems to reflect a paucity of historical imagination and desire to collapse every conflict into an manichaean analogy with modern civilization's foundational battle of good vs. evil.
It might make at least as much sense to compare to Erdoğan's Turkey, Orban's Hungary, Syria's Assad and al-Julani, Chile with Allende and Pinochet, Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, the Spanish Civil War, Maidan and the Ukraine war, Cerén and Bukele in El Salvador, etc etc etc.
The point is, if you drew up a few dozen historical parallels that were at least as close to the current American predicament as is Germany in the 1930s, you might draw (and implicitly suggest your audience draw) more tentative and complex conclusions regarding the correct course of action. Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
> Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis"
Does it? I haven’t thought about shooting anyone. I would like to see more widespread awareness, protesting, and a general strike.
This. If you read Reddit, a whole lot of comments go from Nazi parallels (which is partly justified, but as another comment points out there are also a lot of parallels with Orban's Hungary, Erdogan's Turkey, Putin's Russia, etc.) to 'Luigi'.
There are so many non-violent approaches that would be effective. First, there is the 3.5% rule [1]. Second, if 10%-20% of the general population would go on a general strike, pretty much all of society would come to a standstill and it would send a heck of a powerful message. One of the issues though in the US is healthcare tied to employment, combined with fire at will. It reduces preparedness of people to protest until it's possibly too late. So, it's simultaneously important to build/strengthen unions, etc.
Aside from that, and this is true for Europe as well, we need to heal as a society. People have divided themselves in stupid 'teams', fueled by politicians, foreign interference, algorithms, etc. Not woke enough? You are cancelled. Left-wing? You are cancelled (employer contacted and fired). We have to do a little less social media and go outside and talk to other people. Even if I disagree with people politically, there often a lot of common ground (we all want food, health, to be safe, etc.), we all like to talk about some sports match, and whatnot. We don't have to agree with each other, but we can at least try to understand and care for each other. Break the stupid tribe wars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule
That 3.5% rule stopped working some time ago with the rise of technical surveillance state. There are now several notorious counter-examples.
> First, there is the 3.5% rule [1]. Second, if 10%-20% of the general population would go on a general strike
FWIW, when the best case recommendations for a restoration of civil order and the rule of law involve very large scale society-wide civil disobedience...
...then maybe the comparison to Nazi Germany and authoritative dictatorships more generally are perhaps not as far afield as you're implying. Like, once your thinking goes beyond "just win the next election" things are kinda over as far as "democracy" goes.
(And FWIW I don't necessarily disagree: the existing regime's leadership, not just the White House, seem extremely unlikely to just walk out the door if they lose an election. It was tried four years ago and failed, the resulting loyalty tests have produced a very different cabinet this time.)
> Like, once your thinking goes beyond "just win the next election" things are kinda over as far as "democracy" goes.
Elections are not the only form democratic participation can take. We can take local action, coordinated action, talk to our representatives at various levels, and so on.
Your suggestions aren't really addressing the things people are actually worried about here.
If leadership-aligned politicians won't dare step out of line, and those opposed are systematically marginalized by the executive, other legislators, and the courts, then what good does that do? Deliberately neutralizing the opposition's power renders the opposition's ideas, efforts, and proposals useless, and the allied politicians will never disobey, so petitioning either of them to make changes is pointless.
I'm not saying any of that is completely true right now, but people are nervous that this is becoming true.
> people are nervous that this is becoming true
It seems abundantly clear that there will be no peaceful/rule-of-law transfer of executive power in January 2029 to anyone but a hand-picked Trump successor that wins an election. A democratic victory (or even a Republican primary winner that isn't appropriately selected) will be resisted at all levels of the executive, and... we'll just see. Whatever the result, the losing party will call it a coup and illegitimate, and such an administration will survive only so long as it can hold control of the government by authoritarian means.
It may even happen earlier. A lot of the kerfuffle around redistricting is being presented to right wing audiences in a way that would be very easy to spin as "cheating". What do we do if democrats win the house next year and Johnson simply refuses to seat the California delegation to keep power? Are we prepared?
Basically, the End of the American Experiment may have already occurred.
I'm not so quick to pull the trigger on that assessment. I think we're at point where the rubber band has ostensibly been pulled back nearly as far as it can go, and it may snap, or it might make a surprising move in the opposite direction in response to the tension. I don't think any of us peons has any meaningful control of which of those two things happens, but I think it will hinge a lot on how much big businesses are affected by the economic and political consequences of recent policy moves. No matter how much Trump might bluster about big businesses and such, he'll still fall in line if enough get pushed to the point of having to draw a line in the sand. Too bad it will probably be big business operating in pure self-interest and not some actual principled entity. Maaaaybe if there's enough economic pain among his base, that could point us towards a voter-driven repudiation to some extent. Even if they cement their power significantly, I don't think they could swing it with an outright rejection of their approach. I doubt that will happen though.
...then maybe the comparison to Nazi Germany and authoritative dictatorships more generally are perhaps not as far afield as you're implying.
Sorry, I was not implying they are far afield. We have seen this playbook in several nearby European/Asian countries in the last two and a half decades (I live in Europe). Of course, not all these countries did have a long democratic history, but they did show the fragility of democracy, you have to actively protect it.
Heck, even in the country where I live, which has quite a healthy democracy, a majority of parliament has just accepted a motion to request declaring antifa a terrorist organization because Trump did it as well (all Dutch experts, including former secret service personnel agree that antifa is neither an organization, nor terrorist). Some of them just to score a few points for the upcoming elections. Only a judge can declare an organization to be a terrorist organization, but it's all small steps in eroding the rule of law.
(Coincidentally, the next day 1500 right wing hooligans rioted in the streets of The Haglue the next day, burning police cars, damaging the office of a center-left political party and the parliament square.)
> Reddit, a whole lot of comments go from Nazi parallels to 'Luigi'.
oof. I certainly understand where Luigi came from, but I'd also say that Luigi represents an escalation that empowers the Trump regime. The general population's latent desire to see some "justice" metered out on the "elites" pushes those elites into cozying up to Trump. Because those elites know that if Trump chooses to go after them, even the masses against Trump aren't going to be terribly concerned with their plight.
This is why people say that "fascism is the failure mode of capitalism." When the rich and powerful get too fat off their structural advantages and society starts coming apart at the seams, capital will align with anti-democratic, anti-freedom, bigoted, and genocidal forces to suppress change rather than relinquish some wealth and power.
They would rather rule over ashes than join us in a little bit more of an equitable society.
I have nagging the suspicion that the knowledge that a good portion of the population wants them dead is a slightly more significant factor in pushing elites to the Republican side compared to the Trump administration's threats.
My point is they're not different factors, they're the same dynamic.
As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years? And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.
Meanwhile Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Part of the pressure are the populist memes that makes the masses unsympathetic to their plights, even though they are the structure of our society.
> As for your comparison, the actual threat from more Luigis is small. There are at least thousands of CEOs at or above the level of Armstrong? And one death, over a seeming period of several years?
It's less about the murderer himself, and more about the high level of support he has. "Many of the rank and file in the Democratic coalition want you dead, but not to worry nearly all of them are cowards who'd never do anything about it." is cold comfort.
> And the motive wasn't just "elites bad", but very specific healthcare denials.
Do I really need to go trough Reddit to find you people calling for the murder of "capitalists", right down to landlords and homeowners?
I'm sure the elites (if we could call them that) prefer to seem like they are being pressured by the Trump administration. It's better for business and it's safer that way. But their compliance comes a little too easy.
You seem to be trying to make this into a partisan thing by invoking some imagined attribution to Democrats, when the outrage against elites is clearly pan-partisan. Also if anything it's rightism that tends to encourage individualist violence (and I'm saying this not as a partisan slam, but as a libertarian who sees the virtues in both philosophies)
You've also completely sidestepped the fact that Trump is actively attacking many companies and institutions. Sure, it's conceivable that some capitulating-institutional leaders were looking for an excuse to bring their institutions to heel, but it's not conceivable that they all were.
It seems like your goal is to absolve the autocratic authoritarians, and justify the elites cozying up to the autocratic authoritarians. So I don't see how continuing this conversation can be productive.
If the oligarchs saw Trump unable to break a general strike and it was destroying the economy, maybe they would let an opposition take hold.
Thanks for the downvotes
Have you seen social media's reaction to that murderer Mangione?
Social media is not real life. How many of those comments are bots? How many people say things online they wouldn’t say in person? The right and left are not as far apart as the internet would have us believe.
It's especially important to realize this when it's TikTok where most of that is happening, and where TikTok is the propaganda arm of China, a country that the US currently considers a frenemy at best, if not an outright enemy, and that considers the US in somewhat similar terms.
And when the algorithms on the rest of the media sites are used to drive maximum engagement for profit purposes, or maximum dissent because of the political leanings of their owner (e.g. X), social media is most definitely not the reality.
> How many of those comments are bots?
Wasn't there a group cheering in front of the courtroom when the judge dropped the terrorism charge? Those people were not bots.
> How many people say things online they wouldn’t say in person?
Ohh, so lovely of them. I wonder how Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and ultimately Paul Graham feel, to know that the only reason why a good portion of the population doesn't advocate for their death is taqiyya?
Alleged murderer*
The case against has basically fallen apart already. If he’s a murderer why does he walk free? The prosecutors will keep billing hours those. They need a scapegoat.
They dismissed the terror charge.
He is still in jail and being charged with murder.
He is not free, and the meat of the of the case - a murder charge - is still being actively prosecuted.
This should be the top-voted comment of the whole thread. I used to teach history; it makes me roll my eyes when I hear comparisons between Nazi Germany and the current moment. It reflects both a lack of historical familiarity with the unique circumstances of Germany in the 1920s and 30s (including recently losing a world war), and also, as you say, a lack of knowledge of other more relevant historical examples — of which I’d also put Erdoğan at the top. It’s just a conversation-stopper and a rhetorical cudgel rather than a serious attempt at historical contextualization.
Surely the Venn diagram needs not be a circle for you to draw parallels, nor does the existence of a more direct comparison make other comparisons moot.
Surely the fact that the current ruling party has an influential faction who explicitly reference Nazi Germany as an ideal worth striving for is relevant to setting the current moment in historical context. Yes we're not LITERALLY Nazi Germany for a variety of reasons but that doesn't mean it doesn't paint a picture of what they want to do, regardless of how successful they will be or what that will look like in practice.
Personally I think the most apt historical comparison is the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, but since we don't LITERALLY live in the Middle Ages and have ethnic divisions between Greeks and Latins one might say that's not a relevant comparison either.
Some of it reminds me of the CCP, which I think is openly considered a model by some neo-authoritarians. Ubiquitous mass surveillance, social credit, and state capitalism with heavy control though regulatory pressure. I assume we will eventually see party men installed on boards of major companies, especially in media, tech, and entertainment.
The “tech right” is a major player here and a lot of those folks idolize China right now.
I think the US has been spiraling toward authoritarianism since 9/11 personally. This did not start yesterday or with the most recent election, nor is it exclusively the result of the right or the Republican Party. A lot of people to the left have also abandoned liberalism and ideas like free speech. There’s been a broad based shift away from liberalism and individualism and toward collectivism, which always leads toward totalitarianism.
Right wing collectivism comes in the form of racism and nationalism, while for the contemporary left its identity-grievance politics and a resurgence of Marxism.
“Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?” is one of the questions I keep asking.
> Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens?”
