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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Science: Do It Yourself - Less Wrong
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That's nothing, I once saw a restaurant called Genghis Khan's Mongolian BBQ.
I dated a Mongolian for a bit, and apparently in that culture Genghis Khan is still highly regarded as a founding figure.
I didn't realise that Genghis was an actual genocide (worse than any other conqueror), but apparently he was.
But if history is written by the victors, then of course we'll see him more positively than we do Hitler. It'll be a while until they rename the main airport in Berlin!
I've heard estimates that put the total death toll of aftermath of the various wars Genghis Khan waged at ~40 million people. The estimates for all the Mongol conquests go from a low of ~30 to a high of 60 million.
Its mind-boggling to consider that isn't that much better than WW2 (low estimates 40, high estimates 72 million). It just gets ridiculous once we remember that population at that time was somewhere in the 300 to 400 million range.
We would probably have had to go nuclear or biological to get the death toll anywhere near 7,5 to 17% of global population!
With distance the atrocities get forgotten. Many well known leaders in the past did pretty bad stuff. I am usually surprised how kings and queens still get items named after them while dictators usually get institutionally forgotten and purged.
s/Berlin/Ulaanbaatar/
(Works without substitution.)
Say more?
(The Ulaanbaastar airport has been renamed for the famous Mongolian conquerer but...) it'll be a while until they rename the main airport in Berlin (after Adolf Hitler, because Hitler is a loser and Genghis Khan is a winner).
Yes, that was what I meant, where ‘a while’ means something significantly longer than 800 years (such as infinity). So it is quite an understatement, really.
The airport in Berlin is named after its location, and I expect it will stay that way. (My family lives right around the corner.)
There is no need to give people names to such installations, that only confuses tourists.
You have that right. I was playing a Trivial Pursuit betting game and the question was asking where Tom Hanks was trapped. I had 'the airport in New York'. JFK, well, that is just some guy.
And imagine the hassle renaming everything when the name giver goes out of fashion.
All the airports in Berlin are named after their locations, although there's a proposal to give the forthcoming Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport the subtitle Willy Brandt.
I see people running around with Che Guevara T-shirts.
And people bow to and kiss the Torah.
David Mitchell has a youtube video on the subject.
There is also a group "Sons of Korah" who sing remixes of the Psalms. Including Psalm 137. Which builds up to:
The Sons of Korah version makes it sound a little better:
Still, it is a recent band singing joyously about genocide. (It is a little better given that the Psalm was written by people at a time when they had just been conquered and the same atrocities done to them, crying out to a power for vengeance.)
They are actually really catchy, and most of their songs (and the Psalms themselves) are reasonably poetic.
The comedian looks young enough to not remember the extent to which there's been a big campaign to take rape seriously.
Earlier, (and to a lesser extent still) it could be presented with enough distance to be a subject of humor. For example, I can remember when a boss chasing a secretary around a desk was considered funny.
More recently, prison rape was a reliable joke in general. Now there are social circles where such jokes aren't welcome but I wouldn't say it's a sort of joke you absolutely can't get away with.
With the recent research on the effects of concussion, I don't think the old cartoons (with the character looking dazed and the little birds chirping as they circle his head) are going to look quite the same as they used to.
To some large extent, people notice what they're told to notice. This doesn't mean I think it's all signaling, but I think perception is very much shaped by social pressure.
He hits the nail on the head: "At the point when everyone who fought in [the World Wars], and everyone who remembers anyone who fought in them, has died, surely they'll become as comic as the Vikings."
After all, the purpose of moral disapproval of atrocities is simply to avoid offending anyone who could be personally connected to them†. Even when people acknowledge that there's nothing besides length of time separating ancient genocides from modern ones, there's just no way to spark the same feeling of outrage.
† Of course, longstanding cultural divides can keep offense alive even when the secondhand witnesses are gone; the Armenian genocide shows no sign of becoming funny, because the acknowledgment of it is a continuing rift between Armenians and Turks.
Personal connection is in the mind, as you say later. I've been looking at the "It would have been me" aspect of the past, and I think it's mostly trained in.
A major reason that the Holocaust is taken very seriously is that there are people who believe that doing so will make a repetition less likely. I don't know how long it would take for that to fade out.
