The thing that NOBODY seems to understand, or maybe not willing to admit is, you CANNOT group people together.
It’s the whole reason racism logically makes no sense. At all.
“Oh, all those dirty (insert race here) are good for nothin! They’re all assholes!”
And sure, regardless of what race you inserted there, there’s going to be some assholes. There’s also going to be some amazing people that you’re unfairly judging.
And it’s not just races. It’s anything. Races, genders, religions, countries, social groups, book clubs, whatever.
If you think all people of one group think the same on everything, you’re just factually wrong. And if you use that incorrect fact to judge that group, now you’re just an asshole.
I’ve found that people th]?6ink judging people is bad, and wrong. I don’t think so. I think some people are just terrible at judging people, and miss the point of judging people. You’re supposed to judge them as an individual. Not as (insert group here).
There’s a difference between judging people on a category they don’t choose vs. a set of beliefs they choose to follow.
If I tried to claim all brown-eyed people are evil, I’d be bigoted because eye color does not determine who you are as a person. But if I claimed that all members of the Puppy Kickers Club are evil because they literally believe in kicking puppies and require doing so frequently as a requirement for membership, then my claim is valid.
Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? If it’s acceptable to judge people based on group membership because it aligns with behavior, people will ascribe abhorrent behavior to group membership. “Oh, you’re a (insert religious group here)? Those people literally rape children!”
Are you a member of a religious group where raping children is a core belief? Yeah, you’re a bigot if you’re making false claims about religion, but what about true claims?
Yes, we should hold people accountable for their religion if their religion is based around doing shitty things. If someone is literally a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, they are literally supporting a hate group by virtue of being a member. Regardless of whether they are literally holding a “God hates fags” sign in that moment, they’ve given time, money, and support to those who do and are directly culpable for that behavior as long as they remain a member.
Again, if your religion revolves around kicking puppies, then you are to blame for kicking puppies. If you don’t want to be associated with puppy kicking, don’t literally make it your religion.
My critic to what the other guy said, is that you can judge a group of that group is specific enough to judge them on these characteristics.
Are all christians bad? Hell no. Active adult members of the Westboro Baptist Church? Hell yes. They are bad because their website is literally godhatesfags.com.
Now Nazis are fucking Nazis. 11 millions murders should be enough to judge them as a group and those who liked it.
Yup. What are they actually advocating for? What are their true core beliefs?
It should also be noted that there are groups you can control your membership of (political parties, religions) and groups you are forced into (ethnicity, sexuality). The group you choose to join speaks far more about how terrible or good you are. The worst groups and people are those that attack people based on groups they are forced into, bigots and fascists.
Well, i don’t think you can judge a group based on their characteristics, if the group is an ethnicity. What are characteristics that e.g. all white people share, which you can judge them for? Obviously none. Just like any and all “forced into” groups.
Mainly what does one mean with racism? If they mean exclusively systematical racism, then it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to be the victim of racism in e.g. the US as a “white” person. Like apparently 75% of the population in the US is “white”, how and why would 75% of the system, so effectively a controlling majority, turn the system against them? It seems at least unlikely.
But as always, us defaultism or western defaultism in the English speaking world runs strong, and it gets completely ignored that there are probably some “white” people born and living in e.g. Japan. I am “white” and I lived in other parts of the world and met my (hopefully) future-wife there. There is systematical racism against “white” people out there.
Now if you mean racism as discrimination by race, obviously it exists and I have experienced it. By a scream, I was angrily called a slur for standing in a park, about to sit down on a bench, by a person outside of the park on the walkway running past the park. I know they meant me as the slur means only that one thing, and there was literally no other “white” person there. Local friends confirmed that I heard it correctly and that there was no one else around. “White” people are so rare there that I would be stared at anywhere I would go, causing me to seek out private spots. Tbh i believe that place has systematical racism against a bunch of ethnicities, including “white” people. But I still think that moment is a good example for unprompted unmistakable racism.
They are bad because their website is literally godhatesfags.com.
Always found it weird that there are people who believe that the immortal and all powerful creator of the universe is for some reason deeply, deeply concerned with what ~10% of a particular branch of weird hairless apes decides to do with their genitals enough to do things like call down plagues and natural disasters over it. Like that’s just…such an extreme level of being a gooner that it’s even more absurd than the whole monotheistic God of everything idea to begin with.
Clearly the universe was created by committee - that’s how you end up with things like the platypus when the bird team and the mammal team are forced to compromise on a design to get the product shipped on time.
Modern nazis? Yes. They can all go fuck themselves.
Historical nazis? Like the ones from the 1920s-1945? Maybe. I’m unclear how many of them knew what being nazis actually meant. Like, the average nazi soldier in some 1942 battle. Does he know about jews dying? Does he know the things the nazis stand for? I’m not saying yes or no, because I legit don’t know. I find it hard to believe that millions of soldiers all knew, and still went along with it.
Now the SS? Oh, those assholes KNEW! They were far enough up the ladder that they knew exactly what was going on. They were the ones enforcing it.
Same as the nazis who ran the camps.
