Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

by hprotagonist • 2 years ago

67 29 2 years ago

harpers.org

kayo_20211030• 2 years ago

contempt mingled with envy (paraphrase)

I reckon that's a good tell, even today.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

I saw this years ago. What strikes me is even though the author tries, it seems to me it has many stereotypes in it. Probably due to the year it was published (1941). So back then it probably got its point across fine.

dkuebric• 2 years ago

Is it anything but stereotypes?

dralley• 2 years ago

Stereotypes isn't the right word. Archetypes perhaps.

ticviking• 2 years ago

What I find most interesting is how few of those stereotypes/archetypes are present in our media today.

I still know many of most of them, but they've been replaced as our economy and demographics change.

cafard• 2 years ago

This gets posted a lot, something like four times in two years.

And I don't particularly buy it. It seemed to me to be something to comfort the Harpers readership with.

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

I had been surprised by Ezra Pound going (not Nazi but) Fascist, because I had thought he had translated chinese poetry in his youth. Then, when I recently discovered his "translation" process was to start from someone else's prose translation and re-poetise from there, it started to make more sense.

(well, that and Il Duce pretty much said that he needed a poet who could rail against the global financial establishment, which is a line I could see many conspiracy-minded artists falling for)

gradschoolfail3• 2 years ago

It’s probably inefficient to deduce an author’s actual position from their [non-autobiographical] work. The more they think of themselves as artists, the more one has to try and read from their comparatively banal actions.

See the following, it threw me off as well.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcast/should-america-have-a-mo...

Yarvin is voting for Joe Biden at the next election

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

I currently have Yarvin in the "inconsistent" bucket (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41228601 ) so if you think he actually has a line, I'd appreciate learning what it may be.

JieJie2• 2 years ago

"Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi."

In my experience, "Secure people never go Nazi and are generally kind, good, happy, and gentlemanly."

zer8k• 2 years ago

Mr. C is a counter-example to all of what you just said. Mr. C is an otherwise successful and intelligent person embittered by society doing him wrong. In literature Mr. C would probably be the anti-hero of an acclaimed revenge movie. He should be secure but he isn't because humiliation is a wound that doesnt heal.

I think the statement "secure people..." is a really broad generalization that misses the point being made here. It does not take much to make someone insecure. There are thousands of examples: food, money, romance, work, housing, etc. Every person effected by one or more of these is a Mr. C. They simply just need the right catalyst to fully realize it.

One may wonder if society in general wasn't so cruel to certain people would Mr. C even exist. To quote the article:

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. He would laugh to see heads roll.

JieJie2• 2 years ago

I think I take your point, though that just sounds like another type of insecurity to me. I meant to turn what I took as the original meaning (personal insecurity as a character trait associated with goodness, kindness, happiness, etc.) around on itself by implying exactly what you seem to be saying about the point I missed.

If you mean what I think you mean, well, we probably don't disagree so much at that. How to make society less cruel, eh? There's the rub.

It seems that with that last quote you're agreeing with my point that people who have lost hope in achieving food, money, romance, work, housing, etc. (becoming insecure), would reach for tools in the authoritarian toolkit.

I do wonder if maybe you misunderstood me.

YeGoblynQueenne• 2 years ago

I don't know if I agree with the thesis, but that's bloody good writing, of the kind it's hard to find anywhere today. I think in the past the people who took writing jobs where those who had a certain natural inclination to education and culture, whereas today it's the people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

... oh dear. That's a bit mean. I'm sorry about that.

pixelready3• 2 years ago

There are a few nuggets of useful insight scattered amongst the flat caricatures here, but the reason this not a useful guide to our modern affliction of growing fascism is it frames Nazism as a foreign invading ideology with the subtext of “who among us will bend the knee if those monsters invade and win” rather than an organically homegrown response to certain conditions of our societies.

Fascism is a cancer of the body politic. The ideas that form its foundation as a philosophy are there in every society, and each culture manages them the way most bodies contain pre-cancerous cells that will never metastasize because the body is healthy enough to maintain itself despite its underlying flaws. The far more interesting question than “who”, for me, is “what”? What are the conditions and triggers that cause the cancer of fascism to overwhelm the counterbalancing philosophies. To fester, grow, and ultimately become terminal to a healthy society.

MaxHoppersGhost2• 2 years ago

What are the conditions and triggers that cause the cancer of fascism to overwhelm the counterbalancing philosophies. To fester, grow, and ultimately become terminal to a healthy society.

Probably many of the things the fascists complain about?

pixelready3• 2 years ago

Fascists are famously unreliable narrators. Scapegoating is core to the philosophy and fascists are typically entirely focused on winning power and asserting dominance over competing factions rather than understanding, explaining and fixing underlying societal ills.

yks• 2 years ago

Fascists are lesser faction but if the society is bitterly splintered, they maneuver their way to power. For example, if a certain country has 2 major parties each supported by ~50% of population and no voter of one party can ever muster to vote for another for any reason, including to protect their future voting itself, then fascists do not need to metastasize to 51% of population, they just need to metastasize to 26%. Adjust to the number of parties as needed.

commercialnix• 2 years ago

In an America where fascism seems to be on the rise, we must understand history so to avoid repeating it.

  Adolf Hitler FULL SPEECH in ENGLISH AI Reconstructed Audio 'Freedom or Slavery' (No Music)

  https://odysee.com/@SpAIke:9/Adolf-Hitler-FULL-SPEECH-in-ENGLISH-AI-Reconstructed-Audio-'Freedom-or-Slavery'--(No-Music)-(1080p):e

keernan• 2 years ago

>more susceptible to Nazism than most people

Any implication that external forces put people in positions that cause them to be 'more susceptible to Nazism' ignores the certainty that for every 1,000 people in the exact same position, some become Nazis while others do not.

The external conditions are irrelevant. No matter how you change the conditions, there will always be a portion that 'become Nazis'.

It is my belief that is because there is something inside them that makes them Nazis to begin with. The external conditions simply present the opportunity for their inner Nazis to express itself.

Unbefleckt• 2 years ago

Is this nazism or simply extreme ideologies in general? I think more people than we would like to admit will rally behind whatever they're compelled to by authority or culture.

poulsbohemian• 2 years ago

I don't have time right now to go pull the multiple books on this topic I have sitting on my bookshelf, but the scholarly work has been fairly consistent that there are two main demographic groups easily exploited into authoritarian ideas. First, you've got an entrepreneurial / business owner crowd that are often the backbone of their communities. They are drawn to authoritarianism because they feel like they've worked hard and have earned their place and more or less want to protect it from "those" people, whoever they might be. They are your civics committee members, your civics club members, not necessarily "the elite" but the people with means who want to pull up the ladder and protect their status. The second group is the disenfranchised and undereducated. They see a family they've never had, acceptance, opportunity, and a way to rise above people they feel have wrong them or looked down on them. Over the past few years as I revisited a lot of the scholarly material, what struck me is how easy it is to look around your own community and how these demographics resonate regardless of era and location. For example, I've got a retired banker friend who is very active in the community. She describes herself as a moderate, but when you actually hear her talk, it might as well be out of the Nazi playbook - and she has no ideas she's doing it or how easily she's manipulated by modern political propaganda. And that's the insidious part that Ahrendt talked about - how mundane evil really can be.

EDIT: Reading the article now, these archetypes line up perfectly with many other post-war research sources.

Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

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