You mean in the aftermath of the great recession where most people were struggling economically and saw that the rules are only for little people? The 20-teens were the time of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party - I don't see how it can be
I think individualism increased, after the teens, in a "don't trust the experts, do your own 'research'" way. Regardless of one's politics, its hard not to be a conspiracy theorist when you see a conspiracy play out in front of your eyes, at your expense. You could draw a straight line between the GFC and the growth of the "burn it all down" contingents on the left and right - indeed, a lot of "Bernie bros" became Trumpers whole remaining true to that ethos.
I would recommend 'Adapt! On a New Political Imperative' by Barbara Stiegler. The movement away from classical liberalism has been going on for far longer and was by design. It is very important to explicitly separate traditional or classical liberalism from neoliberalism when discussing these things. And just to be pedantic the term liberal should also absolutely be avoided when discussing anything involve impacts from the "new left" movement.
>Why did everyone across the entire political spectrum abandon individualism in the 20-teens
IMO they didn't - at least not explicitly. Individualism has been somewhat illusionary since the progressive era it is just finally coming home to roost. What happened is that the internet finally out ran the ability of the traditional media consensus methods at the national level as the internet generation aged in. So we are sort of in unknown territory where it is not clear any "expert" can play the designated role to drive the consensus required in the neoliberal system.
Where to go from there is an open question but her thesis is that the neoliberal system needs to be adapted in someway. Anyway that is largely the picture of the problem she paints. I'm not doing it justice but it is worth a read to at least place a lot of the problems people are observing in a mental and historical framework.
I think a good step is moving towards federating into smaller communities. The best of those ideas will get adopted by other communities. Basically the fediverse model applied to society. People already have this feeling intuitively and it is playing out with the push back against globalization.
Individualism started dying when it became clear the problems we face are now too large for any one individual to overcome. Massive institutions crush the individual. You can’t chase individualist dreams as easily as you once could. It requires a lot of money and luck, and luck has run out.
Social media also made it easier for you to be a group thinker and reap the benefits of that. Being an individual gives you no clout.
> Whereas the Nazi Germany analogy ends with near-inevitable wave function collapse into "start shooting Nazis", other historical analogies might caution against encouraging everyone escalating into a violent conflict as the only imaginable course of action.
This is, is course, why it's the one preferred comparison.
> and who knows what it will look like if we have some kind of civil war out of this.
I don't understand mentions of "civil war" in the public lately (there's even a Hollywood movie about it).
There is only one party controlling the armed forces. I also doubt that any high-ranking officers would take the troops they command out of the command structure and then even order them to attack the government and other troops.
Not to mention that the new administration did some cleanup among the ranks already.
The chances for enough, or any, troops breaking away from the command are very low, no?
So who is going to fight that "civil war"? It looks to me like the government has overwhelming power. At most I see some troops refuse orders to shoot at the American people, or at other troops.
Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.
We have several recent real-world examples of that not working out for the military. Assuming like minded people wont self-organize is a bad starting point, and jets and tanks have a tough time doing things like enforcing curfews. That's also ignoring that such a scenario would involve portions of said military force joining the civilian resistance, including those in leadership positions.
Besides, I've always hated this argument, because why fight the military when they can just target the politicians directly.
> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight
In the 1940s, the DoD published a field manual on how folk with "puny little guns" - or no guns at all - can fight.
Let's see... military drones; satellite surveillance; comms surveillance; giant network of flock cameras vacuuming up facial, descriptive vehicular, and license plate movement data; small-scale tactical nuclear weapons; a huge fleet of hypersonic aircraft and extremely maneuverable helicopters; decades of urban combat experience; militarized law enforcement; the largest military in the world by orders of magnitude fighting on its own turf; complete control of utilities infrastructure, centralized resource creation for food, fuel and weapons; large stockpiles of modern chemical weapons that they wouldn't hesitate to use for a second if it was an existential threat... the world is a very very different place than it was in the 40s, and the modern US military is very very very very very different than any military was back then. Even if you can argue that our power has grown linearly with more access to guns or whatever, the US military's power has grown at a much much faster rate.
Good luck with hypersonic nukes when your patrols are pecked by ambushes and FPV drones in the spaghetti of neighborhoods with opposing alignments.
Well, I think you did a pretty good job of describing the resources that they are consolidating into that one party that controls the military. For now it's just the National Guard going into cities, but didn't they float the idea of sending Marines to LA? There's so much it's impossible to keep track of what's actually going on.
I've always been of the idea that 100 guys with guns gets wiped out with 1 bomb nowadays, so why do individuals arm themselves to the teeth and LARP in the woods? it is looking more like that's going to be a paramilitary arm, or "private consultants" to ICE and CBP. those resources aren't for nothing, and they certainly aren't for taking down the US military.
This is a WW2 figure who had a song written about him after he was martyred. It became the anthem of the Nazi party. I didn't ever hear about him in my many years in the US, until a few days ago on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel
He already sent active duty marines to Los Angeles, and it was ruled illegal by a judge (after the fact) but it doesn't matter because no one with any real power cares what laws or judges say: https://time.com/7313929/trump-national-guard-la-los-angeles...
Most importantly Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman admitted he knew it was illegal and did it anyway. So much for that oath!
Law enforcement and security aren’t really set up for scenarios where random members of the general public want to attack you.
If the president shreds the constitution, there would likely be many in the military opposed to it.
While they are actively replacing cabinet positions with loyal outsiders that have little-to-no experience within the organizations they now run (eg Patel, Hegseth), I think it’s reasonable to assume that there remains career leaders throughout that would put country before king.
You also need to look at loyalty within the rank and file of course.
When I talk to conservative friends about this scenario they generally laugh; of course the military would choose country over king. At least for now I think there remains enough institutional integrity that this is plausible.
Hard to say. "About six-in-ten registered voters who say they have served in the U.S. military or military reserves (61%) support former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, while 37% back Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early September." from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-...
The military is not composed of constitutional lawyers and the danger is that they might persuade themselves that the best way to protect the country is to support whoever has at least a façade of legitimacy, particularly if it aligns with their political preferences.
This is probably the most ironic post I read in quite a while.
TLDR: brain washing is dangerous, we don't have headspace due to Trump oh and btw Trump is hitler.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you saying this is obvious and nothing needs to be done, or that I'm totally wrong or what? Or saying that I'm being a conspiracy theorist by seeing parallels?
> This is probably the most ironic post I read in quite a while. [¶] TLDR: brain washing is dangerous, we don't have headspace due to Trump oh and btw Trump is hitler.
Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. (But no, Trump isn't Hitler — even though they do share some characteristics.)
Trump is hitler... so far!
It doesn't matter if Trump is Hitler or not (what does that even mean?)
Stop paying that much attention to people, they mostly do not matter. Think instead about the circumstances.
What matter is that the USA in 2025 is not Germany of 100 years ago, today economics is not the same as the great depression, there is no threatening civil unrest due to a massive neighboring country which just went through a social revolution, nor due to decomposing colonial empires.
That’s what makes this scarier. If a political party can drum up this much social unrest when the world was largely prospering, then that shows just how much people have forgotten about the real hardships our parents and grandparents suffered, and how quickly we could end up back there through greed.
Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?
That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany.
Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
As much as I lament the quality of leadership at the moment (and not just in the US) I am not sure that we can equate Afghanistan with Germany.
It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.
Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.
That could explain the success of rebuilding Germany, as it shared a lot culturally with the US, but what about Japan? Japan was, and to a large extent still is, a very alien culture, and yet the US rebuilt it extremely effectively.
The US totally blew it in Afghanistan and its well-documented how most of the initiatives there failed due to corruption and mismanagement.
The underlying theory that the GP is getting at is that Japan and Germany were easy to rebuild because they had existing institutions and a society that trusted institutions. The idea is that it is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy; germany and Japan will "remember" how to be civilized, but under different leadership, Afghanistan and Iraq cannot revert to that.
It leans heavily on assumptions about countries and institutions.
It's true to an extent, but its not what happened in Afghanistan.
> Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan
Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...
Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.
There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.
Afg/Iraq became places to funnel money to friends in security contracting.
East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1] It had catched up at around 1970. Since 1970 the two were roughly equivalent: some years one was ahead some years the other.[2] However, Germany is now considerably ahead of the UK in terms of per capita GDP measuered in PPP (ie. adjusted to local prices: aprox. 20% now, or 10 to 15 years (depending on your reference point).[3]
[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...
> East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1]
Germany was behind the UK even before WW2. Just the UK outproduced Germany in (e.g.) aircraft production, and that was even before the US got involved.
Adam Tooze wrote an entire book on the subject:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#/media...
It’s something of a red herring. Britain got the largest slice of the Marshall Plan money, they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire. One thing you’d learn from the book is Germany definitely wasn’t in a good shape in 55.
> they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire.
they just wasted it on things like nationalizing the coal, gas, electricity, rail, air transport and steel industries.
Apart from the Suez crisis and the Rhodesian embargo was there any serious British attempt to maintain the empire after the second World War?
Mau Mau, Malaya, Kenya
Those were efforts at preventing British colonies from becoming Soviet colonies, weren't they?
There was no effort to keep either Kenya or Malaysia as British. In Malaysia, the war continued after independence.
The entire effort by the British was to keep them as possessions. The wars continued after independence because non-communists took power.
Nah, that’s really more a recent phenomenon, and is more to do with Britain’s weak growth over the last 20 years than anything else.
You probably only mean economic growth, otherwise that's hard to imagine
I suppose it's easier to achieve "growth" in percentage terms when you're starting from a low baseline (because your entire country got flattened by invading armies.)
Certainly not the ones occupied by the Soviet Union.
Which Germany?
The Allies defeated Germany, not the British.
It turns out that the British were one of the allies and about 380,000 of them died fighting the Nazis, so they have a good claim to having defeated Germany, with help from their friends.
Yes, I am not downplaying the role of the British and hoped no one would take it that way. The British were the first on alert as far as I know, and without them it would have been a whole lot worse.
USA swoops in towards the end (a large cost as well, but not as much of it and not on their doorstep) and takes a big role in creating the new world.
If we're going by those numbers, Germany was defeated by the USSR, and the British were the friends who helped.
Reassuring to hear that the british consider soviets their friends. Not joking.
From June 4, 1940 to June 22, 1941 Britain faced Hitler alone.
I'm not saying they didn't. But Britain didn't defeat Germany alone, and certainly didn't get the entire share of control after Germany was defeated. And after that the further decline of the UK showed that the power was shifting into the hands of those with wealth anyway, and here we are.
Since around Nixon (maybe?) there has been a gradual post-WW2 deregulation that really accelerated under Reagan and now with Trump its accelerating again. More and more keeps shifting into the hands of unelected, wealthy individuals who see that their power keeps growing and growing and as far as I can tell, won't stop until they have it all. It doesn't make any sense to me why that looks like a stable world to them, but the one thing that is certain is that there is no 2nd amendment that will stop the billionaire club.
Mostly because the Allies took over and invested a bunch of money into them developing in ways that didn't involve fascism.
That's not even remotely what happened
Give us your truth on it then I genuinely interested.
History disagrees with your bold statement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
No it doesn't. They didn't "invest", they took everything that wasn't bolted to the ground, and then they took that too. A third of the country was taken away and millions of Germans displaced.
My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.
The Marshall Plan was a real thing.
My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.
hollerith says >My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.
The Marshall Plan was a real thing. <
So damned funny!!8-)) The phrase "Grasping defeat from the jaws of victory!" comes to mind.