I read about this one guy who was basically the warden of one of those camps. Directly responsible for literally millions of dead jews in 4 years. They put him on trial at the Nuremburg trials, and he says he did nothing wrong. So they asked him if they threw him in that same oven, would that be wrong? He said no. Sooooo…that’s what they did. One of the last things he said was that it was ironic that the one who was to throw the switch on his death was Jewish.
Bro, if a person can’t step back and objectively determine for themselves that what the nazis were doing was wrong, then they’re not innocent. They’re stupid, but they’re also not innocent.
What I’m saying is, if you study history, in the 1920s Germany was one of the most progressive, left leaning, all inclusive cultures. To go from that to…nazi Germany in about 10 years should tell you that the general public didn’t know at all what they were doing with the jews.
In the early days, before the war, they were just deporting them. Well what they kept finding happening was, they’d deport the jews. Then they’d take over new land. On that new land they’d find not only jews, but they were figuring out these were the SAME jews they just deported a year earlier from their land. So they’d deport them from this NEW land. Only to later take over more new land, and the cycle repeats.
So for people living in Germany before the nazis, they probably knew and liked their jewish neighbors. Everybody knows the story of Anne Frank, but think of what that entails. It means the homeowner saw the jews being deported, and allowed this entire family to live in the attic. Which shows that people were living in nazi germany, but not in favor of it. And that’s one story that became famous because of a diary, but it was happening all over Germany.
So to think about how many young kids were in the bulk of the soldiers, mandatory drafted, I cannot believe that they all supported something that was intentionally kept a secret from the general public…and these soldiers would have been the general public before being enlisted.
I believe the people who believed in the nazi idiology were definately in the top 5 most evil “governments” we’ve ever seen. Arguably the most evil.
I just don’t believe you can assume a group of 19 year olds are in the know about a government conspiracy to construct a series of death camps with the intention of killing all jews.
Just the same I don’t believe all USA soldiers who fought in Vietnam knew about Agent Orange being sprayed and causing health issues.
Even right now, in russia, you have an entire country that thinks they were invaded by Ukraine. That’s not what happened, but thats what they think.
Government propaganda is real, and it is powerful. So yeah, I absolutely think there were tons of young German soldiers that only found out the truth after the war was over. And if you look at German citizen reaction, it’s pretty clear they didn’t know. They did an abrupt 180, and instantly had empathy for what they had done. If they knew and supported it, they would have kept doing it after Hitler died.
Historical nazis? Like the ones from the 1920s-1945? Maybe. I’m unclear how many of them knew what being nazis actually meant. Like, the average nazi soldier in some 1942 battle. Does he know about jews dying? Does he know the things the nazis stand for? I’m not saying yes or no, because I legit don’t know. I find it hard to believe that millions of soldiers all knew, and still went along with it.
Fuck off with that nazi apologist bullshit. The whole nazi party ideology was based on hating minorities and blaming them for Germany’s economic and social ills. Who fucking cares about the details, the whole party was hate filled rage bait just like modern Republicans.
I don’t want to say ‘Itodaso’ but the guy went from “Not all men” to Nazi apologist in ONE post. These guys are all over Lemmy and it’s super depressing.
If you say something you think is normal, but get downvoted to hell with a bunch of angry replies, then seriously consider their perspective instead of arguing with each one.
Seek out places where you think they’ve been making good points.
If you want to educate the person above, don’t start with “fuck off”. Just explain to them why they are wrong and corroborate with historical bits as you please. The fuck off is completely unnecessary and counter-productive
If you want to educate the person above, don’t start with “fuck off”. Just explain to them why they are wrong and corroborate with historical bits as you please.
Like the ‘innocent German farmer soldiers’ who had no idea what was happening? This is how that starts, dude, seriously, this isn’t even a clever attempt at a wedge issue. It’s as in-your-face as it could be.
Does it feel good getting off to demonizing people who don’t know better
What is he, a goddamn four year old? Who the fuck doesn’t know Nazi’s are bad are you fucking kidding me here? Nobody is ‘getting off’ on anything, this person called out a Nazi apologist. There’s no clean wehrmacht, it was a Nazi lie by higher ups to save their own fucking skin.
From 16 Days in Berlin: (I can’t be assed to find the original attribution, go do it yourself if you care to.)
“We have to win this war… if the others win the war, and they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won’t be a single German left in a few weeks.”
There now I’ve done the thing where the lefty finds the answers for you.
Fuck fascism, fuck Nazi’s, fight them everywhere you see them, give them no ground, no quarter. Defend each other because even the centrists will side with them, just like last time.
18 year old draftees into the Vietnam war sprayed everything with agent orange and caused generations of suffering for innocent people. Many of them also suffered from the after effects and American companies refused to ackniwledge their part in it. Arguably the average American company is far worse than the Nazis were. If you work at Facebook for example, you assisted in multiple genocides. If you know a facebook user, they obviously don’t care.
Why are you saying all this to me? This should’ve been in your response to the other guy. Hell even just linking the myth of the clean Wehrmacht article would’ve been a lot more productive than calling them a Nazi apologist right out the gate.
The citizens in nazi Germany was very much aware of the anti-semitism and the violent nature of the nazi party.
If you want to claim that they didn’t know of the systemical murder of e.g. Jewish. Based on my understanding, you are wrong. But even if you want to ignore that, they knew of the violence against Jewish and enabled it.
