“being a successful Nazi required a great deal of initiative and out-of-the-box thinking... [gas chambers were] not the result of top-down planning. It was the result of the Nazis cultivating multiple Jew-killing startups... In many ways Nazism represented rebellion against authority.”
(https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/e85hvr/_/faf93pf/?context=1)
posted on December 11, 2019 05:59 AM by
u/yemwez
69
u/DELETED80 pointsat 1576051117.000000
On twitter you have a neverending conflict between the two groups:
the “Bluechecks” (i.e. often highly credentialed users who write under
their real names) and nihilists often with pepe frog avatars. With the
former using their clout to ban the latter.
'unbiased' AI classifiers who are used to detect people who fraud on their taxes and benefits.
Oddly enough, all these fraudsters are non-white. But code can't be racist.
The poster implies that freedom to kill a subset of humans however you like is on some level a greater or truer freedom than that afforded in a liberal society. I wonder where their priorities lie, hm...
For most of the rant, "liberal" is used where "capitalist" would be more accurate and appropriate, but you do see a brief criticism of industrialism:
>But soon afterwards the big industrialists came to the scene and demanded total obedience out of disempowered proles.
So the "startups" of (state-funded) Nazi extermination efforts, which do not make money or compete in a market in any way that's comparable to a small business, are somehow harkening back to Adam Smith (also antebellum!)-era of anti-authoritarian entrepreneurial freedom?
I mean, it's obvious that the poster is just throwing anti-liberal ideas at a wall to see what sticks, and is probably only the slightest bit sincere, but I feel that this post does more harm to their cause than anything.
Because it's... really not accurate? At the very least, I have a hard time believing that there were a significant number of people sitting around under German liberalism, frustrated that they couldn't do what they wanted to Jews/homosexuals/the Roma/et cetera, who then decided to institute fascism to let them do that.
Fascism might have let them do what they wanted to do, but I don't think they thought about it that way at all.
Anti-conformism is when I serve the ideology I can be murdered for
opposing with trial and error, which is of course directly analogous to
being a startup entrepreneur
Isnt the whole ‘priests and lords were stagnant’ a lie anyway? Iirc
r/askhistory has several questions debunking that.
E: also no mention of the nazis also killing gay, degenerates, and
Roma people, but a weird focus on the slavs. Somebody is missing a
little bit of history. (Their descriptions of the methods of killing are
correct however).
And ow god the ‘you are an npc because you got some ideas from
somebody else’ argument… (I always thought this was stupid, see in
science for example, where the big thing is ‘standing on the shoulders
of giants’, or when taken to its logical (stupid) extreme, this means
only schizophrenics are truly free).
Somebody also forgot about the hitler jugend.
Also, be wary of anybody defending people with ‘pepe’ avatars who
doesn’t make a distinction between the dead pepe frog, and the new
anti-semetic dog whistle groyper the toad.
Anyway weird post that is weirdly quick to give the nazis the ‘free
thinkers’ label, and odd to not be the radical centrist and extend this
generosity to the communist SJWs. Makes you think.
I want my child to be a free thinker so I'm not going to teach them anything or allow them an education of any sort, lest I cloud their brain with other thoughts that they might mistake as their own!
It is not pretty obvious.
Just a few weeks ago a guy triednto shoot up a synagogue near me.
And antisemitism is on the rise in many countries.
For most people its obvious that killing humans like them without proper reason is bad.
Which is why Nazis/Neonazis and others try to have people believe that Jews aren't humans like them.
If you start with demands to kill a group most people won't listen. You have to discredit the group. For Neonazis this starts with casting doubt on the history of the third Reich and trying to cast nazis in a different light.
Which at some point will lead you to believe that the Holocaust is a lie made up by Jews to surpress "us".
Therefore one should always be mindful when arguing about the history of Naziism.
Ah, you are a slav, that explains. Not that weird then. And sadly a lot of people are not of the opinion that the nazis were bad. And there even are people who go and say 'the nazis were bad' while secretly thinking that they actually weren't that bad. The Kolmogorov option, but for nazis (and neo-nazis, and alt-righters etc).
Anyway, the sneer is more that you classify nazis as free thinkers, but only in the business of killing undesirables. It has high 'conservatism is the new punk rock' vibes with a little bit of contrarianism on top.
And of course SC is baised against seeing hints of nazi's in themotte, esp as there have been actual blood and soil nazis recruiting in themotte. So defending nazi's as free thinkers quickly gets you labeled as a nazi enthusiast. And that is one of the many reasons people made a sneerpost about your post.
Anyway, I have never seen people actually trust the 'we were just following orders' argument anyway. Esp when after the war a lot of former low level nazis were still very much into nazism. (In dutch apparently the NSB'ers said 'we hadden het niet zo bedoeld' aka 'we didn't mean it that way' which also was met with derision and mockery (and fists).
This is all besides your main points of free thinking and rebellion against conformity of course.
It represents rebellion against authority in the kind of way a crown prince killing his parent to gain their authority does.
But surely not a rebellion against the concept of authority.
