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gjm comments on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016 - Less Wrong
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There's an ambiguity here. Suppose the official position of the Social Party for German National Workers is as follows:
... and suppose the SPGNW loudly proclaims "We have no sympathy with fascism or Nazism". The SPGNW explicitly endorses a big pile of key Nazi ideas, but it doesn't explicitly endorse the word "Nazism". What then? Personally I'd be happy saying that they explicitly endorse Nazism and are just lying about it.
I don't know enough about the Golden Dawn for my opinions on whether they're doing something similar to be worth much. But it's certainly possible a priori that they might be.
(Adopting this flag really doesn't seem like something a party fully committed to not endorsing Nazism would do. The resemblance isn't exactly subtle.)
I could argue over the semantics of 'explicitly' but basically they are Nazis whether they all admit it or not.
I don't think they actually beleived this. Perhaps traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved to maintain the Aryan birthrate, but that's a little different - if premarital sex leads to lots of Aryan babies, I doubt they would object.
Interestingly, the leader of the SA was gay.
Of course, modern day Germany does censor the internet for anti-migrant comments...
It's not clear to me what they actually believed. They may have been inconsistent.
Pretty much all governments, ancient and modern, left and right, intrude more into their citizens' affairs than I'd like. But the Nazis seem to have been quite a lot worse in that respect than today's German government.
LOL
I'm not sure whether you're laughing at or with me. If the former, good; I was hoping to amuse. If the latter, perhaps consider explaining what I wrote that you find laughable?
At :-P
I find the idea of being fully committed to NOT endorsing something to be laughable.
Are you fully committed to not endorsing, say, Genghis Khan? Can you prove it? X-D
OK, so let me do something that never works :-) and explain the joke, such as it was.
Of course there is not really such a thing as being fully committed to not endorsing something; it's not the kind of thing it makes sense to be committed to. So describing someone or something as "not fully committed to endorsing X" has to be an instance of meiosis (understatement for rhetorical effect); and so it is. What I am actually suggesting is that the Golden Dawn looks like a basically-fascist party that's nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany, and that no one adopts a flag like that without the deliberate intention to evoke the Nazi flag, and that what GD is actually interested in is endorsing Nazism with plausible deniability. But -- being a dry-witted English sort of chap -- I chose to express that by understating it to pretty much the greatest extent possible. It was intended to be just very slightly amusing, at least to sympathetic readers.
As I already remarked, explaining jokes never works. (Especially, I think, this sort of joke.) And I've just spent at least 30x longer explaining what I wrote as I did writing it. Oh well, never mind.
That joke would have worked better if we were not discussing whether a contemporary political movement is actually Nazi and if demands to be fully committed to not endorsing white male cis hetero partriarchy (add more words to taste) did not actually pop up outside of Monty Python sketches.
Getting back to the subject at hand, do you suggest that the Golden Dawn is actually "nostalgic for the good old days of Nazi Germany"? That strikes me as not very likely, not to mention that those good old days were very few before they became terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.
I think maybe "Adopting this flag really doesn't seem like something a party fully committed to not endorsing Nazism would do" is British understatement for "Adopting this flag is tacitly endorsing Nazism".
I like to believe I understand British understatements. This one... didn't perform as expected :-P
That was in fact exactly my meaning.
Your opinion is noted.
Literally? Quite likely not. Keen to reproduce most of the salient features of those days if they get into power? Yeah, probably. (And I'll hazard a guess that if asked many of them would say: well, yes, Hitler did some terrible things, but at least he tried to make Germany great through purity and strength. Perhaps with a side-order of Holocaust denial.)
Depending on your pick of "salient features", this is applicable to a lot of political movements. The desire for a powerful state, national unity, a strong hand keeping miscreants in check, etc. is quite common.
Take a look at the NSDAP program -- isn't it easy to find some common ground with pretty much anyone? :-/
E.g. Bernie Sanders wants free education and hey look, it's right here, point 20: "The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. ... We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession."
Re. Bernie Sanders, he is clearly a socialist, and in some ways mildly nationalist, e.g. :
So would it be accurate to say that Sanders may be mildly national socialist, but certainly not a capitalised National Socialist?
I dunno. Find a Bernie Bro and tell him that "Sanders may be mildly national socialist". On an off chance that he knows what National Socialism is, duck X-D
Well, that's why the things that tend to get described as specifically Nazi tend not to be things like "improving the education system" or even more specifically "providing good education for gifted children from all backgrounds" (er, of course some kinds of backgrounds wouldn't have been acceptable to the Nazis) that have pretty wide support from all quarters. Just as describing someone as "very like Richard Feynman" probably doesn't mean that they had some artistic talent and enjoyed drawing.
Providing special attention to gifted children is extremely controversial. Far more resources are spent on the slow kids.
Where by "specifically Nazi" you mean "the parts that gjm doesn't approve off".
Speak for yourself. I very much don't approve of point 20 from their program. "The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program" is a nice-ish sounding way of saying, "we will ram whatever propaganda we want down all kids' thoughts and force you to pay for it".
No, I think that's not the why. I think the actual why is because the Nazis lost the last war and so became known as the incarnation of pure evil, and everything they touched turned to pure evil, the end. In less flowery prose, "Nazi" (or neo-nazi) nowadays is just a derogatory term without much historical meaning.
I am not a fan of NSDAP and though I don't know much about Golden Dawn I doubt they are a bunch of decent fellows. If someone calls them neo-nazis, I mentally translate it to "I don't really like 'em". But if people want to insist that they are actually, literally Nazis and pine for the good old days of the Third Reich, well, at this point I feel compelled to point out that no, taking derogatories literally is rarely a good idea.