JackRiddler » Tue Jul 27, 2021 3:18 pm wrote:
If you can't read -- and I can't believe that, in your case -- then yeah, you can simplify what I said ('clearly laid out without hyperbole') into this completely opposite misrepresentation of it. I feel no need to correct this, as it would merely mean I'd repeat myself, allowing the same misrepresentation. Besides, I'm the one doing all the work here, and it only takes a quarter-second for you to stamp REJECT on it and give a little self-congratulatory flourish.
This has very little to do with 'seeing', since no one actually seems interested in studying the cases empirically. One would allow for 'parallels' as well as differences, and we've had 98-page threads on this board fighting out comparisons of Nazi Germany to present-day societies.
Hint: History may remain atrocious, but it neither repeats nor 'rhymes'. Mostly it just sticks around, some of it as trauma or unconscious persistence, some of it reshaped into new forms. Here's an example of someone trying to describe the phenomenon, better than I can.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.
It works analogously with the villainization. A very common one is to drape the Nazi guise over the bad guys, even when it doesn't apply usefully (which is not to say the bad guys are therefore good guys, or even to imply they're morally better; they may not be). I'll admit there is a major exception to that here on RI: One doesn't want to compare today's actual movement fascists with the classical fascists. That's just out of bounds!
The point you find so objectionable above was about how useless it is to insist on the utility of a particular historical comparison that is clearly far from 1:1 and has the practical effect of damaging whatever communication you want to make with a world outside of RI. But again, go ahead. Pretend that when I point out obvious differences from Nazi Germany I'm trying to defend the Covidian order, or whatever it is you think I'm doing.
By the way, the implicit model in 'They Thought They Were Free', as a product of the Cold War totalitarianism theory (which tried to disguise the libidinous unleashing of 'Aryan' supremacy as the product of bureaucratic-police-state oppression so that NS Germany could be equated or put in the same box as the USSR), may in fact fit the present day a lot better than it works as a description of Germany in the 1930s.
One parallel that should also be seen perhaps is in how some among the anti-Nazi elements in Germany insisted that everyone who wasn't repeating their own alienating rhetoric word-for-word was a Nazi. It worked so fabulously well.
.
I don't have any power to insist. In case you haven't noticed, others actually
are insisting, and they aren't going to be placated or assuaged by any understanding of them as qualitatively different from fascists or Nazi's. None of which is likely to prevent me from making ill informed and half baked comparisons, I'm afraid.
But then, who was it who said our feudal masters are Nazi's? I haven't as far as I'm aware.
In fact, it's you who seems to want to reserve something approaching that label for the high political theatre of the Trump administration, for example, as discrete from the substantive actions of every single presidency since WWII including Trump. But since any effective political or media opposition are imprisoned, bankrupt, shut down, excluded or completely neutered, there exists at least one good parallel with the early days of Nazism that we can point to. The segregation now being proposed all around us is a qualitative step forward from the economic apartheid we all know well, toward something more resembling totalitarianism, if not a fascism overt enough to actually register. As it is, we know full well that if
we, any of us, were inconvenient to power, they'd have killed us already, like all the others we read about continually in the forum behind you. Just as surely as any self respecting Nazi would.
If it's simply scale we're talking about, with 30 million+ bodies since 1945 under its belt, NATO, under the stewardship of America and all it's Presidents, is making excellent, if slower progress. If we include the original settlers and all the wars up until 1945, arguably America is well ahead of them in body count and overt racism if not
overt fascism.
If you happened to be on the receiving end however, whatever qualitative differences exist between what America is and does and fascism itself is open to experience and debate.
The British Empire was also well ahead of the Nazi's in most of the metrics, by quite a long margin. The Soviet Union, Spain, France, Portugal, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Ottomans and all the rest probably weren't that far behind by any similar measure and some, arguably, well ahead.
But if Nazism was ultimately about about racial purity as a central idea as you suggested earlier, through killing Jews, if that is the Nazi expression of fascism, then why were the Nazi's content to assist Jews in leaving Germany almost up until the war began? Why didn't they begin with the Jews first, if that were the end rather than the means? For that matter, why did they move against the Slav's if eradicating Jews was the central point? Surely power, or at the very least, 'cultural purity' seems a better description. If we judge the Nazi's by what their immediate priorities were, the real perceived agenda in order of importance was power, neutralising political and establishment rivals, territorial ambition, and eradicating the communists, the trade unions and the socialists.
We're currently having it impressed upon us, as we can see from dozens of angles, that total compliance is more important than either belief, science, medical efficacy or enthusiasm. That was certainly true of the early days of Nazism wasn't it?
We've seen sweeping legal changes which, in the UK at least, effectively bestow upon state actors the freedom to commit any crime against citizens without limitation,
effectively removing the right to life of all non state actors. Is that not potentially comparable to the Nazi racial laws
in effect if not
in intent? The entire domestic population of the UK (and other notional democracies) is now
legally Untermensch. Then there's the litany of bizarre 'scientific' experiments conducted by the Nazi's. With no hint of restraint or consent those might seem an order of magnitude ahead of most western governments in cruelty, but right here on RI there are also plenty of threads on the history of outlandish 'medical' experimentation without consent or care in our so called democracies. Especially if you happen to be a native or a former slave. If the level of damage currently acrueing to this grand 'vaccine' experiment continues to rise, then there too, the metrics will, before very long, become competitive.
While we're all fascinated by the spectacle, you seem to view it as something essentially understandable whereas I don't. I don't believe it is rational, nor can it be reduced to any logic or rationale except through erasure. It can certainly be analysed and categorised but ultimately, knowing something fully is not possible without direct experience, and even then, experience is no guarantee of understanding. To that end, I take Mayer for exactly what it is, a chance for us to sample the experience of those whom we might prefer to hate rather than understand, if only to look up and find striking reflections all around us today.
I'll certainly agree that comparisons with Nazism and Fascism can be unhelpful on the whole but I'd also argue that such comparisons as can be made, should be made while ignoring them entirely has more in common with Mayer's 'little man' keeping his head down, than not.
The argument is this: whatever we call it, we should mobilise to appreciate an equivalent level of threat posed by the technological feudalism/fascism that is upon us all, while it may still be possible to do something about it.