The challenge with long form texts is that they are so often picked apart, each piece quoted and analyzed on its own, without regard for how that small piece fits into the whole, often veering from a far more nuanced argument or portrait of life.
Something I very much like about poetry, is that so much wisdom can be condensed into such succinct language. We fill the gaps with our own experiences, not relying on the author to lead us step by step. And I see poetry proliferating in modern times in song. (How else is a poet to earn a living?)
There frequently are reminders of who we are, where we come from, and whence we always return. Life is a wheel. From Black Sabbath:
> They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966, 2017 by the University of Chicago.
Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free.
And if freedom begins to disappear, even those who believe themselves safely conformist are not safe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
>Such books will no longer be published if universities are not free.
That depends on which are the ways in which they are not free.
Government influence is categorically worse because of its very nature, but I'm trying to think of a more consequential influence in the US than the leftist hegemony in universities and coming up with nothing.
Universities will not be safe from government meddling until they comprehensively stop taking money from the government first. Until such a point, they run the real risk of censorship and becoming the agents of the very thing that they are warning about.
Worth drawing a distinction between governmental support for science and for the humanities.
The first does a lot of relative low mark-up contract work requested by governmental agencies. Governments and all of us would like to see cancer and Alzheimer disease cured.
The request for “bids” (aka grant applications) from NIH, DoD (now DoW) and NSF is what has greatly expanded research-focused universities and msde the USA the greatest source if cutting-edge science since WW2 (now relative success is shifting rapidly to China).
The recipients of these small but numerous contract to big medical schools usually are totally agnostic about politics—at least at work.
Turns out even autocratic-leaning politicians and the public are almost universally interested in learning how to live a long healthy life.
In contrast, the humanities are not a bread winners for universities. These faculty are ultimately paid by tuition or red or blue state support. These much more socially saavy and interested faculty mainly teach, and if they are lucky, have some modest time to think, read, and write. They are not beholding to government funds. They can speak truth to power.
So if a university like Columbia is brought to heel by the administration it is mainly due to the addiction of university administrators for the relative modest overhead they receive for NIH compared to that any corporation would accept for the same work.
And the ultimate source and cause of that addiction of administrators now willing to bend the knee to retain their federal funding overheads is the hard and intense work of their research scientists.
It’s my understanding that the humanities doesn’t get much in government grants to begin with, but when the sciences have a finance problem, they cut the humanities for some reason.
I'm not aware of humanities getting get to fund the sciences, at least in the UC system. But in many places with highly complicated accounting, the sciences can sometimes indirectly fund humanities through the overhead rate that universities charge. These are highly negotiated rates between the government and the universities, so there has to be a bit of confusion on what money keeps which buildings going.
The problems at the University of Chicago seem especially bad and I don’t entirely trust this article, but for what it’s worth:
> The reason today’s Dean of Humanities wants to send students to other universities to learn subjects that she would like to cancel, or use ChatGPT to teach subjects tomorrow that humans teach today, is to drive the “marginal cost” of teaching students from 20 percent of their tuition down to 10 percent. Future applicants should know that the University plans a further expansion from around 7,400 students to 9,000 ... and has simultaneously announced an intent to hold the number of research faculty constant. Perhaps we can drive the cost of educating students below 10 percent? Perhaps that is what the president and provost and dean of humanities mean when they say that we need to position ourselves as leaders in the field.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-the-univers...
It would be nice to read something more in-depth about university finances. Can humanities courses be funded by tuition alone or not?
By "UC" I was referring to the University of California system, which is massive, and generally what UC means in the scientific world is travel in.
The University of Chicago is a very prestigious institution due to its historical reputation, but the administration in recent years seems to have both ruined its future with terrible financial decisions, even before the pressures of Trump.
What a strange assertion.
It's not the case that the government is necessarily run by authoritarians cracking down on speech they disapprove of at colleges by threatening to withhold other funding. This is a novel development.
We can surely go back to funding schools without such strings attached.
This kind of reasoning works for private companies, not for the government.
It is true that if you are accepting money from Coca Cola, it will limit your ability to do work that goes against the interests of Coca Cola. To be independent, just stop accepting money from them.
But it only works because Coca Cola can't do much against an independent group. Of course, you need to be careful, which typically means hiring a good lawyer, but you should be fine. And the reason you should be fine is because the government is there to protect you, at least to some extent.
But you can't be independent from your government, unlike Coca Cola, they can raid your house and put your in jail if you do things they don't want you to do, and they have no one to answer to but themselves. Government censorship doesn't depend on whether you are getting paid or not.
I don't know why you think financial independence would free them from government meddling. That happens to be an easy tool that Trump has used, but it isn't the only one available. Ultimately the government can simply pass laws to make Universities do whatever they want.
you're historically wrong.
monasteries were financialy independent. when the "government changed" and the new rulers had no use for the church, all of them were raided and plundered.
it's very dangerous to have resources and not be politically positioned. you become a target more than a fortress. it's the one thing preppers don't get.
universities are facing the same problem as monasteries faced. they are huge bags of money already. excluding the UCs they are already rich and take government money more for the associations than the actual money.
I’ve read the book. It’s genuinely interesting. It’s very interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years. It also contains a) passages that are very much quoted out of context and b) an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.
I highly recommend actually reading it and understanding what it is and isn’t. Mostly I learned that there’s no simple answers, but also that people and even political movements were just as slippery then as they are now. But you may come away with something completely different. It’s an odd but interesting book.
> an awful lot of stuff about “national character” that is… questionable.
Yes! I recently read this book and was pretty shocked by how much was chalked up to the German character.
I came away feeling neither comfort nor increased panic relating to the current US situation. I read the book because I was hand-wringing about how complicit I am just by getting on with my privileged and comfortable life right now. I didn’t really come away with any resolution to that question or clear ideas about how I should change my behavior.
Anecdotally, having lived in Germany for a couple of years recently, there is a perceptible national character. The best way to understand it is to ponder the difference between a drag race and a rally race - in one, success means going as fast as possible; in the other success means getting to navigation points within a window of error. Or, with beer: in America success is discovering a new beer with a different flavor profile. In Germany, success is figuring out a way to even more precisely and consistently conforming to a centuries-old brewing standard. This, along with a kind of blunt speech that presupposes the listener to have little in the way of vanity or ego (or challenges them to not express it), is the "German character" as far as I can tell.
I suspect in part this was because they were burned very, very badly by the outward striving into the unknown that Hitler represented, and still having creativity and effort to apply turned inward to asymptotically approach perfect execution of the known.
Eh, I think that's a bit overblown. In theory, Germans are famously methodical and precise, in practice the rail network is falling apart, a major bridge in my city recently collapsed due to lack of proper maintenance, and "made in Germany" is mainly an encouragement to buy local, rather than buying for quality.
My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany.
I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states.
All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.
While reading about history can always be enlightening, I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong and what your behaviour should be.
Who or what should we be discussing or consulting ethics with? Is the line drawn at the written word?
It’s easy to read your comment as meaning ‘never let others influence your opinions on right or wrong’ which is (I hope!) obviously ludicrous.
Yes, I do read books to give me different perspectives on life that help me form my beliefs about what is right, wrong and ethical. The suggestion that’s a bad idea is pretty incredible to me. Where do you think I should go for such things?
The entire purpose / point of this book is that the overly-oppressed majority is easily susceptible to becoming "NAZIS," and why National Socialist mentality ought to be actively DISCOURAGED.
But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies.
Good work /s
If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...
To your point, the thing that jumped out at me reading this book is how familiar the German characters are. People have loved to imagine that the Nazi era in Germany was so anomalous it could never happen again. But no, the Germans were just like us.
This is my problem with a lot of literature and movies. The Nazis are always unfathomably evil, when in reality, most of them were just people doing their jobs.
I read Eichmann in Jerusalem recently, and the reality is that what Eichmann did was incredibly mundane for the most part. There is someone in ICE right now doing exactly what Eichmann was doing: Coordinating roundups of people made "illegal" by law, and then transporting them to foreign camps and foreign countries. The final solution came very far into the whole sequence of events, and Eichmann presents that he didn't like it at all, but really had no choice in the matter if he didn't want to be made a pariah or face severe personal repercussions. I would be willing to bet there are any number of people inside the US federal government who are thinking exactly that line of thought.
a lot of the western world learns only speaks about ww2 (let alone ww1, americans civil war, etc.).
there has been countless western and non western wars with slightly different patterns and a taste of "winner writes history".
one i find interesting is the french revolution. its also fairly recent, but not as tampered with as ww2 history. for example, there still are records of how terrible and cruel the revolutionaries were, how everyone was a royalist that needed to die and how the populace started to be ready to revolt - again - right after the change of power. thankfully, things eventually calmed down - as they were cruel, but not dumb.
either way I'd basically recommend expending the reading curriculum a bit.
what elements of WW2 history are you suggesting are most tampered with?
what made the stuff about national character questionable?
It requires there to be meaningful systematic differences between the people who happen to live in different countries.
So... Culture? Are we doubting the existence of culture now?
so what are you suggesting causes, for example, the French to strike more often than other Western countries? or Japan to typically have particularly low inflation? or Argentina to typically have particularly high inflation?
History? Geography? Specific laws? Particular parties in power?
There are a lot of things to look at alongside mystical notions of a collective national character of a people, especially now that most of these countries have significant immigration and exposure to ideas from elsewhere.
all of the things you listed make up or result from national character. besides some short interludes, for example, Japan has had the same party in power since 1955. it's a weird thing to deny the existence of. different nations act differently. it's not heresy to make generalisations, particularly in the age of nationalism when many/most people actively try to set and follow their country's norms
Unless we disagree on the meaning of "national character", isn't that easy to come up with 100 other reasons to explain those economic/political differences?
what is your definition of "national character"?
Waiting for the country of people who fly out of their mother's wombs or whom are born in a sack on their father's backs and further those who mentally convince themselves to pass through walls.
so there not being the difference between a human and a kangaroo or a frog and a bat means that the difference between an Argentine and a Japanese person isn't real either? literally meaningless analogy
Posted here multiple times before:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973 (02/2025, 473 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315 (11/2020, 382 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304 (04/2022, 239 comments)
Spaced repetition promotes learning.
Seriously though, this is the first time I've seen it (and I visit HN daily).
I’d assume it gets flagged pretty quickly; the implied criticism of Dear Leader is not appreciated in some quarters.
That's why I only browse /active these days. Front page is way too sterile.
None of the previous submissions of this article have ever been flagged.
American flagged?
Unfortunately a common occurrence here.
One very helpful workaround is to browse the HN "front page" displayed at
https://hckrnews.com
so that you don't have to worry about HN censorship / algorithm fuckery
It becomes more important with each repost
I was reading the comments from the past times this was submitted, and I just wanted a reason to draw attention to this comment from 2020:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315#25104589
We're seeking narrative to explain how and why these things are happening when narratives are how they are happening. When a species relies on inferior and limited tools, it suffers from their use. When the tool is seamless with the problem, it destroys us without us becoming aware.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/jd-vance-lie...
This article is all we need to know about fascism, the candidate admits this is the central tool they use on the path to gain unlimited power, even The Guardian grasps this but can't extricate from their use, the news is addicted to stories financially: "In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio."
The central problem is epistemological, the coding of explanations in mythological thought, which is narrative. The myth is the primary causal illusion. That causes that. When we add intent, which is elusive and reduces meaning subjectively, it robs any event of the true meaning load, we create propaganda without knowing it. There's the rub. If we wee the burning bush as just a brushfire, we are sane. See it as the voice of God, we're doomed.
