I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards.
We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change.
Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary.
Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.
One way to look at it is that our civilized world is just a thin veneer covering up our animalistic, brutal nature.
Another way to look at it is that we're a budding new form of life that seems rather distinct from what came before (consciousness, reason/science, etc.), and we're still very young and foolish and unable to fully utilize these new abilities.
Of course, there's a real risk that we'll destroy ourselves, or that we'll remain stuck in some kind of local optimum, doomed to repeat ourselves and constantly wage ware against our evolutionary 'legacy code'.
But as someone who can get quite depressed or cynical about all the bad things that are happening (over and over again, it seems), it helps me to focus on the amazing ways in which we did overcome our more brutal past.
If we're looking for ways to meaningfully understand Nazi-ism, and actually look beyond "omg bad" and "death camps" into the ideals and philosophies and the sociopolitical situation leading to the party's rise... well, you could do far worse than to start with Harper's "Who Goes Nazi?" (1941).
Also, we need to look in the mirror. If we think of the people who were Nazis as somehow alien creatures, not ordinary people like us, we overlook a central point and a critical risk. Germany and Austria were a/the centers of science, culture, industry, and civilization; think of all those scientists, composers, industrialists, philosophers ...
Humans - educated, modern people like us - did these things. A whole society provided all the services, political support, leadership, funding, engineering, manual labor, management, project management, architecture, transportation infrastructure and operations, IT (look up what IBM did), etc. etc. Imagine the scale of that project. Other whole societies helped or looked the other way; the U.S. turned away Jewish refugees from its shores, IIRC; the Roman Catholic church kept its head down, at best. (And others resisted, such as Denmark and, IIRC, the Eastern Orthodox church.)
The human genetic code hasn't changed; we're biologically exactly the same as the Nazis, and millennia of humanity before that. Unless you believe in a supernatural power (and what good did that do?), nothing prevents the same (or other evils) from happening again except us. It doesn't happen randomly or instantly; we have societal norms and institutions. But we need to protect those norms and institutions and make sure we don't get to the point of doing evil; it's too late to stop by then.
Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good. I think of the people who built those institutions of freedom in the generations before us - in the U.S., for example, from Washington to Lincoln to MLK - making the world a better place. I think of the people who died in WWII - many 18 year old kids who died in pain - to give us the freedom we have today from Nazis, fascists, and religious oppression. What are we giving the next generation?
(Sorry I got a bit carried away, but I don't mean it as a lecture; I feel pretty strongly about it.)
Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before and was pretty violent prior Nazi taking power. Its democracy was also very dysfunctional, had weak support among citizens and many people did not got over previous revolutions yet. When we are painting them as the centers of science, culture and civilization, we are painting that in much better colors than was the actual reality.
There is a risk it will happen again, but we are not there yet. We are far from that levels of dysfunction. (Same goes for French revolution and communist uprising in Russia.)
Agreed, very good points; thanks. I should have been more careful with my paints. I did mean to depict that we aren't there yet.
> Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before
The U.S. has had a strong culture of racial discrimination for its entire history. I don't mean that in an exaggerated sense like "everyone is racist", but I think that rationally it's hard to escape the fact that such a culture has always been prominent.
Speaking of strong militaristic culture, this section of "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is interesting, re: the role of Prussia in the modern German state:
"By this time Prussia had pulled itself up by its own bootstraps to be one of the ranking military powers of Europe. It had none of the resources of the others. Its land was barren and bereft of minerals. The population was small. There were no large towns, no industry and little culture. Even the nobility was poor, and the landless peasants lived like cattle. Yet by a supreme act of will and a genius for organization the Hohenzollerns managed to create a Spartan military state whose well-drilled Army won one victory after another and whose Machiavellian diplomacy of temporary alliances with whatever power seemed the strongest brought constant additions to its territory.
There thus arose quite artificially a state born of no popular force nor even of an idea except that of conquest, and held together by the absolute power of the ruler, by a narrow-minded bureaucracy which did his bidding and by a ruthlessly disciplined army. Two thirds and sometimes as much as five sixths of the annual state revenue was expended on the Army, which became, under the King, the state itself. “Prussia,” remarked Mirabeau, “is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.”
And the state, which was run with the efficiency and soullessness of a factory, became all; the people were little more than cogs in the machinery. Individuals were taught not only by the kings and the drill sergeants but by the philosophers that their role in life was one of obedience, work, sacrifice and duty. Even Kant preached that duty demands the suppression of human feeling, and the Prussian poet Willibald Alexis gloried in the enslavement of the people under the Hohenzollerns. To Lessing, who did not like it, “Prussia was the most slavish country of Europe.”
