Who Goes Nazi? (1941)
harpers.orgI get what the author is getting at. Not sure I agree. Many years ago, I read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland", which analyzes interviews with the actual men performing the slaughter of innocents at the end of the war.
The conclusion that book drew was different than this article, and makes more sense to me — that it's not "mean people 'go nazi'", but ordinary people who 'go nazi', given a system which relieves them of responsibility for their actions. "Just following orders" was the typical & honest answer, if I recall. The men didn't feel they bore a moral duty to disobey, because these things just had to be done, or so they were told.
So, if I can riff a bit on the article's themes... maybe mean people will hand you the gun, but anyone will pull the trigger, if they're told to do so.
This dynamic is significant in the culture wars of today.
As part of some work in architecture for some public sector projects, I read "The Nazi Census" which was a description of the technologies and techniques of the 1938 german census which was a basis for the NSDAPs brutal bureaucracy. (https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Census-Identification-Control-Po...)
One of the interesting parts was adding "unused," fields to the Hollerith punch cards for "future use," much like we use extensibility fields in data models today. The book says many of the people recruited to administer it were promoted from the ranks of the disaffected, often far above their level to ensure their loyalty. It was a technique used by the NSDAP, Stalin, and Mao, where they put country "peasant" types in administrative roles over towns and cities to exploit rural resentment of city dwellers.
As a result, you can "steelman" the sentiments behind many conservative arguments by summarizing them as questioning the wisdom of handing reins of unimaginably powerful institutions and technologies to people who identify as victims with an implied entitlement to revenge, and who are not bound by the ethical frameworks of the deposed - the ones assumed when those techs and institutions were built. It at least provides a logic beyond evil and hatred.
Regardless of whether it's accurate in the context, it's a heuristic for reasoning about the motives and quality of an argument.
> As a result, you can "steelman" the sentiments behind many conservative arguments by summarizing them...
Which conservative arguments? It seems like you're just referring to a different brand of identity politics as "conservative".
That is a sound observation. I think what we call identity politics is a divisive style of argument across the spectrum, and not a political stripe in itself.
In the Jonathan Haidt model, conservatives tend to be rule seeking and internally group biased, where liberals prefer the opportunities created by external influences and focus on outcomes.
Regarding the original article, 20th century wars figure prominently in the minds of conservatives, and it's worth considering that many good people are indexed on factors in a narrative that includes them.
I'd phrase it as conservatives find good principles are more trustworthy than good individuals, especially given that turnover guarantees more opportunities to install bad individuals in power.
There is a principle that some knowledge is crowd-sourced over time and we shouldn't ignore that. If there is a fence in a field, we should figure out why it is there before tearing it down. And we should tear it down in a gradual and reversible way in case we were wrong in our original guess.
Your comments about which groups are in charge of what could be that kind of conservatism if you squint, but it ignores the fact that individualism is one of the principles conservatives are trying to preserve.
What do you mean by "the ones assumed when those techs and institutions were built"? Both Nazi and Communists institutions and techs were built for that exact purpose.
If you mean designed and built, that's a rather harsh judgement of eg IBM - well beyond "war profiteer". Perhaps supplied for that purpose though.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...
Somewhat chilling to contemplate what purpose the current "Watson" could be put to, though:
"When the Nazis invaded Poland (...) IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson."
"Hello, Watson - is our genocide still on track?"
The origins of almost every "Nazi tech" predate their rise to power.
I think the point of the article is not ‘mean people go nazi’, it’s that ordinary people who surround you today would go nazi, for multiple reasons - because it is the easier way, because it leads to monetary success, because they’ve always felt slighted, because they are outsiders in the current system.
The banality of evil does not absolve people from responsibility or mean that anyone will pull the trigger. There are numerous examples of people who refused to participate.
While I definitely agree that removing responsibility likely allows/causes people to participate in horrible things it should also be remembered that "at the end of the war" they knew they were on the losing side and probably looking to minimize their own role in that side.
This sounds like basic opportunism... fits well in line with OPs comment.
Yeah, but I don't think most ordinary people are just looking for excuses to murder people. Somewhere along the way, these "ordinary people" were convinced that innocent men, women, and children were enough of a threat to slaughter them. By the end of the war when they realized that they'd lost, they might look to absolve themselves, but that doesn't explain the mechanism causing that behavior in the beginning.
