> And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
I remember reading this long before the Internet and thinking that it made sense. The world was literally going insane around the author but nobody noticed. It happened through an accumulation of no-crisis baby steps, year after year.
The mass adoption of the Internet has caused me to reconsider. Every crackpot I've ever encountered thinks exactly the same thing, namely that we're all asleep while <major issue> continues unabated. How can we be so blind to it!
This is not to dismiss the author, who clearly saw some shit, but rather to point out the very fine line between crackpot and prophet, at least when viewed on the surface.
Yes, but I think people sometimes confuse the criteria for 'good reasoning' in the moment.
It's easier to paint a prophet as a crackpot if everyone else is putting time and energy into finding fault with them. You can vilify anyone, especially those that look different.
It's unfortunately a very human tendency to shift baselines, to judge each individual step only relative to the last one, without considering the situation in the absolute.
This applies in much lower stakes environments as well: the workplace, relationships. It's surprising how reliably someone's attitude can flip from "if ever X, I'll quit" to "X isn't that much worse than X-1, this isn't worth making a fuss about" if the change happens slowly enough.
> The history of the world isn't the history of evil people with glowing red eyes doing evil things; it's the history of throngs of average people, out of touch with their own faults, betraying themselves and others by heading up the wrong set of stairs—usually with the help of a handful of truly bad people.
I like to think if I were alive during the Nazi era, I wouldn't have become a Nazi.
But I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those German citizens who would have gradually become part of the Nazi machine.
I think it's perhaps safer to recognise the line between good and evil runs through every person, and not be presumptive to think of oneself as being part of a select group of virtuous people.
I can think of many recent occurrences where people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue.
This understanding of ourselves as being as flawed as everyone else is so important, I think.
One of my favorite sayings (even though I am not religious at all) is, “therefore but by the grace of god go I.” It is about realizing that so much of our behavior is dictated by circumstances. We don’t like to think of it that way, but it is true.
One of my favorite essays of all time is called “A muscular empathy” (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...). It is about using this idea, and thinking about why we would behave the same way as all these people who we would like to believe we would have been better than if we were in their shoes. My favorite quote from it:
> It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, or if we were slave masters, our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.
> Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.
> That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
> I can think of many recent occurrences where people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue.
Case in point is that nearly every terrible political act in history has been perpetrated by someone proclaiming to be fighting the good fight. They all had their rationalisations. I can’t think of any examples of political groups that declare themselves pro-evil.
In a sense, this is encouraging. It means there is widespread low tolerance for transparently evil ideas.
In another sense, this indicates we have widespread low capability to determine which ideas are actually virtuous, and which merely have a veneer of virtue (masking great harm).
> people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue.
They say majority of Russian people really support Putin and his war on Ukraine. Similarly many Germans supported Hitler and his invasion of Poland. I think the situation in Russia is now very similar to the early Nazi Germany.
It could happen here too. But I hope and pray if there's anything good about Putin's war it is it makes people realize Fascism is alive and well, and will not go away by itself.
What makes you think it hasn't? How do you know all those drone strikes were on bad people? How do you know that standards of evidence before employing military force haven't been slacked off to the point of meaninglessness? How do you know those secret FISA courts are actually giving full and complete due-process? How do you know that every person in the world's largest slave-labor force definitely deserves to be there? There is an awful lot of stuff that one could point to as being fascist in the modern US system.
And we have a habit of "military adventurism" ourselves... we got ourselves into Iraq through acts of aggression, and that's far from the first.
This is precisely the problem discussed in the article and the comments here - the framing of "us, good wholesome people who love our country, vs dirty vile Russians who support an evil military aggressor" is itself the result of propaganda and messaging. No country is going to message themselves as being the bad guys.
Most people support their country because it's what one does, and there's immense social pressure to do so. And we tend to rationalize away the bad because "well, there's always some bad, but it's mostly good". Most people really don't have (and aren't allowed to have) a full picture of whether the sum is actually good or not, we just assume it.
So in the end, Germans support German tyranny, Russians support Russian tyranny, and Americans support American tyranny, because that's what one does. Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?
> Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?
That was precisely my point, I said there's Nazi-minded people in every country. It's not country against country but democracy vs. autocracy. Unfortunately when autocracy takes over it is very difficult to get democracy back, you can't vote to go back to democracy any more. But as long as there's still little bit of democracy left, what you can do is vote for more democracy, not less.
Or as a friend of mine put it somewhat sarcastically: "It was really unlucky for George Floyd that none of the millions of people who definitely would have physically intervened on his behalf were present"
These are US airstrike counts since 2014. They stopped counting once a Taliban agreement was reached. Now we all know these were all done for freedom and only bad people get bombed, but I wonder what Americans would think if the aftermath of every one showed up on their twitter feed.
This is something hard to word. The boiling frog is hard to fight, because there's no big event to go against, it's just a mellow dilution of behaviors and values.
The Ukraine invasion made me see how Russia is today, and it doesn't take much to turn a society into a fog of nothingness. A bit of leeway regarding police forces, a bit of good old propaganda, and now you can't speak, nothing is true anymore.
As an immigrant, and therefore not beholden to either side, it is hard for me to distinguish whether your last line is with regard to Russia, or the US. Which is very much the point of the article.
It was about Russia, but I see this creeping up a little bit in France. The recent president was a bit too quick to put police blocks everytime there was a manifestation. They were a little more brutal and unhinged than usual and the president didn't seem to be annoyed about it. If he pushes further in that direction I'll be afraid of the police in the streets and will suddenly lie about my beliefs in public out of fear of being threatened or arrested.
Western countries have flaws, yeah the media spread bullshit depending on which interests each channel has, US police is too gun-ready, the financial world is rigged, etc etc but so far people can still speak up, it's a subtle but crucial difference.
There was a doctor in Nazi Germany whose clinic was vandalized by people who though he was a Jew (he wasn't) so he joined the party out of self preservation. Then, being a good party member, he started treating other more affluent party members at his clinic. As a reward for this, he was eventually gifted a lavish property (formally owned by a Jewish businesses man) but it was a bit of a white elephant. The upkeep was very expensive, he was expected to keep it staffed (maid, butler, groundskeeper, etc.) and being a gift, he couldn't sell it. He was trapped into having to continue doing business with the party in order to pay for it all. I found the story interesting because he wasn't a Nazi at the start, he was just acting out of self preservation and his life spiralled out of control as he got sucked further and further into the party.
This pretty much describes my worst fears about political leaders in the US. They are absolutely beholden to those who finance their campaigns and prop up their respective national committees. I will and won't "both sides" this, from time to time, because both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently.
> both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently
It's interesting because any two random people might not agree on which side is "worse" in this regard. People often think they're immune to the tactics and propaganda of the other side, but they'll frequently fail to see the same or very similar stuff happening on their own side, or they'll downplay it because it doesn't affect them so much personally.
The thing about the Nazi's is it wasn't just the obvious "Jews are bad" stuff. They really framed themselves as being scientific and holding an interest in not just making the nation better but humanity itself. They did a lot to project strength, progress, modernization and scientific thought and inspire people to get behind them.
Of course, it all blends together... There was insidious breadth in their messaging... They would do things like go to elementary schools and cherry pick the most pathetic and weak (who "happened" to be stereotypically jewish-looking) child and then pick a child known amongst their peers to be athletic, intelligent, and handsome/beautiful (and who "happened" to be Aryan-looking) and then they'd talk 'scientifically' about the distinctive features of the two races, and the physical differences between the two children, espousing the 'good genes' of the Aryan looking kid.
Even today, in 'more virtuous' societies, people love to think of themselves as superior to others in some capacity. It's less common to emphasize the inferiority of others, especially using race as a basis, but at the end of the day, we're talking about basically the same human tendency toward contempt.
Me too, it is simple to judge after the facts. In the future we will be judged the same way, and many will not understand how we could not see the catastrophic end of our journey.
It is certainly more nuanced and complex than reducing it in terms of a persons's propensity towards good and evil. You must look into the psychosocial conditions that made Germany the breeding grounds for Nazism. Why was it appealing to the ordinary Germany citizen? I recommend reading Erich Fromm's book Escape from Freedom as he explores this at depth. Still a relevant book almost 80 years after being written — where might observe similar phenomena today?
where? Not a question hard to answer these days. Somehow, like the story descibes happened almost 100 years ago, this gradual mindshift seems to have happened over the past decades without people noticing it.
Just look at Russia - a real Nazist regime while most Russians conveniently believe they are fighting world Nazism. The truth is actually available to them, yet it is so scary and inconvenient that they instinctively choose to ignore it.
Their propagandists on state TV even stated recently discussing Ukraine that Nazism = political nationalism + totalitarism. Which obviously doesn't apply to Ukraine, yet absolutely describes Russia.
I support Ukraine and oppose Putin - but Putin isn’t a Nazi. His ideology, in its details, is quite different from that of Nazism.
Russian propaganda that “Ukraine is a Nazi state” is stupid, but you have to understand that “Nazism” means something quite different to Russians than to most Westerners. Most Westerners focus on the Nazis’ genocidal Antisemitism; in Russia, the focus is more on the Nazis’ genocidal Russophobia. That different focus makes the propaganda seem not quite as ludicrous as it does in the West, especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian), which the Russian government paints as Russophobic discrimination.
>Putin isn’t a Nazi. His ideology, in its details, is quite different from that of Nazism.
no. Just read his war declaration speech. Classic Nazism. They had "master race" and inferior "races" of Jews and Slavics. Putin has master nation of Russians and inferior Ukrainians. And he is using that the same was as Hitler as a reason to claim the master race's/nation's right to the territory and to conduct ethnical cleansing and genocide there.
>especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian)
The "War and Peace" opens with the scene of an aristocratic party in St.Peterburg where French language - de-facto language of Russian nobility in the years before - is totally banned because of Napoleon invasion.
To Putin, Ukrainians are Russians who have been corrupted by anti-Russian influences into believing themselves to be a different people, and the Ukrainian language is a corrupted form of Russian (Russian with some Polish mixed in)
Hitler didn’t see Jews as Germans who had been corrupted into viewing themselves as non-Germans. On the contrary, he insisted full-blooded Jews could never be Germans, no matter how much they wanted to be-even if they completely rejected their Jewish identity. There was a tiny minority of Jews (the Association of German National Jews) who supported Hitler - how did he repay them for their support? He sent them to the camps.
I don't know why this is down voted. Imo, it is accurate.
Hitler is not the only bad genocidal man in world history. It is super possible for Russia to be fascist, genocidal while also having important differences against Hitlers ideology. Being different then Hitler does not make one good or defensible.
>To Putin, Ukrainians are Russians who have been corrupted by anti-Russian influences into believing themselves to be a different people, and the Ukrainian language is a corrupted form of Russian (Russian with some Polish mixed in)
That sounds almost benign, like just a minor difference of opinions, when taken that way out of the context. The context though is the declaration that anybody resisting that conversion back to Russian and insisting on being Ukrainian is to be killed. Another, wider context, is the deep contempt (which Russians in theie Great Russia chauvinism fail to notice as well as to acknowledge when pointed out to) Russians have for Ukrainians in general which is well illustrated by usage of "hohly" with various level of offensiveness for example, as well as pretty deep mutual anymosity between Russians and Western Ukrainians.
(Note: i grew up in USSR as a Russian by mentality, and i'm half-Ukrainian by blood, so i have some idea what i'm talking about here)
Anyway, Nazism isn't about why some are deemed inferior. Nazism is about deeming some inferior and acting violently upon that belief.
People have been doing that for many centuries, even millennia. “Nazism” is a specific ideology which arose in 20th century Germany, not a generic term for violent xenophobia, which is far older than Nazism is.
