Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016

Elo

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threadspage before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

explicitly endorse Nazism

There's an ambiguity here. Suppose the official position of the Social Party for German National Workers is as follows:

Germany needs to be a great power once more, and can only become so by military expansion, so that it can fulfil its destiny by ruling all Europe with a fist of iron.
Jews and Communists are responsible for most of the nation's ills and must be destroyed.
The Aryan race is superior to all others and must be favoured and kept pure.
Traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved for fear of moral degeneracy.
To achieve all these things, it is necessary for the nation's security forces to be able to know and control what everyone says and does.

... 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.)

Personally I'd be happy saying that they explicitly endorse Nazism and are just lying about it.

I could argue over the semantics of 'explicitly' but basically they are Nazis whether they all admit it or not.

Traditional views on sex and gender must be preserved for fear of moral degeneracy.

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 le... (read more)