What is a Nazi?

[Gorbles]

And what amadeus said wasn't really a response to Hygro, either. If folks want to play with non-sequiturs, what do you expect @Ajidica?

My opinion here is some of you (Aji, and so on) are missing the forest for the trees. We've mythologised Nazism to the point where we can't even use it as a justified comparison to events that occur. The Internet has been poisoned by Godwin's Law (to the extent that its author weighed in on it, some time back on Twitter).

What the Nazis did was horrific, but not to the extent that nothing else can be compared to them. What was perpetrated by European settlers against indigenous settlements the world over was comparably devastating to the peoples that were targeted.

But when people raise that as a comparison to current events, it's "too long ago". Or people are "overreacting". Telling someone they're overreacting is easy. But how do you know they actually are? How do you know how badly their life is being affected by things that are pretty much purely academic for you (or I).

Nazism didn't start with death camps or pogroms. The Nazis didn't just do the whole genocide thing either. They were fiercely anti-LGBTQ. They destroyed one of the most important institutes for understanding sex and gender the world possibly had at the time. So saying "this isn't the same as a gas chamber" is definitely missing the point.

And, not to get too cheesy, but we're literally at this point I feel: those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The death camps and the gas chambers were the endgame. Not the start. Not even the middle. Pretty late on, as the timeline goes. Any amount of history would show you warning signs that correlate with modern-day problems. Whatever happened to being safe rather than sorry?

tl;dr: try and think charitably about why these comparisons are being used, instead of starting from the position that their inaccurate and need to be disproven. Don't be reductive.

 

[Verbose]

Okay, but in this thread, we're not talking about cops, republicans, or political alignment. We're talking about the person who called the cops. I can't rigorously prove this with scholarly citations, but please believe me when I say my lived experienced as a minority is this: not many people actively want to harm me, but a lot of people won't care if I'm harmed.

How about calling people like that just "Americans"? Seems to be a more precise label than "Nazi" at least.
Moderator Action: As noted above, let's not go there. Birdjaguar

Moderator Action: If I have misread your post let me know. there seems to be some ambiguity when paired with what follows.

The problem with slapping "Nazi" on everyone is that only ones who stand to actually benefit are the real Nazis – the people who are still engaged in things like casting doubt in the Holocaust, because if they can successfully do so, then opportunities arise for them to reformulate a kind of modern, updated version of Nazism, and have actual Nazism make a come-back as a viable political ideology. Extending the use of it to describe people being bastards just generally can really only helps the actual Nazis looking for a come-back.

 

[Gorbles]

@Verbose - to use your own argument, because "Americans" means something already. It's the opposite of a precise label. Nazi is more accurate than American, assuming you don't want to stereotype everyone living in the US as prejudiced as the caller mentioned in Hygro's OP.

So, of the two, "Nazi" fits better. Sure, it's not a perfect fit, but what I frequently have people telling me - as I'm one of those leftist types - is that I shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. So why are we insisting on perfection here?

If your concern is "real Nazis might benefit from the label being applied too loosely", I want to ask: how? How will they benefit? What is "too" loosely, and why does it seem to be "whenever the label isn't a perfect fit", which isn't really that loose at all, really. This is what I was getting at with my previous post - by banning any comparison to Nazi behaviour just because the person in question might not be a literal Nazi isn't helpful.

I mean, the Nazis were virulently anti-leftist and anti-Semitic from the start. They didn't exactly try and hide it.

There is a vast difference between someone making a rude comment about gays on twitter and warming up the ovens.

I missed this one, sorry to pick on you twice. There should be no discernable difference between homophobia and antisemitism. We should have a zero tolerance policy for both. Positing this rather dubious binary of "a rude comment" vs. "gas chamber reference" is playing down the former (while pushing the latter to its semantic extreme).

There is a vast difference, in isolation, between a rude comment and mass slaughter. However, contextually, the reality is that the Nazis and their supporters had a lot of use for "rude comments" as well, and nobody can deny the link between homophobia, or transphobia, and physical violence against the respective minorities. The same goes for the homeless, too (independent of any homeless person also being a marginalised minority).

 

[Senethro]

One of the problems of the word Nazi is that its now an ancestral boogeyman that we fought against and has been forever defeated because we did the equivalent of destroying the One Ring. Or something. Therefore, anything we do is ok, even if its something that the Nazis would also have done.