> Germany had strongly militaristic culture long before and was pretty violent prior Nazi taking power. Its democracy was also very dysfunctional, had weak support among citizens
This is what I see when I like at the US. It may not be third reich levels, but compared tot he rest of the western world it is very militaristic and democratically dysfunctional.
It's much more militaristic than before 9/11. In the U.S., the military now is glorified, as is war and violence.
* Despite the military's lack of success in Afghanistan and extreme recklessness and failure in Iraq, the public trusts the military more than most other institutions.
* Politicians must say 'the greatest military in the world'; the military is glorified at sporting events and elsewhere. I attended a small college's graduation in a rural area. A few students were ROTC members;[0] the audience gave them a standing ovation for several minutes; no other graduates received anything like it.
* Politicians on the right, and to some extent the left, must openly demonstrate hyper-aggression and an embrace of war and violence in foreign policy. Diplomacy is mocked by some (and Trump is neutering the State Department). When is the last time you heard a U.S. politician mention "peace" as a goal and priority, or speak of the horrors of war?
* Trump has appointed members of the military as Secretary of Defense (which hasn't happened since WWII), Homeland Security, and as National Security Advisor. All are almost always civilian jobs, to maintain civilian control of the national security apparatus. Now people seek the military to run the government.
----
[0] ROTC: Reserve Officers Training Corp: In return for scholarships, college students undergo military training in college and serve for a few years afterward (IIRC the details).
> Rereading that, it sounds very grim; but we have all the power we need in our hands to stop it and more, to do good.
Fundamentally I share that optimism. However, I am a bit worried that the main 'solution' that I hear about is some variation of 'remembering the past' and 'education'. The reason why this worries me is that 'remembering and learning from the past' is probably exactly what people have said throughout history and yet we still had WW2/the holocaust, relatively recently. What do we do when 'never again!' keeps happening?
I don't think the lesson is that learning from our past or being educated is not effective. So far at least in some regards we seem to be moving 'forward', however vague that statement is. I'm just worried that it's not effective enough.
Disgusting, but sociologically fascinating, too. And very valuable to keep around, in case anyone falls under the mistaken impression that the nazis were simply born evil.
It vastly exceeds even what you would expect from the 80-20 rule. I don't have a source for this, but I've read that about 0.7% of commenters are responsible for about 75% of the comments by volume, and they trend overwhelmingly negative.
It's probably not that simple. They'd just get a new account, marked green of course, but still someone "completely different" as far as comment history is concerned. You banned the account, but not the person.
You could go further, by tracking the IP addresses that people post from, and banning new accounts from those IP addresses. But that's not foolproof, in an age of DHCP. It's also turning the hosting site into something that tracks you, which is a bit frightening.
Sure, but this is banning 101 - if it's trivial to create accounts then banning is ineffective. Similarly, if you don't check IPs then running a mail server becomes impossible as you drown in spam. And this is why so many places ban Tor.
(The extreme end is metafilter, who have maintained a sustained long-term stable friendly community by charging $5 to make an account. They don't ban many people - they don't have to. Difficult to replicate this!)
And there's no better proof of your claim than the two holocaust deniers in this very comment chain - both of them have very old accounts, with some very old comments, and then over a year of utter silence - and then today, they're both all "holocaust never happened".
Nevermind. The deniers are getting their comments flagged, which hides them... so either they had a year of utter silence, OR the last year's worth of comments were all bad enough to get removed.
My anecdotal observation is that in the last week or so, the extremist right-wing[0] trolls have returned to HN after being silent for a time, maybe since Trump's election and especially since the inauguration time.
First there were brand new accounts that posted trolling questions to otherwise intelligent discussions. Things like, 'how can we really predict the climate years in the future?' or 'maybe Putin really is an ally' - i.e., the old technique of raising vacuous, speculative, provocative questions, without contributing anything substantive. Then I saw older accounts doing it.
[0] To be clear, they have no more to do with the rest of people on the right than al Qaeda has to do with Islam. One is not a reflection on the other.
EDIT: Also, others are voting for them. For example, I can only wonder how this relatively bizarre comment (judgmental, I know, but a pretty safe judgment in this case) get voted to the top of a front-page thread?
I disagree, for some of these people maybe, but plenty of them are legitimately Nazis who would happily staff an extermination camp. Moon landing conspiracy is relatively harmless, Nazism killed millions.
Nazism includes people who feel no need to deny the Holocaust which IMO shifts things around somewhat. Further, you notice people that are vocal not just those who believe something.
I disagree. I've known some of these people. They are sincere and thoughtful, it's just that they've got a severe case of bias that causes them to hold contradictory evidence to an absurdly high standard, while blindly accepting anything that agrees with them.
