It can never be stated enough. I don’t know what sort of unwritten rule you think we have, but you cannot assume that history writes itself. Have you been looking around. No,Nazism is bad is not implied. We have actual Nazis parading around in our streets, beating up and killing people under the actual Nazis flag.
Yeah. This. It seems like it should be obvious by now, but there are real people walking the street unconcerned that they are Nazis. This isn’t normal and hasn’t been seen for a very long time. I think it’s doubly important that it be smashed with impunity because clearly a number of people don’t seem to see a problem with it?
I think the normalization of Nazis is right on point. This is normal now in America. If you can’t accept it, you can’t fight it. It’s fucking horrifying. That story should scare the shit out of you if you’re not an evil person.
White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776.
The most effective way of normalizing Nazis is to tell all white people that they’re already Nazis whether they like it or not.
I think what they’re trying to say with that statement is the Nazis are not all basement dwellers in their mom’s garage. Some of them have jobs, sit next to you, smile and work with you all while wishing they could stab you in the back and kill you so they can have their made up white’s only country back… which they never really had in the first place. Those people are not normal… but they have lives that might somewhat resemble normal. There’s a difference.
I know exactly what they’re saying. They’re saying that you get to assume other white people are “normal” and thus Nazis unless they self-flagellate 5 times a day and say the right magic words to prove they’re the good guys. It’s all about white people trying to create an in-group to exclude other white people. You can’t be too shocked when some of the people who get excluded turn out to be evil and decide they really will be Nazis.
That’s not what they’re saying. That’s what you’re saying.
And I promise you, if someone didn’t get to be part of the “in” crowd and decided to show everyone how cool they really are by turning to worship a group that murdered men, women and children in gas chambers… I will always be shocked.
Murder is not the answer to I’m not popular. Most of us learn that in high school if not earlier.
This past weekend, the New York Times published a profile of an American Nazi that rightly stirred up a major backlash. The article, which dwells at length on the apparent normality of Tony Hovater, its subject, casts a revealing light on U.S. intellectual elites, who persist in underplaying the existential crisis facing the American republic. Amid increasing neo-fascist mobilization, and during the tenure of a president who routinely peddles far-right talking points and policies and equivocates on condemning white supremacists, the Times has produced a soft-focus profile of one of the founding members of the country’s leading neo-Nazi groups.
In other words, one of America’s papers of record, whose writers and editors routinely interact with the most powerful people in the world, has published an article that treats the specter of far-right violence, an increasingly present reality for millions of immigrants and people of color in the United States, as just another voice in the marketplace of ideas. It is as though fascism, the 20th century’s most murderous ideology, has become an obscure, little-understood footnote in history.
uh
if you have to deny being a nazi 5x/day, maybe a liberal conspiracy isn’t the problem
That’s the one I believe.
That it’s a mystery why people are suddenly Nazis and what made them that way as near as I can tell.
Only… they’ve always been there. Only now they get good press because we don’t want to call them out on it because that would be rude and presumptuous or something. This dude is more Nazi than David Duke and people like Reagan had no issue calling him out on it and didn’t bother wasting time trying to figure out why David was a worthless piece of shit. He just called him a piece of shit.
It’s not a mystery. People get sold/sell hate enough to get people riled up enough to hate.
The reason it’s really cropping up now in America is because RW media has been pushing hate propaganda for decades and now we have a President elected based upon hate (hate of muslims/liberals/Hillary/etc.).
This is no freaking mystery. The mystery is why more people aren’t denouncing it and voting/speaking out against hate rather than for it. So called christians in the evangelical movement (mostly founded out of the Southern Baptists anti-negro stance) are the ones who most need to do this, IMHO.
Most of us are mostly passive. I post here, but not elsewhere. Comment threads in most places are just people angry with one another and not really a place for reasoned discourse.
I think some of it is our political system. With two parties, one wins and the other loses, so there is no middle ground. So the commentary reflects that. Don’t concede a point or even acknowledge an understanding of that point of view. Ignore and attack. Losing 52-48 might as well be losing 100-0.
So now we have one party doing the nudge-nudge, wink-wink with the alt-right. They don’t want to reject them. They want those votes. After all, better to give a furtive embrace to the Nazis and win than to denounce them and lose.
Strangely, people (e.g. Jeff Sharlet) who have been writing about neo-nazism in the USA for decades are highlighting that contemporary neo-nazism is attracting the kinds of people who would have traditionally been left/liberal-leaning.
Of course, it’s far easier and simpler to just say “Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes. Except people don’t repeat the daily catechism of “Nazi’s are evil”, so more people are openly Nazi’s now”.
You know, you shouldn’t be so obviously proud of something so monumentally dumb.
This quote is going to go way past you because of course it will, but I’ll try nonetheless:
Apparently these people were always Nazis. Despite not being in the Nazi party. Despite being born and having their formative years long before Nazism/Fascism were coherent ideologies. They were always Nazis but enough people didn’t repeat their daily catechisms so they felt like it was ok to do truly evil things.
It is absolutely imperative to understand why people are increasingly turning to an ideology that has no apparent positives beyond a sense of belonging, and that is mired in 70 years of universal and repeated condemnation of everything it stands for.