I'd really suggest you read the book I mentioned, even just the preview pages available via Amazon. Your intuition doesn't match what is depicted. Their actions were not a reaction to the threat posed by the Jews, nor did they justify their actions in that way.
If you think that’s the only opportunity involved, then OK sure, but authority hierarchies offer much more. A feeling of control is what most people are after, and many other things they don’t want to readily admit. But whatever they want, I agree it’s unlikely to be ‘harming others’ but most people get what they do want from life by flattering authority. Different people want different things but most people get those things the same way, which is what matters here.
I agree with this 100%. I started writing a comment about how the author emphasised all the bad traits of the Nazis-to-be and that’s not really how it worked.
I seem to remember something about how lots of “un-American communists” were pretty staunch anti-Nazis.
But OTOH this was 1941, and there were still plenty of Nazi sympathisers in the US. The battle of ideas was still live then, and I guess Harpers were fighting it.
Sounds a lot like Arendt’s “little Eichmanns”
There is this...
> The men didn't feel they bore a moral duty to disobey, because these things just had to be done, or so they were told.
That is how they were raised. That kind of thinking was traditional and Nazi school system and propaganda were designed to produce people like that.
It is also not true that anyone would pull the trigger. Even in Germany were many people who having choice participated to the minimum or did not joined groups doing worst things when they could. It is interesting that another popular glib is that "ordinary people who don't fight back are responsible". But people who looked away or were passive should be better off morally then those who could not participate but did (not everyone could avoid such duty).
Reminds me of culture shock between Europe and South America. When people came there, sacrifices seemed barbaric. To the aztec/inca ... these were probably a noble gesture.
People's emotions toward acts is highly dependant on the reference system they live in.
I'm sure it's exceptionally hard to escape this kind of nation wide social pressure. At least for a while. I've read people starting to feel sick and question their duty. But they still agreed at first.
Similarly, drone operators started happy, but became overly depressed after "working" for months.
> People's emotions toward acts is highly dependant on the reference system they live in.
Yes, but let's be careful not to conflate felt nobility with actual good. Sacrificing humans to false gods is pretty awful, no matter the sentiment behind the acts.
Try to put yourself in their shoes, to the victim it was probably a high desire, his family was probably proud, they may believe he went into heaven and were relieved. If the whole system is strong in its belief and consistent you cannot "understand" their acts as good or bad.
I believe there are objectively bad things to do and killing people for a false sacrifice is certainly bad.
It's true that people need empathy, though, partly so they can be wary despite their own good intentions and clean consciences.
You never felt the pleasure of giving your life for someone ? for a group ?
I did, very few times, but I did. I bet 10$ that their culture only amplified that feeling.
I'm confused why you think a lack of empathy on my part is the problem. Of course I can empathize with people doing horrible things with good intentions. It's all the more reason to be clear and definitive when drawing clear moral lines for everyone. So confusing feelings don't lead people to do horrible things.
We don't serve people well by simply putting ourselves in their shoes. That's certainly part of a mature response, but it's far from a complete answer.
not lack of empathy, I wouldn't dare, I mean altruistic "deathwish" might not be so common in society hence my question.
Lets also not confuse means with ends. A room full of corpses is a room full of corpses. Regardless if they were put there from human sacrifice, nazi genocide, communist collectivization, or capitalist cost cutting (the sweatshop workers that get burned to death).
That the people who filled that room wanted a wonderful society filled with everything good doesn't detract from the fact they were monsters.
Perhaps a more apt title would be "Who goes Nazi first?"
Or “who inspires/leads the Nazi?” Confusing the rank and file with an obersturmbannfuhrer or someone like Mengele is a mistake.
I think the author and you are targeting slightly different things: she identifies who is amongst the vanguard who bring it into power, you are observing that once in a Nazi state, most people will go along with it
The Nazis in the article remind me of the political class in Croatia, where I live.
Once socialist one party rule collapsed, the whole ruling class divided itself into political parties and participated in the whole political spectrum, like nothing happened. Some of them became ardent anti-communists, despite being active parts of the old regime.
After ten years of center-right rule, some even switched sides and former nationalists (and before that communists) rebranded themselves as Christian democrats, Europeans, clean shaven centrists.
Some people are simply made for all regimes. They're the Nazis the author talks about.
I think it's that people tend to just go with their group. And when good people don't rise to oppose evil it snowballs into tragedy.