That typo made my day. Interesting post overall; good food for thought.
It’s been 7mo and we’re not all here every day. It’s fine. I appreciate the post and discussion it sparked.
Why does it bother you?
Why are you interpreting it as a complaint, or an expression of being bothered?
Occasional reposts are well within HN's norms, and when something is reposted, it's common to link to past discussions for comparison.
Why do you think it bothers me? I wrote the original comment because previous discussions might be interesting reads.
Maybe prefixing with "Previous discussions" instead of "Posted here multiple times before" will not sound like complaining
The phrasing was matter of fact. And there is nothing inherently wrong with reposting. Certain other websites have developed a culture opposed to it, but I have yet to see that here.
Agreed, I actually tried and go back to change the wording to exactly that, but unfortunately it was already past the editing grace period. But lesson learned for next time.
I listened to the audio book a few months back - probably the last time it appeared on HN, I'm not sure how else I would have stumbled across it. It's well worth the time.
I remember particularly the teacher's statement that (paraphrasing, it's been a while) "if I could not resist, it means that anyone else of my station or below could also not resist".
The idea that an admission of impotence is not just a personal note, but also an observation of an actionable waterline that anyone with fewer means will also be unable to rise above...
"If I am unable to do X, who else is unable to do X?" is such a powerful question to consider.
Free societies are not ruled by decree.
Free societies are not ruled through masses.
Who gets to rule, then, and why? Your position that the masses shouldn't rule is at odds with a government legitimized by the consent of the government. Why should I or anyone else obey a government I don't consider legitimate?
Five essential questions of democracy (Tony Benn):
His observation is that the last question fundamentally defines a democracy - not the ability for the people to give someone power, but to dispose of that power via accepted protocols. It is also the reason people with power so commonly hate democracy: properly answered, these questions limit their use of that power, and threaten to remove their access to it completely.The problem is one of scale, at the macro level.
The upside to large countries is that they are economically and militarily stronger, on average. This is leads to a high resistance to outside influence. The downside is large enough (arbitrary) populations encompass multiple ideologies and understandings of the world, which lead to infighting and ultimately destabilization. Note the 3.5% rule, among cultural drift and competing economic incentives.
On the flip side, a small concentrated population is more stable internally, but is fragile to outside influences.
The short answer is the masses are precisely who should rule. The long answer is that they can't if you want the nation to be independent. I posit, there is no optimal balance. There are only different choices that ultimately lead to ruin.
A ruling technology maybe. Open source, auditable.
Those who watch the Watchers.
Switzerland is obviously ruled by the masses, and that is freedom for those masses, so I think what you say here is quite false.
I can't tell if you're being ironic.
Which unfree society is ruled by the people? (not in name like north korea or soviet). Swizerland?
Oh the masses didn't like that.
Keep on like that and you'll be accused of unscientificness.
https://youtu.be/Sfekgjfh1Rk?feature=shared
Bonhoeffer got a lot of things right.
> "How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.
The experts, people that have dedicated their lives to understand authoritarianism have already given the alarm. Well, a specialist has even moved to Canada for god's sake.
And well, criticizing democracy is fashionable again. High profile figures started saying out loud that "maybe democracies are overrated. maybe democracies cannot deal with the world as it is now". Just listen to what people are actually saying instead of what you think they meant when they say it and you'll hear they saying that an authoritarian leader is what america needs now.
> And well, criticizing democracy is fashionable again.
Yup. I've see it a few times a week on HN at this point
By all means criticise the implementation but definitely don’t criticise the idea! America’s democracy would be greatly improved by being made more representative through electoral reform.
Yeah, but this is not what they are saying. They are saying that debate stiffle innovation. They are saying that we should get rid of all this mess and let the wise man govern.
I think about least 3/4 of the anti-democracy rhetoric I've seen here has been from people opposed to this administration.
So I wouldn't conflate opposition to democracy/embracing authoritarianism with one particular man if that is what you mean by "let the wise man govern."
It's broader than that and more worrying because there are multiple authoritarian factions who agree mainly on democracy being the enemy.
In that sense it's a similar sort of set up heading into WWII
I think it has been happening for a while now cancel culture had a very negative effect on academia Jordon Peterson and Warren Smith being examples of that. I much appreciate Dr. Sam Richards who walks the fine line of trying to be centerist but he did comment recently how he does gets hate from both sides. Now I know this is going to be down voted because some will say I am both sidesing this when it's clearly one side right now. This is true I think that's however not a great argument to start a conversation. the founding fathers gave us a great foundation to work with it just takes open dialogue to convince enough of the other side that their is an actual good counter argument. The violence we have seen in the past couple months is only going to entrench positions because each side will want the result of that violence to have been meaningful furthering solidifing the separation. Currently I think American agree on the vast majority of things social media just does it's best to highlight our differences but the average person has mostly the same culture and the same day to day issues so I actually am hopeful.
The US has always been a very moralistic country. From banning alcohol and burning witches to its long struggle to accept differences (in skin color, gender or even the definition of freedom). “Cancel culture” is part of America since its foundation. It’s a moral tug of war.
It’s a different thing altogether to have the government itself weaponize “cancel culture”, however. As much as right wing people like to scream that “democrats are the same”, there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge (“if the left cancels, I can cancel too”). It’s a flight from moral infighting to authoritarian rule.
> there’s little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse and disregard for institutions in the name of revenge
If you think that, you've not been paying attention. Both sides doing it is disgusting and I think the right does it more than the left (at this point in time), but the left DOES do it.
Great argument, congratulations
> little evidence of the same level of systemic abuse
You not looking for it doesn't mean "little evidence."
It's well documented that the previous administration pressured social media to silence views it didn't like, as well as instances of debanking conservative organizations.
That's not to say this administration doesn't throw its weight around, too, but to think it's only one side make you complicit in the problem.
Some individuals from the previous administration asking a donor to do something is not exactly the same thing as the president FORCING someone to do it and demanding bribes or else they’ll impose fines on the business (which he then proceeds to do anyway, eg with Nvidia)
You’re quite literally a character from the book in this post, if you think they’re equivalent (your argument is verbatim what one of the nazis interviewed uses to justify having supported hitler)
Reading this, you can see how the political ideology of trumps supporters was so easily manipulated, and how effective the radicalisation of the right has been.
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy" -James Madison
Will we ever get a second analogy?
We’re working on it as we speak
Caesar?
I know this is made to be an analogy with America, but people there still think much about politics at least at this moment, despite the recent chaos slowly becoming expected and mundane. I think the point of the passage is not to allow things to slip and not to simply accept the chaos, but the good news is there's still time, for the most part.
no the point is to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about their perceived political enemies
Everyone in this thread is reading this in relation to the current US government. But some other interesting parallels are the current Israeli government, and more speculatively, A(G)I.
IR is more complex. They know very well what it's leading to, since it's part of their founding history. Half the population do go out on streets to rotest, while the other half go out to protest the protests. So it is the opposite of the lack of awareness/too busy with life and changes etc the article talks about.
meanwhile, this is very pertinent to USA current climate. But interestingly, people will repost this, comment, vote, but nobody will ever think of discussing impeachment.
He’s been impeached twice already and the GOP has chosen party over constitution and country twice. The handful of token GOP senate votes for conviction don’t matter. With a GOP house, an impeachment stops there without going to the Senate, there’s already been a House vote to impeach this year that failed. A bunch of Democrats voted against it.
One man had the chance to make the Jan 6th impeachment stick. If McConnell had maintained his integrity, I have no idea who would be president now, but it wouldn’t be Trump.
The part I found relevant for Israel was the bit about how war is a catalyst that lets the leaders justify anything on the basis of necessity, including things they wanted all along for ideological reasons.
> Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong.
Sort of pertinent for any boiling the frog or salami tactics situation where something profoundly negative is gradually introduced into society so as not to raise alarm.
Tremendous.
People say to me, "Donald, I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say." And they're right! They right! They said nothing, they thought of nothing to say.
>But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes
Look at Russians right now.
The vast majority of them do their jobs, pay their taxes, and consider themselves patriots and good people because they help their families and motherland, and are polite and well-meaning.
While their jobs help the military machine that murders thousands of innocent people every week, their taxes fund that machine, and their complacency keeps the system stable for decades, costing not only their enemies, but also themselves and their own kids their futures.
When starvation, war, and political terror come, they will consider themselves innocent victims of another unearned, unavoidable political tragedy - not understanding their own decades of inaction brought it on them.
And America isn't that far behind.
Not thinking objectively, living unconsciously, engrossed in short-term matters - is the worst sin that leads to all the other sins. It's how it happened in Belarus, Russia and it's how it's going to happen in US.
The shocking thing isn't that fascism would come back. The shocking thing is that the people I thought were smart would allow it to normalize so fast and give up without a fight. And that even some people I know are apparently fascists at heart - they just needed "permission" to show themselves.
For most of my teens I wondered what side I would have been on in 1930s Germany. If I would have had the courage to stand up to fascists. Even when they emerge among your friends. I used to wonder what side other people would end up on. Who would recognize fascism for what it was. Who would have the guts to call people out.
I read extensively about fascism. About the war. About the camp. About where all this came from.
Almost everyone has disapponted me in the past year. Not only the shits who turned out to be closeted fascists, but the cowards who do not dare to speak up. Because this time there was no excuse. Our history should have warned about this. And we failed. Almost all of us. Almost everyone makes excuses for themselves. For why they can't stand up to this.
The excuses are worse than the stupidity.
I do not despise people for being stupid. I despise people for being having had every opportunity to not repeat past mistakes and still
> For why they can't stand up to this.
How have you been standing up to "this"? How do you expect others to stand up?
I have it on my shelf. Fascinating to read the perspective of regular citizens who organized themselves to do something terrible. Likely to remain relevant for as long as people can read it.
There really needs to be a Second American Revolution. It should be bloodless and as simple as 90% of the country showing up to take back the wealth that was stolen from the middle classes during the neoliberal assault. The popular momentum exists for this project in both the MAGA camp and lefties that support Sanders. It seems like the only alternative is liberal authoritarianism which we're seeing from Vance and Peter Thiel. We still have a chance. Let's use it.
This isn't a drill. Let us assemble the Rebel Alliance.
Ah yes, the syllogism of thieves strikes again. - You have it. I want it. Therefore you must have stolen it from me and I am justified in taking it "back".
Have you read history at all? "Revolutions" by entitled thieves who feel that every transaction they agreed to is somehow retroactively unfair because somebody else has more money is the surest way to kill an economy. Nobody wants to do trade with cannibals.
You talk like it's the case that people with wealth never actually stole it. Yes I've read history thanks, and there are plenty of cases where it turns out for the better for the majority of people. Judge each case on its merits instead of citing fatuous truisms.
I wonder how many people interpret this based on “the other side” rather than objectively?
As a German outside observer I can tell you there is only one side going down the facist path.
The "other side" isn't great either. Would be great to have a sane alternative, I guess.
This line of reason is actually becoming more frequently used to justify things. For years, the right wing propaganda machine has been establishing the concept that conservatism and America as a whole is besieged by authoritarian leftists and their smug out-of-outch enablers the liberals.
THEY are the authoritarians and they are seeking to destroy America. WE are its defenders, and in the face of existential threat, our methods are justified. THEY have been doing this to us for years, now this is our chance to fight back.
Yes, and then they call this openly a Reichstag fire moment and people still don't get the parallels.
And back then there was a proper systems conflict. People like Krupp actually had to fear being disowned by communists.
Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view?
