|
Post by Amadan on Aug 17, 2017 19:12:52 GMT -5
Oh, please. I'm not much of a bandwagon poster. I picked at the point with which I disagreed--still do--nothing more. You know, I'm watching something of a shitstorm on my FB the last few days. People are actively scouring their FB friends in search of closet Trump supporters, are unfriending and/or blocking ones they find (how they can be certain on their assessment is beyond me). Others are going father, getting rid of friends who are not speaking out strongly enough against Trump, are not part of the fables "resistance." They're free to do this stuff, to be sure, but I'm not going to be coerced into emotive, hand-wringy, end-of-the-world statements, simply to satisfy people who apparently can only accept agreement on something if the expression of such meets their arbitrary standards. I don't do that, and I'm certainly not asking you to join us in ritual condemnation of Trump. But you really do seem compelled to nibble at whatever is the weakest anti-Trump argument you can find just so no one mistakes you for being on the bandwagon. You're starting to drift across the line from "iconoclast" to "apologist." You know, I've never been fond of the argument that Trump (or any other President) enables extremists by being in office. But there really is a dirty, particularly noxious reactionary element that's emerging into daylight since Trump was elected, and I don't think it's entirely coincidental. Is Trump personally responsible for the worst elements of the Alt-Right? No, but damn, he sure needs his arm twisted to offer even the most mealy-mouthed disapproval of them. Does that embolden and empower them? When the Daily Stormer is praising him for exactly this, I have to say yes. Uh, really? They wear Nazi symbols, they spout Nazi ideology, but they aren't Nazis? Okay, fine - almost all real members of the National Socialist Party are dead, and the few who aren't are old, old men. But that's an awfully fine hair you're splitting. I am not equating every single member of the Alt-Right, or every protester in Charlottesville, with Nazis. But the ones who dress like Nazis, walk like Nazis, and talk like Nazis? Yeah, I'm pretty comfortable calling them Nazis.
|
|
|
Post by robeiae on Aug 17, 2017 19:19:11 GMT -5
Call them whatever you desire and if they self-identify as "Nazis," all the more reason to do so. But they're still not equivalent to the actual Nazis of WWII, which is my point.
|
|
|
Post by Amadan on Aug 17, 2017 19:26:32 GMT -5
Call them whatever you desire and if they self-identify as "Nazis," all the more reason to do so. But they're still not equivalent to the actual Nazis of WWII, which is my point. Okay. They do not drive Panzers. Duly noted.
|
|
|
Post by Vince524 on Aug 17, 2017 20:17:56 GMT -5
Can we still get Indiana Jones to punch them and use his whip?
|
|
|
Post by maxinquaye on Aug 17, 2017 20:25:15 GMT -5
There are no good Nazis. There are no good Nazis. There are no good Nazis. There are no good Nazis. There are no good Nazis.
You don't nuance Nazis. You don't compromise with Nazis. You don't debate with Nazis. You don't try to understand Nazis. You don't try to include Nazis. You don't try to contexualise Nazis. You don't try to ignore Nazis.
You resist Nazis.
|
|
|
Post by poetinahat on Aug 17, 2017 20:53:10 GMT -5
Yeah, I would think that if they want to look like Nazis and act like Nazis, they need to be dealt with as though they're the real thing. Not as just-kidding Nazis, but as terrorists and enemies. They're not reenacting historical events; they're live.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2017 20:59:04 GMT -5
Amadan and Max posted much of what I'd intended to post in reply to Rob. I'll add this:
Sure, the Nazis in Germany ended by murdering millions of innocent people and our Nazis haven't done that yet.
But the Nazis in Germany didn't start overnight gassing Jews, etc. They started with calls to nationalism. Rallying youth. Shouting and publishing slogans and racist, anti-Semitic crap. Harassing Jews and others they didn't like. They picked up on a line of underlying discontent, racism, and anti-Semitism in German society and used it to gain power. Sound familiar?
Of course, they progressed to making Jews wear yellow stars, moving into ghettos, taking their property, and from there to death camps. And yeah, we're not there ... yet. So if that's what you mean, Rob, by "they're not real Nazis", I suppose I can give you that much. They haven't built gas chambers yet. Happy?
And I'll give you this. If all you have is a couple of isolated ignorant jerks who mouth off on a street corner or mutter in some dark corner of the internet, there might be no real need for concern. There will always be some of those. As long as they're just isolated jerks, whatever. We can handle it. No need to panic just for that.
But I submit you should start to worry well before it gets to death camps and yellow stars.
A good place to start? When masses of them feel emboldened enough to arm up and march shouting Nazi slogans and waving Nazi flags. When they start punching counter-protesters and fucking mowing them down with a car. And when THE GODDAMN PRESIDENT winks and pats them on the back.
|
|
|
Post by maxinquaye on Aug 17, 2017 21:27:54 GMT -5
The majority of German Nazis probably had no idea what went on in the death camps during the war. It wasn't like the ones who ran them invited the public to them. They often were placed in remote locations. You had "less severe" camps closer to populations, but less severe in this case means "the prisoners weren't herded off the trains straight into the gas chambers". Less severe here means starvation diet slavery and severe physical and emotional abuse making munitions for the German war machine.