There is something ugly about this piece, about the idea that you can see into someone's soul and just know that they'd be a Nazi if they could. To be honest, the tone of it reminds me of the stereotypical pre-Anschluss German who privately scrutinizes the faces of party guests for hints of Jewish or Roma heritage, and flatters himself for his keen eye in discerning their inferiority.
For what it's worth, when the article’s author Dorothy Thompson was in her twenties, she was a fiery activist for women's suffrage, which was deeply intertwined with the temperance movement of that era. (Many temperance groups shared the same leadership as women's suffrage groups, and both shared a core idea that women were inherently less coarse and crude than men and that the burden fell on women to transform the debased, violent world men had created.)
Thompson toured New York state giving barnburner speeches promoting women's suffrage, and promoting temperance figures as well, like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, a popular keynote speaker for the New York Woman Suffrage Party and prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The W.C.T.U. is the political organization most responsible for bringing us the 18th Amendment prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages in the United States. The Volstead Act passed to enforce Prohibition ultimately resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens who were gunned down in the crossfire of speakeasy raids, or who drank liquor poisoned deliberately by the Feds.
Not quite Nazism, but government agents murderously enforcing philosophies of moral purity are perhaps not so far away, either. All this was going on in 1919; Thompson moved to Europe in 1920, the year Prohibition came into effect, leaving behind the violence and chaos she'd helped bring to power.
It's doubtful she wanted things to turn out quite the way they did. She meant to support only the good people and the good idea of women's suffrage, yet somehow some bad people and bad ideas came along for the ride. Indeed, some of the good people with the good ideas were also the bad people with bad ideas.
There might be a better moral in this than the notion that Nazis are a separate breed of people we can know by second sight.
Discussed in 2016:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053415
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155824
Dorothy Thompson was one of if not the most famous American journalist of the 1930s and 40s. She's largely forgotten now, but is sure to be rediscovered.
It's amazing reading comments that sound like they are about Trump, but are actually written about Obama.
There’s only one comment in those about Obama, and that’s turning a thread about Trump into one about Obama. (No one seriously thinks of Obama as being the “strongman” archetype)
OTOH, there is the typical anti-Semitic “Nazis were just a response to Commununists, and it was the Jews fault” comment. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11156462
Who becomes a cog in the surveillance capitalistic machinery?
Me, it turns out. Is it because I am unhappy and insecurity? Yeah maybe I suppose. It's not that I'm seeking revenge or domination. More that I just don't have enough fucks to give left over to care about anyone else. Staying alive takes full concentration.
Now that you recognize it, you can escape being part of that machinery. It will require you to nurture your conscience, though.
The second paragraph's mention of Jewish Nazis actually is correct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National.... Almost anyone can become a Nazi. Unfortunately, it turns out that being a Nazi, does not save you from the Nazis.
"[…] it turns out that being a Nazi, does not save you from the Nazis."
That depended on your level of devotion, I suppose. See e.g. Emil Maurice, he was a Jew and a founding member of the Schutzstaffel (SS member #2).
"Hitler compelled Himmler to make an exception for Maurice and his brothers, who were informally declared 'Honorary Aryans' and allowed to stay in the SS."
It's worth noting that only a letter from Hitler himself saved him. It's easy to imagine how many Jews had similar views but didn't have Hitler's personal protection and ended up dead.
See e.g. Emil Maurice, he was a Jew
One of his great-grandfathers was Jewish; he was not.
Yeah, these are less puzzling when you realize that nazi defined Jewishness by blood and thus many assimilated people who considered themselves Germans and believed same things as other Germans got catch in net too.
Which was oddly less strict than in the American South where one drop of Black blood was enough to make you not White. As far as determining blood mixing in the Reich the Mischling Test was used and if you had 3 grandparents who were Jewish that made you Jewish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling_Test
I totally was reading this thread last night and didn’t refresh before posting, I didn’t see the post below.
The Mischling test checked for one grandparent of Jewish confession. Even Nazis would not consider him the same way they did their victims.
I posted this article several years ago. In my mind, the interesting question isn't who goes Nazi; but rather, would I go Nazi and what circumstances would I go Nazi?
Its easy to assume that you are the good guy in the movie. Twist the plot a bit, and do you become the bad guy?
I believe this ignores the component of social cohesion. In rapidly changing and uncertain times, the lure of steadfast resolve and order can be psychologically powerful to many types of people. Fascist ideologies of all types promise this. And if the atrocities of the state are out-of-sight out-of-mind for the majority of folks, sadly, many find them easy to ignore as long as _their_ world is "in order".