These people are used to being shouted down, banned, and publicly mocked, which just feeds into their persecution complex. They can be reasoned with, but it's laborious, unpleasant, and not really worth my time.
That's not to say there aren't quite a few regular trolls - but anecdotally, I don't think trolls are the majority.
> They are sincere and thoughtful, it's just that they've got a severe case of bias that causes them to hold contradictory evidence to an absurdly high standard, while blindly accepting anything that agrees with them.
"Once the war ended, Zeidel traveled overland before smuggling himself in the autumn of 1945 to what would become the State of Israel"
Well there's the Holocaust deniers on the one hand.
But then, it does no harm at all for the state of Israel to see a story like this appear just when it has decided to extend still further the settlements in the West bank.
If you're talking about the HN comment thread, then please don't make it worse by posting like this. Instead, the way to be a good community member is by flagging the comments you find egregious so that moderators have a chance to see them.
To flag a comment (assuming your account has > 30 karma), click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top.
Sorry, I didn't notice this. I was talking about the comment thread in the external website. I didn't specify because at the time the sleeper nazi accounts hadn't yet activated here.
Not everything you disagree with is "disgusting neo nazi propaganda". Josef Burg was a Jewish historian, not a nazi, who defended in court (in the Zundel case) that there were no gas chambers used to kill Jews. Paul Rassinier, an anti-nazi socialist who was detained in Auchwitz, also vouched that there were no gas chambers there nor any extermination going on. A Jewish former Auschwitz inmate Marika Frank Abrams said the same thing, and so did Jewish Auschwitz inmate Dr. Benedikt Kautsky. Roger Dommergue is another Jewish historian who defends there was no extermination program whatsoever, much less gas chambers. Robert Litoff is yet another Jewish historian who disbelieves the orthodox narrative of there being an extermination program. There are many other examples of anti-nazis who defend that there were no exterminations - Gilad Atzmon, Gerard Menuhin, Arnold Friedman, Esther Grossman, etc. Let's keep an open mind and not dismiss counter-arguments based on our prejudices. Many people, as I have shown, can disbelieve the holocaust (victor's) narrative without being a nazi (in fact, while even remaining anti-nazi).
Did you examine all of those people's claims? Even Raul Hilberg thanked revisionists for helping him come to terms with the fact there was no Hitler order (for the extermination), which he said there was in the first edition of his madterpiece, but then retracted in the second edition, among other corrections. Smugness and pretending to know what you don't does not help anything, especially to defuse racism and ulterior motives. Raul Hilberg understood that, which is why in his second book about the sources of the holocaust, he admits most of the narrative is based on testimonies and that there are no susbstantial documents to support it. He came a long way from his first impressions on his subject. I doubt you even knew he published a second book, with all due respect.
I read the comments, a few of those are actually disgusting neo nazi propaganda!
You've referred to a few people claiming that the Germans didn't have a Jewish extermination plan in their concentration camps. I recognize a few of the names, I don't have time to look up all of the unfamiliar ones.
The Nazis ran 4 types of detainment camps, lets call them Concentration, Work(forced labor), Extermination, and Transit
As it became clearer that Nazis would not win against the Allies, the Nazis stepped up efforts in the Extermination camps.
As far as I know, the American forces only saw the results of the detainment camps, and never got to the extermination camps (they were in territory that eventually was held by the Soviets).
There's a good book on how the empires of Hitler and the USSR squeezed between them the jews and slavs of Eastern Europe, resulting in millions of deaths, "Bloodlands"
There are only 4 prominent people saying it happened with sources to back it up and all of them readily admit the most important sources are all from verbal testimonies and not documentation of any kind. See Raul Hilberg's second book on the sources for the holocaust:
It did not, but even if it did, it does not justify the billions spent on reparations by countries including Belgium. It does not justify jailing people for asking questions. It does not justify the precedents set by the Nuremburg show trials. And it sure as hell doesn't justify importing hundreds of thousands of "refugees."
Yes, a common modus operandi of Holocaust deniers is to make lists of people who were in some camp but never witnessed any gassing. This is then brought forward as a reason to question the existence of any gas chambers anywhere. It's such a stupid logic fallacy that there isn't even a name for it.
There are scientists who dispute the existence of global warming, too. But on the subject of both disputed topics, I will go ahead and go with the consensus of 99.99% of experts and witnesses.
