If people can't agree on what Nazi means we should ban the word altogether since it has loaded political context and doesn't foster proper discussion.
It appears to me that:
1) Some use Nazi to mean Nazi Party with proper historical context 2) Some use Nazi as tool to bludgeon anyone they don't like 3) Some use Nazi to be an umbrella term for anything related to fascism, racism, right-leaning ideology, all kinds of other stuff.
If a single word means all kinds of things to all kinds of people, it's a useless word.
I think your comment was fine, but I had to read it pretty closely to be sure. Most likely it was worded in a way that it made it seem more provocative than it actually is. Unfortunately, seeming provocative and being provocative are pretty much the same thing on the internet. The word "Nazi" itself contains a provocative charge for many readers, so in a way your comment was affected by the phenomenon it describes.
I find this a bit confusing. Provocative to whom? There are 1) people calling other people Nazis and there are 2) people being called Nazis.
1) Can't claim they're being provoked because they're the ones using the word in the first place. I don't think 2) would be offended by the word itself. They don't like being called Nazis, which is different.
When someone says "Nazi" I'm thinking "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and the "superiority of the Aryan master race". These are very bad things and practically everyone agrees!
Side note: perhaps when people say Nazis they mean ethno-nationalists?
Nazis killed millions of people in Europe and took my country apart. What was left behind is a deeply damaged society. I don't know how many generations it will take to fix it. So it annoys me when the word is thrown so casually at any random person on the internet. A dude going to a Mall with a swastika flag is probably just an ass that wants to "trigger lefties". And they take the bait. And media takes the bait too.
I'd argue this category actually represents the majority demographic. Heck, I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've typed the word "Nazi" on the internet.
Terms like "Nazi" and "alt-right" are powerful memes. They have dictionary definitions of course, but people aren't dictionaries. Outside of special practices (engineering, math, etc), people think in terms of relatively vague concepts - in memes. Language can be used to shape people's perception of reality. This very article is an example of that, look at how many characters in this simple story had their beliefs shaped by memes of various kinds: the girl who had detailed beliefs of what the boy did despite having next to no information; the school administrators who were absolutely sure he had done something terrible despite working from a child's opinion, the parents who had trouble seriously addressing their son's new obsession despite being highly knowledgeable on "the facts of the matter". Another example is forum discussions on topics similar to this one.
Human beings hold an incredibly detailed model of reality in their mind, they have extremely high confidence in their model (after all, if it was incorrect, they'd change it of course), yet every single person's model is largely based on memes. Ideas and "facts" about the reality they live in, picked up from here and there, all added to the ultra high resolution model of reality they hold in their heads. The vast, vast majority of that model is based on vague, often incorrect data. But to the observer, it looks perfectly correct.
As for why Americans are so obsessed with Nazis? Because it is a powerfully persuasive meme. Attaching a label ("Nazi", "alt-right", "socialist", "crooked Hillary", "Lyin' Ted", etc) to someone alters the mental model of reality held by other human beings. Sometimes it is used for good, sometimes it is used for evil. Language has always been used to shape people's perceptions of reality, the internet has just increased the speed of propagation. We often hear how we should base our opinions on facts, yet those in power who tell us this seem rather reluctant to give up their reliance on memes.
Here's a fun experiment: next time you encounter someone online asserting a "fact" that you sense is actually a meme, ask them how they know that their fact is actually true. In my experience, you will collect several downvotes, and zero answers to a perfectly obvious and reasonable question.
Moderated platforms are no better because then one is at the mercy of the moderator.
What are we to do?
I like to discuss anything and everything because I can't turn off my brain and I just think about all kinds of random stuff, a lot. There's no "idle" mode.
There just doesn't seem to be any sane place left on the internet.
But even when motivated by curiosity, it's easy for comments on divisive topics to get caught in, and even feed, the flames. Therefore one needs to learn how to include a bit of flame retardant each time one does so. Unfortunate, maybe, but it's a reasonable price for not having the forum burn to a crisp.
I downvoted your comment. I can explain why if you like. It's not because "I don't really care about what you're saying", and it's not right to be so dismissive. There are substantive reasons.
First, you set up a strawman: Why are Americans so obsessed with Nazis?