When you take a step back it becomes very clear that this escalating messaging is being push onto both sides of the political isle to create these feelings.
I remember in the span of two weeks seeing almost identical posts urging people to train because you are going to have to fight. The wording was almost identical only one post said “leftists” and the other “fascists”.
My only question who is pushing the messaging and who does it benefit?
In what way are democrats (or, “leftists,” if you must) authoritarian?
Requiring face masks in a pandemic (which happened under the trump admin, in case anyone forgot) is not the same as masked goons throwing brown people into vans.
As a libertarian, I see authoritarianism as the imposition of top-down control, often fine-grained, onto individuals' lives. The reflexive reaching for government/law to solve problems. The war on drugs. Mass surveillance, regardless of its goals or who is in charge. The crushing weight and lack of justice in the criminal justice system. The draconian copyright regime.
This makes the Democratic [establishment] bureaucratic authoritarians, while the current Republican [establishment] are autocratic authoritarians.
Obviously I would prefer anti-authoritarianism - a goal of reducing government control in our lives (including corporate de facto government). I think so would most people, but for being lured in by partisan messaging. Authoritarian singular-perspective narratives always sound so simplistically compelling.
But while the autocratic authoritarians weren't in power, it was all too easy to point to the bureaucratic authoritarians as a creeping problem. So now we have autocratic authoritarianism "good and hard". Between the two, I'd prefer bureaucratic authoritarianism as it at least keeps the worst impulses in check (eg the capricious tariff taxes, the naked corruption/bribes, politicizing departments to go after political enemies, wanton cruelty against immigrants for circenses, etc). The only real question is whether at least some of our institutions will hold out so that we can collectively decide to change course, or if it's just set now.
As far as the mask issue, I want to live in a world where they weren't mandated, but yet most everyone wears one out of enlightened self interest. The traditional Republican message would have been "wear a mask to protect yourself". The fact that it was self-harming contrarianism instead has more to do with edgelordism and foreign influence campaigns.
> Similar to calling everyone Nazi’s and fascists who has an opposing point of view?
Well, the actual neo-Nazis do support one particular party (and it's not the Democrats); see (e.g.) Charlottesville, 2017:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally
And it was (is?) official Republican strategy to court racists:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
As The Simpsons once joked “Fox News: Not Racist, But #1 With Racists”:
* https://www.nydailynews.com/2017/07/24/simpsons-creator-matt...
You must separate actions from words, and government actors from private citizens, and powerful monied interests from powerless randos. If you don't do this your brain will remain cooked.
There are no "Leftists" in government. No, Bernie and AOC do not count. Soc Dems are nice, don't get me wrong, but the vanguard they are not.
There is no "Leftist" billionaire funding propaganda, no the boogyman 'Soros' doesn't count. He's very much a 'liberal' capitalist, just ask the UK.
There is no major US media outlet or platform owned by a "Leftist". If you insist that actually Biden, Obama, Clinton, Schumer, or Pelosi are leftists, please please just stop talking about politics.
Again, I'm begging you to separate "things pseudonymous people say online" from "things government officials say and do"
Let's try an example: "Fascists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies" or "Leftists are sending the US military and an unaccountable masked federal police force into cities to quell dissent and hunt down their ideological enemies"
Which of these statements is true?
Are you just going to ignore the 2016-2024 state-directed viewpoint censorship on social media?
Now we have 2025-? stare censored social media. Of all the hypocrisies, people screaming "but what about THEM" while ignoring what people in power NOW are doing is the most insufferable
I think the appropriate response to a lack of due consideration to the bill of rights should be doubling down on the bill of rights. not setting it on fire as show of oneupmanship
I think the sane alternative has long been modeled by the US Constitution.
The real test is how any model handles corruption and expunges it because no matter the ideology, people are in charge and people are corruptible.
The only real model that can work is one that minimizes the power of those in charge.
The US constitution is outdated and vulnerable. Modern constitutions like Germany’s basic law are a lot more resilient. We are watching the US constitution fail right now, it didn’t even take smart men to start dismantling it. I hope I’ll be proven wrong, but what indications do you see right now that the US constitution is performing as intended?
I’m unfamiliar with German basic law, but considering the lawlessness we’re seeing play out in the US right now, I’m curious how/why modern constitutions are less vulnerable?
By this I mean: it’s not as if the things we see playing out are lawful. Is there a structural difference that somehow prevents the same kind of lawlessness?
Put another way, what stops a movement that decides to ignore Germany’s constitution from ignoring it should they somehow gain power?
Constitution is just a social contract, it’s not a law of physics. Without people wanting to preserve it, it’s just words on a piece of paper with no real power. With a majority in the Supreme Court, the Constitution can be interpreted however one wants.
1. When Trump lost to Biden, many Republicans including Mike Pence certified Biden's win as prescribed by the constitution.
2. Trump knows the military will not participate in a coup.
3. Trump will not run for a third term. If he does, he will loose because Americans knows it's unconstitutional.
So Americans know that all the dirty laundry will come out when the next president takes office.
The problem is norms are being destroyed.
It’s not all new with Trump (governing by executive order, ignoring duly enacted laws, strong arming media companies, etc.). But while earlier administrations might have done those things on the margins, Trump takes them to 11 (in the spirit of the new Spinal Tap) and makes them the central and primary means of administration.
With the norms destroyed, we potentially lose our nation of laws, and become a plutocracy with different juntas every few years.
1. There's barely any normal republicans left, its all MAGA now that would hang Pence like they wanted to in 2021.
2. Likely true, but they don't really need the military as ICE which now employs all the armed racists they need, like Jan 6 people.
3. He's floating the idea, even talking about not having elections if they're in a war like Ukraine, even though its not in the constitution. Either way they're going all in on rigging elections so Vance will take over.
The US Constitutional government is meant to be slow, methodical and gridlocked. It is supposed to take enormous compromise to get any decision created into law.
This post from 2003 has made the rounds several times in recent years...
"The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
...and I recall people reading it and saying they don't see how Donald Trump ticks the boxes.
It's all very tedious to complain about when half the electorate supports it. It makes one feel like a nag and a broken record.
Also see Umberto Eco's 14 characteristics of fascism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
There are clearly very many countries that tick most of those boxes. Including some that i wouldn't necessarily define as fascist. Prominent examples are China, Russia, Iran North Korea and other middle eastern countries. I'm not saying this list is incorrect, per se, but it is vague to the point of uselessness.
Authoritarianism is IMO the common thread whether you’re talking about fascism or communism.
At the root, there’s either principled freedom or control.
I mean, as far as fascist states go China, Russia and North Korea are pretty up there? In the original "14 points" [0], the author explains this is not an exhaustive checklist that makes something fascist if it ticks all of the items, and gives motivation for such a list. Go read it if you have time to, it's rather short and well written.
> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
> But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
[0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
1930s fascism can never occur again. It was a product of its time.
But the psychology behind fascism stems from deep human quirks and is something eternal.
All those nations, except perhaps China, share the DNA. If we didn't already have names for their systems, we probably would describe them as fascistic.
What Trump has turned the American government into is closer to Fascism than to Liberal Democracy, no?
In future highschool textbooks Trump Fascism will have its own name ("Trashism" perhaps?) but it will be placed in the same chapter as the others.
It's inaccurate to blame Trump. He is a greedy egotistical idiot. Blaming Trump is like blaming a rock that hit you in the head. Look up and pay attention to who threw the rock. Blame them.
The Trump presidency is the culmination of a roughly 45 year campaign to return the United States to the Gilded Age, and to ensure it stays that way until it's bled dry and nothing remains of its corpse. The political and social problems that led to his second election have been a long time coming.
What's interesting is that the gaps in our political system that allow him to do so many illegal and distasteful things have always been there. The framers of the constitution never anticipated all three branches of government colluding together in alignment and bad faith, with the vociferous support of roughly half the voting population.
That's the nature of fascism, it molds itself to fit different societies. German fascism would never have worked in America, American fascism is draped in the flag and holds the cross.
I have come to conclude that there are both reasonable and unbalanced individuals on the extreme ends of both sides. When Obama was elected I had paranoid relatives telling me he was going to pilfer their 401k and bankrupt the country. Well, that never happened. When Trump was re-elected it was, “He is going to tear down democracy! He’s going to put gay people in concentration camps!” Last I checked we still have free elections, and nobody cares whether you’re gay. And we see political violence targeting both major parties. This also is not new. So I think this isn’t a result of anyone’s politics, but rather individual temperance; the voices we choose to amplify and listen to.
> "Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better.[...]"
I read this book a few years ago and I can't stop thinking about this line of discourse (there's more of this subject in the book). I've felt this exceptional frustration and disgust towards the (in my opinion) wildly underreacting non-fascist millions in the States, more so than the fascists themselves, which seemed contradictory.
The closest I've come to communicating why is that one group is on script while the other isn't. For example, a deadly airborne disease is awful, but the truly scary thing to me would be witnessing doctors and immunologists just kind of shrugging their shoulders.
I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom. I always admired that. I remember thinking it was a feature that they're so quick to protest and make a scene. I had, without any doubt in my heart and soul, anticipated total disaster. I was expecting to see protests and riots and fires and further uncelebrated but deemed necessary violence in response to the slow ablation of freedom and liberty.
It's quite possible that I'm wrong and that total disaster is premature. But never before have I felt this certain about an "everyone else is wrong" belief. It's scary and somewhat lonely. Reading this book made me feel much less lonely, and much more scared.
The right in the US has convinced people that the only way to protect their own freedoms is to let them take the freedom from everyone, and allocate out appropriate permissions to the right people afterwards.
There's also a spirit of "I don't care as long as they get hurt more" that's stronger than ever.
The party of self-sufficiency and pulling yourself up into a better life with minimal oversight from government has become the party of cutting off your nose to spite your own face.
It's ridiculous.
Americans do not fuck around with loud proclamations but actions are harder. Don’t doubt that there are actions, though. But our media landscape is extremely fragmented and successful organizations of people are not covered. There are plenty of loud, mass protests happening everywhere in the country. But also understand that successful organizations that do get media attention are cracked down on. Not so long ago Los Angeles had mass demonstrations against ICE raids and the federal government literally sent in the military against its own people. Particularly conservative media covered these protestors as anti-American for their protesting, and this narrative made it so far as brought up repeatedly in spaces like Hacker News. Somehow optics of the protestors matters more than the actions of the government.
The people are fractured, the people who are trying to fight for their fellow Americans are depicted as anti-American and enough Americans are buying it that the fractures continue.
It's basic primate psychology, status is the key. It divides the society well-enough that if a majority are not inconvenienced, then the doublespeak creates a denial at all scales. Even things that are obviously absurd like vaccine denial aren't about across the board policy, the exclusive high status can still gain them. The policy and others are used as a political wedge to create eugenics, racism, whatever the underlying status-bias curve that gains them the weird pluralities to maintain a semblance of power.
Humans are dark matter communicators. We code all the top-down biases seamlessly in news stories, speech, novels, movies, always as a by-product of social and virtue signaling. Even altruism comes with a handicap principle. Ultimately we are followers, not leaders, or adventurers, that would be chaos. If the leaders can fool the populace by mixtures of narratives, and sleight of hand oppress on behalf of enough pluralities status, the audience id placated and inert.
> I was expecting to see protests and riots and fires and further uncelebrated but deemed necessary violence in response to the slow ablation of freedom and liberty.
To what % are you confident thst you would be one of the first participants in these, were the same to happen to your own country?