> There, as you know, there were Macedonians and Thracians and Illyrians, all most warlike nations, here Syrians and Asiatic Greeks, the most worthless peoples among mankind and born for slavery.
That’s a quote from the Roman general and consul (joint head of state) Manius Acilius Glabrio, in the early 2nd century BCE. The quote is given by the ancient Roman historian Livy - ancient historians often invented speeches for their subjects, so Manius Acilius probably never spoke those exact words, but Livy believed they were an accurate representation of his beliefs. So, rather than being a 20th century Nazi invention, violent xenophobia was the state ideology of the ancient Roman Republic.
Roman Empire has a lot of similar aspects - there is a reason why Hitler took so much from the Roman Empire - yet it had imperial ideology, not nazist. To illustrate the difference - if Russia went in Ukraine to get those good agricultural lands or to just expand because supposedly being bigger is better that would be the imperial motive. Tsarist Russia was imperial. USSR is bit more complicated - while it looks to many like imperial, it was an ideology driven totalitarian state like Nazi Germany, just instead of Nazist ideology it had class-based/socialist/communism ideology. And now we come to Putin's Russia - it is a totalitarian state driven by a nazist ideology of Russian "master nation".
Unfortunately, even say just a year ago i, like many, wasn't able to recognize Russian Nazism even though it was right into our faces - it looked to me just like strong authoritarianism with imperial ideology colored by Great Russia chauvinism. Today it is pretty clear to me that all the last 22 years, right from the apartment building bombings by FSB in 1999, we had the Russian Nazism rising. It finally dawns on more and more people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashism
> Roman Empire has a lot of similar aspects - there is a reason why Hitler took so much from the Roman Empire - yet it had imperial ideology, not nazist.
I shared a quote by an ancient Roman general and politician saying the peoples of the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Levant were “the most worthless peoples among mankind and born for slavery”-how is that different from Hitler’s view that Slavs were an inferior race who ought to be enslaved? If there is a difference I don’t see it. But if the Roman Empire was practising “Nazism” 2000 years before Hitler was even born, maybe “Nazism” is somewhat of a misnomer for the generic phenomena (as opposed to the specific instantiation of it in 20th century Germany)
> But if the Roman Empire was practising “Nazism” 2000 years before Hitler was even born, maybe “Nazism” is somewhat of a misnomer for the generic phenomena (as opposed to the specific instantiation of it in 20th century Germany)
Nazism is fascism plus violent xenophobia of specific, ie. of "superiority", kind, like "master race" in case of Hitler or "master nation" in case of Russia. In my original comment i specifically mentioned practically the same definition given by Russian propagandists - "totalitarism plus political nationalism" (fascism is a totalitarism). For example Italy was fascist, yet it wasn't really nazist. Roman Empire wasn't a fascist state, thus it was also not a nazist state. USSR had totalitarism, yet it wasn't a fascism, and USSR also didn't had a nationalism ideology. Putin's Russia has both - fascism and "master nation" ideology, and thus Putin's Russia is a nazist state.
> Nazism is fascism plus violent xenophobia of specific, ie. of "superiority", kind, like "master race" in case of Hitler or "master nation" in case of Russia.
Ancient Romans believed they were a “master race/nation”. As the quote I provided demonstrates, they believed that “inferior” foreign nations - such as Thracians, Illyrians, Macedonians, Syrians - were “born for slavery”. That is exactly the same as what the Nazis believed, there is no significant difference between ancient Roman and Nazi beliefs on this topic, except for the identity of the “superior race”.
> Roman Empire wasn't a fascist state, thus it was also not a nazist state.
You realise what the etymology of “fascist” is? It comes from Latin “fasces”, which is a special type of axe which was used in the Roman Republic and Empire as a symbol of state power. The Italian fascists adopted the same symbol, and the word, because they saw what they were doing as taking Italy back to the past glory of the Roman Empire. So ancient Rome was the original fascist state which 20th century fascists adopted as their model.
Roman Empire wasn't a fascist state, and in particular it wasn't even a totalitarian state. As long as you acknowledged imperial power and paid taxes you could go your way about things. For example for the most part there were multiple religions allowed. Religion was much bigger deal back then than today. Allowing multiple religions back then was like if USSR allowed multiple ideologies and political parties. Of course USSR wouldn't do such thing because it was a totalitarian state while Roman Empire wasn't.
> For example for the most part there were multiple religions allowed.
Mussolini didn't really care about religion. He only made Catholicism the state religion because he thought that by doing so he could buy the Catholic Church's support; which only partially worked, it continued to be somewhat of a thorn in his side for the remainder of his rule. In seeing religion primarily as a tool to be manipulated to political ends, as opposed to being driven by personal religious belief, Mussolini actually has a lot in common with ancient Roman politicians, many of whom had a very similar attitude towards religion. If the end policy result seems quite different, that is more due to differences in historical circumstance than a fundamentally different ideological starting point.
And just like fascist Italy, ancient Rome had a state religion, and everyone had to pay lip service to it – the state didn't care if you believed in it in your heart, but criticising it publicly could get you killed. Much of the ancient Roman persecution of Jews and Christians was because they refused to pay lip service to the state religion, and dared to express their disbelief in the state's Gods publicly rather than privately. Likewise, Fascist Italy didn't care if you sincerely believed in Catholicism – Il Duce himself didn't – so long as you publicly pretended to believe in it. The primary difference is that the Roman state religion, being polytheistic, was often willing to import foreign gods - although the government reserved the right to decide in each individual case whether a given importation was to be permitted or prohibited, and a number of foreign cults were indeed banned – while Catholicism as (a branch of) an exclusively monotheistic religion generally isn't willing to do that (although it has some history of importing figures from other religions as Saints – the Gautama Buddha was accepted into Catholicism as Saint Josaphat, but he was later dropped as a Saint once his non-Christian origin became clear–although some of the Eastern Orthodox churches still have him as one; many argue that the Irish Saint Brigid is a Christianisation of the Irish Goddess Brigid; others argue that Our Lady of Guadalupe is a Christianisation of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin, although that is somewhat more disputed.)
Was fascist Italy a totalitarian state? It officially claimed to be one – when the liberal opposition used "totalitarian" as a pejorative, Mussolini decided to reclaim the epithet and wear it proudly ("yes, we are totalitarian, totalitarianism is great!") – but Mussolini never gained absolute power: the King and the Church acted as independent spheres of power, and Mussolini never managed to gain as much control over either as he wished – when Hitler asked Mussolini to join World War II on the Axis side, Mussolini had to ask the King for permission, and was told "No" several times before Victor Emmanuel eventually said "Yes". Mussolini's position in Italy was always much weaker than Hitler's in Germany or Stalin's in Russia (or even Franco's in Spain), and while fascist Italy did persecute political dissidents, the persecution was far milder than that of the Nazis or Stalinists. (I'm not defending Mussolini here, who undoubtedly was a bad person who did numerous evil things and brought his country to near-ruin – but in many ways a lesser evil than Hitler or Stalin.)
i think you're conflating absolute power and totalitarianism. Though they may co-exist occasionally, those are 2 different things. Absolutism is about unchecked power of the ruler over state, while totalitarianism is about control of the state over all aspects of the citizens' lives. Roman Empire like say France of 17th century or like most of the kingdoms/empires in the history was absolutist (Magna Carta in 1215 started that slow process of non-absolutist kingdoms appearance in history). In absolutist state the will of the rule is the primary source of the things, and may be codified in the laws or may be applied just at whim. A totalitarian state isn't necessarily absolutist. It may be absolutist like the USSR during Stalin while it may be not absolutist like the same USSR during Brezhnev. In totalitarian state people are typically oppressed based on the laws of the state driven by ideology, not because of the whims of the ruler. The whims of the ruler if happen, like in case of Stalin, come in addition to the totalitarian state oppression and don't change the nature of the state, and may naturally disappear with the death of the ruler while the totalitarian state would continue its existence.
Looking at pre-20th century history the closest to totalitarianism would be the Church's tight control over all aspects of the people lives in the Middle Ages. That Church's power wasn't absolutist - it wasn't performed purely according to the whims of the current Pope, instead it was mainly driven by the Church's ideology, and while Popes changed the state of total control of the Church over people would go unchanged for centuries. Compare that Church's power with the power of the kings at the same time - the kings could do whatever they want, kill/punish whoever they wanted, yet they didn't maintain such control as the Church.
> totalitarianism is about control of the state over all aspects of the citizens' lives
The Roman Empire had no compunction about interfering in any aspect of citizens' lives. If it engaged in less interference in practice than many modern regimes, that was simply because there was far less for it to interfere with. Consider the education system – in modern times, education is near-universal, and so regimes seek to control the education system in order to influence the thoughts of the mass of the population. If the Roman Empire had universal schooling, it is near-certain that the imperial government would have done the very same. But, it didn't – the bulk of the population was illiterate and uneducated, while fee-paying private schools served the children of the affluent. The government never sought to regulate those schools, simply because it did not see any point in doing so. Why should the state care about the school curriculum when 95% of children never went to school, and the most of the 5% who did would have been children of regime insiders anyway?
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both subordinated all civil society organisations to state control. What did the Roman Empire do? Well, civil society – as understood today – largely didn't exist in ancient times. There were few formal civil society institutions, and those few which did exist were generally religious in character, attached to Temples/Churches/etc. And the Roman state heavily interfered with religious institutions – in the pre-Christian period, major Pagan temples were generally government-owned and with state-appointed clergy. If anything, the adoption of Christianity as a state religion saw a modest decline in government control of religion, simply because Christianity had an organised clergy not under direct state control, whereas the Pagan clergy were far less organised and hence far more amenable to direct state interference.
Fascist Italy was a different situation again – Mussolini sought to subordinate all civil society to the state just as the Nazis and Soviets had done, but was forced to compromise with the Catholic Church and permit it to retain its own independent Church-sponsored civil society organisations, which functioned as alternatives and competitors to the state-sponsored ones. Italian citizens had a freedom to choose between two competing ideologies (Fascism and Catholicism) – a relatively narrow freedom, but nonetheless one which was denied to those ruled by the Nazis or Soviets. The military was another area in which Mussolini failed to implement totalitarianism – Nazi soldiers swore allegiance to Hitler, Soviet soldiers swore allegiance to the Soviet State, but Italian soldiers swore allegiance, not to Mussolini, but rather to King Victor Emmanuel III. As a result, many royalist/monarchist opponents of Fascism found a refuge and power base within the Italian military – nothing parallel could be said about the Wehrmacht or Red Army.
Comparing Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, I think it can be argued that only the last was complete totalitarianism, whereas the former were less than fully "total". In the Soviet Union, the economic sphere was fully subordinated to the state; with private enterprise, private property and private wealth severely restricted (if not abolished entirely). By contrast, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany allowed private enterprise and property to continue to exist, and both regimes permitted the wealthy to keep the bulk of their private wealth, provided they did not politically oppose the regime, and were not members of persecuted minorities. While both regimes did interfere with the operation of private businesses to a degree, they never sought the complete state control of business decision-making which existed in the Soviet Union.
> In totalitarian state people are typically oppressed based on the laws of the state driven by ideology, not because of the whims of the ruler. The whims of the ruler if happen, like in case of Stalin, come in addition to the totalitarian state oppression and don't change the nature of the state,
Why does it matter whether one's oppression is driven by "ideology" or "whim"? I can't see why this is an important distinction. And it seems rather orthogonal to the question of whether the state has "total" control over society. One regime might be highly ideological yet with significant spheres of society maintaining independence from state control; another regime might be founded on personal whim and the ruler's megalomania rather than any coherent ideology, and yet subject every aspect of life to those whims.
> and may naturally disappear with the death of the ruler while the totalitarian state would continue its existence.