There are two implications here:
* The first is that there is an obsession, an irrational amount of attention. Obsession has strong negative associations. It's a highly loaded word. This is a common rhetorical pattern: choose such a loaded word and present it as the antecedent of whatever argument you're putting forth. It lays the groundwork of the ensuing discussion that, indeed, Americans are obsessed, why would anyone not agree with that? It's often used as part of a Gish Gallop, where highly editorialized statements are peppered throughout an argument, making a thorough response become far too long-winded, meandering, and rhetorically weak. It's a strong signal that someone is posting in bad faith; there are many ways to ask this question in a neutral way, but that wasn't done.
* The second is that Nazis are the issue, rather than fascism or the right-wing in general. It's definitely worth noting that this article specifically used the term "Alt-right", and only referred to Nazis when referring to actual neo-Nazis, Nazi symbolism/flags, etc. Generally, discussion of Nazis is common because it's an entirely apt and powerful example of right-wing ideology and political power.
Beyond the rhetorical flair, the rise of right-wing ideology in America has been so sudden and pervasive that it strains credulity that anyone would be surprised that the issue gets lots of attention. The rhetoric of foreign threats, heterodoxy and distrust of academics/authorities/elites, national/racial pride, traditional values, etc. are all shared between the contemporary alt-right and the Nazis, so these comparisons are bound to happen, and are often apt. Certainly it's not always used appropriately, but nothing can change the fact that these are, overall, similar right-wing movements.
Your comment went out of the way to bring up "obsession" with "Nazi hysteria" despite having nothing to do with this particular article, so it's hard to believe it's made in good faith. Perhaps it is, but the cost of false-positives in this sort of moderation strategy are very low; you can easily get around it by taking on a somewhat more neutral tone.
To address your first point, I disagree it's a strawman. My personal opinion and what I'm arguing here is that yes, it is indeed an (unhealthy) obsession. I'm an expat. I lived outside my home country longer than I lived there. I bounced around Europe, Asia and US. I've never heard much Nazis except the constant coverage from US media that emerged in last few years.
I agree that comment was only tangential to the article. But every time someone says Nazis I raise my eyebrows and think "who are those Nazis they speak of"? I've only been to New York, DC, Bay Area and few other places in US and I've never seen a Nazi.
I'm happy to concede that what I've said was somewhat off-topic though.
To address your second point, while the bulk of the article talks about alt-right, Nazis and American History X are mentioned, and I think that makes discussing them fair game. Because this article does not exist in vacuum.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your downvote though.
I think I could substitute "obsessed" for "preoccupied" in the future :)
Has it really been sudden? The actual Nazis and Klansmen are still bumbling around, selling guns and meth like they always have. There aren't actually very many of them, and they are stupid and nasty, but largely harmless in the grand scheme.
What is different is that the scope of the definition has grown such that a kindly Canadian psychology professor, a gay Jewish talkshow host, a Somalian lobbyist/politician, and a feminist philospher can be painted with this all-encompassing Alt-Right brush.
For this reason, even a center-right person can seem to be extremely far away to the right, to them.
Maybe it's because we had to deal with the consequences of the actual Nazis and they're not just comic book villains to us. Or because it's the last big war America fought in with a clear bad guy, whereas more recent events are harder to defend.
A lot of commentators without thinking seem to call the nazi's a 'left' party -- I assume because of the word socialist in the party name -- there are many books on the history of the nazi party, and reading any of them should be enough to clear anyone of this misapprehension.
They were into government intervention and social spending.
They had gun control. (a prerequisite for hauling off the Jews)
They shipped an ethnicity off to prison camps, just as FDR did. FDR is on the left, is he not?
They had the Sturmabteilung to break up opponent's political meetings, rather like the violent protesters that were sent to attack Trump supporters at campaign events.
So it seems you may need to clear up a misapprehension. I suspect the mistake arises from the desire to maximize political distance from the Nazi party for yourself, while minimizing that distance for your opponents. You might also wrongly associate nationalism with racism. They are not the same. Both can be found on both sides of the political divide.
It is fair to say that the Nazi party was to the right of communism, the popular alternative at the time, but of course everything is to the right of communism.
Hitler was incredibly anti-liberal, authoritarian, pro-business and pro-military and drew most of his initial support from the middle classes and farmers. The socialist name was an attempt to draw lower class workers to the party who typically voted for the actual communist party.