But it doesn't matter if they knew or not. Nobody gives a crap whether they knew or not because the Nazi crimes were so out of this world that every single one of them shared the blame. The fat mayor of some town hall in lower Saxony who joined the Nazi party to get a couple of rungs up the social ladder. The worker in Berlin who couldn't join the war effort because of a WW 1 injury but who gloated that "they got their pride back". The woman who gave serial births of new little Aryans for the Vaterland. Nobody cares about their motivations. They were to blame for all of it.
One of the best decisions post-war was to take those people into the death camps and put them to work cleaning up the bodies. It didn't matter that they cried. It didn't matter that they felt sick from the sights or the stench. It didn't matter that "they didn't know". They shared the blame, and had to see what they had supported.
Pre-emptively doing that 'show and tell' with modern Nazis seems a good thing to do. Then maybe there won't have to be a show and tell after. The Nazis won't have to feel sick to their stomach digging out emaciated corpses of those the Nazis put in camps.
|
|
|
Post by Vince524 on Aug 17, 2017 21:31:01 GMT -5
I just threw up in my mouth, just a little bit.
|
|
|
Post by nighttimer on Aug 17, 2017 22:09:42 GMT -5
Call them whatever you desire and if they self-identify as "Nazis," all the more reason to do so. But they're still not equivalent to the actual Nazis of WWII, which is my point. Then you need to sharpen your pencil. The Nazis weren't the Nazis right away. They were simply a motley group of moronic hotheads and no threat to anyone. Until they were.It took the lesson of a humiliating defeat for Hitler to learn the lesson and get better at what he wanted to accomplish. And once he did, he rolled over the German political establishment and reshaped the entire nation into his version of what it had to become to make Germany great again. What happened in Charlottesville wasn't the rise of the Fourth Reich, but it was wildly successful by any standard for the Neo-Nazi White Supremacist cause. How many other hate movements can claim they have a enthusiastic supporter in the Oval Office?
|
|
|
Post by maxinquaye on Aug 17, 2017 22:48:35 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by nighttimer on Aug 18, 2017 9:08:59 GMT -5
You know, I'm watching something of a shitstorm on my FB the last few days. People are actively scouring their FB friends in search of closet Trump supporters, are unfriending and/or blocking ones they find (how they can be certain on their assessment is beyond me). Others are going father, getting rid of friends who are not speaking out strongly enough against Trump, are not part of the fables "resistance." They're free to do this stuff, to be sure, but I'm not going to be coerced into emotive, hand-wringy, end-of-the-world statements, simply to satisfy people who apparently can only accept agreement on something if the expression of such meets their arbitrary standards. Wow, if THIS isn't a pots calling kettles moment, I don't know what is. To be sure, your media-bashing line is as trite as it is predictable When an innocent woman is murdered by a Nazi a fucking TWEET is not "reaching out to the family." I'm sure someone in the White House could have found Heather Heyer's family phone number if Trump wanted it. A Tweet is weak and your rationalization for it is weaker. It doesn't make one part of "the torch and pithcfork (sic) crowd" to note how Trump took the lamest way possible to respond to Heyer's murder. All it takes is to not be a Trump apologist. Has Trump reached out personally to express his sympathies? Did the White House send a representative of the president to Heather's memorial service? How 'bout a wreath? Maybe some flowers? What about a card saying, "Sorry for your loss?" How about Trump get off his lazy fat ass and break off a phone call? How about that? "That crowd" can't use Heather Heyer because Trump already has. He has used the sad tragedy of an anti-supremacist protestor's death to exalt the evil she was protesting against. Mild reproach. Tepid umbrage. Wait for the pivot. At long last we reach the heart of the matter. A series of sweeping generalizations concluding in an unsupported criticism of the richly deserved rebukes of Trump. What part of the President of the United States should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS condemn Nazis without hesitation or equivocation do you not get, robeiae? For anyone with even the most superficial grasp of what World War II was about, this is an absolute truth and should be as natural an act as breathing. This was quite literally the easiest call for Trump to make in his entire life. And he STILL screwed the pooch. It wasn't an easy call for Donald Trump. Not for the guy who kept Mein Kampf for his bedside reading. Not every Nazi sympathizer marches around carrying tiki torches yelling, "YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US!/JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!" Some stand in the gaudily gauche lobby of a hotel and switch up from relaxing environmental impact studies that impede infrastructure development to saying essentially there's no difference between anti-fascists and fascists. They ARE Nazis. You don't need Hitler to be a Nazi. You don't have to live in post-WWI Germany to have Nazis. They are Nazis because they have proclaimed themselves as Nazis. The chant of " Blood and Soil" does not have its origins in America. It is a chant born in Germany and appropriated by the Nazis to stress the superiority of The Master Race. Dismissing the White nationalists who assembled in Charlottesville as nobodies signifying nothing of significance would be a mistake. A baby crocodile can't kill and eat you, but just wait until it's not a baby anymore. Then we'll really have some fun.