Historically, many absolute monarchies have had no particular ideology, yet saw a succession of absolute rulers lasting centuries, as the role of absolute ruler is successively passed from father to son. The particularities of whim may change with each generation, but it is still whim; and sons likely inherit much of their whims from their fathers.
> Looking at pre-20th century history the closest to totalitarianism would be the Church's tight control over all aspects of the people lives in the Middle Ages
I think the mediaeval Catholic Church was actually far weaker than many people today think it was. It did not exert much control over the average person's life at all; many mediaeval clerics bemoaned that the majority of the population rarely went to church, and often acted quite disrespectfully on the occasions they did, indulged in widespread drunkenness, promiscuity, unmarried cohabitation, adultery, prostitution, etc, and that the government mostly didn't care. Even within the Catholic Church itself–very many "celibate" clergy had mistresses and illegitimate children (including bishops, cardinals, even Popes); homosexual activity was widespread in many monasteries (which while a capital offence, few were actually prosecuted–generally only the indiscreet, unlucky, or those who had made powerful enemies.) Many viewed religion as a fitting subject for mockery, and got away with it far more often than most today would think they did. Those who sought to establish a competing religious ideology to the Church's frequently faced execution, but those who decided to just ignore it all and quietly live their lives as they saw fit were largely free to do so.
The only difference is that German Nazis believed Jews were themselves evil, and Russian Nazis believe Ukrainians are irreversibly corrupted by evil West. The exact flavors of their victim complex and exceptionalism are irrelevant.
There are more differences tho. Nazism was not just about Jews. There was a lot more to the ideology: race hierarchy, need for living space, survival of the fittest ideology and so on.
Russia now resembles more Tsarists imperial wars mixed with communist practices.
if you understand Russian - on the "new people, new Russia" https://rutube.ru/video/6a82ce7cc138125d6c9d0f3a47c5e74e/ (by one of the main Russian propagandist who is every day on the state TV) where they also talk about "new blood" being not IT/programmers/entrepreneurs/artists/etc., instead it is those "heroes" of the war "who will break that needs to be broken and will build what needs to be built" . If you ever watched "Man in the High Castle" - that has significant overlap with "The Year 0".
The Nazis practiced social darwinism which goes way beyond hating and killing jews. If you were to simplify it, it would be nationalism on steroids with a deep hate for all other nations and the desire to conquer all of them.
> If you were to simplify it, it would be nationalism on steroids with a deep hate for all other nations
That is a huge oversimplification. Nazis viewed Slavs as inferiors to be enslaved, but they saw Scandinavians much more positively. Hitler admired the British Empire, and prior to the outbreak of WW2, Nazi propaganda was pro-British - Hitler had hoped to recruit Britain as an ally, and was disappointed when it became an enemy instead. Nazi policy towards conquered nations was complex, ranging from genocidal extermination at one extreme, to promoting enhanced minority rights at the other (which they did for the Frisians in the Netherlands and the Bretons in France). Even for Slavs the policy wasn’t purely enslavement - some were to be forcibly assimilated as Germans instead (the Sorbs), and the Nazis were keen to play different Slavic groups off against each other (which is how some Ukrainian nationalists ended up volunteering to fight for the Nazis)
If you hate something about yourself, maybe it affords some reassurance to see that thing in someone else and then try and destroy them. I wonder if thats what's going on with some of these Russians.
> I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those German citizens who would have gradually become part of the Nazi machine
You can think about how you handle current events:
If you live in the US, how did you handle the Trump presidency?
If you live in Russia, how are you handling the current situation?
A few weeks ago a Russian colleague of mine IMed me looking to move out of the country. That night I told my wife how lucky I felt that we didn't need to leave the US when Trump was in power.
Putin has been in power for 20 years. It takes a while to dismantle all the democratic institutions that make is so that you can stay here without worry. Trump made an attempt to dismantle every institution from the 3-letter agencies like CIA, FBI, CDC, DOJ, the media, rule of law, even the concept of the presidency and elections themselves. We won't be so lucky if Trump has a second go at dismantling these institutions, because it took him a while to figure out how, but now he's pretty much an expert.
It seems like the institution of presidential debates that has been a hallmark of our democratic process for decades was destroyed by the GOP just yesterday, so speaking in the past tense as if the damage has ceased is a mistake.
I would argue that Russia did not had much of democratic institutions in the first place. And Putin was just returning back to the practices he learned when he was young and middle aged KGB agent the first moment it seemed useful.
I’ve often thought about this. But, if I would have been raised during the Nazi era, I wouldn’t be me. If you would take back via a time machine now, I definitely wouldn’t become a Nazi. But what if you’d erase my memory and everything I know about history and then transfer me back? I hope that it’s ingrained values and not just knowledge that would let me make the right choices.
I wonder if nazis had any realistic hope of resisting. In russia today there are a handful of people who will take open action against Putin, and pay for it with years in prison. If you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself on that scale, could you have done much in Nazi germany, either?
Maybe it's like being a part of a bad company. It's too big a machine for you to meaningfully change, and the only way to remain on board is to help it along.
People in position and with experience to meaningfully resist were targeted by regime first. There were actually attempts to resist, but simply, they lost.
A question that seems pointless to me unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality, which history has shown usually isn't the case for people. Your upbringing and circumstances would have been totally different, and therefore your mindset unpredictable.
Your greatest chance of being anti-Nazi, for instance, would have been just to be a card-carrying Communist.
His question is interesting (I have often wondered similarly) but your response is also interesting. So...
> unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality
to suggest otherwise would be to say that most people don't, but most people will help others - a lot of support is going to Ukraine which would simply not if Ukraine were the aggressor (and I acknowledge such ethical behaviour is patchy and sometimes not there but often it is).
Some might be offended by holocaust comparisons here, but if we are to really take the ideal of "never again" seriously, then it's absolutely crucial that we be free to openly discuss in good faith how situations gradually snowballed from one thing to another and ended up at a certain point in history without needing to censor ourselves so much to avoid offending someone.
And thankfully we've had nothing close to approaching the horrendous events of the holocaust during our present pandemic difficulties, but opposing discussion on the grounds of it being potentially offensive isn't doing any service to the survivors (and victims) of those past atrocities, and it risks us following some of those dark paths of the past into the future if we cannot apply what we learned to our own times.
The various lessons of history must be applied as much as possible in order to better understand our present time and to avoid repeating those mistakes of history.
Yes. In the US, things didn't get as far (but they got far worse than I would have predicted) , but what we saw in Australia, China, and other nations was very disturbing. A study of the history and characteristics of genocidal regimes always begin with very strong "us vs. them" narratives and can be based on ethnicity, religion, perceived illnesses, and many other factors. It is critical that the human race learns to recognize how easy it is to scapegoat and persecute people for these and other reasons.
As an Australian who lived here throughout the pandemic, it's massively hyperbolic and bad-faith argumentation to relate Australia's pandemic response to Nazi Germany, or even to what is going on in China now.
Yes we had lockdowns - as did many other countries/states/provinces/cities, including in the U.S. And yes we've had vaccine mandates in order to work in many roles - as has been the case in the U.S. and many other places around the world that have always been regarded as highly liberal and democratic. And yes we had quarantine for people entering the country - which has been utilised widely throughout history.
It sucked to experience, and yes, sometimes there was cause for concern as to how far it was going and how permanent the restrictions would be.
But we can now see the outcome; the country is almost completely back to normal, and ended up with one of the lowest per-capita fatality rates in the world, hospitals were only briefly strained when omicron surged this past January but quickly returned to normal, and the country has fared well economically compared to most other countries.
And even if the outcome wasn't so positive, this distinction is crucial: Nazi Germany was defined by persecuting, imprisoning and murdering huge numbers of people; Australia's pandemic response was intended to prevent the premature deaths of huge numbers of people, and it succeeded at doing that whilst impinging on people's freedoms for only a limited period of time and to only a limited extent.
Screeching ideologues on Twitter and cable TV who were not here and know nothing about our societal values are not the people to be informed by on this topic.
I am far from the only person who expressed concern about what happened in Australia. I also saw huge numbers of Australians protesting in the streets, unless you are claiming that the lockdown protests are somehow hyperbolic and not real.
Human Rights Watch [1] documented a variety of arbitrary abuses and disturbing authoritarian trends. I watched videos of police choke-slamming an innocent woman for not wearing a mask [2], people being forcefully kidnapped from their homes and taken to camps (!) [3], and many other abuses.
The comparison with the National Socialist regime in WWII is not a comparison of specific ideologies, as I already made very clear, but of a societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good. There is a desensitization that occurs and, IMO, any honest student of history would see the exact same forces at play.
I’ll preface my response by saying I’ve leaned libertarian/Laissez-faire for much of my (now lengthy) adult life, and I’ve liked plenty of what I’ve seen you write on HN before (I recognize your handle as we met personally at YC many years ago). I say that to point out that I don’t think we’re coming at this with strongly opposing ideological priors.
To your response:
- I myself was concerned by some of the measures and the risk of overreach and permanence of the measures - I said so in my original comment.
- Yes people protested, which was understandable and healthy, and allowed by governments/police.
- Yes sometimes police were heavy handed in enforcing the laws - where it went too far it was widely shared on social and mainstream media and condemned by pretty much everyone. But these cases were isolated.
- The measures taken in the NT to quarantine cases were done because that territory is home to some of the most vulnerable people on earth in terms of pre-existing health conditions, education/language and access to medical care and information; in short, it was done to protect the most vulnerable members of the indigenous population from severe illness and premature death. You couldn’t possibly think of anything more opposite to Nazism if you tried.
The thing about being an adult is that you learn that government policies/measures shouldn’t be measured against some idealistic, imagined alternate reality, but against the realistic next-worst scenario. That’s the whole reason I outgrew my belief in simplistic socialist policies in my late 20s, which most people do, of course.
To me one of the greatest revelations of the pandemic is that libertarians are just as liable to succumb to idealistic fantasies as socialists have historically been.
The standard refrain has been that governments should “protect the vulnerable” while letting everyone else live totally freely - but without suggesting a workable plan for how this actually could be achieved, particularly when it’s not obvious in advance, who is/isn’t vulnerable.
Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.
If I’ve misrepresented you, please explain how.
If not, please be less euphemistic in how you’re conveying the kind of outcome you’d prefer to see of the pandemic in Australia, given that the ultimate actual outcome has been a remarkably low fatality rate by world standards (1/7 per-capita even of the much vaunted Sweden), and a social/political order now largely back to what it was beforehand.
Good to know where you're coming from and, yes, I remember you well. Nice to chat again.
>Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism.
> If I've misrepresented you, please explain how.
Yes, this is a misrepresentation (though I know you don't do it maliciously), and I'll be happy to explain. The original article posted here beautifully illustrates this process as well. The article also notes that the gas-lighting and trivialization of objections to this process as "alarmist" is a present feature.
The process that a society undergoes in order to eventually commit atrocities against some scapegoated people is well-known and it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass to outcome-based management which focuses on a single-minded definition of success. This single-metric management is a finely-tuned technique that is favored by officials acting against the best interests of the people as a whole to erode and impede basic human rights. In this process, the ends always justify the means.
The only way this process is successful is if the despots in question are able to manipulate enough of the people via their base instincts and the most useful of instincts in propaganda is fear. Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear. Girard described this entire process perfectly (as does OP's original article).
We saw this same process occur in the US after 9/11, where the fear and anger in response to those attacks led our country into a 20 year military campaign of the most irrational nature and one which ended in total failure. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, trillions of dollars were wasted, and thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured with no regard to human rights or due process of law. I watched with dismay as people who described themselves as patriots and "strong Constitutionalists" threw any notion of rights and due process out the window in the name of "getting those terrorists." Even the definition of terrorist became quite vague ("he looked like one"), and the long-term societal effects in America and around the world remain with us to this day and they will likely never go away.
