Comment on Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 13:58:39 GMT

In what way?

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.

if a movement endorses their entire platform, it's safe to call them Nazis.

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.

Except that isn't the case for Golden Dawn

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.

And the difference is?

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.

Discuss