Antisemitism, historically, tends not to distinguish between religion, ethnicity, or cultural identity. People routinely conflate the three anyway, most recently evidenced by the response to the Israeli shelling of Gaza.
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By the time the Nazis took power, that dynamic wasnât alive. The German hyperinflation was over in the early 20s and the economy had recovered near-fully by 1927, the point when support for the Nazi party was very low. Then in 1929 the U.S. stock market crash causing American loans to be withdrawn. Eventually it was the desire of the Communists and the more traditional conservatives to stick it to the Social Democrats in 1931-1933 (during the financial collapse, massive unemployment, and de-flation) that brought together the coalitions that led to Hitler becoming Chancellor.
Itâs a common revision to say that the post-WW1 economic problems were what brought Weimar down. It wasnât. It was the Wall Street Crash and American bank failures. The revision is pushed because it papers over the problems of tight money liquidationism. Revisionists tend to be gold bugs, so instead of dealing with this inconsistency (or learning that the inconsistency exists in their rhetoric, they happily conflate half-learned stuff.
This rhetoric has been so popular in the U.S. that itâs become received knowledge.
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I personally never quite understood what there was about the topia in Brave New World that made it particularly dys. The world of 1984 was manifestly more realistic and shitty; I just saw Brave New World as reaching for an extrapolationâof society-wide enforcement of norms of pleasure or simple not-painâthat couldnât actually have the ability to extend to the conclusion Huxley proposes. Compare that to the world of 1984 where thereâs much less constraint on brutality taking totalitarian control.
In other words, in Brave New World Huxley seems to propose a kind of dope-smoking fascism that dope-smokers couldnât actually achieve or maintain.
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In yet another restatement, brutal totalitarianism is a stable system, like a hanging pendulum under heavy acceleration, based on strong negative feedback against anything that might destabilize the regime. Huxleyâs hippie hedopia would be like an upside-down pendulum, with itâs developing forms facing only light, generally unphysical correction.
I find it interesting that fascists tend to fear the possibility of state-changes in themselves or the people they consider to be their clique or property, while liberals tend to react much more strongly to constraints on the ability to change.
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WTF does this mean? Put down the beer and splain yourself, please.
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E.g (from a mid-century fascist V. liberal perspective): education steals the childrens, psychology is a jew/atheist conspiracy, criticizing me equals physical harm, donât steal the brains of my friends and make them vote demmacrat, use words to explain what other people are doing wrong generally; V. go with the flow, turn on-tune in-drop out, find your own way, wish/advocate/fight for equal opportunity, nudge others toward better behavior, use words to explain how you feel about what other people are doing to you.
Isat yer kweshchun? urp.
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well I belong to glasgow and glasgow belongs to me
these are the people, these are the people, the rich, the people with the money, âŚthey point the scinger of fum
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People often comment on Orwells own opus in that conservatives( liberals ) see it as a warning against liberalism( conservatism ).
I think a lot of pundits took both positions, warning about the horrors of Nazism during the war and pivoting smoothly to warn about the scourge of trade unions after the war. Churchill tried this, but the public was tired of him. But for the pundit class, it was a cakewalk since all they had to do was dust off the scripts that had been thoroughly tested by the Nazis themselves. A real professional keeps his eye on the ball (protecting the status quo).
In WW2 FA Hayek did not return to Austria to fight for the Germans, and instead stayed in England to write his foray into sociology âThe Road To Serfdomâ about how trade unions would inevitably lead to a gulag. Meanwhile, Hitler, his fellow Austrian, was filling actual death camps with Jews and trade union members. Hayek was way ahead of the curve in recycling Mein Kampf before the war had even ended, and the book was widely ignored after the war. But inevitably demand for that message came backâŚ
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Note also that FA Hayek didnât like oligarchy, didnât agree with a complete lack of a welfare state, and thought patents were perverse, issues which modern day claimants of his legacy rotate in ineffective equivocation on, take the opposite position on, or simply ignore.