So am I saying that those "patriots" were Nazis or that the post-9/11 response in America is the same as Nazism? No, it's not about the characteristics of an ideology rooted in a specific milieu. I'm saying that Nazism itself was of the same Category / Type of all collectivist and coercive behavior and it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management. You lose the forest for the trees and a whole bunch of civilizational progress toward human freedom along the way.
I probably have a few years even on you and, as such, am well acquainted with the real world. The older I get, the more I can see that if we abandon high-minded ideals and indulge our base passions we are left only with lizard brains and that this process of totalitarian control is designed with that exact outcome in mind.
My original statement in response to the parent of this thread / context was simply an opportunity for self-reflection.
How did we all respond to people on the outside of the establishment narrative, who had differing beliefs? Did we support their freedom of choice and basic human rights or did we look the other way when they lost their jobs or businesses, support forced vaccinations (violence), gloss over the abuses of law enforcement, etc. It's not a personal accusation, it's a simple question and one that we have to answer both as individuals and as a society. The ideology, the regime, the government officials, etc. are ultimately irrelevant because all of that depends on the cooperation of the ordinary people, including you and me. But those same choices then were the same choices faced by the Germans in WWII, regardless of the specifics of the ideology in question.
The transformation of the people that I witnessed in two short years was disturbing to say the least.
I understand the position, and please trust that I've wrestled with these issues daily since the pandemic measures began, and tried very hard to examine all perspectives, both philosophically and practically, as thoroughly and dispassionately as possible.
And please also trust that in my own family and community I've been in the (often lonely) position of questioning and critiquing the measures.
But where I'm pushing back here is on the proportionality of the condemnation and the aptness of the historical analogies. Given enough differences in the circumstances, such analogies cease to be appropriate or helpful, and certainly not persuasive to those with different (albeit thoughtful and legitimate) views.
The key points of my perspective in response to yours are:
- Re "... it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass ..." – sure, but unlike the two analogies you give, which are all about attacking/imprisoning/killing people due to their racial/national/religious identities, the pandemic measures were about saving significant numbers of a society's own people from severe illness and death, which is _not_ a subversion of people's ordinary moral compass; a healthy, moral society protects its fellow citizens from illness and death as far as reasonably possible, regardless of how old or sick they are.
- Re. "Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear." and "it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management..." – (1) The fears, whilst sometimes exaggerated, were not imagined or hypothetical; the deaths really did happen, and are still happening (though thankfully in diminishing numbers), and happened not only to the elderly and frail, but to plenty of people with many years ahead of them in which to bring companionship and contribution to their families and societies. It's not a subversion of morality for people to care deeply about this, and it's neither excessively emotional nor excessively rational; it matters both from emotional and rational perspectives; (2) I pay a lot of attention to the decision-making that goes on in government about these things, and it was certainly not "single-metric management"; the fatality count was one factor, as was the load on hospitals/effect on hospital workers with regard both to covid patients and other patients, but also the flow-on effects to the rest of the economy/society. The effect on people's businesses/jobs was real (and for what it's worth, substantial moral and tangible support was offered to people whose jobs/businesses were affected), but given the complex nature of a pandemic, there were always going to be harms to people's jobs/businesses; this couldn't be avoided any more than illness/fatalities could, the issue was/is how to balance and minimise the harms overall; (3) To put it all down to "lizard brain" dominance; sure I see plenty of this, but I personally come to it having spent countless hours over many years doing emotional healing/development work to get out of lizard-brain thinking, and I have the most gratifying conversations on the topic with others who have been similarly dedicated to this kind of work. I equally see plenty of lizard brain dominance from those who cry "Nazi", "fascist", "globalists", etc in response to every/any government measure to manage the pandemic.
- I've done plenty of thinking and reading about how the pandemic response fits in with classical liberal philosophies, and have paid much attention to the likes of Taleb and Norman [1] from the Real World Risk Institute (who, incidentally, are now bitterly opposed to one another on the matter of vaccinations, but that is a healthy dynamic I think), and I'm persuaded by the idea that there is plenty of compatibility between Hayekian philosophy and the pandemic measures; this paper discusses it well [2].
I understand that much of the commentary about this is influenced by the significant differences in the way Americans vs Australians regard their governments, and real differences in the way the respective governments have operated, particularly in recent decades. Australians tend not to have such a hostile and adversarial relationship with their government, and I don't think this is altogether unhealthy; it's a much smaller country, with a much smaller role in the world, and plenty of mechanisms to limit/diffuse power, and so politicians here just don't have the scope to amass much power or wealth. It just doesn't hold that we're at significant risk of sliding down a slippery slope to despotic tyranny.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I don't see any signs of it yet, and if I do I'll be sure to write many words about it :)
I'm glad to hear that you were willing to question a lot of the things that were happening, especially in an environment where it was very difficult to do so. That, coupled with the fact that you're even having this conversation with me shows a far more open mind and willingness to see things from another perspective than I am used to encountering when this topic comes up.
Regarding your two points of contention, I understand where you're coming from.
In order to answer, I'll clarify again that I'm not talking about government policy in this specific thread (although I did feel that it was equally problematic across the board in most countries) but, rather, the behavior of the people. This is my sticking point and the reason that do believe the comparison is apt, even if we didn't escalate (thankfully) in most countries to the point that things did in Germany before and during WWII (thanks, in this case, to the people, enough people on the other side of this to make a difference). It is ultimately the same types of behaviors involved in scapegoating and desensitization to persecution and oppression.
If our pattern-matching for totalitarian behavior is confined to images of psychotic Germans clad in Hugo Boss and runes as they hunt their victims, we're going to miss a whole lot of equally bad behaviors, even if they aren't (yet) as overtly shocking.
The German people themselves didn't just wake up one day and decide to start exterminating minorities, it was a long process of mass propaganda and brainwashing which gradually led to that conclusion. And the people let it happen. It is our duty as human beings, I believe, to identify and block this process as early as possible in every case in order to prevent it from ever happening again.
What specific behaviors am I talking about (during COVID)?
- Snitching / video recording / screaming at / attacking people who didn't "comply" with mandates
- People fantasizing online about murdering people who didn't want the vaccine
- Schoolteachers taping masks to their elementary school students, forcing them to sit outside in the cold, mocking them, and more
- Corporations firing employees who refused the vaccine (and often in very underhanded ways so they didn't have to pay severance)
- And many more that I'm frankly not comfortable with mentioning here
While I'm sure there is a "whataboutist" response to each of the points above, the fact remains that all of the above behavior happened in conjunction with and was generally not condemned by anyone in the establishment (e.g., with real power).
Governments are always going to try to increase their level of control over society but it only works if the people participate. That was just as true during COVID as it was during the Third Reich. While I know that it stings to hear it, I believe it to be the truth, or else I wouldn't say it.
My other objection to your main point (your point that the intentions were good, which is why these actions were acceptable (please let me know if I am mis-characterizing)) is that this rationalization sets a very low bar for both governments and the people to excuse behaviors that should never be present in free societies. You can basically find a way to rationalize anything to the people if this is the standard we set, given enough time and propaganda.
We may or may not disagree on that point but that is where I am coming from. I don't believe, at the end of the day, that the ends justify the means in this situation. There are many other externalities (and, yes, deaths caused by these restrictions and behaviors) that must be taken in to consideration. Not only did I not see anyone aligned with the establishment asking these questions, any attempt to do so from the outside was shut down, censored, gaslit, and more. We probably won't end up agreeing on this but I do appreciate your thoughts and thoughtfulness in talking about it. Sucks that we have to have this conversation in text, which is a poor / cold medium for these types of conversations but it is what it is.
I'll read the papers you sent and definitely agree that there is always a lot of self-reflection and work we all have to do ourselves in order to get out of and stay out of lizard-brain mentalities.
“Coercion is coercion” is an inane idea. If you’re kicked out of a bar for being drunk, it’s coercion. To say that there’s no difference to the Holocaust is, at the very least, deeply misguided.
Not willing to associate with Nazis is something that only happened after Germany lost the war and people wanted a specific group to blame, which is ironic because that is exactly what the nazis did by blaming the jews.
There are Nazi-minded people in every country. Also anti-Nazis. It is not like a war between Nazi-nations and anti-Nazi nations. It is a cold war between autocracy vs. democracy, happening everywhere.
Germany did not slowly slipped into dictatorship after Hitler took power in 1933. It jumped right in with crackdown on democracy supporting parties, first concentration camps (for political opposition), arbitrarily search house searches and arrests. Within few months, all political parties except one were banned.
The first measures against Jews were also taken instantly.
Meaning, whether you felt free or not severely dependended on who you were - generally you needed to be pro Hitler to feel free.
The title itself and the fact that it's posted here almost implicitly
contains every comment within its seed.
> "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 have since about 2010, sensed better. Snowden helped me trust my
instincts. At this time I am left with no moral choice whatsoever but
to speak up about the direction of technology and what we are helping
to create. It now seems like a Pascal's wager. If I'm wrong it won't
matter and I'll simply look like a fool. I am really, really praying
that I end up looking a fool.
The sad thing is that most often, the actual villains trick everyone into thinking it's a different party.
When bad people rise to power, they often do so vilifying one or more other groups. The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.
You're being sarcastic, but I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.
You can't reduce politics to a game of pattern-matching where every time someone says something which pattern-matches to "you called someone bad people!" you should react just like the last time someone said it. Sometimes people are bad, sometimes they're not, and there's no shortcut to figuring it out other than by taking the time and effort to actually figure it out, (Which isn't really a shortcut at all.)
You seem to be arguing in favor of the ability to declare one side entirely bad, while I (using sarcasm) argued against it. I am still not entirely convinced that the ability to completely denounce one side as entirely evil is somehow an important freedom which must be preserved, even if it is sometimes true.
Regarding your examples, I couldn’t possibly comment, for obvious reasons.
Of course, no one is arguing that all sides are equally bad or that when one side says that that the other side is evil they are always wrong… the problem is that it is hard to know if you are being tricked or told the truth.
>I can think of a number of cases where someone could have expressed that opinion seriously and been pretty much correct, including Jews under the Nazis, and the Ukrainians now.
The problem is that if you place yourself in a random time and party, you are more likely to be a Nazi than a Jew, because a crucial element of evil is the power to do it, which is associated with having greater numbers, and that rigs the odds so that your random insertion will be among them rather than their heroic enemies.
In early 30s the Nazis only got 33-37% of the vote not too much unlike the portion of the electorate who support ending democracy in favor of our own would be dictator.
"Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule..."
If you place yourself at a random time of trouble you will 2 to 1 find yourself behind the eyes of someone indifferent or scared neither victim nor victimizer.
I think that when it becomes culty and reality-denying is where the real problems come in. For example, 47 years ago the city of Phenom Penh was forced at gunpoint to march into the wilderness to farm rice because of how some people interpreted Marx. Those that weren't simply marched off to be killed--often beaten to death to save on bullets--were made to farm rice despite not knowing how and with no plans made to actually feed them. So most of the rest worked 16+ hour days and simply starved, because you could get shot for high crimes like catching a fish to eat when it was swimming between your legs.
> I think that when it becomes culty and reality-denying is where the
real problems come in. For example, 47 years ago the city of Phenom
Penh was forced at gunpoint to march into the wilderness to farm
rice because of how some people interpreted
This! Absolutely. Technological backlash is one of the grave dangers I
address in Digital Vegan. Anti-intellectualism lies just beneath the
surface in a technological society that is out of touch with itself
and has alienated its members through the very technology that could
unite it. It grows prone to regressive catastrophes like Mao's brutal
projects and of the Khmer Rouge you mention. "Strong Leaders" attach
themselves easily to ruralism, "back to basics" and other regressive
ideologies. In many ways I think Putin may be one of
them. Technological cults beget anti-technological cults.