Now, you might be able to make the case that early Nazi party members, before the rise of power, weren’t 100% antisemitic, they absolutely knew they were getting into bed with antisemites.
After the rise in power started, Jewish sympathisers were purged from the party. Anyone in or supporting Nazis (which was a large portion of the population) knew what they were supporting.
I’d just caution painting too broadly. That wasn’t all German citizens that supported the Nazi movement. It was also a brutal regime that stomped out detractors. German media of the era was highly controlled. It’d paint a false picture of the amount of support. True dissent was a dangerous position to publicly take.
I am sorry but it seems you misunderstood my take.
If the German public knew, Nazis knew.
You can choose what you want to call a Nazi. Idc for the sake of my argument. But you can’t claim that you can’t judge Nazis for their support for Nazi shit because they didn’t know. They knew.
I don’t want to bother if you are the person I previously responded to. If you aren’t, then I am not saying, you claimed anything. If you are, read above.
I’m a different person. It appeared to me that you were lumping in all German citizens with Nazis which is why I made the post.
I’m not defending Nazi supporters, even in the earliest stages. They j knowingly joined with the antisemites to try and push their own agendas. History tells us how that worked out.
But that article doesn’t seem to claim that individual soldiers have the same guaranteed culpability.
I mean they must have that culpability since they were cooperating with Nazi genocidal policy by, among other things, invading countries to where the Holocaust would be exported in the first place. I mean it was by definition individual soldiers enforcing the state of affairs where Jews and other targets of Nazi ire were getting exterminated. It was those individual soldiers suppressing resistance, taking POWs to be executed, etc. I mean you’re pretty guilty the moment you’re fighting a war of extermination on the side of extermination.
If we’re trying to find a single good nazi in all of history, then I think technically Schindler counts.
That’s fair, but I think most modern people wouldn’t consider him a Nazi. He was registered as a Nazi by necessity, but ideologically I don’t think he believed in the extermination of Jews while bribing Nazi officials to keep his workers out of death camps. If you do consider him a Nazi then yeah there was dissent within the Nazi party; I don’t think that’s much of a surprise.
Let me tell you that it has been socially unacceptable to make apologies for anyone who flew the Nazi flag ever since 1945.
Yes, I understand you’re trying to take a nuanced approach to the Nazis who had been drafted since being kids, etc, but just don’t.
History already happened, and the last of the original Nazis are slowly dieing out (youngest Nazis tended to be 16 years old, so 1945-16 = born in 1929, so they’d be about 96 years old). They don’t need a random stranger to try to defend them.
Nazism is a failed ideology that abused large parts of the world. It doesn’t need defending.
He was a Semiens branch manager in China in Nanking during the Rape of Nanking.
It’s full of him doing everything he can to minimize the casualties and harm and then he’ll be like “China is great because there aren’t any Jews here, I know Herr Hitler wouldn’t accept such wanton murder and rape from his allies if he knew about it. He’s a good socialist and a friend of the workers, after all!”
And then Rabe, the “Good Nazi,” fresh from saving countless lives from the IJA, returns to Germany and says he approves of the Party 100% in 1938, and to anyone’s knowledge never breathed a word of criticism about the Holocaust.
So it’s a-ok as long as you (pretend that you) don’t know what you are fighting for? So it’s better to be a murderous yes-man than to question or face that you (directly or indirectly), through killing/enslaving/torturing innocent people, are a piece of shit with no spine or balls? That’s… better? That’s okay? That’s, uh, let’s say an interesting take. An awful, braindead take… But it sure is interesting, I suppose. If I were to start killing people that you are close to, would that be fine if I was like ‘oops my bad lmao I didn’t know what I was doing’?
Signed,
a gay guy who would have been experimented on and murdered
I’d like to quote my awsome history teacher here: “People went to the camp on a sunday stroll, looking at the victims as if it were a zoo”
Another great example: A Wehrmacht troop is tasked with pillaging a village. The officers clearly state that this will include killing women and children. They explain that every soldier has the right to refuse to take part in this and will not face any consequences.
Out of a hundred less then ten men refuse.
Also, the people from concentration camps were used as forced laborours. They were led through towns like callte in the morning when their shift started, and led back the same route after their shift ended.
People knew what the regime was doing. To varying degrees, surely, but with all the xenophobic propaganda, the burning of books, “entartete Kunst”, the deportation of millions of people I find it hard to believe that people were that clueless. Because after all, the NSDAP didn’t try to hide it. They wrote it on their banners all proud.
Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?
Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.
While it seems like the common stance in American culture (to which I belong) is that the Nazi Evil and the Holocaust positively were uniquely evil and should be distinguished against other crimes against humanity.
However, I am willing to take the position that this might be American propaganda that focuses the American populace on the Nazis, blinding them to the other atrocities that have occurred in the modern age. Some of this might be because many US History classes end their curriculums at the end of WWII, and so modern history after that isn’t really taught. That lasting impression could explain cultural permanence.
I do tend to agree with you though. I think the Nazis were evil and did evil shit, but after reflecting on it, it is possible to think of today’s Zionists and “modern Nazis”, as one might towards other authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.
If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.