To add to this: it is incredibly difficult to risk yourself and your family to protect strangers, no matter what the numbers are. That's why the act of defying the Nazis in WW2 was particularly heroic: the alternative was to just go along, and be safe and comfortable. Heroism in warfare counts for less, since the alternative is often just a different kind of death.
The author, Dorothy Thompson, was a key journalist and personality who encouraged the U.S. entry into WW2. The book "Those Angry Days" by Lynne Olson describes the struggle between the interventionists and the isolationists.
I highly recommend the excellent
“They Thought They Were Free”
For perspective on what it feels like to become a nazi.
https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/022...
It's a spot on essay on the kind of the original Nazi movement (and others since), but not applicable to the modern Trump situation.
First, because the Nazi analogy is far-fetched -- from the Wall, to the travel ban, to throwing out immigrants, and on to war, he is continuing more or less the same policies as Obama. Who didn't do that great on institutional racism either (remember "black lives matter"? The hurt that caused this and the killer cop business had continued as usual under his watch. Same for things like surveillance, hawkish attacks in foreign policy, etc. Heck, even Obamacare was "inspired" from Mitt Romney -- and nothing like e.g. British or Canadian healthcare).
But even more so, because while the Nazi party was THE establishment, Trump is a small anomaly, with most of the establishment figures (all "good society" and the prestigious press) against him. You can't build a career on being for Trump today (you'll regret very soon), whereas you could for being pro Nazi in the thirties. And many of the author's analogies are based on those aspects.
An incognito window works for this one, and the first page is viewable at https://outline.com/36bqXA.
Great read. The central concepts apply to modern day subculture movements.
I feel like there is much more of propaganda than insight in this piece. For one, because it looks specifically at Nazi-ism, and collaboration, rather than at fascism from the home front.
Secondly, it reeks of 'The good old boy' and the idea that a good man could never be deceived. It promotes a sense that, if you are simply American enough, you can escape the feverish grip of nationalism or public panic.
I didn't get that from the article at all.
I think this sentence in the last section of the article is the central point:
> Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.
That Nazism is a product of cruelty, unhappiness, and insecurity.
Fascism is about dominance. About being a part of the group to which the other is subordinate. Which is something that appeals to people who are deeply bitter, delight in suffering (of their own or others), or lack a sense of self-identity.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never... become school shooters, or terrorists, etc. At some level, people want to be winning at life: if they are, they're invested in the current system. If they aren't, they may seek change (or at least immerse themselves in some subculture).
'winning' implies that there has to be someone 'losing' and I don't feel like that represents my view of my life though I do feel very satisfied.
I am very glad that I was able to purchase a modest house that I can work on and modify. I'm happy with designing and implementing solutions to the technical problems my job entails. I'm happy that I have the opportunity to save so that I have a financial cushion should many unexpected events occur.
And I don't think this situation requires anyone else to lose.
Now I would admit that I might not be and likely am not representative of everyone in our society but isn't that more of an attitude towards expectations than some sort of static rule? I might have the expectation that I should have a Ferrari and an attractive and doting partner, or a happy perfect family, but there is no reason my expectations justify hurting others.
I think if we look closer at social dysfunction in general we would see that the people lashing out have either unrealistic expectations or have someone been marginalized even beyond what we all might agree about as a baseline of expectations: that we have the opportunity to take part in society without being treated shabbily for no reason, that we are appreciated at some level by someone, and that we can be vulnerable and rely on others without being neglected or ostracized.
There will always be people who are naturally dysfunctional due to mental health issues but I have to think most of the worst problems society faces could be greatly reduced if we cared about each other more.
By buying a house, you've put upward pressure on house prices in your area, thus making them more expensive for everyone else. Some people would be nudged over the edge from affording it to not affording it.
I think the loss, if it actually exists, is distributed thinly over a lot of people so it's hard to see.
> I don't think this situation requires anyone else to lose.
I don't know enough macroeconomics, nor enough about the veracity of macroeconomics, to determine whether this is true. I'm not calling you out, or asking you to defend your thesis to strangers. I'm just wondering whether you're able to reason end-to-end about this in your own mind, to reach this conclusion.
Also, whether or not your good fortune depends on losers, there are losers. An exchange at dinner the other night went like this: What slogan did Obama run on? Change. And what is it that people want to change? They want their lives to stop sucking so hard.
