Survivor guilt
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An awkward topic. You're aware of how this subject is taught in schools, I assume. The well has been not only poisoned but turned into a toxic dump. I have questions about both sides of the coin, but I'm too tired of the subject to ask.
I've pretty much settled on "it doesn't matter one way or the other". It's taught for political purposes rather than historical understanding, and I don't think propaganda deserves serious consideration (though it can help people understand how much of a farce school is).
Even if it didn't happen, it doesn't change the context of the war. It doesn't even change the aftermath. Things were fucked, for sure, and I mostly find myself annoyed by this distraction that impedes my understanding of the relevant events.
Personally, I blame the laws banning holocaust denial over there. Negative reinforcement is easy because it works poorly. Similarly, if we were encouraged to understand instead of simply memorize, I think most people wouldn't give it so much weight.
I am, but it's normally never as crazy as the HD'ers claim.
In my experience it's basically doing a project, reading Night, and reading Maus. It's not really any better than any other particular topic the public school likes to focus on. Most people hardly know anything about it because the school covered it for 2-4 weeks, including WW2, and that's about it.
Being a fan of history, nobody knows shit from history about public school. I took my friends to go see "Dunkirk" and I had to give them a quick history lesson before the movie started, just so they got the idea of who was fighting, where, and why. All their knowledge of history basically comes from public school... so they didn't know shit. They guess WW2 started in 1937, and I was just glad they got around a good date.
Actually watching documentaries, listening to recordings, reviewing some court documents brought to Nuremburg, and JFC seeing Night And Fog, it's a whole different story.
Unfortunately, this genocide matters for 2 important reasons:
One: It is a fundamental aspect to National Socialism. The Holocaust had to occur because of National Socialism. If Germany had been Fascist instead of National Socialist, it wouldn't have happened. The war still would have been bloody, but the explicit extermination of the Jewish race was an imperative to National Socialism and Nazi argument of Judeo-Bolshevism, the Racial Theory of History, and Socialism as applied to race. That should concern the fuck out of you given how many Racial Socialists are appearing on the right and are making all the same claims.
Two: It's methodology was vastly different from most depopulation efforts. Genocide isn't even the typical method of depopulation, although war is. The National Socialists didn't let Jews out. They wanted to eradicate all of them to save Europe. Most of the time, conquering forces push people out before them. Even in Genocides, people flee. The National Socialists made sure they couldn't. This was a very deliberate effort of total extermination on a supra-national scale. The amount of Jews that the National Socialists had to kill was extreme. And they knew it. That's why they developed an infrastructure to do it. What HD'ers will run with sometimes is they will ask why the National Socialists didn't just shoot everyone. They were! But it wasn't fast enough, wasn't orderly enough, and used too much resources.
This why they had to use extermination camps. In economics it's called "Capital Investment". You make an investment in assets to make your production flow more efficient. Instead of having 10 people make widgets as fast as they can and producing 50 /hr. Make a widget machine that requires 5 people to operate and maintain, that makes 100 /hr. Without capital investment, maybe the best you can do is 100 people making 1000 widgits an hour. With capital investment in widget machines, you can hire might not hit that point of diminishing return until you get 200 people making 10,000 widgits an hour. That's the sinister part of this. These are factories of death. Murder is the commodity that the factory is producing. They made a capital investment in murder, and a logistical system to support it. They had an agenda to kill every single Jew in Europe without exception, and they were building a logistical system to do exactly that. It was the commodification of death that makes the Holocaust truly unique.
I don't think you're wrong. Censorship doesn't fix the problem. But there's also the fact that the National Socialists want to deny it because
a) Stating that it is a moral imperative, as the National Socialists concluded, is really intolerable to all moral creatures
b) It's a way of hoisting the Marxists and Communists on their own petard. They would like the systemic extermination of the Capitalist bourgeoisie. The National Socialists are asserting the Jews are the Capitalist bourgeoisie. It's a trap: if the National Socialists are Socialists, the Marxists have to admit they want a Holocaust of the rich... which happens to also include a lot of names that end in -stein. If the National Socialists are not Socialists, then they would never call for the extermination ... of bourgeoisie. To deny Socialism is to deny the Holocaust, to deny the Holocaust is to deny Socialism.