I know a person who genuinely thinks men shouldn’t have any rights because they’re so bad. She’s like “women are superior, they develop emotional maturity earlier” or “all men are assholes”. I think she’s a lost hope.
At some point I told her about how Meta removed tampons from men’s bathrooms and she was like “hell yeah men would just ruin everything, take all the tampons for no reason”… seemingly forgetting trans men exist?? Then I said “what about trans men?” and the answer was “oh”.
As a trans woman I don’t think I feel safe around her.
You have to look at it from the opposite to understand why social psychology and sociology works: people inherently group people together and that very grouping creates power imbalances and forces shared perspectives. Social constructs are constructs, yes, but they also have very tangible effects.
What do you mean? They were used as examples of random groups of people. They’re good examples of that, right? Just like postmen, cyclists, gingers, diabetics… They’re groups of people that have one thing in common and can be completely different in many other aspects.
You’re right, in many ways it isn’t, but I don’t think it’s relevant in this context. We’re talking generalization when it comes to random groups. When you’re a cyclist, it’s reasonable to think you like cycling. It’s not reasonable to judge your morality, taste or family status. It works for all kinds of groups. We’re talking about the fact that groups of any kind are not homogeneous.
Some groups are very much homogeneous by design. Religious dimwits and police come to mind. I judge the morality of those groups all the time and I sleep fine. Meanwhile I feel kinda bad for swiping whichever way is ‘reject’ on dating apps. I’ll agree that is not right for most groups. But groups founded on hatred (police and rekigion) or for the purpose of being obnoxious/attention seeking (ABATE motorcycle chapters) can absolutely be generalized.
Now keep in mind we’re discussing in a thread where the top level comment was from an admitted Nazi sympathizer.
In some respects, yes. In the respect they are talking about in this comment, not so much.
The point of their comment is that even if you’re born with something in common with another person, say both of you are born left handed, what else can we infer about both of those left handers? Nothing, nothing at all. Sure they may have other things in common, they may both like the same music, but that isn’t due to their left handedness.
In some ways you can infer a few things about a group, for the book club example, you know they like books and that’s it, if it’s a science fiction book club then you can also infer they like science fiction, but can you tell me the race, age, sexuality, gender, food preferences, music preferences, TV preferences, medical history, yadda yadda, anything else about all the members of that book club? No, you can’t. Because (and this was the point of their comment) book clubs and those in them (and all other groups that aren’t used for examples here too) are not a monolith incapable of individual thought.
One could say the same thing about Christianity. Jesus basically ripped his notes from the Stoics.
But the answer is that in both cases there’s a lot of supernatural stuff in the texts. When you look at the totality of the scriptures and appended lore Buddha isn’t just some wise man who had and epiphany, while early scriptures were closer to that interpretation a lot of the later scriptures that describe enlightenment and elaborate on it… it’s basically more describing that people who reach enlightenment get superpowers, mostly omniscience but also like a bunch of other stuff. There’s also a lot of writings and different sects that elaborate on the afterlife and how one earns their place there. Like there is legitimately a Buddhist version of hell and it looks fairly familiar to the Christian one because both got cross contaminated with Hinduism’s Naraka and depictions of the Greek afterlife just like Christianity did.
A philosophy I think is a discussion about observations of life and how it is lived and particularly opinions on how it is lived well. When you start appending supernatural rewards and punishments to that discussion you get a religion or a cult.
I mean you can and you can’t. All X people are Y will never be true while some X people are Y will almost always be true. Stereotypes come from most X people are Y and is often true. There is a reason it got started although in some cases it is just straight up propoganda or differences in definition. Like lazy. lazy about what? I straight up rather do any physical activity than dealing with bills, budgeting, and taxes. My ancestry is known for drinkin. I rarely drink. Being able to count in a year the times on one hand and zero not being uncommon. If you were at a family wedding though you would not notice me not drinking especially given all the male family members who get closer to your face when talking to you the more they drank. So it does not hold for me but it does for like 90%+ of my extended family and from my other experiences with my folks who are not family and share my ancestry it is a typical thing.
The thing that NOBODY seems to understand, or maybe not willing to admit is, you CANNOT group people together.
It’s the whole reason racism logically makes no sense. At all.
“Oh, all those dirty (insert race here) are good for nothin! They’re all assholes!”
And sure, regardless of what race you inserted there, there’s going to be some assholes. There’s also going to be some amazing people that you’re unfairly judging.
And it’s not just races. It’s anything. Races, genders, religions, countries, social groups, book clubs, whatever.
If you think all people of one group think the same on everything, you’re just factually wrong. And if you use that incorrect fact to judge that group, now you’re just an asshole.
I’ve found that people th]?6ink judging people is bad, and wrong. I don’t think so. I think some people are just terrible at judging people, and miss the point of judging people. You’re supposed to judge them as an individual. Not as (insert group here).
There’s a difference between judging people on a category they don’t choose vs. a set of beliefs they choose to follow.
If I tried to claim all brown-eyed people are evil, I’d be bigoted because eye color does not determine who you are as a person. But if I claimed that all members of the Puppy Kickers Club are evil because they literally believe in kicking puppies and require doing so frequently as a requirement for membership, then my claim is valid.
Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? If it’s acceptable to judge people based on group membership because it aligns with behavior, people will ascribe abhorrent behavior to group membership. “Oh, you’re a (insert religious group here)? Those people literally rape children!”
Are you a member of a religious group where raping children is a core belief? Yeah, you’re a bigot if you’re making false claims about religion, but what about true claims?
Yes, we should hold people accountable for their religion if their religion is based around doing shitty things. If someone is literally a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, they are literally supporting a hate group by virtue of being a member. Regardless of whether they are literally holding a “God hates fags” sign in that moment, they’ve given time, money, and support to those who do and are directly culpable for that behavior as long as they remain a member.
Again, if your religion revolves around kicking puppies, then you are to blame for kicking puppies. If you don’t want to be associated with puppy kicking, don’t literally make it your religion.
I think we can safely shit on Nazis as a whole, though.
My critic to what the other guy said, is that you can judge a group of that group is specific enough to judge them on these characteristics.
Are all christians bad? Hell no. Active adult members of the Westboro Baptist Church? Hell yes. They are bad because their website is literally godhatesfags.com.
Now Nazis are fucking Nazis. 11 millions murders should be enough to judge them as a group and those who liked it.
Yup. What are they actually advocating for? What are their true core beliefs?
It should also be noted that there are groups you can control your membership of (political parties, religions) and groups you are forced into (ethnicity, sexuality). The group you choose to join speaks far more about how terrible or good you are. The worst groups and people are those that attack people based on groups they are forced into, bigots and fascists.
Well, i don’t think you can judge a group based on their characteristics, if the group is an ethnicity. What are characteristics that e.g. all white people share, which you can judge them for? Obviously none. Just like any and all “forced into” groups.
It’s wild how some people think you can’t be racist against white people.
It depends on a lot of things.
Mainly what does one mean with racism? If they mean exclusively systematical racism, then it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to be the victim of racism in e.g. the US as a “white” person. Like apparently 75% of the population in the US is “white”, how and why would 75% of the system, so effectively a controlling majority, turn the system against them? It seems at least unlikely.
But as always, us defaultism or western defaultism in the English speaking world runs strong, and it gets completely ignored that there are probably some “white” people born and living in e.g. Japan. I am “white” and I lived in other parts of the world and met my (hopefully) future-wife there. There is systematical racism against “white” people out there.
Now if you mean racism as discrimination by race, obviously it exists and I have experienced it. By a scream, I was angrily called a slur for standing in a park, about to sit down on a bench, by a person outside of the park on the walkway running past the park. I know they meant me as the slur means only that one thing, and there was literally no other “white” person there. Local friends confirmed that I heard it correctly and that there was no one else around. “White” people are so rare there that I would be stared at anywhere I would go, causing me to seek out private spots. Tbh i believe that place has systematical racism against a bunch of ethnicities, including “white” people. But I still think that moment is a good example for unprompted unmistakable racism.
Always found it weird that there are people who believe that the immortal and all powerful creator of the universe is for some reason deeply, deeply concerned with what ~10% of a particular branch of weird hairless apes decides to do with their genitals enough to do things like call down plagues and natural disasters over it. Like that’s just…such an extreme level of being a gooner that it’s even more absurd than the whole monotheistic God of everything idea to begin with.
Clearly the universe was created by committee - that’s how you end up with things like the platypus when the bird team and the mammal team are forced to compromise on a design to get the product shipped on time.
Modern nazis? Yes. They can all go fuck themselves.
Historical nazis? Like the ones from the 1920s-1945? Maybe. I’m unclear how many of them knew what being nazis actually meant. Like, the average nazi soldier in some 1942 battle. Does he know about jews dying? Does he know the things the nazis stand for? I’m not saying yes or no, because I legit don’t know. I find it hard to believe that millions of soldiers all knew, and still went along with it.
Now the SS? Oh, those assholes KNEW! They were far enough up the ladder that they knew exactly what was going on. They were the ones enforcing it.
Same as the nazis who ran the camps.
I read about this one guy who was basically the warden of one of those camps. Directly responsible for literally millions of dead jews in 4 years. They put him on trial at the Nuremburg trials, and he says he did nothing wrong. So they asked him if they threw him in that same oven, would that be wrong? He said no. Sooooo…that’s what they did. One of the last things he said was that it was ironic that the one who was to throw the switch on his death was Jewish.
That’s not irony. That’s payback.
Bro, if a person can’t step back and objectively determine for themselves that what the nazis were doing was wrong, then they’re not innocent. They’re stupid, but they’re also not innocent.
Evil prevails when good ppl fail to act
What I’m saying is, if you study history, in the 1920s Germany was one of the most progressive, left leaning, all inclusive cultures. To go from that to…nazi Germany in about 10 years should tell you that the general public didn’t know at all what they were doing with the jews.
In the early days, before the war, they were just deporting them. Well what they kept finding happening was, they’d deport the jews. Then they’d take over new land. On that new land they’d find not only jews, but they were figuring out these were the SAME jews they just deported a year earlier from their land. So they’d deport them from this NEW land. Only to later take over more new land, and the cycle repeats.