Some documents came to light a while back showing that during a 1970s UK gov, the senior Cabinet offices signed off as at least having read (i.e. not necessarily endorsing, I think) a plan for a forced population transfer between counties on Ireland as a means to "solve" the Troubles. Anyone know what I'm talking about? I can't get the right google search terms.

American and Euro imperial powers say "Oh, we're not like that anymore! Don't call us racist!", but did they in fact ever stop?

 

[amadeus]

And what amadeus said wasn't really a response to Hygro, either.

I could. I mean, here’s how I read it: things either did or did not happen. Fantasizing about what maybe somebody else thought, is that sufficient cause to start labeling them as Nazis?

Yes, the Germans didn’t start the extermination camps on day one (though, I think it’s worth noting that the original concentration camps for political dissidents, etc. were in fact in operation from very early on in the regime.) But America has had nearly 250 years of constitutional government—I think the trial period for concern about these creeping grand abuses has long since passed. American history and Western European history has tended towards more civil and political rights rather than fewer, so I’m finding this whole thing blown way out of proportion.

 

[Gorbles]

I could. I mean, here’s how I read it: things either did or did not happen. Fantasizing about what maybe somebody else thought, is that sufficient cause to start labeling them as Nazis?

Yes, the Germans didn’t start the extermination camps on day one (though, I think it’s worth noting that the original concentration camps for political dissidents, etc. were in fact in operation from very early on in the regime.) But America has had nearly 250 years of constitutional government—I think the trial period for concern about these creeping grand abuses has long since passed. American history and Western European history has tended towards more civil and political rights rather than fewer, so I’m finding this whole thing blown way out of proportion.

The original concentration camps are not the same as extermination camps, you're completely correct. Not that the US, or any other country, has specific blacksites where they hold people extrajudicially and subject them to torture and other such things. Definitely doesn't happen, right? But once again you're fixating on the wrong thing. Something doesn't have to exactly, perfectly match everything that happened in a particular regime, to be compared to it.

Otherwise where would all the discussions about communism go, eh?

To frame this discussion into "did or didn't not happen" is unnecessarily limiting, and precisely what we shouldn't be learning from history. Otherwise you'll be saying that right up until worse things happen. People have already tried that, and things have gotten worse. Every time. You have to be open to the idea of "might happen" without undermining it as "fantasising" or describing it as "what maybe somebody else thought". It's not a matter of thought - it's a matter of the actions they can be judged by. Not everyone who calls the might of the law down upon a homeless person is automatically the reincarnation of Joseph Goebbels. But the action is a point in a greater data pattern, and with this you can correlate to past behaviour from other times and places.

Creeping grand abuses happen. Pretty much all the time. I'm honestly not sure why you think such a trial period of concern has "long since passed". Various countries are currently making an absolute mockery of either their current democratic laws, or their former democratic laws. People can hardly hold up the US as an example of a political system that works, insofar as the incredibly low bar is "people vote". People do vote. They're also disenfranched, gerrymandered, literally discriminated against, jailed for incredibly minor mistakes (during voting), and so on. The same goes for a bunch of other nominally modern, developed nations. To sit there and say "yes but it hasn't gotten X bad yet" is to miss how history arrives at X in the first place.

 

[Zardnaar]

@Verbose - to use your own argument, because "Americans" means something already. It's the opposite of a precise label. Nazi is more accurate than American, assuming you don't want to stereotype everyone living in the US as prejudiced as the caller mentioned in Hygro's OP.

So, of the two, "Nazi" fits better. Sure, it's not a perfect fit, but what I frequently have people telling me - as I'm one of those leftist types - is that I shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. So why are we insisting on perfection here?

If your concern is "real Nazis might benefit from the label being applied too loosely", I want to ask: how? How will they benefit? What is "too" loosely, and why does it seem to be "whenever the label isn't a perfect fit", which isn't really that loose at all, really. This is what I was getting at with my previous post - by banning any comparison to Nazi behaviour just because the person in question might not be a literal Nazi isn't helpful.


I missed this one, sorry to pick on you twice. There should be no discernable difference between homophobia and antisemitism. We should have a zero tolerance policy for both. Positing this rather dubious binary of "a rude comment" vs. "gas chamber reference" is playing down the former (while pushing the latter to its semantic extreme).

There is a vast difference, in isolation, between a rude comment and mass slaughter. However, contextually, the reality is that the Nazis and their supporters had a lot of use for "rude comments" as well, and nobody can deny the link between homophobia, or transphobia, and physical violence against the respective minorities. The same goes for the homeless, too (independent of any homeless person also being a marginalised minority).

