Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
by ng12 on Thursday June 06, 2019 @10:23AM
(#20114820)
I'm not sure I understand your contention. Pan-Germanicism was about uniting ethnic Germans. Are you implying that there's no ethnic difference between a German and an Ashkenazi Jew or a Romani?
Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
by danans on Thursday June 06, 2019 @11:17AM
(#20115347)
No, I'm saying that the way that the Nazis defined German identity was their biological model of "racial" classification, and not a cultural feature like ethnicity. The Nazis then (as today), have an explicitly biological notion of identity, not cultural.
I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.
Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?
How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".
Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
by ng12 on Thursday June 06, 2019 @11:50AM
(#20115687)
The point I was making above was that Nazis were concerned about German-ness (well, Aryan-ness) not whiteness. Classifying them as white supremacists is generally incorrect.
Re:YouTube to Remove Thousands of Videos Pushing Extreme Views
by danans on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:07PM
(#20115865)
The problem with that argument is that the Nazis considered the German "race" to be the paragon of "whiteness", and other less-German white peoples, like European Jews, to be degraded. They absolutely conflated "whiteness" with their idealized German identity.
What defined German ethnicity?
Clearly it wasn't the ability to speak the language, or being descended from many generations of ancestors living in Germany, otherwise the Jews and Roma both would have been considered German.
Clearly there was something else attributed to them that didn't fit the definition of "German". It was that they weren't considered racially German. Race is literally what the Nuremberg Laws were about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_policy_of_Nazi_Germany
Given the preponderance of clear historical evidence for the Third Reich's racially based rationale for its actions, one wonders why would anyone try to water it down to the more innocuous seeming rationale of "German ethnicity".