99.99% of the experts are only 4: Yehuda Bauer, Yitzak Arad, Jean-Claude Pressac and Raul Hilberg. Have you read their books to see what exactly they think happened? I have and they do not think as low of revisionists as you seem to. There is no need to be emotional about this subject. We're all interested in the truth. Read Arad's sources' testimonies for yourself and see if you believe then fully (it includes bears and eagles attacking Jews in cages) and then ask yourself how likely it is that those testimonies are the correct ones versus those of the formar camp inmates who defend there were no gas chambers. All those tesimonies are available onlinr, sometimes with video of the inmate him/herself telling their story.
There are about a billion things I enjoy in life more than debating with holocaust deniers. There is mountains of definitive evidence of the existence of gas chambers, and if you aren't aware of that, it's because you're desperately trying not to be.
I have no more to say on the subject to you. I recognize that such angry and dismissive attitudes are not the most effective way to change the minds of nazi apologists, but frankly, that's not my job, so the world will have to move on without waiting for you to open your eyes.
> debating with holocaust deniers. There is mountains of definitive evidence of the existence of gas chambers
The stupid thing about this argument is that many of the victims were killed in their communities by groups like the Einsatzgruppen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Death_squads_.28...). Suggesting that the absence of gas chambers (that were destroyed by the Germans) as evidence that the Holocaust didn't happen is just ignorance.
I mean, why not go full postfactual, in this day and age. Did you also see that comment in thread that says you can make $104000 a month working from home by just clicking the link. Why not give it a try?
Changing the subject is not constructive. I listed many names of historians. Did you look at their claims? You seem to have dismissed them entirely based on your preconceptions which, I assume, you learned in school, a time where people are at their most impressionable age.
check his post history. he's commented on threads on three occasions over the past couple of years, and two of those occasions were chiming in with holocaust denial.
Incidentally, the exact same pattern follows with the other holocaust denier in this thread.
And were any of these actually in positions of power to know definitively whether or not extermination programs existed (including ones not at their local camp)?
Also, how about Einsatzgruppen? Are there witnesses claiming they didn't exist either?
edit: Also, what's your response to the Wannsee notes and Posen speeches? Even if hypothetically the gas chambers never did exist, there's clear evidence they very strongly intended to kill all European Jews. Clear intent + 6 million Jews missing + a whole lot of mass graves seems like a pretty cut and dry case, even if you have to resort to saying they were all starved/worked to death and shot instead of gassed.
This is a very serious claim right here. Any concrete data on "Czarist government" undertaking pogroms?
The whole discourse right here reeks of 60's university left's "commies good, czars bad". This is when commies could murder the same number of people, off-war, on their not the most busy day, as the "Czarist government" during the whole early XX century.
> The pogroms are generally thought to have been either organized or at least condoned by the authorities. This view was challenged by Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson and John Klier, who couldn't find such sanctions documented in the state archives.
So it's basically one big fat weasel. They can't confirm that authorities officially sanctioned anything and that's where "were behind" comes into existence. Proving that you "weren't behind" is impossible.
However, I can see how, in the absense of documented sanctions, I can call the article's author, Matthew Shaer, a liar for his "undertaken" word.
WRT the article. Half of Vilnus's population was Jews. How on earth could a community fear pogroms when being in such numbers? Might as well be the side doing the pogroming.
Isn't it amazing that you're in all the racist threads.
Oh yes, I'm sure you have so much interesting stuff to tell us about why you're a racist. Here I was thinking you're a normal immigrant-hater but you're a Jew-hater as well. You're like a master racist. A true virtuoso of vitriol.
Do you primarily hate Jews because they steal Christian babies, or because they conspire to keep the white man down? Do you hate foreigners for their swarthy good looks and their large ... hands, or do you hate them because they took your job? I'm sure the biggest thing you fear isn't your sister being hurt by an immigrant, it's her being seduced by an immigrant. When you get violent with the immigrant prostitutes you solicit, is it fear that you aren't really that different that causes the rage? Or is the rage always there because they're keeping you from achieving your white destiny?
You're so complex, with so much to share. A font of limitless wisdom.
But instead they had to miraculously survive eight gassings apiece and countless trips to the banks for decades afterwards to cash their survivor checks.
That claim is idiotic anyway. Majority of killed Jews were not from Germany. They were from conquered territories, notably from Eastern Europe, and given no chance to leave.
German Jews were leaving in mass. Those who stayed were predominantly old, sick, poor or German patriots (e.g. were Jews by blood but not culturally with German families - shocked that they count as Jews too - that includes wwi fighters).
It makes me think it's just one person with several accounts who came upon this thread. Hopefully not a regular who typically posts normal things and switched to these accounts for this topic.