Whether their lives are "sucking" is a matter of perspective. There are billions of people around the world who would be only too grateful for a life that "sucks" as much as theirs do. You'll find people from all walks of life who have convinced themselves that their life sucks and that, if only they got that raise, or if the economy grew at x % or if the guy who talks like them became president, it would suck less. As long as the majority of people keep looking to external factors to determine their happiness and satisfaction with life, your society will always be vulnerable to populism.
At best, I think this could only be a solution for an individual. Perhaps I'm simply lacking imagination here, but the U.S. adopting some alternative to materialism is one of the last things in the world I can picture.
What did you anchor these modest goals upon? Chances are they were based on your perception of how people around you are doing. If you lived in the Paleolithic, perhaps winning would have been having a decent cave, and enough game to feed your family. In another world, perhaps you'd require only one or two modest robot butlers, not a fleet like many others have. Dumb analogies, I know. The point is that, most people's goals are derived from what seems achievable based on perceptions of how everybody else is doing at "the game" we call capitalism. As soon as you start doing that, there are winners and losers by definition.
The winners and losers in your description seems more a ranking, rather than causal. In most games, a winner causes there to be a loser. What about GP's stated goals and achievements would cause someone else to lose at the game of life?
I have friends who would consider me a "loser" by rankings (no house, no wife, no kids; I rent, have a fiancee, and, well, no kids). But their achievements have not caused me to be in this state. It's just facts of how life has played out, and differing priorities.
You can be winning at your own self defined game. And you probably should be.
Not all games are zero sum. I'm not saying that you need to win in order for others to lose. The cause and effect are almost the inverse of that. What I'm saying is, your definition of success and winning is defined by either achieving what others have, or avoiding situations you know are possible because other people are in them.
You know you're winning because your not in a third world country, homeless, starving, immediately dying, etc. You wouldn't know those were states to avoid unless others were in them.
This is what I was hinting of when I mentioned subcultures: https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society
The summary is that everyone needs to be a winner, and we can be as long as we all play a different game.
I think the article addresses that, too, with Mr. C: "...he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism."
> a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery
Wow. How little things change.
I love to read ancient documents that have survived to our days, all the way back to the first written forms of documentation.
The conclusion taken from almost 4 000 years of written information is that indeed things change very little regarding human politics.
Fascism, for the people who shape it as such, will be pushed forward by some of the kinds of people the article mentions. However, Germany was and is and always will be peopled by mostly reasonable, kind, stout folks, because most people everywhere are reasonable, kind, and stout.
Even the cream of a country can be goaded and led and pushed into fascism, as the tide sweeps across a frightened or depressed people. The soldiers of Germany had to be shown the horrors and crimes of their superiors in gory detail, and still they had to be marshaled by strict speech laws to prevent the resurrection of a horror that largely benefitted the masses.
Compare how Germany was treated by the world after WWI, and after WWII. Big difference in treatment, and consequences for that treatment. Fortunately the lessons of WWI hadn't been forgotten when it came time to cleanup after WWII.
Even if a punitive approach had been taken, it would have been a very different post war period. Germany was utterly destroyed, beaten and occupied. In WW1 that wasn’t the case and while there had been massive loss of life, Germany was intact.
> Fascism is about dominance. About being a part of the group to which the other is subordinate.
This is utterly correct.
> Which is something that appeals to people who are deeply bitter, delight in suffering (of their own or others), or lack a sense of self-identity.
This is absurd, and does not follow from the first part.
Here's the truth (and you do get this from the article) : anyone who rises a lot in the world, or has that as an ambition, in either popularity or money, would "go nazi". That is very different from actively persecuting people, and that should be clearly understood.
I feel like dropping another 10 points on this site, so may I just make the point. Someone who was born a man (or woman) of some privilege (not necessarily much, but some) and does not really seek to advance, someone who gets his life pre-planned for them, and follows the plan. "Dad was a doctor, and I will be too". Those are the people that do not go Nazi, that, no matter what, will never join.
In other words : rich republicans would be the bastion against Nazism. They would be the people that, no matter what efforts are done, cannot be converted. Doctor families. Lawyer "dynasties".
The Bay Area ... would be a hotbed of Nazism in America. No doubt about it. Nazism has everything that SF wants : loads of young people. Support from universities and "follows science" (read the newspapers from the time). It sings the praises of the poor, gives a clear reason for the poor getting repressed (rich jewish bankers), Nazism hates the status-quo and wants to change it at all costs (even though most people don't nearly realize just how big those costs were going to get. Please keep that thoroughly in mind before judging people).