In the end, the National Socialists are straight up lying about the Holocaust which is something they think is a moral imperative, and their Useful Idiots are normally so ignorant of Holocaust in an even rudimentary way that there's rarely anything to talk about with them.
I was really surprised with the subtlety of this movie. Made it seem more realistic to not have every character saying "nazi". I don't think they even specified nationalities? It seemed like a movie made for adults, which I respected. I barely recall anything about the history, though, even being similarly told about it beforehand.
Perhaps I should have asked you to define The Holocaust, as most of my points are going to revolve around it being the "disputed" eradication of millions of jews. If you pull it back to include the, erm, civilian antics, then I wouldn't have much to say.
The meat of the issue, to me, comes before they were being rounded up in camps. There was some clear hostility. It was being encouraged among the citizens and backed by the state to various degrees. I do agree about this being desirable for the political philosophy at play - I just don't want to feel trapped by a real death toll to justify claiming that it was a bad idea.
Like..one of the arguments I liked from HD (holocaust deniers) was that the camps were intended as transitional spaces for the jews. This is the idea that they didn't need to die, they just needed to get out. Obviously there are some flaws in this, but I'm not trying to argue that it's true. My point is that it led me to the thought experiment of assuming it was true, and that even if zero jews had died, it doesn't make everything happy and fun. Bad things were done. I think the death part really undermines the tragedy at play, in fact.
I don't know much about this part, I never really saw it mentioned before. But I'll accept it here. Even in a savior theory where the state offers their protection to jews because those crazy citizens are out of hand, so come to our safe camp until things settle down (made up the most generous theory I could) - the ideologies at play are wholly responsible for things getting that bad in the first place and it turns into one of those disgusting displays where the plague-bearer is selling cures.
I do wonder how much of this is that classic german efficiency versus how much was politically inevitable for a modern sort of society.
I'll agree here. I can't quite describe why, but something about the argument troubles me. Something about totalitarianism. Do whatever you want on your own land, but don't demand your neighbors do the same. Modern problem being that small scale societies may not exist anymore, as if totalitarianism is an evolutionary certainty.
The way you describe it in this section, makes it sound like the ideology was refined for the purpose of dominating socialism-adjacent philosophies. Do you think that's true?
Admittedly I share sympathies with it there. I think it's hard not to with how skewed society is right now. Living paycheck to paycheck really sucks and no amount of effort can dig you out of that hole if that effort isn't directed just right. Impossible to lift your head and look around when you're exhausted and demoralized. And we don't all have family or friends to count on for sound advice.
If they all didn't make such terrible arguments/suggestions, maybe I'd be caught up in "anti-capitalism" as well. I'm dreading the time when I have to talk one of my dumb relatives down, they're heading that way.
Sort of an aside here, but how do you even classify "the right"? It's no fun to look up definitions for these things. I tried to make a definition based off the thing you say about leftism being a philosophy of war. Since leftism is about power, that'd make 'rightism' about principle, wouldn't it? I don't see this asked often enough online, considering the frequency of "right-wing" being passed out as a label.
What I'm most concerned about is the civil unrest and authoritative racialism and how they're being interwoven. Seems too much like that Weimar period to me. Even if I don't think we're gonna have any death camps here, I can't shake this fear. There's much worse things than death anyway.
Edit:
Kinda jealous here. My most memorable experience for holocaust learning was a highschool german class where my bleeding heart teacher had us watch Schindler's List and got really upset when I laughed at something in the movie (some directorially hamfisted moment; I wasn't openly edgy). Ironically way more involved and manipulative than anything I ever got from history class.
I'd focus it down to intentional depopulation and eradication efforts by the German National Socialists specifically, for the purposes of National Socialism. Other depopulation efforts that occurred intentionally by all other forces, Axis or Allies, I would not include as part of that.
That's what socialists do, you can't expect anything else.
They were. Jews were not going to be held indefinitely. They were going to be exterminated. Their assets were seized, they were worked for whatever their labor was worth, and eventually exterminated.
It was an inevitable aspect of "mass societies", totalitarianism, Marxism, and identity collectivism. The essence of the Germans coming up with a logistical system to carry murder of an entire demographic is a kind of German line of thought, and so is the obsession of taking a thing to it's very extreme as a collective.