I also don't know how close we are to longevity tech, but when such exists, the past is presumably going to fade more slowly.
On the relativity of what is considered serious-- I think there's been a bit of a shift lately, but when you think about Hitler's atrocities, you probably mostly think about the Holocaust. He was also responsible for tens of millions of deaths as the result of WWII, but that doesn't get the same publicity, probably because building an empire is viewed as sort of normal behavior. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, and Napoleon aren't usually counted as mass murderers.
Alexander the Great, Shaka Zulu and Napoleon were 'just' empire builders. Genghis Khan, on the other hand, make Hitler look like a fluffy puppy in every way except temporal and social proximity.
-Part of a speech allegedly made by Adolp Hitler on August 22, 1939 at Obersalzberg
Its interesting since this quote seems to show:
a) Hitler having values very different from the postChristian West, rather than disagreeing on how to live up to those values.
b) The genocides of WW2 helped to rekindle interest and even an air of seriousness around what was 70 years ago not considered an important event (Armenian genocide).
Also Hitler has a point. Might does (eventually) make right to as much as our value systems can be influenced by upbringing (and after genetic engineering that won't be a limiting factor either). What does anyone truly care about what the weak or a weak tired civilization thinks of you beyond signalling concerns?
That the Jews were slaves in Egypt [1] has been commemorated every year for at least 2500 years-- possibly 3000 years or so.
I wouldn't expect it to fade quickly.
[1] This is disputed-- there doesn't seem to be any solid evidence of it.
That's absurd. When I disapprove of Serbs (and Greek volunteers) massacring civilians in Srebrenica, it's not because I want to avoid offending people, it's because I want to offend them into shame, so that they stop supporting policies and parties in my own nation (Greece) that will make a repetition of the butchery and support of such butchery, likely.
You talk as if all discussion of politics is a signalling of status, rather than a sometimes hopeless attempt to influence the future into a better direction.
You're right, of course- my comment needs modification. I'm just talking about the case where one isn't really angry about an old atrocity, but would still hesitate to make a joke about it. I'm not made of Hansons all the way down.
But this time we got video.
Assuming a non-Singularity future where all the second-order witnesses have died, one would not expect many people to go and watch video of 20th-century atrocities. I mean, first-hand accounts of the Spanish Inquisition and the genocide of the Americas exist. How much of them have you read?
(In high school, we read a few excerpts at most; I did read this book in college, thanks to its Great Books focus. Of course, I read plenty in high school about slavery, but that's because the Civil War is still tied to current cultural divides in the U.S.)
None. Now I'm anticipating learning about the world wars via "Age of Empires IX".
You mean this hasn't happened already?
As noted in the Mitchell video, there are comical pieces set in the World Wars, but one has to be careful how one writes it. Catch-22 is a black comedy, as are Blackadder Goes Forth, Life is Beautiful and most of the other comedies set in 20th century wars.
The simplest way to put it, perhaps, is to note that Mel Brooks could do the Spanish Inquisition and the French Revolution in straightforward screwball style, but had to do Hitler as a musical-within-a-movie.
Bugs Bunny did it...
That's comedy as wartime propaganda, which has its own rich history. Note that WB has basically refused to show it since the war. If you want a real exception, Hogan's Heroes might qualify.
The fascinating thing is that the actors who played the major Nazi roles were all Jews. Two of which spent time in concentration camps and had their families butchered. That impresses me.
The actor who played Colonel Klink had it written into his contract that the Nazis would never win.
So did Donald Duck, and quite a few others. IIRC Hitler was generally viewed pretty comically (at least in America? I don't remember) before the Holocaust and its scale became widely known after the war.
Aw crap, Godwin's Law.
That really used to be a problem
It's been a while since I've read it, but I think all the viewpoints were in the military and about the treadmill of being trapped into flying unlimited bombing missions. There was nothing from the point of view of the people on the ground who were being bombed, was there?
I've seen that plenty of times. Seems to be a fairly common university-campus phenomenon, especially for students in the humanities.
I'm not sure if there are any cultures whose folk historical memory of Genghis Khan involves the same visceral horror as the present-day Western reaction to Hitler. So while this is an accurate historical parallel, it might not be one in terms of unintentional hilarity.