Homophobia is one thing but there's a difference between say not letting gays get married vs sending them to death camps.

 

[Gorbles]

Homophobia is one thing but there's a difference between say not letting gays get married vs sending them to death camps.

If you're not going to read the posts, I don't see any point in bothering repeating them.

 

[red_elk]

Americans call people who tase dogs or dislike gays Nazis, because they were lucky not to see actual Nazis on their soil.

 

[Gorbles]

Americans call people who tase dogs or dislike gays Nazis, because they were lucky not to see actual Nazis on their soil.

I mean this is demonstrably false on a number of levels just going by a history book.

It's these arguments that make people just roll their eyes. If you don't even want to try and understand, don't then try to complain when people treat you as not capable of understanding

 

[Naskra]

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Maybe this:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3586019/Population-transfer-Its-the-Irish-way.html

 

[GenMarshall]

Americans call people who tase dogs or dislike gays Nazis, because they were lucky not to see actual Nazis on their soil.

These days, it’s more or less that leftists and SJWs call their ideological opponents “Nazis”, even if said opponent loathes Nazism.

 

[red_elk]

These days, it’s more or less that leftists and SJWs call their ideological opponents “Nazis”, even if said opponent loathes Nazism.

Yes, I know, not all Americans and not only Americans. Just a figure of speech.

 

[Gorbles]

These days, it’s more or less that leftists and SJWs call their ideological opponents “Nazis”, even if said opponent loathes Nazism.

And on the other hand, people leaning the other way keep making the silly, ahistorical argument that Nazis were socialists. Thus associating their enemies (socialists) with the Nazis. Here's why that's a bad idea.

Also, it's funny that you mention "these days", when the article notes the left-wing comparison of right-wingers and Nazis goes back half a century. I get it, you buy into the conservative rhetoric that left-leaning politics is uniquely worse "these days", or similar. Conservatives been peddling that line for decades. Every decade's leftist is apparently worse in some way than the ones that came before. Because that's how they get you, generationally-speaking. You're an okay leftist, because you're older and thus traditionally more conservative than this other leftist, who's younger and more radical because of X.

Yes, I know, not all Americans and not only Americans. Just a figure of speech.

Interesting. Tell me more about this figure of speech, and why you're allowed to make it despite it being inaccurate?

 

[Fippy]

Well i live in Germany and can give you an opinion on this.
Overall the term Nazi gets used too often, and is widely mixed up with far right wingers.

Real Nazis are violent, which is sometimes forgotten when comparing those of today to those under Hitler.
So this means somebody babbling about..whatever, you all know their ideologies, on the internet can rarely be classified as Nazi.

An example for real Nazis would be groups of them who look for victims of bodily harm on the streets.
Or those who organize them. Or the horrible series of events where foreign shop keepers were killed by an underground Nazi group.

edited out one paragraph where i maybe got too aggressive (can happen with this topic).

 

[Gorbles]

An example for real Nazis would be groups of them who look for victims of bodily harm on the streets.

So stuff like this, right?

 

[Fippy]

I think so.
NSU was the serial killers if you want to look that up.

 

[Gorbles]

Americans call people who tase dogs or dislike gays Nazis, because they were lucky not to see actual Nazis on their soil.

On that topic, a Canadian soldier turned Neo-Nazi terrorist sentenced to 9 Years in US prison (Vice).

"It ends an almost two year-long saga for the neo-Nazi which involves being outed as a member of the Base, investigated by the Canadian military, skipping the country to cohabitate with American neo-Nazis, train them, and finally getting scooped up in an FBI raid."

 

[aelf]

I'd stick to calling them fascists, but people have a problem with that too.

Maybe I can just call them right-wingers, then.

 

[Synobun]

I think the trial period for concern about these creeping grand abuses has long since passed. American history and Western European history has tended towards more civil and political rights rather than fewer, so I’m finding this whole thing blown way out of proportion.

This conveniently forgets January 6th, 2021, and the subsequent efforts from Republican state apparatuses to quell voting rights and dismember the voting system in order to guarantee their continued power.

I do not understand how you can talk about history and then in the same breath claim that what happened "long ago" can never happen again. This is history 101 stuff.

I'd stick to calling them fascists, but people have a problem with that too.

Maybe I can just call them right-wingers, then.

Maybe "very fine people"?