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Lumifer comments on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016 - Less Wrong
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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
Hmm, it is tempting to find a historically illiterate Bernie supporter and persuade them to describe their politics as "national socialist".
"Look, many would love to be international socialists and raise the living standard for the entire world. But clearly the US cannot afford to supply welfare, heathcare and education to all 7 billion people in the world. So, maybe one day we can have international socialism, but right now we have to be pragmatic and advocate national socialism"
Get popcorn, sit back, and watch as Bernie Bro tries to convince others to national socialism :P
Bonus points if the expression "workers' party" gets used.
Double bonus points if you persuade him to rail against fat-cat bankers who suffocate the common people with their greed. Abolish unearned (work and labour) incomes! Break debt (interest)-slavery!
Don't just imprison the banksters, kill them!
I think we're onto something here. I mean, if you replace the bits of Nazi ideology about 'Jews control the banks' with 'white men run silicon valley and the banks' and replace demands for lebensraum with demands for safe spaces then I think the Socialist Workers Party of the American Nation could really take off.
It's not a new observation :-/
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.
I didn't intend to imply it's uncontroversial. Only that it's widely supported by people with very varied politics.
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".
You keep doing this. You keep being wrong. You should stop it.
I fear you misunderstand me (and someone else seems to have misunderstood the same way, so presumably I should have been clearer). I meant not "everyone agrees with this" but "many people with a wide variety of political positions agree with this". And I didn't intend to imply that everyone in their programme other than "kill the Jews" is in that category.
"The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program" could, in isolation, mean anything from "we're going to build a lot of new schools and fund a lot of new teachers" to "we're going to close down the education system entirely" via "we're going to turn the schools into brainwashing units" and "we're going to change the schools from brainwashing units to places of actual education". In the Nazis' case, it turned out to be the brainwashing one, and no reasonable person would support that. And, lo, I think "brainwash all the children to agree with the State's position" would generally be regarded as a characteristically Nazi policy, though of course totalitarians of all stripes do that -- and this is consistent with both Lumifer's analysis (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and it was really bad) and mine (something qualifies to be thought of as characteristically Nazi iff the Nazis did it and most others didn't).
Actually I think both Lumifer's analysis and mine are right; something is easier to pigeonhole as Nazi if (1) you see it done often by people who aren't Nazis and (2) you feel positively about it. I'll add another: once Nazism is associated in everyone's mind mostly with nationalism, Jew-killing, and war-making, any given other thing is going to be easier to think of as "Nazi" if it feels like it resembles those.
What do you mean by a "wide variety of political positions"? Your definition of "Nazi" currently amounts to "supports the parts of the Nazi platform only Nazis support". Now obviously stated this way, it is clearly a circular, hense useless, definition. So we are left with how you use it in practice, which brings us back to "supports the parts of the definition gjm doesn't approve of".
I don't see the difference between your first and last interpretation. After all if "we" build new school and fund a lot of teachers, "we" are presumably going to have them teach cources on history, social sciences, etc. and do it from our precpective. One could get around this problem by not having education be centralised, but that's not what either the Nazis or Bernie were proposing.
Not quite. For instance, Soviet-style communism was pretty big on totalitarianism, which is certainly a distinctively Nazi trait, but Nazism and Soviet communism were very different things.
Nope. E.g., if some new political movement comes out for Jew-killing, totalitarian control, military expansionism, moral traditionalism, and fostering the Master Race, I'll be very happy saying that yup, they're basically Nazis even if they don't use that term.
(That's not meant to be a necessary-and-sufficient condition; just an example.)
This seems to be your default assumption, to which you fall back as soon as you think you've ruled out any single alternative. It's still wrong, just as it was before.
For instance: the NSDAP programme includes the abolition of unearned income -- interest, rent, etc. I think that's a terrible idea, but finding that an organization advocates the same idea wouldn't much dispose me to call it "Nazi".
(Perhaps it should -- it's a rather unusual idea as well as probably a bad one. So maybe I could be persuaded. But the fact that I'd need persuading indicates that I am not using the word the way you say I am.)
That word "presumably" would be one key difference. Another would be that teaching from a particular perspective is (possibly bad but) not the same thing as brainwashing.
In what way?
Ok, if a movement endorses their entire platform, it's safe to call them Nazis. Except that isn't the case for Golden Dawn, which was the movement under discussion.
And the difference is?
Many ways. Here are some examples. The NSDAP had the word "socialist" in its name but didn't actually do much in the way of nationalization and communalization, whereas the Soviet communists did. The Nazis had racial purity at the centre of their rhetoric and policy, whereas the Soviet communists did not. (There was plenty of antisemitism in the USSR, but it was less explicit and less central and e.g. the USSR never made a systematic attempt to exterminate all its Jewish people.) Both were religiously oppressive but in quite different ways: the Communists tried to wipe out religion completely, whereas the Nazis tried (with limited success) to align it with their dogmas.
The things I listed aren't their "entire platform" -- you may have forgotten that that was a point you were making a few comments upthread.
Sure. Because the question you asked -- sorry, I mean the accusation you made -- was not about the Golden Dawn. You claimed that my use of the word "Nazi" is circular and content-free because it amounts to saying "Nazis are those who hold the positions Nazis hold", so I answered that accusation.
The extent to which the teachers attempt to get the pupils to adopt that perspective, and the means used to do it.
For instance, schoolteachers would make life unpleasant for children who had not joined the Hitler Youth. And here are a couple of questions taken from Nazi-era school mathematics textbooks.
"A plane on take off carries 12 bombs, each weighing ten kilos. The aircraft makes for Warsaw , the centre of international Jewry. It bombs the town. On take off with all bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1500 kilos of fuel the aircraft weighed 8 tonnes. When it returned from the crusade, there were still 230 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty?"
"The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?"
It seems clear that what's going on here is that even what you'd think was pretty much a maximally non-political subject, namely arithmetic, was being used to deliver particular political ideas to children.
Does that necessarily amount to "brainwashing"? Nope. I don't know enough about Nazi education to know whether what happened in Nazi schools could rightly be described that way. But it's certainly further along the spectrum from impartial teaching to brainwashing than, say, anything that happens in typical state-funded schools in the UK.
Funny you should mention that. Let me quote the president of Chicago Teachers Union. She said this in 2014:
There is even a book: Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers.
That doesn't follow. You can do the comparison of obvious Nazis and obvious non-Nazis to see what the Nazis support, then use the information from that to assess whether the non-obvious cases are nazis.
Except then you'd have to use some other criterion to determine the "obvious" cases.
I think Otto Wels, Ernst Thälmann and Ludwig Kaas would be the most obvious non-Nazis.
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.
I may have used the word "fascist" or "Nazi" as derogatory terms back when I was an angry young 20 year old, but I am trying to be a little more rational now. I have been arguing that they are literally Nazis.
Literally Nazis means they are members of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
How are you defining the word "Nazi"? (or the word "literally"?)