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polymathwannabe comments on LINK: In favor of niceness, community, and civilisation - Less Wrong Discussion
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What if you are Jewish and are trying to stop a Hitler from coming to power and the best means would be to spread a deliberate lie about him. Are you saying that the worse the outcome would be, the less likely you would be to lie?
The best means to stop a Hitler would be to show the actual, ugly truth of where he'll lead us. Very few lies about Hitler could match the real horror.
To credibly show the truth. Claims of Hitler-equivalent societal doom are a dime a dozen. Almost all of them are false.
Almost all isn't that reassuring given the scope of the potential harm. Hitler democratically acquired power in an advanced civilized Western Christian nation while being fairly open about his terminal values. Fear of this pattern repeating is worth continually emphasizing.
The analogy isn't effective (outside the ingroup where it originates) unless it's credible; throwing it around in situations where it isn't in no way guards against the possibility of a recurrence of Nazism, or one of its less famous but often equally nasty companions in 20th-century totalitarianism. In fact, I'd say it's probably actively detrimental, as it makes the accusation less punchy when and if we do start seeing a totalizing popular movement that openly preaches extreme prejudice against an unpopular group of scapegoats.
That's not to say that these kinds of mass movements aren't worth studying or analogies to modern movements can't be made; they absolutely are and can. But crying Nazi without commensurately serious justification can only cheapen the term once everyone catches on. Who cares about having one more political slur?
I think it's somewhere in Sun Tzu's Art of War. Often things are well hidden in plain sight.
Hitler's biggest advantage was that nobody took him seriously.
And yet the German military didn't overthrow Hitler when he started messing up military strategy in Russia.
By that time Hitler did put people he trusted into central positions of military power. Everybody who Hitler considered to be untrustworthy was already removed from power.
Nobody succeeded in running a coup against him but people did try at such dates as the 20 of July. The military didn't follow Hitlers orders when it comes to subjects such as burning brides in Germany.
A few tried, even specifically operating under the theory that the failures in Russia would make a post-assassination coup politically possible, in Operation Spark.
I don't think this much affects your point, though; by the time a sufficiently evil person and/or group is in power, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of political and psychological mechanisms they can use to entrench there.
In a world with rational voters, yes. In our world you might want to start a false rumor such as Hitler's Jew hating is just a false cover for his true desire to reduce social welfare payments
That rumor wouldn't spread. It's to complicated to be a good story that's believable to the average person in that time period. I think Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction is quite brilliant at illustrating how such principles work.
I was making an analogy to Bill Clinton's false claim that Bob Dole wanted to cut medical benefits to senior citizens. When confronted with his lie by Dole, Clinton reportedly said "You gotta do what you gotta do."
It's confusing to talk about history of the 1930's with examples that come from the 1990's and which aren't marked that way.
It prevents you from learning the historic lessons that the 1930's do provide.
In Tea-Party constituencies, that'd be an argument in his favor.
No, smarter voters would see the purpose of the lie and vote against Hitler. (As a tea party person I'm disassociating with Hitler.)
The Tea Party would probably support a candidate who they had reason to think wants to cut down welfare programs, even if there are some unnerving rumors about him.