Violent protesters exist on both sides, sure. However only one side agitates its members into such a fury that they mow down counter-protesters with cars. The parallels to Sturmabteilung are absolutely ridiculous.
Also, gun control did not aide in "hauling off the jews"[1]
1. https://www.politifact.com/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2...
How else could they recover from the punishment of Treaty of Versailles? The economic recovery of Germany before the start of WW2 is pretty interesting and a surprising success story even knowing what we now do of those involved. The Nazi's were famously and fanatically anti-bolshevik.
> They had gun control. (a prerequisite for hauling off the Jews)
I have no real opinion on this besides "gun control" being an American issue which seems to be used to split left/right there. Our left and right parties both support gun control here, as does most of the rest of the world.
> They shipped an ethnicity off to prison camps, just as FDR did. FDR is on the left, is he not?
"Shipped an ethnicity off to prison camps" doesn't really do the events of the Holocaust justice. By FDR I assume you mean the American president? What does he have to do with the Nazi party? Your argument for the nazi party having "leftist" policies is that some later US president who did the 'same thing' (he ordered the deaths of all these people did he?) was a member of a left party? That's pretty weak sauce my friend.
As a German, I have no desire to minimize or indeed maximize the 'distance 'to Nazi ideology for anyone, I'm not attacking you here -- I just don't understand how you can hold such views.
You've cherry picked some here which you think are enough to be able to present the nazis as a left party while ignoring the historical actions of this group (which are far-right in the extreme). It's quite ironic that on an article about bios-confirming echo chambers you seem to be hook-line+sinker in the same hole.
Please think carefully before throwing Nazi around or trying to align them with one side of the political debate wherever you are or the other -- the nazis were among the worst we have come up with so far in our history, and no one is aligned with them. While I think you're wrong to call them leftist; in the end it doesn't matter. We object to nazis because they are evil, not because of their supposed political leanings -- using them as ammunition in a discussion only ends it and offends people.
Also Americans value free speech over most things. Proclaiming yourself a Nazi in Europe would probably have more severe consequences socially. In Germany it could land you in prison.
Proclaiming yourself a Nazi shouldn't. Expect to be watched closely by intelligence services though (unless you're a cop, very different rules apply then).
Promoting the ideology may land in you in jail, depending on details (after a series of trials ending in fines because we believe in measured response).
Maybe I should have said "face criminal penalties" instead of "end up in prison".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a
Italy certainly has its share of modern center-left people, but it still has outright communists as well.
Communists eliminated a whole heck of a lot of minorities.
Also, the only group that killed more communists than the Nazis, were other communists themselves.
I'm sure Nazis themselves would make the same argument as you, about how they actually just support "traditionalist culture" or whatever. But we know what really happened. Same argument applies to communists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_th...
Usually one of the first thing that communists do once they are in power is crush the anarchists, and other competing leftist movements.
None of this is controversial.
Soviet repression of gay people was also well documented, as well as Cuban repression/murder of it's gay population.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fidel-castros-horrific-record-...
I'm a Canadian that just moved back after 4 years in Europe, and I found it impossible to have a progressive-minded conversation with most europeans (not all, but much higher ratio than at home) - about feminism, rape culture, about racial discrimination, about unconscious bias, about migration and immigration.
Europe has figured out a pretty good well-balanced society for its' citizens, and is incapable of reacting to change.
This is why nationalism, racism, and yes - fascism - are on the rise throughout Europe. Because nobody worries about it, and nobody pays attention to it. They just see brown people at the train station, get nervous, and ask no follow-up questions.
A foreigner from a different continent finds it hard to talk to most Europeans (because they are all a singular block) about feminism? Don't be ridiculous. They likely just didn't want to talk to you about it, and it sounds as if you laboured on such points a few times.
And, depending on how well you knew the people you where talking to, they likely mistook your accent for American (I'm English and this happens even to me), which would certainly affect how people see your views on such topics and would impact their willingness to talk to you about it.
All in all, not many people want to talk to American sounding people they might not know very well about issues like their views on feminism or racial discrimination. I see this more as a "you" thing than a "Europe" thing.
Before you wonder if it's just my coworkers and company.