I’m not sure that’s all that relevant other than thematically. And I’m not sure anyone can have confidence in that. I suspect most people are very overconfident. But I’ve been to pretty much all the major protests of my life (I’m only 6 hours from Ottawa and 2 from Toronto) (except Québec referendum rally: I was 9), and I’ve given an average of 1% of my income to Ukraine these past 3 years. So I’d like to hope I would be one of the first. But nobody can be sure how they’d actually respond, right?
> I grew up with this belief that for all their loud, obnoxious quirks and faults, Americans do not fuck around when it comes to their principles of liberty and freedom.
This is exactly the problem. Americans see their own country as perfect example of freedom and liberty, and the idea that they might be wrong never crosses their minds. When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.
One of the things that Trump is doing is pointing to general "wokeness", "cancel culture", and so on, and labeling them as censorship. The trick is that he's not exactly wrong. Most Americans have their entire livehoods tied to their employers, which usually are emotionless corporations that can fire said Americans at will. This means that, if you express an undesirable opinion, you can and will be fired, and self-censorship is a vital element of American culture. Many Americans celebrated this as a feature that allowed them to maintain social cohesion. Now that the tide has shifted and the list of socially acceptable opinions has changed, same Americans are suddenly very upset because they cannot voice their opinions.
It's not that Americans suddenly stopped valuing freedom and liberty. They never did, but you never noticed, because you never tried to cross the boundary. You can interpret this in two ways - either be sad that your vision of America isn't real, or be happy that for all bad things that Trump is doing, it's not a fundamental change in American society.
> When you try to explain to them that their culture has elements actively hostile to personal freedom, you get a syntax error at best.
Alright, I'll bite. Mind elaborating more?
As a follow up question, are you talking more about positive or negative freedoms? I e. freedom-to vs freedom-from?
I imagine one example is the imposition of their values on LGBTQ/trans/etc. It’s very much a “stop you from having personal freedoms” padded with very, very weak strawman arguments for why they’re protecting themselves or kids from imaginary bogeymen.
Thank you for illustrating my point. I dedicated entire following paragraph to explaining that you're not free if exercising your lawful freedom costs you your job, but you didn't even read it. It's not that you didn't understand it, you didn't even read it. Literal syntax error.
To answer your follow-up question: I understand "freedom" as "freedom to". This trivially includes "freedom from" through "freedom to choose not to participate in something".
I think this is interesting, but perhaps for reasons other than intended. I think it shows the formation of the post-war mythology that Germans used to explain to themselves how their family members or parents were good people, and did not deserve any punishment, despite the involvement in the most genocidal movement in modern history.
When you read these accounts, it always feels like no one had any agency or knowledge what's going on, that Hitler was basically a lone wolf who installed himself in power against the wishes of the nation, that had some outlandish ideas that no good German believed in, and that then he and a small band of his supporters somehow forced everyone to comply.
And to be clear, it was a totalitarian state, but it also wasn't North Korea and no Soviet Union. If nothing else, you could always leave. Many countries wouldn't take fleeing Jews, but as a dissenting German, you'd be welcomed with open hands almost everywhere.
So yes, of course there were people who hated the regime, and just decided they didn't want to or couldn't rock the boat. But a significant portion of the population approved of what was happening. Hitler was wildly popular. Millions of people enthusiastically bought into what he was selling. Germany perceived itself as a wounded lion after WWI. They felt they had a rightful claim on their "living space". And antisemitism in Europe needed no marketing. Tellingly, purges of Jews continued even after the war in the Soviet sphere of influence.
My point is, for every person who genuinely had no choice, there were ten who definitely had it, who more or less approved what was happening, and who would have been proud of it had Germany won the war.
history does not repeat itself it rhymes
If you’re interested in this topic, I really recommend reading How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley. [1] It’s a remarkable book - slim, easy to read, and enlightening. What was most astonishing to me was that there is a playbook: ever wonder why these regimes always target LGTBQ people, for example? It’s explained here, along with everything else you need to know about the mechanics of prosaic, predictable type of government.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Fascism_Works
To save some people a click:
> According to a New York Times review, Stanley's book—a "slim volume"—"breezes across decades and continents" and says that Donald Trump "resembles other purveyors of authoritarian ultranationalism."
The problem is that essays like this are always written, preserved and propagated with the benefit of hindsight, producing the mistaken feeling that an actionable lesson is contained within.
"A bad thing happened. We had been a little uneasy, but did not act on it. Well, of course it was hard to act on mere unease. Still, if only we had acted on it sooner...". And thus, what we take away is a simple lesson and call to action - are you feeling uneasy now? If so, it is time to stop and work to derail society from whatever track it is on.
Something that never makes it into these essays are all the times when people felt uneasy and overwhelmed, and yet nothing happened that in our backward-looking perspective ought to have been prevented. Were those feelings of unease distinguishable, to those who had them, from those experienced by the protagonists of this essay?
Something that is discussed even less are all the instances where people experienced the same unease and alienation and did act on them. The story of Nazi Germany is told as one of evil purpose-driven agitators, their evil enabling cronies, and a whole host of good people who were vaguely uneasy but did nothing. A parallel story unfolded throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, though. Germany had lost an existential war, and was under crushing pressure from the victors which wanted to be paid their dues in flesh. Society was tearing at the seams, the massive country to the East had fallen to a totalitarian revolution and rumours of repression and atrocities were trickling in every day even as their sympathisers engaged in street violence and made no secret of wanting to establish the same system at home. First the global financial crisis destroyed whatever semblance of stability and prosperity was left, and then government was paralysed due to lack of majorities even as a repeat loomed. Then, too, good people were vaguely and then increasingly uneasy - and then they decided to actually do something about it. That something was a last-ditch stabilising effort by setting aside factionalism and forming a unity government of anti-communist parties. The rest is history.
As far as more modern comparisons are concerned, I find it difficult to read this essay and not draw a comparison to the COVID years. "Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "Believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand"? "or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"? Unfortunately, for the Terminally Online, that period has now receded into history as a cute extended staycation that normalised remote working. This obscures the extent to which, right now, the US may be experiencing the results of good "big men" (on the other side) having decided to act on their increasing sense of unease.
> Receiving decisions deliberated in secret"? "Believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand"? "or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security"? "Demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before"
It's awfully funny that your comparison is to the COVID years! There were a million deaths from COVID. It's almost as if those people don't exist anymore, all those people that died, that their lives were nothingness and not worth fighting for.
Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?
Nothing was faked with COVID, it was all out there in the open. People who actively lied and spread misinformation got tagged as doing so on some but not all platforms, but they could still speak just fine and have their views weighed against the warnings of the platform which was giving them the means to communicate their misinformation. It's not like a popular broadcaster who said something that the President disliked would get fired because the executives were getting strongarmed into firing the person.
I find your comment quite disturbing, and it is making me reassess just how far down the hole the US has gone. We are far closer to Nazi Germany than I had assumed. That a person that can form full sentences like you do, in paragraphs of thought, and still type these thoughts out. Perhaps its because I was a scientist and could evaluate all the information that was out there in the public, it wasn't a mystery, the basis for decisions was 100% transparent and open for anybody to see. For others, that listened to lies and never got the information or disregarded it as unintelligible, perhaps what you describe might make sense. But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.
There's little point in retreading all the old arguments about COVID here (whose mind is going to be changed at this point?), but just to illustrate the sort of things I am talking about, there was the early whiplash in government messaging about mask-wearing[1], where the relevant officials outright stated after the fact that they were issuing instructions that were at least deliberately vague about the motivations in order to further an interest (prioritising supply for medical professionals) that was not communicated to the public; and the argumentative contortions[2] to exempt certain classes of political protest from the restrictions that were imposed on everything else.
I'm sure that if you were tapped into certain strands of "the conversation" on Twitter at the time, you did not feel like any of these decisions were made behind your back for inscrutable reasons! I'm also sure that all the way from 1918 through to 1945, there were certain strata of society that were looped into the decision making and never once got the feeling that they were being governed "by surprise". In neither of those situations was this the case for the majority of the affected population, though, and appealing to your own rarefied status as a "scientist" hardly helps the argument that your own experience is any evidence that government during COVID happened by consent.
> Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?
Editing to replace a section here, because I was unhappy with the (lack of) clarity in my original text. I am not just meaning to make a two-way comparison between COVID and one or another of the German periods. We are looking at four distinct situations here:
(1) The Weimar interbellum (1918~1936). Well-meaning people were beset by a creeping unease over instability and communism (which by 1933 had already killed on the order of ten times your COVID figure). They chose to act on it by enabling Hitler's rise to power.
(2) The Nazi era (1936~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of communism, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease, but they did not act upon it. Bad outcomes.
(3) The COVID period (2019~2023?). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of COVID, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease. They chose to act on it by enabling Trump's rise to power.
(4) Trump II (2025~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Well-meaning people are beset by creeping unease. (What's next?)
Looking at the first three cases where outcomes are known, do you actually see some pattern that looks like it'd yield a good rule for when unease should be acted upon by well-meaning people? Given these examples and your alignment of course you would be tempted to say "when they are left-wing", but it's not like we can't find relatively left-coded examples similar to (1), or right-coded examples similar to (2). I would go looking to spin a narrative around the French Revolution, or the two phases of the Russian Revolution (which might well be parseable as a case of left action against the Empire, followed by a case of right inaction against the Bolsheviks), but this would require some more research to do at a reasonable level of quality.
> But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I am not American or in the US anymore (though I spent many years there as a PhD student, including through the COVID years).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...
and remember there was a NAZI RALLY AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
1939, twenty-thousand attended
while all that was going on, it was normalized
in the end took 15 million military killed
38 million civilians killed
to stop it finally
when in 1930 it simply started by making all other political parties illegal
making all jews illegal immigrants so they could not have jobs, healthcare or even shop eventually
group after group made illegal so they could be disappeared
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/artifact/chart-of-...
"when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."
Remember that, then they attack the immigrants, the woke people, the trans gender and the leftist...
This book's cover/spine features swastika — definitely controversial on a bookshelf, but can lead to some aggressive questioning ["why own this?" e.g.]. Unfortunately this detracts from the truths within this book (that National Socialist Ideology is attractive to the majority in a fascist regime change-over; you cannot fault ill-informed "nazi citizens" for their patriotism).