|
|
|
Post by Vince524 on Aug 18, 2017 11:55:38 GMT -5
Call them whatever you desire and if they self-identify as "Nazis," all the more reason to do so. But they're still not equivalent to the actual Nazis of WWII, which is my point. I do think I get what Rob is saying. 1st off, most of these morons haven't killed anyone, certainly not a mass killing. Jason Kessler is an exception, not the rule. 2nd off, there's no evidence that they really want anyone to die. Their ideas of white supremacy are wholly repugnant, but I don't know of any of them for the most part (And there may again be individual exceptions) who wish physical harm. Nor do we know that many would even be able to stomach watching a child being sent to slaughter like what we saw in Nazi Germany.
I don't say these things as a defense of them, but we should remember that Nazi Germany got to a point of such hideous evil, that men who thought of themselves as decent human beings watched with either glee or even casual indifference as entire families were slaughtered before their eyes. They'd send children into the gas chambers and go home and get a good nights sleep.
The majority of the kids killed in those gas chambers would probably have passed by natural causes by now, but I know myself. If I were to watch a 1 hour documentary on 1 of them, some poor kid who should have been able to run and play and laugh and was instead gassed to death, it would probably keep me up at night. I still remember seeing some movie on the holocaust when I was in high school. I couldn't name it now, but there was a scene where they had families lined up for the gas chamber, all stripped naked. A kid ran away and was chased down by dogs where, out of the camera's view, he was torn to pieces while his mother helplessly watched.
That kept me up for several nights, and thinking about it, how it was a movie but it was also at some point real. That human beings went through this, while other's who claimed to be human did it. Watched it. In some cases, enjoyed it.
These people aren't at that stage.
Yet
Nazi Germany didn't get there overnight either.
Yet they held up their flag. They protested under that banner.
That's grotesque, and vile, and so many more things. I don't understand how they can even look at themselves in the mirror.
But the fact that they're not as bad as the Nazi's of WWII isn't a defense. It's simply an acknowledgement of how dark evil in the form of humans can be.
One of the great sins of that time was shrugging of shoulders. That is one sin I will not commit.
|
|
|
Post by Amadan on Aug 18, 2017 12:08:40 GMT -5
Call them whatever you desire and if they self-identify as "Nazis," all the more reason to do so. But they're still not equivalent to the actual Nazis of WWII, which is my point. I do think I get what Rob is saying. I get what he's saying, but it's a stupid and pedantic distinction. We're using "Nazi" to mean "People who hold Nazi beliefs and wish to further a Nazi agenda," and Rob is using "Nazi" to mean "People who were members of the National-Socialist German Workers' Party in World War II." Yeah, most of these modern Hitler cosplayers haven't killed anyone, and contrary to some of the more overheated rhetoric on Facebook, I don't think we can or should literally treat them the way we treated Nazis in World War II (i.e., as enemy combatants who are fair game for shooting on sight). They are still exercising their right to free speech so "punching Nazis" is illegal. But they're still fucking Nazis and I find all this limp-wristed tut-tutting because they aren't real Nazis to be some pretty sad shit. If you want to dress up like a Nazi and play Nazi, I'll regard you as a Nazi until such time as you learn some fucking sense and human decency. If the government tries to put you in jail for your Hitler cosplaying, I will, on principle, disagree, but I sure won't be contributing to your legal defense fund. And if someone punches you for being a Nazi, I will, in principle, agree that it shouldn't be legal for them to do that. But I probably will contribute to their legal defense fund.
|
|
|
Post by celawson on Aug 18, 2017 12:42:20 GMT -5
The Vice News clip NT posted was fascinating. The Nazis in it are repugnant, of course. But one thing that was very interesting is that even a professionally edited clip such as that did not show any of the white supremacists inciting violence, throwing the first punch, macing anyone. It showed THEM getting maced by the resistance, though. And that brings me to wonder - how do we deal with these guys?
Vince above said: No, only the guy with the car and anger management issues actually killed anyone. But their callous response to Heather Heyer's death was pretty awful. I don't think death of the "other" will bother a lot of these monsters, and it seems a small step to go from ridiculing someone who was killed, to participating in an action that would cause the killing itself.
Back to my question - how do we deal with these people? Large tech companies like Google and Paypal have decided to kick them off. Is that a good thing? Is it beneficial to force them underground where their plans and discussions are more hidden? And is there a slippery slope here? Where tech companies can censor speech they find morally repugnant?
|
|