A problem is that nuanced (but 'inconvenient') tech critique gets
labelled as precisely that regressive anti-intellectualism by those
who profit from technologically mediated alienation. Simply count the
allusions to Luddism in responses to my comments. That "shutting down"
and trying to place reasoned technological critique as beyond
discussion is mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and is the road to
trouble.
> but to speak up about the direction of technology and what we are helping to create
Shot in the dark here, but maybe it's worth asking: how exactly are you managing your (remaining) relation with technology going forward? How do you see it (in the future, that is)?
I'm asking because I assume (this being HN) that you're somehow employed in a technology-related field and, as such, you can't/didn't just "quit" technology cold-turkey. I'm also asking because I'm sensing that I'm in the same both as you, i.e. I'm a computer programmer that has started to see more and more clearly the way technology is going and what bad things it does to our society (for me it started about 4-5 years ago, when I actually got to read Ellul first-hand, and before anyone starts asking, no, I'm definitely not a fan of what Ted Kaczynski did).
Later edit: Seen your other comments on this thread after I had written down my comment above, saw that you also mentioned Ellul and some other very interesting stuff/authors that I didn't know about, so thanks a lot "from a distance" for all those suggestions, comments/inputs like yours is what still keeps me active on this website.
What do you sense about technology? Can you describe what you're worried we are creating? Obviously there are unintended negative effects, but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.
Not op, but I want to jump in. I sense that we're building a culture of surveillance and manipulation. Long-term none of us wants to live in such a society or culture, but we're building it anyway, because in the short-term it's incentivized, by economics.
When your long-term goals and short-term actions don't line up, you're in for nasty weather.
That's literally the point of the quote and their statement, I think. Any specific thing can be convincingly shot down in a forum of relative experts like this one.
We don't know where it's going or how it'll play out. But we can feel that it is already bad and is going to get worse. Some day people will try to say "we didn't know" but that will be a lie. Some of us did and tried to convince y'all. But because we aren't able to convincingly predict the future in minute detail we've been ignored.
The worst part is whenever bringing up such points others are often quick to dismiss them as wacky "conspiracy theories" or even just unfounded pessimism about the state of things as they are today. Merely bringing up comparisons of certain observations about society today to those of Nazi Germany (or other reprehensible regimes throughout history) risks getting oneself cancelled or targeted in other ways. "How dare you compare the horrors of World War II with the relative ease of things today! It's nowhere near as bad today as it was back then!", cry the detractors. And they may be right about that in some sense, but those who don't learn from history and apply its lessons to the present are doomed to repeat certain mistakes, or at least to make history rhyme, as the saying goes. The chilling effect caused by the stifling of open discussion about how things are today and where they could risk going wrong in the future is how we all end up sleepwalking into the well-known horrors of the past that we'd otherwise all wish to avoid.
We can thank Snowden for giving us a pretty good example of what has gone wrong and how conspiracy theories cannot all be dismissed - all the more effective, probably, because of the discontinuity it represented in this slow "boiling the frog" business.
We can at least sense that the potential is there for technology to become something horrible and oppressive - either on its own, or underlying some kind of oppressive government.
We don't have to know the exact form it will take. We should oppose all the forms that tech can become oppressive.
History is full of groups opposed to technological progress. Perhaps the most famous being the Luddites who are now the namesake of a word that signifies someone who is opposed to technological advancement. How do you differentiate your senses now compared to what they sensed back then? As it turns out, they were incredibly wrong and the amount of suffering has reduced as a direct consequence of technology. Technology has also made us more aware of human suffering but we should be careful to adjust for information available. The truth is that, since WWII, the quality of life has increased tremendously due to technology.
> History is full of groups opposed to technological progress.
That is a disingenuous comment or you gravely misunderstand the
issues.
There are almost no groups ever in history "opposed to technological
progress", even the "Luddites" that inevitably will get mention a
dozen times in this thread.
Nobody is opposed to technological progress. The opposition is to
technological tyranny. I do hope you understand the difference between
the two.
> There are almost no groups ever in history "opposed to technological progress", even the "Luddites"
I would agree that the Luddites were not opposed to all technological progress, just the part that impacted their jobs. But this type of reasoning leads to the tragedy of the commons where each group refuses technology that replaces themselves. The end result is no technological progress. Anyway, "technological tyranny" is poorly defined and people just pick whatever they deem wrong as tyranny and whatever is good as a non-issue. We are under rule of the internet. Without it, society would cease to function. Are people opposed to the internet tyranny? We require a functioning society to have advanced health care, regardless of socialism/capitalism, are we under "advanced health care tyranny" because it is being used to push people into a functioning society?
You make some astute and fair comments but this one just jumped out at
me as terrifyingly wrong
> "We are under rule of the internet."
Good Lord! No! If we are "under the rule" of anything it is the Rule
of Law. In Britain, unlike USA, we are "subjects of Her Majesty", such
that the Law is mediated through a parliamentary democracy. You have
it slightly different under a republic. Either way, despite general
cynicism we are lucky enough to enjoy governments that serve us, and
long may that last.
The internet is nothing but a tool. It damn well serves us. And it
does so if and only if we ask it to. Your's is precisely the sort of
expressions that gives me concern, please reconsider what you are
saying.
I'm confused because you are the one who said that they were opposed to technological tyranny. Like, somehow how factories were controlling their lives/agency as another commenter puts it. I am the one that is saying that technology is but a tool (which we agree?). I was just extending this nebulous definition of "technology running our lives" to mean "technological tyranny" which I prefaced was ill-defined and took it to its absurd logical limit that we were being "controlled" by other technologies.
They were angry because factories could produce their crafts more cheaply and then they could not find a job (in their choice of craft) because the factories had reduced the demand for those jobs. So they burned down factories in order to protect their jobs. The same sentiment has been rediscovered every technological shift. Refrigeration, computation, internet, etc. Last time I checked, no one feels bad for all those iceberg harvesters that used to bring ice cubes to millionaires in the Southern US who no longer work. We are too busy enjoying our iced teas I suppose.
> Where will you be if you are wrong?
You do not know my stance on the matter. You presume, because I responded inquiring into how your senses were different, that I was not on your side. But I would most likely be in a little cabin in the mountains. I have quit Meta for the past 6 years, have de-Googled myself (in so much that you cannot really what others do), and generally agree that many technologies are more harmful to society than help. Particularly, what people call surveillance capitalism. That being said, I recognize that it is not the underlying technology that is problematic but the institutions and decision makers. If you read the article, they are recreating the exact widening of the gap between themselves and the people under the guise that they know better (since the have the data, they made it, only they understand the tech, etc.) I would never advocate for the destruction of the internet to prevent these institutions but rather educate and elucidate my peers to narrow this gap. I asked you to help close this gap by telling me what you see and your response was "you're the problem for even asking".
They were angry because said factories took away their livlihoods, and that of their children as well. And because there was no social net in place to soften the decline in demand for their trades.
It's def interesting to see a pushback commentary on cybernetics (catchall term for what I think OP is describing), so I'll wade in.
The overall system and how it is applied and incentivized, not the random non-deterministic effects some of which are cool and some very bad, is the issue.
Tech introduces a governance layer with increasingly par relevancy with the rest of our civil social contract. I have to pay taxes to the city, and I also have to do it through a website. I want to go out to a restaurant, I have to pay via a toasttab app. I want to use public transportation, and its a cashless affair. I want to go to a concert, I need a ticketmaster app on an updated smart phone with geolocation services turned on (and so on). I want to get car insurance, I install an app and list my social media for discounts.
Worse, the system leverages massive network effects, so there are stronger links everyday to enforce tech and civil society, not just the civil society part. Worse, the automation will eventually start drowning the knowledge class careers as well.
While I am definitely letting my ideology leak through above, this area has a tremendous amount of research behind it so this just isn't me and my luddite buddies. Big Tech discovers it occasionally, cypherpunks(tor, pgp, bitcoin) have been on it for a while, non-technical observers (pysch, lib arts) often notice it from external evaluation especially around misinformation, and so on. MIT pioneered cybernetics research, which specifically aims for the above governance.
It's really hard to miss this dynamic if you work in the industry and look beyond your company, and even if you do miss it or don't believe your own take, there is a mountain of cross-disciplinary research on it.
Cybernetics, both as a term and idea carries an interesting history.
Norbert Wiener was himself a devastating critic of the immediate
Dr. Strangelove type conclusions his generation of peers immediately
took to. At the time a comparison was made to eugenics, though I
forget by whom within that circle.
It has incarnations not just in the obvious twentieth century
fascist/axis contexts (Germany, Italy, Japan) but then in South
America and as a Soviet version, both with leftist spins.
The most modern condemnation I have encountered (other than of
economists/doco-journalists like Varoufakis, Adam Curtis etc) is from
"The Invisible Committee" which offers an anarchist take [1]. []
If you're looking for a modernist take that's not econ or journalism, the way in is probably checking out the CCRU, which still has a lot of literature on it and by it around [0], and the Cybernetic Hypothesis [1]. CCRU is like if a technically aware philosophy department discovered this and extended it into total conclusion(idk, that's not really a good explanation), Cybernetic Hypothesis is like if like arts/anarchist types did the same, and then both filter into interesting pools. Cypherpunk and early bitcoin are definitely tuned in, but with probably different motivations and outcome goals.
What sort of blows my mind is especially those first two sources offer really clear eyed commentary on 'all of this,' but they are also dated - 1990's publishing date. It's like you have to tap into sometimes hokey "the information age" literature to get a clear read on 2020's tech. What's worse is the 1990's lit theorizes fairly radical (for the time) outcomes that came very true today even beyond the usual Neuromancer/Cryptonomicon/Sci-Fi mappings, yet there isn't much discussion on it (like this thread).
edit - would check out Jaron Lanier, 'who owns the future,' for a pretty modern take that discusses the above well and he has tech bonafides.
> What sort of blows my mind is especially those first two sources
offer really clear eyed commentary on 'all of this,' but they are
also dated - 1990's publishing date. It's like you have to tap into
sometimes hokey "the information age" literature to get a clear read
on 2020's tech.
Yes that's weird isn't it. I don't believe in "suppression
conspiracies" but am amazed how often deeply prescient things are
passed over the first time around and must be dug up. For more
archaeology dig around Phil Agre's "Red Rock Eaters" and the old Whole
Earth where I first discovered Dana Meadows.
Evidence supported by links b/t diverse parties and/or similar conclusions without much of a shared background, defeated by the catch-all defense of Luddite accusations/general malaise, is what disconcerts me the most.
A drugged out 1990 Nick Land, the MIT crew (Meadows, Wiener), the original computers (Lanier, Agre, cypherpunks), Mark Fisher and the Occupy area, etc. etc. all come to fairly similar conclusions or exist in very similar orbits, "other research" by the same entities was or is fairly influential, but this area - cybernetic, the Concern, "idk but something isn't great" just does not exist currently and that lack of anchoring really concerns me. All that's available is ex-Social Media/adtech CEOs going on podcast apology tours like that Social Dilemma doc.
Nick Land (of the CCRU) supposedly recently "opened fire" on Moldbuggian hard-ons for monarchy, I'll need to check that out... (Likely related : Unabomber's criticisms of how the "left" cannot avoid becoming the tool (in both senses) of "the System" when taking power ?)
I'm guessing that they were always fundamentally opposed anyway, Land being of "bottom" and Yarvin of the "top" sensibilities (in the political compass sense) ?
I'm 30% in, and this does seem to be a potential seed for a vision of the future that the (bottom) left has been so sorely lacking since the failure of the Soviets !