Ignoring the context and speaking literally just about Nazis, this is
not terribly wrong. As Timothy Snyder describes it, Nazis were somewhat
agents of chaos, given guns and and a general high level direction, but
with wide discretion as to how exactly they found Jews in
Poland to kill, and what the method of execution was. Similarly, some of
the most effective resistance to Nazism was plain old fashioned
bureaucracy – issuing people passports, getting good lawyers, enforcing
laws on the books (to avoid Nazis attempting an end run around the
administrative state.)
I mean, that one sentence almost touches on the functionalist vs. intentionalist debate among Holocaust historians, but then quickly veers off into lunacy, like a novel-length argument that conservatism is the new punk.
What? No I'm talking about the line about death camps not being the result of top-down planning. Then the next sentence ludicrously compares Nazism to Y-combinator or something.
'some of the most effective resistance to Nazism was plain old fashioned bureaucracy'
Speaking as a Dutch person, this sadly wasn't true. We had extensive records on who was and wasn't related to Jewish people. Now after the occupation we don't have a lot of Jewish people.
Shoutout to the normally a bit more authoritarian/traditionalist student associations who destroyed their own bookkeeping and records to keep the nazis away from them.
Our bureaucracy was also easily coopted by the invaders because of our own local collaborators, the fucking [NSB'ers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Movement_in_the_Netherlands) which is still an insult to this day btw.
E: of course, this was in the western part of Europe, I don't know much about the eastern part in regards to the nazi atrocities. So doesn't mean that in the east the bureaucracy didn't help, just that in .nl it was a shitshow).
OTOH, the dutch example actually has one of the best examples of bureuacracy stifling the nazis, (whosse name I can't remember becuase it's 4 o'clock) with one of the people assigned to deporting jews essentially burying most of his requests in paperwork in a deliberately obstructive way.
The administrative state where the Nazis themselves though.
Bureaucracy could only be used against them because the Nazis themselves gave power to it and held legal documents and laws on some level as authorities.
They made documents to determine how pure ones blood was.
If a officially issued piece of paper can decide if you are executed by the state or not, that reeks bureaucratic and authoritarian to me.
Your description seems very narrow and picky from my point of view.
The point is that in areas where the killing had to go through bureaucracy it was a lot easier to sidetrack the murder-machine than in the areas where the nazis were given freer reign (like the east) the death tolls were much higher. 75% of the french jewish community survived, while more than 90% of the latvian community died, as an example. (in one of history's shittiest ironies, the vast majority of survivors were those that had been deported east by Stalin during the occupation of the baltics) even the Dutch (where deportation was particularly high) managed to save about 25%.
> Ignoring the context and speaking literally just about Nazis, this is not terribly wrong
Except it is. Nazis were, and are, deeply stupid "people".
Go bounce on nazi dick somewhere else, brownshirt.
I mean, “great deal of initiative and out-of-the-box thinking” are phrases that have oddly positive connotations when describing nazis.
The startups quote is funny because it is extremely Rationalist to view history through the lens of sf tech.
And saying nazism represented rebellion against authority is just straight up galaxy-brained.
The disclaimers you included in your post are noted.
this is the new marxist class analysis
So if each unit of Nazis was a startup, then the Nazi Party as a whole was YCombinator, which makes Paul Graham Hitler.
Nothing says rebellion against authority like developing a cult of personality around an infallible supreme authoritarian strongman
Anti-conformism is when I serve the ideology I can be murdered for opposing with trial and error, which is of course directly analogous to being a startup entrepreneur
Thanks I hate it
Isnt the whole ‘priests and lords were stagnant’ a lie anyway? Iirc r/askhistory has several questions debunking that.
E: also no mention of the nazis also killing gay, degenerates, and Roma people, but a weird focus on the slavs. Somebody is missing a little bit of history. (Their descriptions of the methods of killing are correct however).
And ow god the ‘you are an npc because you got some ideas from somebody else’ argument… (I always thought this was stupid, see in science for example, where the big thing is ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, or when taken to its logical (stupid) extreme, this means only schizophrenics are truly free).
Somebody also forgot about the hitler jugend.
Also, be wary of anybody defending people with ‘pepe’ avatars who doesn’t make a distinction between the dead pepe frog, and the new anti-semetic dog whistle groyper the toad.
Anyway weird post that is weirdly quick to give the nazis the ‘free thinkers’ label, and odd to not be the radical centrist and extend this generosity to the communist SJWs. Makes you think.
If anything, that is an indictment against start-up culture.
(I mean, duh, the Nazis were not all conformists, but the main thesis is really fucking stupid and /r/badhistory material)
[deleted]
Ironic. Those that you tell to “fuck off” are, in fact, the truest punks of all.
Ignoring the context and speaking literally just about Nazis, this is not terribly wrong. As Timothy Snyder describes it, Nazis were somewhat agents of chaos, given guns and and a general high level direction, but with wide discretion as to how exactly they found Jews in Poland to kill, and what the method of execution was. Similarly, some of the most effective resistance to Nazism was plain old fashioned bureaucracy – issuing people passports, getting good lawyers, enforcing laws on the books (to avoid Nazis attempting an end run around the administrative state.)
We have reached levels of edgelord previously thought impossible!
That doesn’t make Nazis look any better.