The other factor is the internet. One of its greatest strengths is building and enabling communities from all over the globe. One of its greatest flaws is building and enabling communities of hate from all over the globe.
I agree. I worry that it’s human nature at its worst, but it’s still human nature. We may have this capability for hate and destruction inimical to us. I don’t think it’s just the last 70 years.
When I think of humans, there have been mass killings dating back to at least the Romans. Even in the US we rounded up and imprisoned citizens during WW2 due to nothing other than their ancestry. There’s the butchery in Rwanda and Cambodia. Stalin and Mao. They’ve found bones in prehistory sites in Europe with evidence of cannabilism – our ancestors were a bunch of Jeffrey Dahmers!
It seems like humans are very capable of identifying with a group and then being complicit in carrying out that group’s objectives, however evil. I think it’s important to study it and understand it, but I’m a bit pessimistic that a better understanding will result in change. We have a better understanding of disease and the benefits of vaccines, but look at the anti-vaxxers. It’s crazy. Makes me sad.
Why is this difficult to understand. There are dozens of white guys out there that are essentially cookie cutters of Andrew Anglin.
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College Drop Out - we often either give up on young people too soon and label them as not college material or we shove them towards college as if somehow college is a fix all guaranteed path to all things good. When they don’t succeed there, they can wind up worse off than a high school dropout or grad because unless they’re rich or have responsible middle class parents, they just wound up with a year or two of college based debt they can’t really pay back. So now we have young people who feel like failures because they didn’t make it and now they’re drowning in debt. Bernie picked up some of this group or some who feared to fall in this group but we don’t have a lot of good places for them… maybe some appreciative ears but no real solution.
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Women - I have a cousin who bases his entire outlook on women as a sex on whether or not he is currently together or apart from his girlfriend. Seriously, women kind is all that plus a bag of chips when they’re together, and we’re bottom feeding conniving bitches who control the lives of men when they’re apart. This outlook in life is toxic and unrealistic. No one else besides some churches is going to cater to this kind of outlook
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Being Polite, / Political Correctness - This is hard. It’s not easy for anyone who tries, and it’s not fun. At the same time, it forces you to look at other groups, and your view of the world and maybe actually learn a thing or two when called out. If you stay in juvenile mode it’s just running around on social media telling everyone how much Freedom of Speech you’re exercising. There are a few fringe groups that cater to this.
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Drugs seriously do we have stats on how many of the American Nazis do drugs and/or heavy alcohol. The white supremacists I’ve run into are heavy into drugs and alcohol. It’s a top pass time.
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Personal Responsibility - So you flunked out of college. Your girlfriend left you. You’re working a low skill job or not getting the recognition you want and bad thing ares generally happening. It’s everyone’s fault but yours. I think there might be too much so called “tough love” out there but the other-side of the coin, when the world is working against you… some groups cater to that but most of don’t give up because the alternative is smoking pot in a mobile homing shifting between rage and sorrow over a lost girlfriend and hanging onto a job where your treated bad by the company and the clients. This is a miserable spot to be in, They need to crawl out of it but no one can help if they won’t even try.
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Blame - if it’s not your fault, who’s is it? Nszis shine here.
What other group out there can these guys join that will allow them to take their lives, which often is not even close to what they imagined it should be, not the life they feel entitled to, and allow them to not only abdicate full responsibility but has a checklist ready to go down for all the people you can blame for your lack of happiness and easy going success. Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Women, liberals… Suddenly you not only have a tribe to join, you have a ready made blame factory, and boy doesn’t it feel good that it’s the world’d fault and not yours?
I mean I get. I’ve been down before. If gone to the bank to see how close to zero if not at zero I was.
But what other group would have them? Even the evangelicals require you to go to church and read.
There seems to still be this notion among some that you can somehow “save” Nazis. That you can just make them see how their ideology is fucked up.
No dude. That’s not real. That is never gonna happen.
In WWII, we killed Nazis BY THE MILLIONS. Their ideology led to the destruction of their nation, and the deaths of millions of their own people.
At this point, you have the benefit of hindsight. If you STILL follow Nazi ideology, you cannot be saved.
The answer is to kill Nazis. Sorry to be the guy who says this, but that’s the end game. That’s where this road leads. The choice isn’t about whether this ends in violence. The only choice is whether we allow it to fester into Germany in the 1930’s, and allow them to kill millions of innocents and potentially destroy the entire world before we kill them.
I say we kill them now. Fuck Nazis.
Breitbart contributor (150+ articles) running racist/fascist facebook group:
Jack Hadfield, a third-year politics student at the University of Warwick in the U.K., has written more than 150 articles for Breitbart News, mainly focusing on technology. But in his spare time he runs the Facebook group Young Right Society (YRS), which has over 200 members and bills itself as “a place for those who are on the Right…to discuss politics, philosophy, and general Right-wing stuff with as little censorship or government intervention as possible.”
While a portion of YRS includes more moderate right-wingers, the British anti-fascism charity Hope Not Hate has discovered that it also serves as a platform for those who advocate fascism and white supremacy.