As horrible as the Holocaust was, I think the thing from the Second World War that has scared me most is probably the Dirlewanger brigade[0]. I guess it's the difference between someone who kills you because that's his task, and someone who kills you because he likes it. Dirlewanger[1] was a cartoon villain. In a work of fiction he would have been easily dismissed as not believable, but he was very real.
He was hardly the only murderous sadist; you can find many in the history of Holocaust camps. Look up Joseph Mengele, for example, who would perform sadistic medical procedures (called experiments, but really for sadism) on prisoners, including children, and without anesthesia. Too sickening to describe here.
Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the NKVD (USSR secret police) during WW2 and also a serial rapist/murderer, the high ups including Stalin all knew, but considered him good enough at his job to essentially let it slide though of course they never let their female relatives anywhere near him.
It's interesting talking in person with a Holocaust denier.
They start out by explaining there is no evidence of the Holocaust, and in fact the Nazis killed few Jews.
So you ask them why this idea is so widely believed, and they explain it is because the Jews have a vast conspiracy to mislead the world so as to gain favor for themselves and the state of Israel.
So you ask them, "Have the Jews done anything else bad?" and their eyes light up, and they go into an long rant about one terrible thing after another the Jews have done, throughout the whole course of human history.
And by the end they have made the Jews look so bad that it would have been a simply wonderful thing for Hitler to try to kill them all off.
I have observed two different kinds of revisionists.
The first kind are simply Jew haters. After they say that they don't believe that the Nazis tried to kill all of the Jews, they either imply or say outright that they should have.
The second kind has an Asperger Syndrome like fixation on details. If the true number was 5.4 million or 6.5 million Jewish people killed, they take exception to the "6 million" figure.
I sadly can't deny that such people exist but it seems profoundly weird to me that anyone could just hate a bunch of random people they've never met. Some sort of wiring bug.
Good point about the fixation-on-details type. However, it is the Jew haters who sometimes get organized and do real damage to the world. Also, nasty politicians can sometimes convert large numbers of people into Jew haters.
So what are your thoughts on this argument? It sounds like you were convinced, and the comment reads like a slightly clever way to spread these hateful ideas. (I can't speak for your intent.)
Oh, sorry, I should have made my point clearer. This is that Holocaust deniers often say they are not antisemitic,just trying to be factual, but if you question them the right way, it turns out they are.
What is really going on in their minds is that they mistakenly believe Jews are evil, and so they defend anyone who think the same, in this case the Nazis against the accusation of killing millions of Jews, even though they themselves think it would be great.
It suspicious when number of victims grows every year without any new data. Yad Vashem collected personal information of millions of victims[0], so let stick to it. Don't inflate numbers, please.
I inflated nothing. I made reference to a hypothetical situation where either more or less were killed and then I mentioned the universally known number of 6 million.
Yes, I have had similar experiences and it's very off-putting to have "jew haters" muddy the waters of open exchange of ideas. What I am left with is this though: if there's no evidence other than eye witness accounts and a confession from Hoess extracted under torture, then it's a matter of choosing what to believe in. And if I have a choice, why would I choose to believe something so horrifying? Especially after so many things that once were accepted as true are officially no longer so: It was supposed to be 4.5 million at Auschwitz and now around 1 million and finally the guy running Auschwitz admitted on camera that what is shown to tourists (the gas chambers) have been build after the war to what it likely was before, since the Germans converted the building into an air raid shelter. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. I know it's hard getting into this topic because of it's gruesome nature and the implication that not believing in the official Holocaust means that somehow that makes you a Nazi or a Nazi defender in the eye of the public.
Before 1940 there are many documents, records, and letters from Jews in Europe. After that there were much less. No country received a huge influx of Jews. Where did they all go?
Aside the fact that nothing in that post is extreme right-wing , the thing that should concern you more is that we are not living in a society where I can use my real name.
Aside from the fact that I do not consider this "trolling" and do not understand what you mean by "at this point", I'd say it is to make you look in the mirror: why won't you allow critical thought to take place in your mind? Not out loud, not in public, but just for yourself. I've been there and for me it was the feeling of disgust towards myself to even ponder the idea, as the implication would be that if I turned out to be wrong (which I still could be, of course) I would have essentially dishonored the memory of the victims. But when I let the thought into my mind that to this point no hard evidence has been found and that it's extremely unlikely that such a large scale operation could be executed only by giving verbal orders I decided to stop believing until someone can prove it to me w/o relying on eye witness testimonies and the good old "where did they go?" argument.
Choosing to erase history because you don't like it is how these things start in the first place.
And choosing to think that everyone else is wrong - that all the people and institutions surrounding the memory of the Holocaust, and the entire state of Israel are built on a myth that was concocted in living memory? Why?
.jpg){kind=link}
reply