So for people living in Germany before the nazis, they probably knew and liked their jewish neighbors. Everybody knows the story of Anne Frank, but think of what that entails. It means the homeowner saw the jews being deported, and allowed this entire family to live in the attic. Which shows that people were living in nazi germany, but not in favor of it. And that’s one story that became famous because of a diary, but it was happening all over Germany.
So to think about how many young kids were in the bulk of the soldiers, mandatory drafted, I cannot believe that they all supported something that was intentionally kept a secret from the general public…and these soldiers would have been the general public before being enlisted.
I believe the people who believed in the nazi idiology were definately in the top 5 most evil “governments” we’ve ever seen. Arguably the most evil.
I just don’t believe you can assume a group of 19 year olds are in the know about a government conspiracy to construct a series of death camps with the intention of killing all jews.
Just the same I don’t believe all USA soldiers who fought in Vietnam knew about Agent Orange being sprayed and causing health issues.
Even right now, in russia, you have an entire country that thinks they were invaded by Ukraine. That’s not what happened, but thats what they think.
Government propaganda is real, and it is powerful. So yeah, I absolutely think there were tons of young German soldiers that only found out the truth after the war was over. And if you look at German citizen reaction, it’s pretty clear they didn’t know. They did an abrupt 180, and instantly had empathy for what they had done. If they knew and supported it, they would have kept doing it after Hitler died.
Fuck off with that nazi apologist bullshit. The whole nazi party ideology was based on hating minorities and blaming them for Germany’s economic and social ills. Who fucking cares about the details, the whole party was hate filled rage bait just like modern Republicans.
I don’t want to say ‘Itodaso’ but the guy went from “Not all men” to Nazi apologist in ONE post. These guys are all over Lemmy and it’s super depressing.
I am not OP, but I might have been subconsciously being an apologist somewhere. How can I improve myself in this regard?
If you say something you think is normal, but get downvoted to hell with a bunch of angry replies, then seriously consider their perspective instead of arguing with each one.
Seek out places where you think they’ve been making good points.
If you want to educate the person above, don’t start with “fuck off”. Just explain to them why they are wrong and corroborate with historical bits as you please. The fuck off is completely unnecessary and counter-productive
No. Fuck Nazi apologists.
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Like the ‘innocent German farmer soldiers’ who had no idea what was happening? This is how that starts, dude, seriously, this isn’t even a clever attempt at a wedge issue. It’s as in-your-face as it could be.
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Does it feel good getting off to demonizing people who don’t know better while accomplishing absolutely nothing of value?
What is he, a goddamn four year old? Who the fuck doesn’t know Nazi’s are bad are you fucking kidding me here? Nobody is ‘getting off’ on anything, this person called out a Nazi apologist. There’s no clean wehrmacht, it was a Nazi lie by higher ups to save their own fucking skin.
From 16 Days in Berlin: (I can’t be assed to find the original attribution, go do it yourself if you care to.)
Here’s a list of the companies that used slave labour from concentration camps.
There now I’ve done the thing where the lefty finds the answers for you.
Fuck fascism, fuck Nazi’s, fight them everywhere you see them, give them no ground, no quarter. Defend each other because even the centrists will side with them, just like last time.
18 year old draftees into the Vietnam war sprayed everything with agent orange and caused generations of suffering for innocent people. Many of them also suffered from the after effects and American companies refused to ackniwledge their part in it. Arguably the average American company is far worse than the Nazis were. If you work at Facebook for example, you assisted in multiple genocides. If you know a facebook user, they obviously don’t care.
Why are you saying all this to me? This should’ve been in your response to the other guy. Hell even just linking the myth of the clean Wehrmacht article would’ve been a lot more productive than calling them a Nazi apologist right out the gate.
Posters have limited energy for polite niceties to people they disagree with. Not one joule of that energy goes to kindness towards Nazi apologists.
Stop being an apologist for nazi apologists.
I told them why they are wrong and if anger keeps them from learning then they weren’t going to learn anyway.
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off.
And fuck the mod or automod who is crying about me being a big ol meanie to Nazi apologists.
😂 one more time for the people in the back ?
Fuck off
oh and the people in the front ?! almost forgot
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The citizens in nazi Germany was very much aware of the anti-semitism and the violent nature of the nazi party.
If you want to claim that they didn’t know of the systemical murder of e.g. Jewish. Based on my understanding, you are wrong. But even if you want to ignore that, they knew of the violence against Jewish and enabled it.
This shit was public
Jews were citizens of Nazi Germany.
Now, you might be able to make the case that early Nazi party members, before the rise of power, weren’t 100% antisemitic, they absolutely knew they were getting into bed with antisemites.
After the rise in power started, Jewish sympathisers were purged from the party. Anyone in or supporting Nazis (which was a large portion of the population) knew what they were supporting.
I’d just caution painting too broadly. That wasn’t all German citizens that supported the Nazi movement. It was also a brutal regime that stomped out detractors. German media of the era was highly controlled. It’d paint a false picture of the amount of support. True dissent was a dangerous position to publicly take.
I am sorry but it seems you misunderstood my take.
If the German public knew, Nazis knew.
You can choose what you want to call a Nazi. Idc for the sake of my argument. But you can’t claim that you can’t judge Nazis for their support for Nazi shit because they didn’t know. They knew.