You don't see something so radical often (last time would have been the Unibomber ?), since they seem to consider that the whole Western civilization has to be thrown away, including its Ancient Greek roots ?!
(But then we are in unprecedented times, with tremendous responsibility, and keep failing harder and harder, so at some point you have to wonder why...)
Recently been seeing, uh, changes in some of my relatives. First Covid denial, then antivaccine in general (wtf), now that and war denial (yes, "there's no war").
Otherwise pretty smart people, but somehow they fall for the dumbest shit. Thinking back, I don't think I ever heard them express such views, and especially not be so adamant about it. They get angry when anyone points out why they're wrong. They're always right, everyone else is wrong...
I didn't believe in Fecebook/Twatter making everyone dumber (never used them myself), but maybe there's truth to that. I guess that's one way technology is affecting the masses, and it's scary because you can't stop the masses, the majority will win, as for now they're in a democracy, actively voting to destroy it and probably not even realizing it. All so a few rich assholes can gain more power.
Other than that, the centralization of everything, that just can't be good. Not only software, but hardware, too. I mean, half of the world's chips (and most of the best ones) are made on one tiny island - God forbid something happens to it.
The few big companies making computers will gladly solder everything and break a chip if you try to reuse it elsewhere, just so you throw it away and buy a new computer when the time comes (i.e. it breaks).
Can't even fix your own car anymore because disconnecting the battery means you need your onboard computer reprogrammed - at an authorized price gouge...errr, I mean, service center, of course.
Not to mention surveillance and the ability to charge you with something at any point if they ever so wish (thanks to "social media").
Technology itself is not at fault, but it does give assholes a whole lot of newpower.
> I mean, half of the world's chips (and most of the best ones) are
made on one tiny island - God forbid something happens to it.
Resilience is one of the big issues I work with. It's one of the
topics that's not about tyranny or malice, but is in some ways more
frightening. It's because we don't see it as "other inflicted" that it
stays beneath the radar somewhat.
Ya I'm not sure how anyone could have missed the numerous and very public insanity-descents from known figures or their own relatives, and think things are still business as usual.
I forgot to add that before 2015-ish, I've not heard this kind of stuff from these relatives. And their main hangouts are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, the usual suspects.
I believe in their mind, they're getting "the truth" and know better. But the reality is it's... self-propagandization.
When 50 channels say you're wrong but you find one that tells "the truth"... I dunno, it's like the common sense circuits have been fried.
Just like people in Russia are brainwashed by the state media, so do these people brainwash themselves online, likely reinforced by the recommendation systems used on the major platforms.
Which I notice on Youtube, btw, and it always skews towards some dumb/funny or just idiotic content. View a couple of funny videos and that's all I get for the rest of the month. I mostly watch stuff like DIYPerks, various machine & history stuff, tutorials on a lot of things and listen to music, but I never get good, or any, recommendations on that. Although to be completely fair, I don't subscribe to anything, just mostly look it up after Google+Wikipedia.
I don't think that it was a coincidence that a significant fraction of the "alternative" online places I was hanging out on (like Zero Hedge) suddenly went pretty crazy at the same time as the Russo-Ukrainian war started in 2014 ?
(They're typically called "alt-right" now.)
Not that this is completely new - I got my "conspiracy theory education" in 2005-2010 when I watched a pretty convincing hour(s)-long YouTube video about how the World Trade Center had supposedly been subjected to controlled demolition... and then shortly after that an even more convincing, detailed, and longer video describing how that previous video was wrong.
> Can you describe what you're worried we are creating?
Not in a casual comment. So I took some time to write a book that
hopefully contains some insights if you're genuinely interested to
know.
So did a bunch of other people;
For a gentle interest to modern tech critique I'd suggest Zuboff,
Rushkoff, Lanier and so on, but to be honest of you want
non-fictional/sci-fi accounts of the "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "Brave
New World" type then I'd recommend starting with Postman, Illich,
Ellul and Mumford as these lay firmer foundations.
IBM and the Holocaust (Edwin Black) is obviously worth a read in this
context.
> Obviously there are unintended negative effects
Those are interesting. But so are the intended ones.
> but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.
The problem we face today is that the protest groups of yesterday that protested for freedom is the opposite of the protest groups today that protest in favor of oppression.
Protests in the past were against something that even if you disagreed with the people, their philosophical foundation was likely agreeable.
The core of these were "freedom", freedom from being forced _to do_ something, freedom from being prevented from doing something, freedom from having something taken from you without just cause, freedom to have your day in court.
Now protests seem to be "I don't want _you_ to be able to say something", "I don't want you too be able to do something","I want to force you too do what I want."
It's like protesters today are working directly for our oppressors and doing their work for them, and they don't even realize it.
Or maybe the elections really were illegitimate, and you'd never know because you've never looked at sources that weren't on the same side as the party allegedly rigging the elections?
That sentence was hard to follow, but it sounds like you're suggesting there are legitimate "sources" that have proof the 2020 election was rigged? I'm putting "sources" in extremely heavy quotation marks because there's absolutely no evidence with any basis in reality that can actually claim that.
The biggest questions I ask myself all the time: What level of deprogramming would it take to get the victims of this delusion to acknowledge the election wasn't rigged? How do flat earthers get deprogrammed? Where do you even begin? What's the strategy? What's the success rate? Is it even possible?
Non-partisan courts did and found nothing. At a certain point, one must just have faith in the system. Also the sources 'weren't on the same side as the party allegedly rigging the elections,' i.e. Republican officials in Georgia and Arizona claimed there was no rigging.
Watching various Russian interview youtube channels reminds me of this [1]. Its very scary you basically have a lot of apathy and denial. People really just want to get on with their normal day and not think about it, they believe only what lines up with their safe world view, nobody wants to be the bad guy, Ukraine is fake news. These people look like came out of the US Midwest just speaking a different language, it could definitely happen anywhere.
Made me think about how the allies made Germans face the atrocities that they where in denial about after the war, making them go to the camps, dig the graves, watch the footage [2].
I think you might be misinterpreting the Russian comments that are along the lines of "I don't follow politics" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion". Those are "safe" answers. It's a euphemism, of sorts. They can't say "No, I don't want the current President to remain in power" so they say "I don't have an opinion on the President". They can't get in trouble for giving that answer. I get the impression the vast majority of the people giving those dismissive answers can't share how they really feel on camera because it would be dangerous. It's not that they're apathetic, they're just aware of the risks that come along with speaking their mind.
It does happen everywhere. European countries in NATO have been responsible for more deaths than the russians. It's hilarious. People are pretending ukraine is the only war that ever existed. Ukraine is the tamest ongoing war right now. The least civilian deaths of any serious war since the turn of the century.
> Made me think about how the allies made Germans face the atrocities that they where in denial about after the war, making them go to the camps, dig the graves, watch the footage
That is literally post-war indoctrination/propaganda. Had the germans won ww2, they would have made the british, americans, russians, etc confront their own war crimes.
I used to have an original copy of this book. I had a relative who was a career officer in the US Army including WWII who had died and the book came to me from his wife when he died.
Interesting book but Milton Mayer was an interesting character (he opposed the US entering WWII IIRC for example) and there was a lot of weird stuff in the book where he showed how willing he himself was to go along with the same kind of things that led to the Nazis coming to power. For example he sometimes came off as having a blind side because he was nearly McCarthyist in his treatment of communism. With 60 years of hindsight you could see he made comments that made you think he would have gone along with a corrupt regime if it was able to contain communism, no different than Germans were taken in by the Nazis.
I don't think things are that different today. All governments are shades between good and evil, and we all subconsciously ignore things governments do if it is obviously far more personally convenient to tolerate that kind of behavior. Self preservation can easily take precedence over being against evil if you are already in the "in group" that is protected by the evil.
It's a good book. I thought these passages were memorable: it shows you how quickly a situation can deteriorate, especially under an all-consuming pressure...like total mobilization for war.
In its issue of November 11, 1938, the Kronenberger Zcitung carried the following report, at the bottom of page 4, under a very small headline reading Schutzhaft, “Protective Custody”: “In the interest of their own security, a number of male Jews were taken into custody yesterday. This morning they were sent away from the city.” I showed it to each of my ten friends. None of them—including the teacher—remembered ever having seen it or anything like it.
1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939—until September 1, when, as the Head of the Government told them, Poland attacked their country—the little lives of my friends went on, under National Socialism as they had before, altered only for the better, and always for the better, in bread and butter, in housing, health, and hope, wherever the New Order touched them. “No one outside Germany seems to understand this,” said an anti-Nazi woman, who had been imprisoned in 1943, ostensibly for listening to the foreign radio but actually for hiding Jews (which was not technically illegal). “I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and the enthusiasm, 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 outside seems to understand how this was.”
Jews were running away from Germany in those years. Quite desperately. 1938 is Kristallnacht alias November pogrom. Jews were restricted in civil service and schools since 1933. The second wave of segregation laws was in 1935.
And other Germans characterized living in Germany as "you did not knew what is fear unless you lived there" - because you could actually get to prison for a joke someone overheard.
My point here is that Nazi Germany did not became totalitarian as the war started. It was very oppressive and totalitarian long before.
I think anyone on this thread who hasn't already, needs to go read Antony Sutton's Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
"PREFACE
This is the third and final volume of a trilogy describing the role of the American corporate
socialists, otherwise known as the Wall Street financial elite or the Eastern Liberal
Establishment, in three significant twentieth-century historical events: the 1917 Lenin-
Trotsky Revolution in Russia, the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United
States, and the 1933 seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Each of these events introduced some variant of socialism into a major country — i.e.,
Bolshevik socialism in Russia, New Deal socialism in the United States, and National
socialism in Germany.
Contemporary academic histories, with perhaps the sole exception of Carroll Quigley's
Tragedy And Hope, ignore this evidence. On the other hand, it is understandable that
universities and research organizations, dependent on financial aid from foundations that are
controlled by this same New York financial elite, would hardly want to support and to
publish research on these aspects of international politics. The bravest of trustees is unlikely
to bite the hand that feeds his organization.
It is also eminently clear from the evidence in this trilogy that "public-spirited businessmen"
do not journey to Washington as lobbyists and administrators in order to serve the United
States. They are in Washington to serve their own profit-maximizing interests. Their
purpose is not to further a competitive, free-market economy, but to manipulate a
politicized regime, call it what you will, to their own advantage.
It is business manipulation of Hitler's accession to power in March 1933 that is the topic of
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
I really don't find too much in the preface, I just thought it was a decent introduction (after all, written by the author) to the book. If I had to be specific though:
> the role of the American corporate socialists, otherwise known as the Wall Street financial elite or the Eastern Liberal Establishment, in three significant twentieth-century historical events: the 1917 Lenin- Trotsky Revolution in Russia, the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, and the 1933 seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in Germany.
> Contemporary academic histories, with perhaps the sole exception of Carroll Quigley's Tragedy And Hope, ignore this evidence.
> universities and research organizations, dependent on financial aid from foundations that are controlled by this same New York financial elite, would hardly want to support and to publish research on these aspects of international politics
> business manipulation of Hitler's accession to power in March 1933 that is the topic of Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
I think just those four things offer plenty of intellectual red-meat that is very interesting to explore.
I've almost finished "The Coming of the Third Reich", by Richard J. Evans, and the one thing that stands out is how much Germany's economic collapse before 1933 laid the seeds for the Nazi's rise. This is why it's hard for me to relate it to anything America has recently experienced or Putin's Russia. As bad as the Jan. 6 riots were they would have been a heck of a lot worse if every rioter had no job to go back to. When loaves of bread cost a wheelbarrow of money and you have a family to feed even the most draconian political structures become attractive.
I recall a German solider interviewed in some documentary. He was young, got into the Nazi party. Fought with his parents who knew he was being brainwashed in a way.