Charlottesville. A rich Republican president says 'Some Very Fine People on Both Sides' about people who self described themselves as Nazis and chanted Nazi slogans. Yes many other Republicans distanced themselves, but nevertheless he has not poisoned the well too much for them, because he's still useful otherwise.
Birtherism to me is Nazism. It is his original sin entering the political scene, and the party did not do anywhere near enough to repudiate it. The passivity was tacit acceptance of it. That's not a bastion.
> This is absurd, and does not follow from the first part.
It doesn't have to follow from the first part (I can imagine several things it could precede from), but it is entirely credible that bitterness/resentfulness might go hand-in-hand with a desire to dominate. If you've been told long enough that you've gotten the short end of the stick, if you feel you've been looked down on, not given enough respect, or even if you're doing quite well for yourself, but of course you've earned it, and there are all kinds of hangers-on and disgusting and lazy people who are still somehow getting a piece of your labors... it's quite plausible that you'd love nothing more than either (a) to be in a position of dominance over your oppressors (real or imagined) or (b) watch someone else who is in such a position really give it to 'em good.
> rich republicans would be the bastion against Nazism. They would be the people that, no matter what efforts are done, cannot be converted. Doctor families. Lawyer "dynasties".
Presumably engineers in that professional class as well.
Amazing that nazi Germany was able to do as much as it did without the help of doctors and engineers and other respectable and conscientious members with a place society. Almost recommends nazism as a philosophy if they were able to basically conquer Europe primarily with the poor, young, faux-science disrupters and others who had no stake in the status quo.
Yeah, this article was very "See if you're a good person like me you'd never go nazi".
If the SJW's taught me anything it's that the people loudest yelling that they're the good people would be the first people to go nazi. It wouldn't be the same nazi's nowadays - their uniforms would be different, their slogans would be different, the group they scapegoat all their problems on would be different.
But they'd still be plowing through imprisoning and killing people who fit into their nearly arbitrary category not caring what kind of people they actually are because "their group is the reason why bad things happen!".
They'd simply go on their facebook feed, be told who they should hate this week, and gleefully post about how they're being put in camps to slowly die, all the while convinced they were doing the right moral thing.
If anyone has ever read Speer's memoirs, the striking thing is just how ordinary all of the Nazi big-baddies were.
He'll be recounting some story of Bormann or Goering, and you'll be thinking to yourself, "That's just like Joe in HR!" or "Matt does that all the time!"
Take the ordinary schmuck in middle-management, give him absolute power, then BAM--nazi.
https://archive.org/stream/Inside_the_Third_Reich_Albert_Spe...
This is all well and good, but to recast this to 2018, you need to factor in the people who can't recognize fascistic tendencies unless they come with a swastika on their sleeve.
You see it in both the obsession to label anything and anyone a nazi or nazi-adjacent, as well as to turn a blind eye to the real abusive power wielded in the name of anti-fascism.
The ends do not justify the means, and you don't get to paint your team's actions as merely "consequences" like it's some sort of divine and just punishment. You can't cast yourself as a powerless observer when you're actively applying leverage in collusion with institutions.
Consistent rules, actual accountability and real responsibility need to apply to everyone if this is to get better.
It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
It is a quote from the article, hence why it is italics. How is this unsubstantive? It's the last lines of the article, it practically answers the title question. It's satire and a polemic.
I agree that mitigates it somewhat, but the comment was still unsubstantive, no? It added no information.
Not even slightly. The definition of substantive: having a firm basis in reality and therefore important
Quotes, citations, showing one's work are all inherently substantive.
To take something seriously as Nazism in the context of a game like a puzzle to be solved, it's brilliant and absurd, and literary cleverness, and worth repeating as is. And this wedge fits within the timing of the article, itself wedged between rampant Nazism in the U.S. but before the U.S. had entered WWII. I doubt this activity could be called a game during or after the war, no matter the satirical hints.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curr...
Adding no information? That's the vast majority of comments on HN including my own, which don't get either an up or down. But fine, you can say it did not enrich the conversation.
When we say "substantive" in HN comments, we mean adding relevant information.
What an awful article. The author starts by ascribing a biological basis to a person's likelihood to be a Nazi. In that respect, she's no better than them.