I don’t want to bother if you are the person I previously responded to. If you aren’t, then I am not saying, you claimed anything. If you are, read above.
I’m a different person. It appeared to me that you were lumping in all German citizens with Nazis which is why I made the post.
I’m not defending Nazi supporters, even in the earliest stages. They j knowingly joined with the antisemites to try and push their own agendas. History tells us how that worked out.
So just to make it clear everything you said in your first paragraph is completely false. It’s something known as the clean Wehrmacht myth.
The Wehrmacht was not “clean”, certainly.
But that article doesn’t seem to claim that individual soldiers have the same guaranteed culpability.
That’s not to say that even low grade nazis were ever innocent and pure, but I think there’s a little grey.
If we’re trying to find a single good nazi in all of history, then I think technically Schindler counts.
I mean they must have that culpability since they were cooperating with Nazi genocidal policy by, among other things, invading countries to where the Holocaust would be exported in the first place. I mean it was by definition individual soldiers enforcing the state of affairs where Jews and other targets of Nazi ire were getting exterminated. It was those individual soldiers suppressing resistance, taking POWs to be executed, etc. I mean you’re pretty guilty the moment you’re fighting a war of extermination on the side of extermination.
That’s fair, but I think most modern people wouldn’t consider him a Nazi. He was registered as a Nazi by necessity, but ideologically I don’t think he believed in the extermination of Jews while bribing Nazi officials to keep his workers out of death camps. If you do consider him a Nazi then yeah there was dissent within the Nazi party; I don’t think that’s much of a surprise.
Agreed, he was only technically a nazi.
Let me tell you that it has been socially unacceptable to make apologies for anyone who flew the Nazi flag ever since 1945.
Yes, I understand you’re trying to take a nuanced approach to the Nazis who had been drafted since being kids, etc, but just don’t.
History already happened, and the last of the original Nazis are slowly dieing out (youngest Nazis tended to be 16 years old, so 1945-16 = born in 1929, so they’d be about 96 years old). They don’t need a random stranger to try to defend them.
Nazism is a failed ideology that abused large parts of the world. It doesn’t need defending.
Oh yes, they knew, all of them. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
John Rabe’s journal is a wild ride.
He was a Semiens branch manager in China in Nanking during the Rape of Nanking.
It’s full of him doing everything he can to minimize the casualties and harm and then he’ll be like “China is great because there aren’t any Jews here, I know Herr Hitler wouldn’t accept such wanton murder and rape from his allies if he knew about it. He’s a good socialist and a friend of the workers, after all!”
And then Rabe, the “Good Nazi,” fresh from saving countless lives from the IJA, returns to Germany and says he approves of the Party 100% in 1938, and to anyone’s knowledge never breathed a word of criticism about the Holocaust.
Yeah, nope. Get out of here with Nazi whitewashing. Germans knew what Nazis stood for. Nazis didn’t even try to hide what they wanted to do.
So it’s a-ok as long as you (pretend that you) don’t know what you are fighting for? So it’s better to be a murderous yes-man than to question or face that you (directly or indirectly), through killing/enslaving/torturing innocent people, are a piece of shit with no spine or balls? That’s… better? That’s okay? That’s, uh, let’s say an interesting take. An awful, braindead take… But it sure is interesting, I suppose. If I were to start killing people that you are close to, would that be fine if I was like ‘oops my bad lmao I didn’t know what I was doing’?
Signed,
I’d like to quote my awsome history teacher here: “People went to the camp on a sunday stroll, looking at the victims as if it were a zoo”
Another great example: A Wehrmacht troop is tasked with pillaging a village. The officers clearly state that this will include killing women and children. They explain that every soldier has the right to refuse to take part in this and will not face any consequences. Out of a hundred less then ten men refuse.
Also, the people from concentration camps were used as forced laborours. They were led through towns like callte in the morning when their shift started, and led back the same route after their shift ended.
People knew what the regime was doing. To varying degrees, surely, but with all the xenophobic propaganda, the burning of books, “entartete Kunst”, the deportation of millions of people I find it hard to believe that people were that clueless. Because after all, the NSDAP didn’t try to hide it. They wrote it on their banners all proud.
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No, all Nazis are horrible. Full stop, no addendums, no caveats.
To be a Nazi is to have an ideology that is abhorrent and to be shunned. It is a choice, unlike all the other examples in you initial comment.
Nazi=bad.
what the fuck?
Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?
No. All Nazis can be grouped together and judged the same, not as individuals. They lost that right as soon as they started being intolerant.
Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.
https://utopiaordystopia.com/2015/12/31/was-nazi-evil-unique/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1cd9yqf/do_you_believe_that_the_nazis_were_uniquely_evil/
While it seems like the common stance in American culture (to which I belong) is that the Nazi Evil and the Holocaust positively were uniquely evil and should be distinguished against other crimes against humanity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_uniqueness_debate
However, I am willing to take the position that this might be American propaganda that focuses the American populace on the Nazis, blinding them to the other atrocities that have occurred in the modern age. Some of this might be because many US History classes end their curriculums at the end of WWII, and so modern history after that isn’t really taught. That lasting impression could explain cultural permanence.