Kind of, yeah. One Leftist tried to use a quote from Hitler where he said National Socialism is not Marxist... because Marxism wasn't true Socialism. ... which should be a dead giveaway that National Socialists are Leftists. The moment someone says "it wasn't real socialism" you can be pretty certain they are a Leftist.
National Socialism attracted a lot of disaffected Communists, Socialists, Democratic Socialists, and Social Democrats because it weaponized the heroic narrative, tried to assert a (mythological) traditional culture, unified all ethnic Germans, and kept the Socialist policies that Leftists thought would work. To the rest of the Left, the National Socialists seemed like they were onto something that would work as Socialism, but wouldn't fall apart into Bolshevism or mismanagement.
Many bureaucrats remarked how glad they were to be part of the National Socialist regime at first. They no longer had to deal with committees, meetings, or other political processes. They asserted stuff, and it was carried out, no questions. A lot of people, a lot of bureaucrats, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of progressives, really did think that Hitler was actually onto something; and in the early 30's it was not clear that they would oppose him. Fascism got the same treatment. All while both of them painted themselves as "moderates" compared to Communism on one hand and Capitalism on the other.
Being one of the people that's done that without a family or community, I've done it by denying myself a lot of vices, and making most of my vices cheap. I swear most people could have more money than they know what to do with if they just didn't fucking spend so much on cellphones, alcohol, and cigarettes. Seriously.
That's exactly right. Some key points from my old post:
"As a person on the political Left, when you decide that you've had enough, and you don't want any more war, the left turns on you. Or really, you turn against the current of the Left. When you decide to stop flowing with the momentum of the water towards the sink, the momentum begins to flow against you. It is only now that you realize just how fast you were headed towards the sink (or the cliff). You become an obstruction for that momentum. You are now 'counter-revolutionary' because you are countering the momentum. To the Left, you must be a traitor because you are a soldier disobeying orders. You are going against their will. You are refusing to accept the inevitable. This is 'the right wing' to them."
"In reality, the 'right wing' are simply alternative principled ideologies that reject the ideology of perpetual war and conquest."
"What I mean to say from this, and what I realized in physics, is that if you choose an origin point, you will examine everything as a reference from that origin. It becomes the focal point of your problem and how you approach solving any issue. Why is Marx so important to the Left? Because the Left doesn't realize that the political Universe is expanding and has no center. They've just asserted that Marx is the center of their Universe. Marx is their origin point from which to reference the rest of politics and philosophy."
Let's put your MathMagician username to the test.
"Right-wing" is nothing more than some arbitrary radial distance from a Leftist origin point, which is perpetually shifting, and which is how people "end up on the Right" without changing an opinion.
As a Leftist changes their origin point, a 'rightist' objective position does not change, but their radial distance does, making them more or less right-wing.
If I am at Cartesian (linear) Co-ordinates (3,3), and a Leftist is at (2,2). I am (1,1) units away from him. In a Polar Co-ordinate system, with him as the origin, he is at (0,0) and I am at (1.41, 45 ^o). If a Leftist moves left 1 unit in Cartesian Co-ordinates to the left, he has moved to (1,2) while I am at (3,3). However, from a Polar Co-ordinate system, using him as the origin. He is still at (0,0), but now I'm at (2.23, 26.56 ^o). So, as he moves away from me, he screams "You're moving radically to the right!", because everything past 1 unit in radius around him is right-wing.
Get it?
The right either measures everything from a principled origin point in objective space that they hope to close to, or they set some arbitrary origin point in space, and set their principles to a point in that ideological space, and measure everything from origin.
The Left sets themselves as an ideological origin point. Or worse, the Left idolizes someone and sets a person or group as an origin point regardless of position.
Think about it. Name a Leftwing ideology named after a person when they were alive: Stalinism, Leninism, Titoism, Trotskism, etc. Name a right-ideology named after a person who is alive. There really aren't any generally. The only two off the top of my head are Trumpism (a label assigned by the Left to understand populist, liberalization movements), and Christianity (who is an objective point in ideological space that is set so far out that no person can reach him, and the Christians don't tend to argue that Christ changed).
Like any good physics student, your first question should be: "where's the origin point"?
People forget why the Weimar period was the Weimar period. The party in power was the SDP. Germany's Social Democratic Party, who are still around, and still have significant political power. Weimar Germany was run by internationalist Democratic Socialists.
