We need a neocon statement generator that we can invoke on demand like the DiscBot. Puts a nice neocon splat all quoted up and everything, for our pleasure.
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My reading of history is the same. He was a good organizer, and managed by strategic, violent acts, to solidify his power masterfully. Plenty of others shared his antisemitism and evil. He didn’t somehow “create” it and then “bestow it” upon the populace. It was already there. And, by your account, well-established.
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The Crusades were about colonialism if you view them as a reaction to Islamic colonialism I suppose (though they pale in comparison, a handful of campaigns and battles and territory won compared to hundreds and vast swathes of Europe on the other side). Nationalism would have been a meaningless concept back then.
I don’t think it would be fair to view the various conflicts between Christendom and Dar al-Islam back then as racialist in any significant way, because Christendom was made up of many different races as they were conceived at the time, and the same would go for the Islamic world (and I don’t think the Europeans at the time would have viewed the Muslim races as inferior to any great degree, seeing as it wasn’t that long before that a large chunk of them had been part of the Byzantine church). There was a sharp increase in anti-semitism in Europe because of the crusades though, that would probably be the most significant racist aspect of the whole thing.
And to dig deeper, how racial was it to pit the British navy against, say the Spanish?
Very much so, intra-European squabbles from the latter middle ages (after the formation of feudal monarchies) to just after the agricultural revolution were inherently racial in their make-up.
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Except both racism and nationalism as we think of it are of rather recent vintage. The crusades depended on a unified notion of religion (no matter how tenuous in reality) from the christian side. It was the pope’s attempt to assert and rally authority. I don’t think the spanish or the english in the early days of new world colonization imagined themselves as races, but rather as competing religious groups.
I don’t think that all nationalisms are necessarily racist, though. Depends on the make up of the nationalism. In the mid-60s and early 70s, there was a high point of positive feelings towards a Yugoslav identity, which was built specifically to incorporate different ethnic groups. Identifying as a Yugoslav meant accepting “brotherhood and unity” among different groups within the country itself. And there are modes of constructing American identity which rely much less on race or ethnicity.
I don’t know, not that old in the grand scheme of things, but I think I agree proto-racism has its roots in the enlightenment for sure.
I don’t think that everyone agrees on that point. It certainly employed some aspects of socialism, but it destroyed any authentic labor movement and despite their subordination to the state, corporations retained their seperate nature (compared to the state ownership in say the Soviet Union). It’s not any sort of socialism that, say Rosa Luxemburg would have recognized.
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I don’t know, not that old in the grand scheme of things, but I think I agree proto-racism has its roots in the enlightenment for sure.
I’d only call it proto-racism if we are comparing to a fixed definition of the word in it’s current usage, but at that time, and before that, they did have explicit concepts of race (and were using the word race, which pre-dates scientific racism by several hundred years - the word itself had quite varied usage) that included a lot of the same features as modern racism.
I think the bedrock on which all the various forms have been built on is out-group prejudice, and that’s what goes back to the dawn of time. Pre-Enlightenment racial categories were still pretty fixed (along ethno-linguistic lines, proto-nationalist in some places maybe), but the level of prejudice was a lot more flexible (aside from that directed at the Jews maybe), and it wasn’t particularly hierarchical - usually in prosperous peaceful times it wasn’t a big deal, but in times of war or political posturing there would be a lot of stoking of the fires from the elites via pamphleteering/theatre/etc (whipping up public outrage to fund campaigns and get the soldiers on board). Prior to that period there wasn’t much talk of races at all, and the in-groups were smaller units (probably related to some kind of clan/tribal feudal system), but even then I think many of the same psychological factors were in play, I see a common thread through it all.
I don’t think that everyone agrees on that point. It certainly employed some aspects of socialism, but it destroyed any authentic labor movement and despite their subordination to the state, corporations retained their seperate nature (compared to the state ownership in say the Soviet Union). It’s not any sort of socialism that, say Rosa Luxemburg would have recognized.
Sure, but I think there’s a distinction between Hitler’s policies and Nazi ideology in general, which is what I was trying to get at. Hitler may have been far less a Socialist than the originators of the ideology were, but I think even after he was in power there were still quite a few who held on to their more traditional socialist ideals (even if a lot of them had to keep their council after the night of the long knives), and a lot of them started off quite Socialist but were won over by Hitler (Goebbels for example).
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That’s what I was waiting for one of you enlightened and educated folks to say. I’m no formal student of any of this stuff, but the gist I’d gathered in my lifetime didn’t lead me to believe that Nazi Germany’s nationalism was purely (or even mostly) founded on a rah-rah love of the Motherland, but had deep-seated roots in various forms of bigotry including racism, religious intolerance, classism, and pretty much every flavor of Other-fearing tribalism… and that Hitler only capitalized on a roiling stewpot of cultural insecurities that helped him (and the Third Reich at large) succeed in lashing out at a number of different forms of Others (Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Bolsheviks, the Allied conquerors of WWI, etc.) as enthusiastically and effectively as they did.