Later on the eastern front he had some event that made him think of what his parents had been saying. He said something like "I realized they were right... but by then it was all too late."
Those choices that close our ears to things and choices that lead us to irreversible paths seem to be the ones that are the worst.
This is hard for me to admit, but it's unfortunately true.
in the UK I voted for UKIP to go to the European Parliament in 2008~ and I voted conservative in the general election of that year.
I was completely bought in by the populist talking points that Farage and Cameron were touting, and I was warned not to buy into populism but my mind at the time thought: "Well, if it's popular, what's the problem? They're supposed to work for us right".
The reality is that people will tell you what you want to hear. I started watching a British series called "Hustle" (about a fictitious band of conmen and grifters which we follow as they rip off comically awful people) but I noticed some patterns in the way that the cons were set up and how people like Farage speak. I noticed that it's all deflection, indirection, 10 lies a minute so that when you refute one of the lies (usually the most outrageous) the others kinda fade into the background and are assumed to be true.
I think what made me snap was when I started looking into the things that were claimed much more closely: the EU regulations on "bendy bananas", and I realised it was all fluff. Farage himself being chair on the fisheries committee of the EU but constantly complaining about fishing rights of the UK.
I felt betrayed, like I'd been grifted.
but it's much too late, and the damage is done.
Not at my hand directly perhaps; but by many people being taken in by dangerous confident grifters.
Why is this relevant: because I don't think I stick out particularly, if I can be taken in, anyone can -- we like to think we make our own choices, but usually that is not the case.
Its like a wave in the ocean, each water molecule only moves a tiny bit, and contributes a fractional amount of energy to the wave, but in aggregate it can move fast and cause lots of damage
I’m not making the point that Cameron is Hitler. If that’s your take away from my post then I communicated it poorly.
I am making the point that we can buy into ideology that is antithetical to our own rather easily.
Not everyone who voted for the Nazis wanted Nazis. They didn’t win a popular vote and hell: who the hell would think that world war 2 would happen as a result.
I’m equating my “being duped” with nazi voting Germans.
With the greatest respect, the analogy between Farage and Hitler is not a good one, and the analogy between Cameron and Hitler is ridiculous. Farage is a populist who wanted out of the EU, basta. He spent too much time kissing Putin's bum - that is my impression. Cameron was a moderate, without many very deep ideas at all, an admirer of Swedish social democracy (who isn't?) and hardly distinguishable from Ed Miliband.
I wasn’t equating Farage, Cameron and Hitler with each other at all.
I’m suggesting that I fell for populism, the end result of that populism isn’t what I’m talking about really, just the feeling of being tricked and that it happened to me: a person who was brought up to think critically.
I’m not special. Neither are you probably. That’s my point.
Not that Cameron is Hitler. That’s obviously not true. Cameron only killed 30,000~ people due to NHS cuts. Not systematic genocide. It’s not at all the same.
Well, now you are double-backing on yourself and trying to use sarcasm to suggest that Cameron really is like Hitler! This is silly. Any choice a politician makes "kills" people. Cameron "killed" x people by not making the NHS budget higher. Blair and Brown also "killed" y people by not making it higher still. Raise taxes? Businesses fail, owners kill themselves. Cut defence? You kill people because dictators start wars. Borrow too much, cause inflation? The poor are hit by lost spending power, some of them will die. Life is real, politics is serious, analogizing your opponents' policy choices to genocide is for tweens.
If anything, those four years showed how poorly the system holds up against bad actors simultaneously in all branches. I'm not sure how you can solve that, though.
Corruption is a rot, slow, like a corpse decomposing. It's an ongoing process that is only opposed by daily actions of cleaning off barnacles. America collected a lot of barnacles from those four years, and the rate at which they've been purged is probably too low. The recent spate of anti-voter laws and gerrymandered districts just shows the steal is ongoing.
I am reminded by Julius Caesar, who, unlike Donald Trump, was smart and competent. Caesar pushed against institutional democracy in Rome (such as it was) and found that very little pushed back.
Gaius didn't destroy the republic, he just wanted to be the one to step up to the throne of its shambline corpse. And it would have worked, if not for those meddling... senators.
Not to me, and not to a lot of others. We'd been expecting it for quite some time. If anything was shocking to me, it's that there wasn't more of it, and worse.
Fortunately, most of the loudest and most paranoid people are also lazy. It's easy and risk-free to spread conspiracy theories on the Internet. Only the .0001% of them with the most free time and least sense showed up that day -- and then only because it was incompetently organized.
There will be better organizers and less stupid leaders coming. That's not even close to over. So don't be shocked next time.
What was shocking to me was how brutal but stupid it was. The party of the second amendment completely pussed out on bringing guns to a coup and it was a bunch of fat old dumbfucks bashing the police with flags and bats. I was shocked that the capitol police only shot one person.
I'll admit to only paying a small amount of attention to that whole thing, but from the little that did filter in, brutal seems like a strange word for it.
What words do you have left for events where numerous people are intentionally killed (shot, beheaded, blown up, tortured, etc) when you use brutal for this one?
We're in a thread about Nazi Germany. I think it really degrades our ability to communicate effectively when you use the same words to talk about that and 1/6.
Was the holocaust just "more brutal" than 1/6? Of course not. They're in completely different universes, and one of those things pretty much set the standard for brutal.
It's a trend that jumps out at me. People reach for the strongest adjectives by default. It seems like peoples scales just aren't calibrated.
I think the sibling comment might be onto something, maybe there was a missing word there.
You could argue the Holocaust was beyond brutal, and 1/6 is certainly not of the same magnitude, but the Holocaust's existence doesn't mean describing a beating as "brutal" is inappropriate. It's pretty standard usage.
People get brutally attacked on a daily basis. Genocide is a bit less common.
I think it actually would be inappropriate (or at least more than a little inaccurate) to describe a beating as brutal when genocide has already been brought into the conversation. Talking about a beating on its own, brutal could absolutely be appropriate.
It's as if we have a scale from 0 to 10, where each number maps to an adjective. To me, brutal is towards the end of that scale. Everyone seems to have forgotten how to use the words on the 3 to 7 range.
OK, what other words are we not permitted to use to describe something once the Holocaust has been mentioned? Am I allowed to describe something as "bad"?
On the contrary, bad seems pretty appropriate, because there are words that mean "worse than bad". "The worst" would be an example of something that would not be appropriate, unless it is actually worse than the holocaust. To me, brutal is basically a superlative.
I have the same reaction when I see people describe something as "extremely x". I don't often see things described as "extremely" whatever and think, "yep this person has a decent grasp on reality". This may just be something I'm sensitive to for whatever reason.
In the sense of a surprise to observers, no. Not really. Certainly should not have been a shock at all to anyone paying any sort of attention from around the 20th of December.
I agree. I mean, more than four years earlier than Jan 6th 2021, David Frum wrote that when Republican voters understand they can no longer win by democratic means (that is, once they become a clear minority), they wouldn't reject the Republican Party, they'd reject democracy.
So this was really a long-observed trajectory.
Personally I think it is not over, because I'm not convinced the GOP is ready to accept it is destined for minority status, and because since that day an enormous amount of groundwork has been done to practically guarantee the next election is undermined.
If Trump would have been smarter, the democratic institutions would have fallen one by one within the two terms which he would had. The supreme court (is still affected by his choices), the Senate, the house (both still more or less 50:50 split), the military and the executive (which both bled a lot). By now, he would prepare to change the constitution like Putin abd friends did.
As a German I am not in the position to tell this is a fault in the American people, but saying the US institutions and habits right now are strong enough is to survive a Hitler is just wrong.
If Jan 6 was a shock, you weren't paying attention. Trump had been broadcasting his contempt for democracy since day 1.
In the end, democracy won... for now. But it was close. I dare say that if Mike Pence had done differently on that day, or if state legislatures had submitted "alternate" slates, or if more Republicans had objected to the results, or, or, or... American democracy would be finished.
The conclusion is not that American institutions are strong, it's that they are too weak, and that they survived this attack by chance. Next time we won't be as lucky.
This is one of those issues we can't discuss intelligently on HN because it involves bad faith. Someone will be along to deny that it happened ("Biden's president now, right?") or that there are any anti-democracy forces at work in the US at all for that matter (other than millions of illegals voting), and we'll have to treat that as a good faith argument.
I agree we can’t have this discussion in good faith:
People keep reiterating there was a planned attack on our nation, when the FBI found there was no such thing — and at least one of the 500+ arrested for Jan 6th was released because the police waved him in.
I think we can’t have that discussion in good faith because people refuse to admit they were tricked by Reichstag Fire 2.0 — or even entertain the idea they might have been.
That’s too bad:
I think the only way we prevent the rise of Nazism in the US is to admit the Jan 6th people are political prisoners and you were tricked (like the Germans).
Whether or not it was planned from the highest levels, did they not still engage in violent protest against the government? Is that not something that should be punished?
The technique is "flooding the zone with shit" per Steve Bannon. When successful, it obscures that there's objective truth at all.
HN is particularly susceptible because we're all in one silo and when we can't agree on a shared reality, we have to assume under the HN guidelines that the alternate reality is truly what our interlocutor believes.
The endgame looks like the Russian people accepting Putin's nonsense because they can't believe anything.
Trump didn't think the 6th insurgents would succeed. He had clearly been advised that the reaction to it might allow him to institute marshal law, and there was a draft executive order floating around that would have seen him use that situation to try to delay things further.
I think a lot of people fail to understand how many different ways there are to make order out of chaos, and how in extreme chaos a lot of people will accept any kind of order.
Hitler outlawed all opposition parties in July 1933 and opened concentration camps for political opposition right away. The official boycot of Jewish businesses started that year and the regime started to strip them of citizenship.
It was not gradual. It was gradual only if you was apolitical or supporter.
The fact is, America has way better and stronger democracy then Germany back then. America is not perfect, but Germany back then was way more massively dysfunctional and violent place.
I am not saying America is perfect or can't be destroyed as democracy, but it would be significantly harder.
The answer to that question, per the Second Amendment, is supposed to be "rise up with your guns in hand and kill them all."
Unfortunately, America's cultural worship of the founding fathers and gun culture has never led it to seriously consider other approaches, as the armed militia was widely considered to be the only necessary bulwark against tyranny, and the only solution that could be trusted. Then it turned out that militia was more than happy to welcome tyranny under certain terms.
I have read this and own it; if such a book were written today, the author would be instantly cancelled for presupposing to even investigate their motivations
today, the press would simply declare America's enemies to be cartoon villains who were born evil and as a result incapable of understanding
what contemporary America understands about Nazis is basically the vision presented in Raiders Of The Lost Ark
> Regardless of what you think, it is your actions that matter.
There's a legal definition for "the intent to commit a crime"[1]. (Even if it's not a legal definition in a particular jurisdiction, certainly it's a concept that can be understood.) It seems to me that we can apply that question of intent to the individual when it comes to the crime of genocide.
The world is full of nuance and you should be cautious when a statement lacks said nuance.
As an introduction to anybody who wants to learn more about the subject, I can recommend a video where Sönke Neitzel talks about the motivation of German soldiers during WWII: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phhmXyrRQb8
Neitzel is professor for military history at Potsdam University and arguably the world's foremost historian on the subject of the history of mentalities of the Wehrmacht.
In fact Wehrmacht members were barred from NSDAP membership. I remember one case of a u boat commander that joined the navy to avoid NSDAP membership. He was later sentenced to death for defatism, despite intervention from senior Navy leadership. After that it took decades for him to be rehabilitated post WW2.
Calling all Germans, 33(39) - 45 Nazis is strong. The truth is as well, so, that the Wehrmacht supported, enabled and perpetrated war crimes and genocide. As an organization, not every individual soldier did so.