* Person I'm buying a car from 2 hours from my city telling me "It's a good thing you're buying a car from me and not one of them black boys, they rip you off" * Landlord I'm viewing an apartment for saying "I would prefer to rent to a white renter. We have a lot of indians that try to rent and they smell"
These kinds of things happened way more in 4 years in Europe than in 20 years in Canada.
You mention fascism being on the rise throughout Europe because of our supposedly poor understanding of these issues, but the intersectional flavor of progressivism you're advocating hasn't exactly demonstrated it could make society less divided (quite the opposite). In other words, I guess we're not quite prepared to get lectured about fascism by the continent that brought us Trump recently.
In fact, this article is a powerful cautionary tale against the backlash that comes with ostracizing young white males. And yes, I'm pretty sure most Europeans shook their head reading the piece of insanity below, thinking "only in America"
One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”
Thanks, but no thanks.
The example you mention is apalling, but is just one version of the story. Here's another.
One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s made a sexual reference to a classmate of theirs using an inside joke. Sam laughed as they both poorly masked their attention on the girl. The girl at the table overheard their private conversation, frustrated with this not being the first time she was harassed by Sam and his friend got fed up, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor, who's already heard about Sam and his coworker being sexually inappropriate in class, pulled Sam out of class and tried to have him have a "come to jesus" moment by taking the situation very seriously and explaining that sexual harassment is a crime. Sam ignored him, defended the comments as "just an inside joke", and was completely dismissive of his role in bullying his female classmates. Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who doubled down on trying to break through to Sam that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”
Is this the truth? Probably not directly.
But the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The rate of people getting accused of sexual harassment falsely is miniscule - maliciously or accidentally.
The rate of people get accused of sexual harassment, and are self-aware enough to understand their role, and admit it is also miniscule.
The most common situation is one where the accused simply do not care, and have plausibly deniable excuses for their behaviour, with "IT was just a JOKE" being #1 on the list of excuses.
I know, I've been one of them.
Historically, teenagers were given a lot of leeway with this - boys will be boys. Society is now dealing with it and saying "No, actually. You can cause real harm, and you need to give a shit about how your actions affect others."
Europe and Europeans are simply next.
Another thing. This may not be a popular opinion but based on my personal observation, ordinary Americans don't "obsess" over Nazi to the same degree as the media.
The claim that Jews are over-represented in fields correlated with success, such as finance (once my field), journalism, and academic disciplines such as physics, is not damaging, even if it is wrong. How would the view that Jews tend to be successful be one of the 'worst stereotypes?'
It's strange to me that you're so unaware of Jewish success that a banal claim that Jews have a high representation in some fields has you shocked.
I took a few minutes to at least get a couple sources, but honestly if the idea that Jews are over-represented in fields like physics or journalism or economics (or ivy league universities) is new to you, then you haven't done a very good job paying attention in class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_and_religion https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4099803,00.html
It's strange to me that you're so unaware of the anti-semitic tropes that portray a Jewish cabal controlling politics and media in the US. Perhaps you weren't paying attention in class...
But the US? WW2 was the making of modern America. The US was catapulted into a world leader position, and got to feel like a badass hero doing it. And WW2 was the US's first major overseas conflict. Nazis are the archetypical "enemy without".
"During the war, over 16 million Americans served in the United States Armed Forces, with 405,399 killed in action and 671,278 wounded. There were also 130,201 American prisoners of war, of whom 116,129 returned home after the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...
Soldiers returned home with stories of what they had seen, including horrors of the death camps in Europe and atrocities in the Pacific. This deeply affected Americans. I was born decades after it ended, but growing up it seemed everyone older than me had been affected by it.
Also, the modern media age was in full swing. Huge amounts of footage had been filmed during the war, and there was an oversupply of military hardware that needed blowing up. These made WWII films easy to splice together.
The US was operating a massive program of denazification in Germany and demilitarization in Japan. This was combined with economic rebuilding with the goal of establishing the type of peacetime prosperity that people wouldn't want to give up for fighting.
Why Nazis specifically? Many Americans saw what happened to the modern hardworking Protestant society that was Germany and thought "Oh so this is what it looks like when white people become drug-fueled psycho nationalists" and then quickly "Dear God, please not here."