Just now you indirectly led me to discover Wikipedia’s article on the völkisch movement , which kinda sums up pretty well my (admittedly quite underinformed) understanding of the matter.
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Your own argument here is my main critique that I formulated when I was reading your responses to me, above. There were no such things as racialism or nationalism back then. These are modern perspectives. Thus why I called them indistinguishable.
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I think nationalism is distinct to racism though, because the concept of race, and prejudice based upon it, pre-dates both enlightenment era and modern racism. Whereas nationalism quires the existence of the nation state, which is a relatively modern conception.
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We keep using the words racism and racialism but we are really talking about ethnocentricity. Then, compare that to nationalist tendencies like being a Spaniard or an English in the 14th through 17th centuries, and it all gets really absurd to parse.
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I think I’d argue the term race changed over time, and when we think about race now, we can’t really project back into the past our own definitions. And of course, the further back in history we go, the less we have sources from a wide variety of people.
I do think that nationalism and racism can and has been conflated. Nazi germany is but one example, natch.
And I still object to categorizing Hitler and the Nazis as socialist, given their direct opposition to German socialists in the 1920s and 30s.
To bring it back to Snyder’s thesis, he seems to be arguing that Hitler co-opted the Nazis for his own ends, which was a form of racial anarchism.
Fear of the other, or an out-group, someone or thing specific, is still a learned behavior though. You may fear the unknown, we all do to some extent, but that doesn’t have to lead to such violent hatreds as we’ve seen in particular places in time. There is a reason why the nazis completely transformed all aspects of german life. It wasn’t just about expunging Jewish influence, but about transforming who they defined as the German people into something new, a more cohesive, unified people. Hence, the hitlerjugend, hence the take over of labor unions, hence the rewarding of women who bred for the reich… It was both a constructive and destructive project.
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Yeah, it gets difficult because the words meant different things at different times. But I do think there are objective understandings you can reach once you slog through the various definitional aspects.
Well, but that’s kind of my point… if we hopped in a time machine, picked up someone talking about race in the Nazi era, in the 19th century, in the 18th, 17th, etc and so on, are they going to be able to mutually understand what the other means when they say race? I’m not sure they all would. I think the Nazi and the 19th century guy (provided they are from the second half) would have a shared notion of race, maybe the 18th could sort of see what they were getting at, but prior to that, all bets were off on a shared set of definitions, I’d argue.
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Not immediately no, but we can as long as we understand what they meant by it in each case. I do disagree with you that prior to that it had no shared definitions, there was no universal definition maybe (it was used to refer to various different forms of categorisation in addition to lineage for example, horse breeds and wines for example, and even that kind of usage lasted post-Enlightenment, Darwin used it in his study of animal evolution - and has frequently been quoted out of context and mischaracterised as a racist because of that). But broadly speaking it related to ethnic groupings, and was widely understood as such from the 16th century on at least (not surprisingly it was a continental European idea originally, it took a bit longer for it to reach Britain). Before that I’m sure it existed in some form (though probably having a more tribal character), though like you said in a previous post we have less sources to go on there, but in the pre-latin european languages there were plenty of words that would probably mean the same thing, usually meaning ‘the people’ or something similar, with a meaning distinct from other tribes and cultures - something which commonly crops up in anthropological studies as well.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:30, topic:65458”]
And I still object to categorizing Hitler and the Nazis as socialist, given their direct opposition to German socialists in the 1920s and 30s.[/quote]
Well I never said Hitler was a socialist, though as you said yourself there were socialist elements to his policies, but I doubt they were particularly ideological from his point of view. But the Nazis were strongly socialist in the beginning, growing out of the broader socialist labour movement, the main difference between them and the other socialists from the beginning was probably the influence of Nietzsche, so they were always distinct certainly. Even in terms of the anti-semitism, a lot of that at the beginning came from workers anti-capitalist sentiment (as the Jews were seen as capitalists before they ended up being seen as communists as well). Hitler then purged or converted most of the leftists within the movement, but I think it’s disingenuous to try and ignore the role it played in it’s formation.
Yawn *. I’m moving on to the various boredom threads.
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You wouldn’t even get a particularly high level of agreement about it amongst humans today, so I would think that the past would be doubly bad for this sort of thing.
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Damn, I kept trying to get a good angle on dropping that line. Nice one.
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Lines from the Princess Bride are always relevant.
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