Instead of me rambling on about this for the dozenth time, I'm just going to provide some of my favorite passages from the book:
>"My faith found that of God in my ten Nazi friends ... they were each of them a most marvelous mixture of good and bad impulses, their lives a marvelous mixture of good and bad acts. I liked them. I couldn't help it." —xiii
>"Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, 'the democratic part.' The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it." —p47
>"In good times, you work with reward. But in bad times and good, you work. These are good times. The regime?—the regime promised the people bread, and I bake the bread." —p32, quoting a 51 baker, Nazi party manager, in 1933
>"When I asked Herr Wedekind, the baker, why he had believed in National Socialism, he said, 'Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.' " —p47
>"The lives of my nine friends—and even of the tenth, the teacher—were lightened and brightened by National Socialism as they knew it. And they look back at it now—nine of them, certainly—as the best time of their lives; for what are men's lives? There were jobs and job security ... what does a mother want to know? She wants to know where her children are, and with whom, and what they are doing ... so things went better at home, and when things go better at home, and on the job, what more does a husband and father want to know?" — p48
>"...'in 1938, during a Nazi festival ... the entusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' " —p51, quoting an anti-Nazi German imprisoned for hiding Jews
>"The German community—the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere." —p56
>"You look every man in the eye, and, though your eyes may be empty, they are clear. You are respected in the community. Why? Because your attitudes are the same as the community's. But are the community's attitudes respectable? That's not the point." —p60
>"Adolf Hitler was good for Germany—in my friends' view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending upon the individual" –p69
>"All ten of my friends gladly confess this crime of having been Germans in Germany." —p164
>" 'Many of the students—the best of them— understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today ... the young people, and yes, the old, too, were drawn to opposite extremes in those [earlier] years ... it is a very dangerous mistake, to think ... that Germans came to believe everything they were told, all the dreadful nonesense that passed for truth' " —p192, a teacher reflecting on students
>" 'Understand, I was proud to be wearing the insignia. It showed I belonged ... still—I didn't want those Jews from our town to see me wearing my insignia ... it hurt me to have Jews see me wearing them.' " —p200
>" 'It is easy these days to say anti-Nazi and even to believe it. Before 1933 I certainly was, but then—only again after the war.' " —p201
>" 'You say Totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism; but perhaps you have never been alone, unemployed, sick, or penniless, or, if you have, perhaps never for long, for so long that you have given up hope; and so it is easy for you to say, Totalitarianism—no. But the other side, the side I speak of, was the side that the people outside Germany never saw, or perhaps never cared to see. And today nobody in Germany will say it. But believe me, nobody in Germany has forgotten it, either.' " —p223
>"The six [most] extremists all said of the extermination of Jews, 'That was wrong' or 'That was going too far,' as if to say, 'The gas oven was somew2hat too great a punishment for people who, after all, deserved very great punishment.' My ten friends had been told, not since 1939 but since 1933, that their nation was fighting for its life." —p183
>"Men under pressure are first dehumanized and only then demoralized, not the other way around. Organization and specialization, system, subsystem, and supersystem are the consuqence, not the cause of the totalitarian spirit. National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists." —p277
>" 'It doesn't matter whether you call it a democracy or dictatorship or what, as long as you have discipline and order.' The sensitive cabinetmaker ... and the insensitive bill-collector ... said the same thing. Neither morality nor religion but legality is decisive in a state of perpetual siege. And the attest of legality is order; law and order are not two things but one." —p284
>"There were only people, all of them certainly guilty of something, all of them certainly innocent of something, coming out from under the broken stones of the real Thousand-Year Reich—the Reich that had taken a thousand years, stone by stone, to build ... how could they understand the world of broken stones that once were houses? Houses mean people. The war against houses was a war against people. 'Strategic bombing' was one of war's little jokes; the strategy was to hit ... houses" —p296
----
There're dozens of typos above, typed while drinking my morning coffee.I hadn't skimmed through they thought they were free [author's styling] since first reading this extremely challenging book, six year ago.
----
Whenever I've recommended to IRL friends (seeing "the book on your bookshelf with a swastika on it!"), nobody wants to read about Nazi's... but this book is about why such ideologies are so attractive, and why ought be avoided.
Read this book, but if the topic interests you Ordinary Men by Chris Rush expands much further on this topic, following a geriatric brigade of conscripted laymen "Nazis."
¢¢
> I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother's arm and whispered, `oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!` No one outisde seems to understand how [attractive Nazi ideology] was.' "
It pays off to point out that actual Jews and opposition left completely different writings and opinions. They did not felt free, in fact. By the 1938, they were thoroughly victimized and fully aware of it.
There was a lot of fear in Germany itself.
The above are opinions and feelings of Nazi, basically. It make sense to write and analyze those, but they dont speak for non-nazi germans, they dont know former opposition, Jews or minorities actually felt and thought.
Correct, the above quotes are from a book which uses German citizens' POVs to explore the dangerous allure of National Socialism to a majority-in-crisis (some using Nazis' own words). A Jew recommended this fantastic book to me [if that matters to you] after he and I had discussed Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
>"if I weren't a Jew, I think I'd be a Nazi!" —p51, an anti-Nazi German, imprisoned for hiding Jews, quoting a Jewish girl he'd overheard telling her own mother.
Was there a reason you cited that particular quote..?
It's interesting, from that of certain famous Jewish POVs, that both Albert Einstein & Henry Kissenger also lamented similarly, well into their old ages (only being Jewish because of birth into Its customs).
I'd love to have real conversations [which is something this book assists readers with, regardless of "Nazi perspective only" as you somewhat-erroneously proclaim]. This is a book about ending hate.
This is a very intense piece, but misses some critical points. Germany after WWI was suffering terribly under reparations that European Allies and the US insisted on. Previously wealthy professionals went broke and begged in the streets for scraps. When Hitler swept aside reparations there was a great economic updraft as Germans rebuilt their economy and got back to work. The politics of the time was driven by the economy. The US appears to be entering into a period of stagnation and a breakdown of global trading upon which it had become dependent and that is a very different situation with economic factors hitting politics in ways unlike past crises.
The German economy was a house of cards waiting to fall, there was no real economic boom that could be sustained. When they annexed Austria they looted their gold reserves and continued to do so through Europe to sustain their economy.
And yet, every government does _not_ stumble into fascism.
So, what stops them ?
This has been true in the USA since approximately 1965, at least. Analysis has shown the general public has absolutely no say in policy making; literally everything is for this or that influential “special interest.”
This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.
Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.
A satirical journey:
It's 2008 and Barack Obama was just elected to Office.
In the year prior, the major Press institutions had pronounced him to be Communism Incarnate.
Running up to the inauguration, high level intelligence agency personnel and the Press, in alliance with a foreign intelligence service, concoct a narrative that would continuously threaten Obama with prison, undemocratically hamstring his presidency, and whip the populace up into hysteria for four years.
All defining Obama's presidency, and creating immense domestic tension in the country.
The Press and agencies advance the notion that since some voters may have had read foreign government published information about Obama, from one specific foreign government but not others, that this meant that the election itself was fundamentally invalid.
This adds to the national hysteria as well as catalyzes institutional anti-free-speech initiatives.
The culmination of those initiatives is CISA, who employ anti-Obama personnel to force censorship of social media running up to the next election in 2012.
In this period, it is impossible to observe a single Obama supporter being interviewed on a televised show or major podcast. Outside of the only sometimes pro-Obama channel. Virtually everything televised about Obama and his supporters are the views of Obama's detractors.
This exclusion adds to the hysteria.
As the 2012 election draws closer, the Press cherry-pick the story of a White drug fueled career criminal, who died while being arrested by a Black cop for robbery, to support the launch of nine months of violent terrorist riots by anti-communist Brown Shirts.
The Brown Shirts terrorize the entire nation for months, in their neighborhoods and on television, ostensibly for the cause of the White career criminal; in a manner that strongly communicates that this will all stop if the populace doesn't again elect Obama.
The Press, local governments, and the Obama-opposed bureaucracy demand that the Brown Shirts be given political cover against significant law enforcement opposition, arrest, and prosecution.
In total, almost thirty people would eventually die in the riots.
At the same time, a never before seen virus spreads across the World from a USG funded lab in China.
The Brown Shirt supporting system establishes national-level political pressure to the effect that all individual movement be restricted except for that of the Brown Shirts.
Given that most of the political apparatus that would be in charge of controlling movement is in support of the Brown Shirts, this demand is self-granted.
The Brown Shirts, aligned at with months of televised - and experienced - open terror in the country, protest outside of the trial of the Black cop. Whose Blackness is a factor in the trial.
Instead of using this jury-intimidation as basis for a mistrial, the judicial system and media ignore the jury-intimidation.
The Black Cop is convicted, and is a short time later almost stabbed to death by White Supremacists in prison.
Everywhere, statues and murals are created in the image of the dead White criminal.
Later, a young man attempts to stand in opposition to the Brown Shirts. Do do this, he stands with a long rifle. The Brown Shirts chase the man, in an effort to disarm him and then who knows. The man ends up variously killing or wounding the Brown Shirts chasing him.
The man is put on trial for murder. Obama supporters breath a sigh of relief when the man is acquitted.
The universal movement-restriction of the rest of the populace creates the excuse to enable the universal use of mail-in-ballots in the upcoming election.
The election comes and goes, and the "not a communist" candidate is elected instead of Obama.
Immediately, the Brown Shirt riots stop.
Various "reasonable center" aligned pundits proclaim that this is for the best, because a presidency under Obama is entirely too chaotic.
In total, Obama was impeached twice in his first term. With the assistance of the "reasonable center" that did not act against the Brown Shirts.
Obama supporters, traumatized from the months of chaos and pressure from the Brown Shirt riots, show up at the US capitol to protest the election's legitimacy.
Predicated on perceived mail-in-ballot fraud, leaving aside the general terrorized environment of the election-season.
Also falsely interpreting that the unprecedented riot-permissiveness for the Brown Shirts would also apply to them.
One female Obama supporter is shot in the head and killed.
The "not a communists" openly celebrate that killing, and continue to do so.
Brown Shirt individuals film themselves dressing in Obama supporter identifying clothing, prior to event at the Capitol. Laughing and joking.
The "not a communist" government pursues every single person that they can identify who attended the event at the Capitol, and charges and imprisons every one that they can. Over 1200 people, to my knowledge.
Many of those officials and Press who propagandize for this effort are the same who supported the actions of the Brown Shirts.
At least one Obama supporter commits suicide. Grandmothers are imprisoned for being on the grounds of the Capitol. An Obama supporter is imprisoned for the riot, even though he was no where near the Capitol at the time.
A "bipartisan" government committee is formed to investigate the Capitol event. Comprised of Right wing officials, who supported the Brown Shirts, and officials who were strongly aligned with the anti-Obama Left since prior to the 2008 election.
The Committee's purpose is to legitimize the USG mobilization effort to prosecute anyone involved in the event at the Capitol, as well as to attempt to have Obama charged with sedition.
The Committee later ends up destroying most of its collected evidence and is granted pardons by the outgoing "not a communist" president.
Obama supporters maintain that the national presentation of the Capitol event is intentionally and severely distorted in a tightly controlled information environment.
President "not a communist" opens the borders to the illegal ingress of tens of millions of White Brown Shirt supporters.
The open border is, itself, the invitation and reason that they come. The "not a communist" faction well-knows this. Regardless, the "not a communist" group claims that an investigation needs to happen as to the reason that they came.
Government CISA and other agency involvement in social media censorship inspires a billionaire to purchase the most significant social media platform.
Four years pass - Obama is elected for his second term.
Obama pardons most of the the people imprisoned for the Capitol event.
The Press immediately starts up the anti-communist hysteria engine.
Obama policy positions that are defined as being anything other than extreme right wing are evidence for the Red Scare. No matter how intolerable the policies of the extreme right wing are to the sensibilities of the Obama voters, and no matter how obviously socially harmful and unprecedented they are.
My next paragraph of writing would be to create an inverted scenario for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In order to avoid issues, I'm going to skip that step and continue to write in the context of it.
Also assume that one was written for the Brian Thompson assassination.
One assassin writes Brown Shirt words and symbols on his bullets.
This assassination will make it impossible to be as politically successful as before, for the Obama coalition.
After the assassinations, the Brown Shirt supporting populace openly sides with and celebrates the assassinations.
Approving of them when openly possible, or when they don't care as to how that approval is received.
Or stating an obviously performative disapproval, before qualifying the death by litigating the victim's worth in the immediate follow up sentence. Which widely reads as justification.
In the exact time period when the Obama Administration and supporters are trying to decide if they are dealing with a lone DVE or an entire opposition party that supports DVE events.