National-socialism was a collectivist ideology. It was grouping people according to a hierarchy of "races", in other words judging individuals according to their ancestry. It was fundamentally horrible not because of its form of collectivism, but because it was both collectivistic and totalitarian.
Human action is driven by ideas and personal choices, not by collective biological origins or urges, nor by "feeding", nor by "physical training."
If you want a deeper, intellectual, practical understanding of what made Nazi Germany possible read "The Ominous Parallels" (1982) [1] or an extract titled "The Cause of Hitler's Germany" [2].
It literally starts by saying it’s not a racial thing.
First paragraph: "I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, ..." [emphasis added]
You need to fully read the article before you make a really strong accusation like that.
"I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines."
If you actually read the article in its entirety, it's pretty clear from both her misuse of the words 'born' and 'biological factors' that Dorothy Thompson, unlike Nazis, is refering environmental factors and not genetic ones. Misuse of those words are the only flaws I see in what's otherwise a good article that feels sadly still relevant today.
It's interesting that you assume, incorrectly, that I did not read the article in its entirety.
So the explanation for the true meaning of her article is that she somehow "misused" the words born and biological throughout her arguments? and that what fundamentally causes someone to become a Nazi is their environment?
Whether your interpretation of her arguments is correct or not, I hold that individuals who promote national-socialism (i.e. Nazism) are entirely responsible for choosing evil ideas (not helpless pawns of their childhood feeding, physical training, or as you assert "environmental factors").
Ok, if you read the article then you've missed the context. She's pretty clear as to what she's meant by born which I've quoted above i.e born with a silver spoon. She's also made it clear as to what she meant by 'biological factors' which others have already commented on as well as quoted, which is definitely not how people today would interpret it.
To the downvoters -- if you ascribe, or condone someone ascribing, someone's ideas and character to their birth or ancestry you are objectively no better than racists and Nazis.
"born Nazi" does not imply that ancestry or ethnicity plays into it. It's merely saying that the personality that one is born with does. i.e. there is some quality of personality that we are born with.
Fourth paragraph: "Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature."
She's ascribing an inclination to Nazism to feeding and physical training. There is no charitable interpretation.
Added [I'm blocked from responding]:
Near the end: "L is the strongest natural-born Nazi in this room... He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an infallible instinct for power."
She constantly ascribes adherence or willingness to adhere to Nazism to a biological cause -- being born, one's feeding, a physical training, Neanderthal man, or instinct.
This is not how to understand Nazism, or its causes; nor is it how to fight it.
> First paragraph: "I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, ..." [emphasis added]
> Fourth paragraph: "Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature."
It's obvious that she's talking about upbringing rather than genetics, despite the word choice. You're being way too literal.
How are education, feeding or physical training biological factors? That sentence is very confusing to me.
There is no charitable interpretation possible for "born Nazis."
She says repeatedly that Nazism is not genetic but is potentially rooted in the earliest upbringing. When she talks about "young D," "the only born Nazi in the room," she says a lot about his upbringing and nothing whatsoever about his heritage. That's what "born" means to Dorothy Thompson.
The word "born" is clearly an awkward choice--perhaps it worked better in the idiom of 1941--but you're not doing any good by ignoring context and stubbornly insisting on a literal dictionary reading.
Actually, there is not a single mention of genes or "genetic" in that article. What are you referring to?
Your interpretation of the word "born" is bizarre. She is repeatedly describing someone's Nazism to be directly caused by biological breeding and processes (such as feeding, physical training, or Neanderthal brains).
Hang on, what are you actually arguing for? I thought blaming politics on genetics was what you were upset about in the first place.
Are you actually saying it's immoral to say that the circumstances of a person's upbringing can affect their adult behavior? Because that goes way beyond just misinterpreting the article.
You wrote: "She says repeatedly that Nazism is not genetic."
I'm asking you to provide evidence for that claim.
Would you please stop? This is a pointless flamewar and now it's going in circles.
The distinction made, throughout the article and all the descriptions it gives, is between those who would be a Nazi were it profitable to do so, and those who would be a Nazi wholeheartedly. The former are Nazis by circumstance, while the latter are those termed as "born Nazis". It does not refer to one's birth or heritage, but the enthusiasm with which one would join a despicable movement.
There certainly is, since that phrase is almost always used figuratively, to mean "that really suits them." You seem to have decided to choose this instance as the one time it absolutely couldn't be figurative. Focusing on one word is poor rhetoric.