So, yeah, we don't tend to think of WWI as much as being one of the major wars we were involved in. The major wars we tend to think about in our cultural consciousness are the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWII, Vietnam War, and then because of the recency bias, the "global war on terror" in Iraq/Afghanistan. WWI is covered in history classes of course, but primarily from the western front perspective, which the US didn't get involved in until the war was almost won.
WWII was the start of a new world order with the USA at the forefront.
It does offer a useful comparison though. In WW1 there were no cartoonishly evil baddies, just a bunch of pointless deaths. It didn't devastate a civilian population, either - nobody got to feel like a hero, there were no joyful liberations. WW2 was a righteous war (that also happened to be an economic goldmine). That permanently shifted American culture (and killed isolationism stone dead). So Nazis became THE enemy - the Lucifer to America's new God complex.
In contrast, the full scale of the horrors of the Nazi regime were not widely known until the final days of WW2.
Where are you in Europe? In my experience, lots of Europeans are worried about fascism. Not necessarily Nazis, but fascism and extremism.
That which is secretly true must be contradicted constantly.
That which is secretly false must be affirmed constantly.
Good question. Maybe different reasons. There sure are a lot of Nazi documentaries on cable.
. Twelve year old boys like snappy uniforms and the idea of a warrior ethos.
. You don't need a God to form a religion, sometimes a Devil is enough. The secular Left, now that culture has taken the place of economics as something to argue about, seems to have built a philosophy with Hitler at the bottom. Enemies are, of course, Hitler.
. WWII makes for a great story. Good guys, bad guys, worldwide (thus the name), heros and villains. Maybe the US is bored with Cowboys and Indians.
It probably strongly depends on the bubble one lives in, both in America and Europe.
I remember reading the Millennium trilogy, written by a Swedish author, where (spoilers, I guess) every unsympathetic guy, without exception, turns out to be literally a secret Nazi. The books sold 80 million copies worldwide, multiple movies were made of them.
Or, if you read Russian propaganda, they never stopped fighting Nazis; it's like WW2 actually never ended. Recently they have liberated Crimea from the Nazi attack.
All this seems crazy to some people, and serious to others.
Now we have people overtly and brazenly affiliating identifying as Nazis (usually citing The Bell Curve and other pseudoscientific racist drivel) and Communists (still with the capital C; they might claim to be lowercase-c communists or plain socialists, but it doesn't take long before "Stalin did nothing wrong" or "China's more ethical than the US" starts peeking through the façade). Both have always existed, of course (at least as long as those ideologies have existed), but nowadays folks are more open about their abhorrently-anti-democratic viewpoints (especially on the Internet, where they enjoy relative safety while simultaneously reaching worldwide audiences).
Worry instead about those quiet ones out there reading old and problematic books: the free spirits, burning forth, ready to smash all our tablets of values.
In case it wasn't clear (Poe's law, and all), I am speaking about myself and people like me, who get along just fine but find themselves quite at odds with the modern world and it's mythologies, and also deeply uninterested in what these radical groups and "activists" have on offer.
Fun fact, before Hitler, the worst person euphemistically was the biblical Pharaoh
Edit: getting some down votes. I hope it’s clear that I’m still trying to say that hitler was maximally bad and not trying to reduce anything to that effect.
It's mostly a boogeyman used to galvanize and justify another extremist group.
In both Europe and America for what it’s worth.
Or, in other words, one of the signals that's being sent is that the speaker is not actually making any sort of point, they're merely performing something that they don't understand using a linguistic package that they haven't unpacked but are pretty sure they can use to erode the status of another party they see as a status threat.
> I personally find the Communists far more dangerous than the NAZI's/Fascists ever were. They are responsible for the greatest human suffering the World has ever seen. A monumental evil based on murder, poverty and destruction.
Well, faced with a rather concrete version of that question in form of actually conforming nation-states, the allies seem to have made a different call than you did about the greater / lesser evils.
There's a lot of competition on the field of ideologically-driven suffering and atrocities, including several major world religions along with communism, fascism, and to some extent, even capitalism, and the driving factor seems to be less the specific hazards associated with any one of them and more (a) human beings and (b) unreflective, imbalanced zeal.
WWII and Nazis destroyed Europe. Are Europeans worried about Nazis? Not as far as I can tell.
Yet all I see from American news is Nazis this Nazis that. Can someone explain?