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Hayekâs âWhy I Am Not A Conservativeâ is a short essay. He won a Nobel Prize in economics for very basic work, but then he went off the deep end when he tried to his hand at sociology and ended up a big fan of Pinochet. Maybe he found some refugees Nazis to hang out with in South America. I donât know, a lot of people should just retire at their peak instead of becoming a public embarrassment.
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Itâs enough to make one think that the libertarian movement isnât really consistent or aligned with any kind of enduring legacy.
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You think? I went looking for the Golden Age of Libertarian thought, but itâs crackpots all the way down. Wealthy people like to have people with degrees tell them they should not be subject to progressive income tax. A lot of the classic titles are in the public domain and available for free in pdf format, and they have many fans over at the white supremacist site Stormfront.
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The Nazis had two streams of propaganda - the anticommunist propaganda directed at the west and the anticapitalist propaganda directed at the east! Naziism was very amorphous, and trying to âproveâ anything based on their propaganda is futile. Note that Holocaust deniers and fascists like to cherry pick Nazi propaganda to prove they arenât Nazis, when that is probably the weakness evidence you could find.
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So true. Hitler and his particular band of low-level thugs would happily exploit any situation to their own ends and make up the logic to suit. Itâs tragic that such nonsense was able to command such destruction.
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Agreed. But I think with the rise of the nation-state and the assumption that a cultural or religious group constituted a people or nation, that became far less fluid than it was in the early modern period. Hell, Marxâs father or grandfather, I think, became Christians and they had been Jewish. I think Marxâs father was a preacher, if Iâm not mistaken. The whole blood and soil ideology has been far more rigid a construction than earlier ways of thinking about people and groups. Identification by religion generally meant far more social movement than identification by nation/race/ethnicity.
Not all responses to the Israeli shelling of Gaza is anti-semetic⌠In fact, I think there are lots of people who are falling over themselves not to sound anti-semetic.
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Well, but the meaning of the word has changed - it used to mean anarchists of the traditional variety. I think that Emma Goldman regularly used libertarian in her language. I donât think sheâs a crackpot, generally speaking. I think the post-Rand/Goldwater variant thatâs tied to a capitalist worldview is the new standard of what we mean when we say libertarian, but even there I know plenty of folks who have a more nuanced view of libertarianism, and they tend to be anti-state and anti-large corporate. But I think the more conservative elements of the republican party have completely appropriated the term.
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I think the only real reason to split hairs and give libertarianism a noble root is to be able to claim those roots as liberal ideas and use those ideas to talk to self-identified libertarians from a both friendly and sane perspective. Unfortunately, libertarianism has dreamed up such a complete alternate timeline of economic and political truthies that itâs basically impossible to discuss anything with movement libertarians without stopping constantly to give them remedial education. Itâs like eugenics; there was a time when it seemed as though breeding humans as if they were farm animals was a normal, self-evident good even though the science and morality of it simply didnât work. For some it still seems like a good idea, but mostly folks canât be bothered to speak to such stupidity.
I used to try to speak truth to stupid, but Iâve officially given it up because there are enough people to talk to who are past the stupidity and corruption of both libertarianism and third-way leftism.
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Is it just me or does Orwellâs writing seem exceptionally modern?
Perhaps itâs a side effect of reading a lot of the flowery, run on sentences of the press of the 1940s.
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Well, except for the part where religious affiliation was a serious enough issue to incite violence. Thereâs nothing like the threat of imprisonment and execution to make one think twice about converting.
In any case, people were hating on the Jews long before Christianity made it cool to do so. The Nazis were kind of late to the party, but they made up for it in scope.
As for the other thing, people, in general, seem to have a lot of trouble separating Israel, as a nation, from Jews, as an ethnoreligious group. This apparently includes Israel itself, which cries antisemitism when confronted with its own human rights violations.
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