If Hitler had ended up winning the war, there may not be that much memory of visceral horror either by now.
Though according to Wikipedia, there are some places where Genghis is still a very bad memory, for ending the Islamic Golden Age and all that.
And note that there isn't general visceral horror about the Soviet Union, even though it committed mass murder on a grand scale. You can wear or display Soviet stuff without it being taken nearly as badly as if you were wearing or displaying Nazi stuff.
Although not Soviet himself, Soviet fanboy Che Guevara is another example. I'm not an expert on Latin American history, but some things I've read make me never want to buy a Che T-shirt.
http://www.slate.com/id/2107100/
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535
[...]
"I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why" is a scary testament to the power of social proof, and the double standards applied to the perpetrators of atrocities based on sympathy towards their ideology.
Do you think people wearing Che shirts without knowing why increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?
At this point, using that symbol without knowing the meaning is rather benign and driven by social proof and the artistic qualities of the image. It's similar to people wearing Gandhi T-shirts. I once saw a mural of Che alongside Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Mother Teresa (once of these things is not like the others).
The fault lies with the members of the leftist* intelligentsia who knew what Che did, but who continued to promote him as a positive symbol of revolution and liberation. It is disturbing, and yes, potentially minorly risky that they are trendsetters. Yet the risk is pretty low, because they are mainly followed out of ignorance. It is a particular sort of leftist consequentialism** promoted by some leftist leaders, intellectuals, and activists that's the real risk.
*Only some people on the left actually support Che as an icon while knowing what he actually did. This sort of attitude is hardly confined to the left.
**Leftists aren't all consequentialists, nor are all consequentialists leftists. It's a particular brand of leftism that I am criticizing.
I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?
Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn't have been a Shoah anyway.
Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.
Mao's China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito's Yugoslavia) is when it didn't really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).
If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don't think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).
I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don't seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .
I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn't consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.
I've also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn't cool just because it's your own population... even if your heart is in the right place.
Excesses? Interesting word choice. So, um, how much murder is the right amount?
Do you think a child scribbling a swastika graffiti without knowing why (or even what the symbol is associated with) increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?
I don't know. I'd discourage it for the sake of the children's reputations and as a kindness to those who don't want to see swastikas, but that's a different issue.
What do you think?
Not by very much, but yes.
Che and the hammer and sickle being cool on T-shirts spills over due to the halo effect.
However like you seem to imply overall I agree it isn't something worth too much concern or attention.
It could be because, while the Soviet Union was generally oppressive, it severely toned down the murderin' during the last ~40 years of its eight-decade history, whereas Nazi Germany spent over half of its brief history conquering Europe and conducting genocide, and then collapsed while it was right in the middle of such activities.
The Soviet Union also wasn't in a desperate war for survival with the people with whom those with the most power to declare things offensive closely identify.
A more important reason I suspect is that communism as a whole is bigger and Soviet iconography can be indicative of loyalty to some harmless local brand. A british trotskyist waving a hammer and sickle is emphatically not a big fan of the USSR.
There may be places where nazi iconography mostly signals loyalty to some local band of fascists but those local nazis are probably associated with or are violent thugs, not reformist presidential candidates.
Now that you bring it up, I realize I don't know why people wear Soviet stuff. I'd assumed it was a combination of liking the art style (it's at least distinctive and not much like anything being done currently) and the wish to be a little edgy, but there are other possibilities.
I've seen two main groups, socialists who'll have something like that "pyramid of workers holding up the aristocracy" poster because they like the message and don't care about the source*, and people in stereotypically first-against-the-wall jobs who'll have a poster about killing bankers for kitsch value. People who like the style tend to go in for Polish movie posters.
*like, I imagine quite a few less wrongers would have no problem hanging this one on their wall: http://img402.imageshack.us/i/leten.jpg/
What is that from?
A Soviet children's book.
Depends on the country. In hungary some symbols from the SU are outlawed atm.
Ironically, the equivalent exists too, or at least it did at one point.
And the Dark Horde in the SCA was a reference to killing on the grand scale long enough ago that it could be considered just slightly edgy, I think.