Obama's FCC Chair legally threatens a Brown Shirt supporting late night host for insinuating to his Brown Shirt supporting audience that one assassin was not "not a communist" affiliated but in fact was Left Wing.
Likely in order to prevent that misinformation from stopping de-radicalization for a widely DVE supportive populace, in an immediate period of highly concerning political instability.
In response, the "not a communist" institutions and "reasonable centrists" widely proclaim that Obama's effort is verification of their Red Scare all along.
They claim that repatriating the tens of millions of mostly White Brown Shirt supporters, which came here illegally under the last administration, is evidence of the same.
An old article entitled "They Thought they Were Free (1955)" is discussed on Hacker News.
You are delusional. Please seek help.
I'm curious what you believe is the point of your comment. For one, it's remarkably lazy compared to the previous poster's efforts in illustrating the inverted scenario. Two, do you believe he or anyone else is going to be convinced or 'seek help'?
The common ground Republicans and Democrats can find is that neither wants the power of government used against them or their rights. The best way to stop the government from being used against either party is to shrink the government until it is a threat to neither party. Lower taxes, less spending, and no regulations infringing on rights or freedoms.
This is one solution to the problem. But it isn't as if its the only solution or one that has no downsides.
I mean from a very trivial point of view, government spending constitutes a large amount of GDP.
What this comes down to, in my opinion, is the question of democratic allocation of resources and labor. Most people believe that there is a role for democracy in the allocation of resources and labor, which is to say that we think that certain societal goals (for example, defense, the care of the elderly or the poor, etc) should not be allocated to by markets but by democratic will.
This seems to be something almost all Americans agree on (though what things should be handled this way and how is contentious).
But to simply shrink the government away has the effect of decreasing the power of democracy to allocate resources, transferring that power to (in an ideal case, anyway) markets.
The fact is, most people do not want to live in a pure free market society, as far as I can tell. They want government services, they want safety nets, they want the air they breathe to be clean and safe. They want the power to decide that sometimes its worth spending money on stuff even if no one accumulates profits in the process.
The system you describe is majority rule, which often abuses minority rights. It is better to have a constitutional democracy with very limited government powers.
No, they noticed. 90 years ago, 2/3 of the world's books were in Germany. They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening. Germans were acutely aware of the reality of the day to day situation and their previous history in WW1.
I just read the book last week. What you said is not true in any useful sense. “Germans were acutely aware…” tries to reduce an entire population and years into one statement. Reality has much more color.
For the germans interviewed in the book, it seems to be true that many had read or heard about the camps or other atrocities, but (1) not the “final solution” which was not in the press and (2) there seems to be heavy desensitization from 1933-1955 when the book was written.
Aside from the tailor that had started the fire at the synagogue, the other 9 interviewees had not directly witnessed atrocities being committed, and instead focused on their personal hardships during the war.
Even though they may have been literate, the people in Mayer’s book were ignorant of the specific realities. Perhaps willfully ignorant, yes, but the nazi regime really did not give any opportunities otherwise.
—
not an expert, just reporting my notes from the book.
i highly recommend all americans read it, its not a long book. it feels eerily familiar, even though many circumstances are drastically different.
Mein Kampf was published 1924 and distributed broadly.
There was not much hidden, the goal of making a big war in the east to conquer new land for the Aryans was there in big letters in the open.
His views towards jews likewise.
So they knew. Maybe largely did not wanted to know. And they did celebrate the victories of the german army as their own. They only stopped celebrating after the victories stopped happening and it was more and more clear that the war will be lost.
You had to take him seriously but not literally.
Nah, better not literally:
" Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc."
(from Mein Kampf, Chapter 11)
But if no one would have taken him serious, there would not have been a problem. But people did take him serious, they seriously believed he was some kind of messias send from god to save his troubled great country.
Yes.
Also, Project 2025 was openly published. Anybody could read it. They aren't hiding the goals.
People just don't want to bother with it.
PNAC (Project for the New American Century) published an interesting 'report' in 2000
No, they dont mind it or agree with it. They prioritise harm to who they perceive ennemies and projwct 2025 delivers that.
In their defense, there is an inexhaustable supply of "take over w my ideology material."
This is a confluence of many conditions. Some long-focused efforts, some architecting and annealing of interests, some individual greed, some long-lasting effects of trauma, and some massive ignorance.
One of the only good points is that the American people are stubbornly allergic to authoritarianism. Yes there are exceptions, but mainly carved out by people trading it for self-interest. Many good surprises like Tucker Carlson's opposition to squashing free speech and the Republican's long-lasting distaste for pedophilia are still out there.
The post above pointing out how we're diff to Nazism is on point. There have been many more authoritarian plays since then. Americans remain conveniently ignorant of them.
Also we're being economically crushed and everyone feels it. Although racism is a powerful tool by this movement, it's actually centered around impoverishing everyone and the dizzying egos of its leaders.
I like a lot of what you are saying. But sadly I think it is an older view. Maybe this was true in 80's before social media.
"American people are stubbornly allergic to authoritarianism"
Literally 40%+ of Americans have voted for Authoritarianism. It's viewed as being 'tough'.
What I took away from the book was that all these people were very eager to say variants of 'das haben wir nicht gewusst' when at the same time they also describe how the jews were systematically removed from their society and every part of civil society was taken over by the nazi's.
I would add to your statement that almost everyone should read it. It's unnerving to read how 'normal' all these people were in some way and how 'easily' it all happened because the population generally disliked jews.
No shit they claim to not have known. No one would say "oh yea I knew they were killing children but i didnt care"?
Based on history books I read (mostly from Richard Evans), they knew. Nazi violence and concentration camps were public knowledge, because the regime needed to generate the fear. Germans prior war were in fact scared a lot.
This particular book is a out what nazi sympatizants and nazi themselves were saying after the war. It is what it is, but there was real motivation to not have own culpability in destruction of Germany in the open. (Which is what they have seen as tradegy, not the holocaust itself all that much)
You don’t know and you can’t know what it was like. The least you could do is try to listen to the people who were there and perhaps do at least a little bit of introspection and consider what you could’ve done differently, knowing what the consequences for troublemakers were. But that seems to be beyond you?
I think OP is talking about the rise of the Nazis rather than the period where the Nazis were already in control and resistance was much more difficult. Although, in fairness, Hitler was already chancellor ‘90 years ago’.
Seems unlikely Germany owned 66% of the world books in 1935.
I'm not counter claiming the rest, but that fact seems off.
Did you even read the article? They explicitly point out that it was the learned class that was so busy with their other important things that they missed all of it. The whole thing is about how that played out.
"They were educated and literate and knew what they were doing and what was happening"
can be hard, it's happening right now, and a lot of people are really all in, love it. or ignoring it, or sinking into streaming services to distract themselves.
Take your average house frau today, and they think Trump rounding people up is just good old law and order.
People aren't thinking everything through, that's how the overwhelming distractions work.
It is western propaganda. Germans were simply supportive of Hitler and, for the most part, Hitler did well by the Germans. Most people do not question actions when these actions do not affect them, let alone oppose them. And most people will not get involved in politics if the upside is negative.
Hitler didn’t do well by the people. Real wages declined throughout Nazi reign. Their lands were destroyed. They were responsible for allowing genocide.
Source: Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
The article shows how he lulled them step by step and diverted them from knowing this was worse than before. Sound familiar USA?
They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different. We can hate the guy but he was not going to conquer Europe with the Germans and then sit at it empty.
No, not just. There were pre-war downsides and hardships for the people. read the book above, it’s clear the common German had a worse life before the war came, to say nothing of being drafted, being killed, losing a family member, or being incinerated.
> They just lost the war. Had they won the war(s), their fortunes would have been different.
"Just". LOL. Is that all?
They lost the war in part because of bad economic policy:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
The UK was out producing Germany in planes and many other sectors—and that was before the US even got involved.
One of the reasons they specifically lost the war was because Hitler was such a fuck up that he was decimating the German economy. When you look at how the war was progressing, the only outcome for the Nazis at the time was either defeat or collapse. Combined with the endemic usage of Pervitin and other drugs at this time both to fuel soldiers and keep the citizens relatively placated they were burning up everything both at the frontline and at home.
Bingo: the story of WW2 is that the Germans started with an effective army, and the Nazis ran it into the ground.
The saddest thing is subsequent decades of bizarre interpretations of this result because people got too excited about some effective German industry that they took Hitlers various wonder weapon attempts as planned engineering projects rather than engineers trying to put form to a mad man's rantings.
Hitler loved the idea of super heavy tanks, so the Germans kept trying to build them even though they were unreliable, ineffective and vulnerable.
Meanwhile the Sherman got a reputation for breaking down a lot...mostly because it kept surviving and being fixed in the field and continuing to provide effective armor support, whereas German tanks just died.
"Hitler did well by the Germans" is a weird way to describe taking over a state by violence and propaganda and then leading it into a humiliating military defeat and committing some of the most morally repugnant acts in recent history in its name, but ok, I guess.
> It is western propaganda. Germans were simply supportive of Hitler and, for the most part, Hitler did well by the Germans.
It's not like they had much of a choice after ~1933:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
And Adam Tooze, who wrote an entire book examining Nazi economic policy, would disagree on the 'doing well by' part:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
And only from reading Chinese history and how the Chinese inteligencia see's it can you get the full wieght that what to them is an inevitable and unstopable cycle. They go so far as to describe the stages and symptoms of each stage, along with specific societal conditions that we continue to replicate with a mechanical precision they gave the name "The turning of the dynastic wheel" The chinese with there long history, and pragmatic introspection have codified things like this in there pictographic written language, where the symbol for disaster is derived from combining the two symbols for danger, and oportunity.
Are they wrong though? On our side, people like Spengler also model societies as pseudo-organisms with lives that go through birth, adolescence, adulthood, senescence, and death. There's a lot of merit to viewing history as cyclic and decay inevitable even if the details change from iteration to iteration.
Similar conditions produce similar outputs. Perhaps the linkage isn't quite as direct and repeatable as the Chinese think, but they have a point.
I have a chinese friend who said something similar to this, she believes much of the culture in the modern west is influenced by some shady chinese government attempt at controlling the speed at which said wheel turns, through Tiktok and stuff. While Id normally dismiss her as a nut, we do have rioting in the street arguing over a miniscule group of people wearing clothes dsigned for the opposite sex.
We also had rioting in the street over this in Berlin, 1933-05-06 (four days before the famous bonfire). Occam's Razor says that shady Chinese government intervention is not needed.
> Hitler did well by the Germans
This could only possibly be true if, like the Nazis, you exclude Jews, Gypsies, gays, disabled people, women who value their sexual and reproductive freedom, etc. etc. from the category ‘German’.
And even then it’s still not true, as others in the thread have pointed out.
It’s disturbingly frequently that I see this weird nudge nudge wink wink kinda-sorta Nazi apologism from high karma accounts here. I’m willing to believe that there aren’t fundamentally bad intentions behind it and that it stems mainly from some kind of reflexive contrarianism, but boy is it weird and disturbing.
> Hitler did well by the Germans.
That's an insanely stupid claim. Jews were systematically stigmatized and eventually sent to extermination camps. What we now call LGBT people and political opponents got the same treatment. Syndicalists too: one of the first thing Hitler did was make unions illegal. And even the "aryans" that supported him, saw their work hours get longer and longer and the pay smaller and smaller.
And let's not speak of the millions dying in a pointless war that ruined Europe.
This felt so insightful, but then they started going on about jews, and I realized it’s from ‘55.