I do tend to agree with you though. I think the Nazis were evil and did evil shit, but after reflecting on it, it is possible to think of today’s Zionists and “modern Nazis”, as one might towards other authoritarian, totalitarian regimes.
So yeah. You’re right
If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.
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How did 28 ppl downvote this? lmao
If you downvoted that comment, you’ve gone to the dark side
🤦🏻♂️
Only the Sith deal in absolutes.
I know a person who genuinely thinks men shouldn’t have any rights because they’re so bad. She’s like “women are superior, they develop emotional maturity earlier” or “all men are assholes”. I think she’s a lost hope.
Don’t talk to them anymore. Antisocial people should be isolated.
Does she think trans men deserve rights?
Every answer to this question is that she’s a TERF
At some point I told her about how Meta removed tampons from men’s bathrooms and she was like “hell yeah men would just ruin everything, take all the tampons for no reason”… seemingly forgetting trans men exist?? Then I said “what about trans men?” and the answer was “oh”.
As a trans woman I don’t think I feel safe around her.
You have to look at it from the opposite to understand why social psychology and sociology works: people inherently group people together and that very grouping creates power imbalances and forces shared perspectives. Social constructs are constructs, yes, but they also have very tangible effects.
The root problem with society is people.
We live in a society.
I think the reason is our futile yearning for safety.
People look for patterns so they can fool themselves into thinking they are prepared. They know this group so they know what to expect.
Bullshit, of course.
People are complex, life is dangerous, face your anger and see it is just fear.
I really disagree here. Religion and book clubs are essentially special interest groups that involve choice to join or continue participating in.
Religion is for weak minded people.
Edit: I knew I should have trusted my gut when I got weird vibes from your post. Then I saw your Nazi apologia below.
What do you mean? They were used as examples of random groups of people. They’re good examples of that, right? Just like postmen, cyclists, gingers, diabetics… They’re groups of people that have one thing in common and can be completely different in many other aspects.
Being part of a group of your choosing is very different from being part of a group you are born into.
You’re right, in many ways it isn’t, but I don’t think it’s relevant in this context. We’re talking generalization when it comes to random groups. When you’re a cyclist, it’s reasonable to think you like cycling. It’s not reasonable to judge your morality, taste or family status. It works for all kinds of groups. We’re talking about the fact that groups of any kind are not homogeneous.
Some groups are very much homogeneous by design. Religious dimwits and police come to mind. I judge the morality of those groups all the time and I sleep fine. Meanwhile I feel kinda bad for swiping whichever way is ‘reject’ on dating apps. I’ll agree that is not right for most groups. But groups founded on hatred (police and rekigion) or for the purpose of being obnoxious/attention seeking (ABATE motorcycle chapters) can absolutely be generalized.
Now keep in mind we’re discussing in a thread where the top level comment was from an admitted Nazi sympathizer.
In some respects, yes. In the respect they are talking about in this comment, not so much.
The point of their comment is that even if you’re born with something in common with another person, say both of you are born left handed, what else can we infer about both of those left handers? Nothing, nothing at all. Sure they may have other things in common, they may both like the same music, but that isn’t due to their left handedness.
In some ways you can infer a few things about a group, for the book club example, you know they like books and that’s it, if it’s a science fiction book club then you can also infer they like science fiction, but can you tell me the race, age, sexuality, gender, food preferences, music preferences, TV preferences, medical history, yadda yadda, anything else about all the members of that book club? No, you can’t. Because (and this was the point of their comment) book clubs and those in them (and all other groups that aren’t used for examples here too) are not a monolith incapable of individual thought.
Thank you, yes, exactly.
What’s your problem with Buddhism?
What makes Buddhism a religion and not just a philosophy?
One could say the same thing about Christianity. Jesus basically ripped his notes from the Stoics.
But the answer is that in both cases there’s a lot of supernatural stuff in the texts. When you look at the totality of the scriptures and appended lore Buddha isn’t just some wise man who had and epiphany, while early scriptures were closer to that interpretation a lot of the later scriptures that describe enlightenment and elaborate on it… it’s basically more describing that people who reach enlightenment get superpowers, mostly omniscience but also like a bunch of other stuff. There’s also a lot of writings and different sects that elaborate on the afterlife and how one earns their place there. Like there is legitimately a Buddhist version of hell and it looks fairly familiar to the Christian one because both got cross contaminated with Hinduism’s Naraka and depictions of the Greek afterlife just like Christianity did.
A philosophy I think is a discussion about observations of life and how it is lived and particularly opinions on how it is lived well. When you start appending supernatural rewards and punishments to that discussion you get a religion or a cult.
I mean you can and you can’t. All X people are Y will never be true while some X people are Y will almost always be true. Stereotypes come from most X people are Y and is often true. There is a reason it got started although in some cases it is just straight up propoganda or differences in definition. Like lazy. lazy about what? I straight up rather do any physical activity than dealing with bills, budgeting, and taxes. My ancestry is known for drinkin. I rarely drink. Being able to count in a year the times on one hand and zero not being uncommon. If you were at a family wedding though you would not notice me not drinking especially given all the male family members who get closer to your face when talking to you the more they drank. So it does not hold for me but it does for like 90%+ of my extended family and from my other experiences with my folks who are not family and share my ancestry it is a typical thing.