EDIT: A lot of the, especially young, officer corps was heavily Nazi influenced. Up to a third joined the NSDAP. In that case it is a clear sign of being a Nazi. As contrasted by practically forced NSDAP membership, e.g. teachers. That's one of the reasons de-Nazification was such a mess, but far from the only one.
I also have heard stories of young men from that era convicted of relatively minor crimes, such as property theft. They would be given the option between a jail sentence or military service. Unsurprisingly, many chose military service.
If two men are fighting side by side, carrying out the same acts, and one has a card in his pocket that says nazi and the other doesn't. I'm meant to understand that we're talking about one nazi, not two?
I'm saying that what they did was nazi shit, in alignment with nazi values, towards nazi goals, so I feel good about calling them nazis. Regardless of whether they would have called themselves nazis.
Why do you care so much about party membership? Why the project of establishing a high barrier and technical definition for what a nazi is?
My question to that would be: is a pacifist in the trenches of Vietnam on the side of the Americans equally culpable as the infantry soldier with a rifle? Both carryout essential tasks, both are likely conscripts. The only different is 1 has a rifle and didn't object to compulsory service. The other one made an objection but still performs an essential service.
I'm not trying to establish a generalizable moral calculus of culpability though. Just refuting the idea that soldiers fighting for nazi germany were somehow not nazis if they weren't registered party members.
Political commentary here on HN is a contentious issue, but I am personally for it so long as it's approached in a way that invites discussion and intellectually stimulating debate.
This is not that.
There's no need to consider "both sides" (as if there is only two) as equally in the wrong; I certainly don't. But you need to at least demonstrate some ability to pass and Ideological Turing Test[1] or there's not even a point in engaging with you.
I'll address some of your point to explain at least some of the Right's departure from Democracy. Most left-leaners seem at a loss to understand it, so although I expect I'll be downvoted to hell, I may be able to add some context to what seems like an impenetrable problem.
I vehemently dislike the GOP; however, I dislike the American left to an even greater degree, and what I disagree with the American left most over is the issue of immigration, which is central to the issue of Democracy. In speaking to left-leaners, I always find that they support increasing immigration. Some say that they'd be fine with millions more every year; some say that they think there should be billions of Americans; some think that borders should be removed entirely.
Immigrants moving to a new country are primarily concerned with their own way of life, and the way of life of that of their compatriots. I know and speak to many immigrants, and their primary questions are: (1) how can I make more money so I can send it to my family; (2) how can I get my family over here? These are often intelligent, creative, brilliant people--humans, all--but their allegiance to their families and their culture is much higher than their allegiance to "Ameria", whatever that means. For many of them, the U.S. exists as an economic zone for them, not as a nation. What to me is an eye-offending megastore and parking complex laid across a prior wetland is to them a safe, predictable, policed place to acquire goods and services. What to me is a tyrannical surveillance practice is to them a connection to the police that could never be trusted in their home country. They will vote to protect these conveniences over any esoteric desires about my own country and culture that I have. Furthermore, in the cases of overtly left-leaning immigrants, I find that they actively dislike me--they mock the food I like, the music I like, the history I'm proud of, etc.
Now, there are usually between 200,000 and 1M new immigrants added to the country every year, worsening the already nasty housing problem. So, now, I ask myself: how to deal with this social and political issue? How can I make my voice heard?
The answer in the US is Democracy, the One Moral Form of Government, the Bringer of Human Rights to the World. In the US, this means that myself and a proportionally dwindling set of conservatives (who are often even worse than the immigrants whose viewpoints I disagree with) will set our votes against a constantly-expanding group of left-leaners and brand new immigrants, each of whom will be emboldened to participate in Democracy, inevitably tilting the balance of control further and further left. This will happen in business as well as in politics; as an exmaple, land and institutions are increasingly captured by Chinese investors (farmland, manufacturing, real estate, etc.), and the legislatures continue to allow it to happen.
So--I am now not so interested in Democracy as I was when I was a child; now I am more interested in Power, who owns it, and how they're going to get it. What is the point of voting if your political opponents will ally with all of the other subcultures in your pluralistic Democracy, vote against you, and permanently change your country into something you don't like?
(To head off the normal comments: no, I do not think that "conservatives" are "oppressed"; no, I did not vote for Trump; no, I don't think the Capitol invasion was smart and I think the Capitol Police would have been justified in using more live ammunition than they did; yes, I understand that my ancestors were immigrants, it may have been a better idea to stay in the Old Country; yes, I agree that many immigrants are smarter, more ethical, and more virtuous than "classical" Americans; and yes, I agree that Native Americans are logically correct to be upset about my continued occupancy of the land their ancestors lived on.)
Interesting. I think it might be a matter of what "leftists" you hang around with/are exposed to, and just possibly how much time you spend on Twitter (a personal bugbear of mine).
Most of my friends consider themselves pretty far on the left, and I don't think any of us have the attitudes about immigration that you're discussing. I think in general our appraisal of the situation is, "It's way more complicated than you think." Reductionist solutions like "Build a wall" or "Remove all borders" are, well, just dumb.
When we talk about the flood of immigrants to our borders, the question frequently turns to root causes. Looking at immigration from Latin America specifically, we have a long history of exploitation and extraction of wealth and resources from those countries. Just like we built our country of slavery, we have done (and are continuing to do) similar levels of exploitation below our southern borders. So when you think of things from that point of view, the range of possible solutions does not usually include "remove our borders" (seriously I've never heard anybody advocate that. If you have, I wonder if it was on Twitter?). It's more like, "corporations who do this kind of thing ought to be heavily taxed, or else prove that they are improving the lives of people in their home countries", etc.
So, as a sort of tl;dr - the leftists I know don't advocate massively increased immigration. We are in favor of treating people humanely, and increasing regulation and taxation on corporations that benefit from keeping places unstable and generally undesirable places to live.
If people have more children and teach them their views isn't that the same thing? Why is it so important that you were born in a country and isn't a large part of the success of the US related to immigrants who bought their talent, culture, and new ideas here?
Thanks for being honest. I find your comments fascinating.
You mention, in passing, how immigrants are making the country worse because they are left-leaning. The left-leaning behaviors you mention are a disregard for the environment (?), being concerned with one’s own family and fortunes (??) and mocking traditional American foods (???).
Even if these things are happening but what does this have to do with being left-wing? The myopic mall-goers sound more like suburban GOP types. And who is mocking hamburgers and meatloaf? That sounds like a white college student to me.
Lastly - I think it’s a dubious proposition that America single-handedly brought democracy to the world, but there’s no question that it was an important step in human political evolution.
But that’s because the USA is uniquely blind to ethnicity, religion, and origin, defining government as the guardian of everyone’s liberty. Probably everything you cherish as all-American is a direct result of that attitude, including hamburgers and meatloaf.
America, so far, has been really good at turning newcomers into Americans - or turning America into someplace that values what the newcomers brought. Why are you losing faith in this now?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L Shirer
Goes into excellent, albeit sometimes boring, detail about the culture of the greater German region at the time and how it made Nazi Germany possible, and then obviously the rise and fall of the Nazi Party.
If that is honest take away, then it means the article is badly written.
Edit: I don't mean it as a joke. If you read just a little about how Germany post 1933 functioned, it was nothing like social media today. The level of threat and risk and associated violence is nowhere similar.
If the article makes honest impression that it is the same, it is not representing Germany well at all.
For the US, next time will be worse. There is an announced Russian plan to destabilize the US political system.[1]
"Meanwhile on Russian state TV: Host Evgeny Popov says it's time for the Russian people to call on Americans to change "the regime in the U.S." before its term expires "and to again help our partner Trump to become President."[2]
Russia is extraordinarily weak and is being put into a sandbox for containment purposes. They're a non-issue (other than the nukes).
Trump wasn't elected because of Russia. He was elected because the voters were and are upset and he represented an opportunity to stab the establishment in the eye (whereas Hillary fully represented the establishment). Trump won for the same reason Bernie Sanders came so close to winning his party's nomination, and the establishment detests Trump for the same reason they dislike Sanders (even though he's far more palatable to them than Trump is, they still don't want him in power either).
* please also note: just because the voters are upset and choose someone like Trump, that obviously doesn't mean they're acting rationally toward their own well-being, don't confuse the two things. They can be upset, they can be choosing something that isn't in their best interests in terms of solving their various problems (eg healthcare costs), and they can be throwing a voter tantrum (perceived anti-establishment), all in one.
So why then he almost won second time? Can't be more pro-establishment than US president and billionaire.
As an US outsider I really wish similar statements were true but I'll believe it only after elections. There are plenty of US folks who would ie vote for anybody who would keep their guns their own, no matter how ridiculous piece of s*t otherwise. And other polarizing topics where its easy to score some populist points.
Well if you are a US outsider you probably know a lot less about what is like to be in the US.
Not understanding why Trump was considered a 'outsider' and 'non-establishment' is just a tip of the iceberg. It is very very easy to understand why people viewed him this way. If people don't know this then they don't know a lot of other things they should.
One of the major reasons that Trump won was because he wasn't a professional politician. His competitors had somewhere between 20-50 years of being lying sacks of shit politicians. Almost none of them have any life experience outside of law and running for office.
He had 0 years.
So it was very easy for him to attack other people on their shitty track records and they couldn't act in kind.
Once he had 4 years of being a lying sack of shit then it was easier for them to counter him. His original tactics were much less effective second time around.
You're conflating how you view him and how the voters view him (those that voted for Trump).
They don't see him as an insider President. They see him as an outsider non-politician and wrecking ball that is fought by the establishment at every turn.
The Russia bogeyman was hyped by Democrats to distract from the fact that they got walloped in swing states and the midwest. It almost happened again in 2020 with a larger than expected chunk of latinos voting for Trump.
Russia likely had a marginal effect in both elections, but you'd think they were brainwashing everyone into voting for Trump somehow based on the primary narrative being hyped.
Actually a lot of Americans detest Trump because he literally tried to stage a coup d'état on January 6th, 2021 to overthrow a democratically elected president.
If having Trump be president is Russia's goal, their state media openly bragging about it is a terrible tactic. I find it far more likely that Russia's strategy here is to undermine faith in American democracy in general.
A large part of the right already believes that our elections have been "stolen". I see this kind of talk from Russian state media as an effort to lay the foundation for the left believing the same thing the next time the right wins.
In a lot of ways this is a much easier strategy to pull off then actually having to manipulate voters into voting a different way than they would have anyway. All you have to do is persuade everyone in the country that if their side didn't win the election it was because of fraud or foreign interference, and you've created a situation that is ripe for unrest that will distract the country from any kind of meaningful foreign policy.
> I see this kind of talk from Russian state media as an effort to lay the foundation for the left believing the same thing the next time the right wins.
The left believes the 2000 and 2016 elections were both stolen.
Considering that the actual, you know, votes would have produced a different result in 2000, it is not an idle conceit. The US Supreme Court did, in fact, choose in 2000, and very publicly, by 5:4. Had Anthony Kennedy chosen differently, we would have had a different presidency, and probably no Iraq War, and might have been well on the way to controlling the now very obvious global climate catastrophe.
It was all perfectly legal.
In 2000, global climate catastrophe was still denied.
"the left" - How many court cases were there? How many protests and number of protestors? You are implying that an entire ideological group thinks something which is wrong
I remember reading this long before the Internet and thinking that it made sense. The world was literally going insane around the author but nobody noticed. It happened through an accumulation of no-crisis baby steps, year after year.
The mass adoption of the Internet has caused me to reconsider. Every crackpot I've ever encountered thinks exactly the same thing, namely that we're all asleep while <major issue> continues unabated. How can we be so blind to it!
This is not to dismiss the author, who clearly saw some shit, but rather to point out the very fine line between crackpot and prophet, at least when viewed on the surface.