Gee, why is similar to a period in time where the world is run by internationalist Democratic Socialists?
It's the same people, making the same mistakes, BECAUSE SOCIALISTS NEVER FUCKING LEARN.
Eh, I liked it.
I'm unsure what exactly you mean by this. Everyone else was doing some sort of depopulation activity in that same time period?
I want to say that depopulation can be good or healthy, but I honestly don't know enough history to give a real example. Or maybe I'm not grasping the full extent of "depopulation". You wouldn't include forms of segregation in it, I assume.
Best I can make up is that a government has some group of citizens that it wishes to have all moved to a certain area. The germans went overboard in forcing such a thing violently, but a different motive could have bred some positive motivator like offering a tax incentive or low interest loan to any member of that group that decided to relocate. But I think it turns into something else if there's already a community in that target area that doesn't get along with this motivated group.
I wish I didn't have to bring this up, but it crosses my mind every time we get a new thread here dunking on "libertarians": "that isn't libertarianism". I understand that there's a core difference between the two statements, but memetically they appear similar and I fully expect the two to be treated the same way in a public forum because of this.
I once read that the true modern libertarians don't really enter the public sphere because they're simply too tired of making sincere responses to retarded gotchas like "who will build roads". Personally, I'm just too lazy to bother.
Anyway, I wanted to ask you to do some more lifting for me and tell me what's beneath "it wasn't real socialism". I gather it's something having to do with the definition of it demanding a certain set of factors, because otherwise it turns into a different form of government that's more functional. I see the boilerplate meme dropped a lot, but I think I've only seen it explained twice in the past 8 years.
This sounds like a legitimate government strategy when you take out some of the context. A citizenry with strong bonds forged in traditional culture, promoting heroism as an aspiration. But then there's the weaponization, the focus on ethnicity, and the socialist policies.
One of the first lessons I learned on building money was to never spend it. I reached the financial goals I laid out, but I wasn't clever enough to make goals for my own health.
I have to assume you were lucky enough to have functional coping mechanisms. I think most vices are just substitutes for coping mechanisms. I've experienced the allure of having alcohol to "take the edge off", using cigarettes not for the nicotine but as a ritual destressor, and other indulgences to try to give meaning to my otherwise wholly miserable life.
Or perhaps you had positive role models growing up? I see it implied all too often that a fatherless child is a doomed child, but I wonder if the heart of such an idea is actually about role models. I had only negative role models available to me (the ones who would have been positive all died before I had a chance to know them), so what I had to work with was "I should do what I can to avoid ___". A person with a positive role model instead thinks "I should do what I can to achieve ___". It also ties into my theory about negative goals (wanting X to not happen) being general corruptors, while positive goals (wanting X to happen) lead to healthier and more stable outcomes.
The theory could be applied politically as well, now that I think of it. Like conservatism, it's a non-positive goal where the ideal is a total lack of movement. Versus liberalism, which is doing anything that makes grandpa unhappy (the motive is negative, but the goal inspires action). Conservatism is doomed because it inherently cannot act; it can only curl into a ball and try to ignore opposing forces. What would be a positive goal variant is some group that actively pursues a restoration of traditional values.
The things I think about to try to come to terms with my life. I'm not sure if I could have sought out a positive role model. I am not interested in discarding all responsibility for my failings, but I do want to be certain that I am responsible for each one. Some kind of agency complex. Like I can't learn properly from my own mistakes until I'm certain that I could have possibly made a different choice. So my sympathy for the dregs of society stops when they try to blame others for their choices. 90+% of them are on easy street compared to me anyway.
It's mostly just a reference to a one-shot character from Dexter's Laboratory. Despite having majored in mathematics.
I do understand your point, though I feel like I've been accused of autism.
Though now I have to question if the left-right scale is actually useful. Seems like it's sure to leave blindspots, like trying to describe the world with a communism-capitalism scale. It's a bit annoying to get another gamergate analogue where it's "you're either with us or against us". But I should be able to put the updated definitions to use easily.
While I appreciate the ability to deny communist efforts in countries that were victims of communism, I was honestly hoping that we could deny those efforts just fine with the aid of available history lessons and not need to edge gradually towards a hot conflict.