- cross-posted to:
- lemmy_support
- cross-posted to:
- lemmy_support
As far as I see that instance is a far-right cess pool. Everything I’ve got from that instance were low-quality transphobic “news articles”.
As far as I see that instance is a far-right cess pool. Everything I’ve got from that instance were low-quality transphobic “news articles”.
What’s your definition of a Nazi? A member of a national socialist party? I want to understand what is being banned before it’s banned.
My criteria for what makes “a Nazi” are something like this.
A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept, that reproducing outside one’s race is inherently wrong, and that some races are inherently superior to others; most often the superior groups are “white”, while the “inferior” groups include Africans, Jews and travelling people
Reverence for cultural “tradition”, real or imagined, with any departure from these traditions classified as “degenerate” and dangerous to society. For example, a belief that avant-garde art is immoral and without value because it doesn’t root itself in what are popularly perceived to be the artistic traditions of “the west”, a neat line from Greek marble statues to Wagner.
Hatred of diversity, seeing it as a plague that rots a society. For example, the belief that women are unfit to hold a social position outside of motherhood, that non-heterosexual sexualities are “degenerate”, that allowing people from another race to exist in your race’s society inevitably leads to that society’s destruction, that gender as a concept is a “mental illness” because only two biological sexes exist and each biological sex has a set-in-stone role demanding a certain presentation and certain values, that societies which follow one religion must not allow followers of another religion to exist within it.
Heavy use of absolutism. Everything is either wholly good or wholly bad. Nothing can be a mix of good and bad, or neutral. And everything is a matter of utmost urgency. Anything that is “bad” is an existential threat to all that is “good” and must be immediately and utterly annihilated.
An authoritarian outlook. Anything opposed by a Nazi must be forbidden by the full force of the law. There is no space for differences of opinion, or a nuanced debate, or reviewing the facts. If they oppose something, whether it’s big or small - the use of marijuana, reformative justice programs, abortion, media with female protagonists - it must be banned under pain of death.
Violence. To a Nazi, the use of violence isn’t an escalation, but the norm. They have no qualms about beating people to death simply for espousing an opposing view, or even just for existing if some aspect of their existence offends their beliefs. Likewise, their rhetoric often alludes to the indiscriminate or nonchalant, even gleeful use of deadly force - “physical removal”, “showers”, etc.
Shameless hypocrisy. The people who say “facts not feelings” as a rebuttal are often the same people whose beliefs are motivated almost entirely by feelings, and will happily mock others for trying to use evidence in their arguments instead of simply saying “it’s common sense”. They will shame someone for being rude and aggressive while also calling them the N word and telling them that on “the day of the rope”, they’ll be among the dead.
Veneration of strong leaders and mocking of “weakness”. Consensus-builders are seen as spineless “cucks”, while people who enforce their every arbitrary whim with total force are held up as “based” exemplars of good leadership and models to be emulated. People who are comfortably being themselves in ways that aren’t conventionally masculine are addressed with slurs and told to kill themselves while ignorant, bullying asshats are applauded for “rustling jimmies”.
You can meet all of these criteria without being a member of a National-Socialist party, or even identifying as a Nazi, but if you do meet most or all of them, your ideology can be pretty confidently described as Nazi-like.
By the way, cheers to you for actually answering the question. I’ve seen “BAN NAZIS” before, but I haven’t really understood what the requestors are looking to ban, and when questioned they seem to disappear quickly.
This seems pretty well thought out.
I’m a little confused by: “A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept”. If I was born in Spain and my whole family has lived there for centuries, am I not Spanish / a Spaniard?
I’d agree that saying things like “all Spaniards are terrible at math” is racist, but I don’t see how one’s race is mutable in this fashion.
Spanish would be a good description of your ethnic background in that situation, but there are quite a number of ethnic identities within Spain as well - the Basque, Galicians and Catalans, just to name a few. “Spanish” isn’t a racial monolith. There would be plenty of people whose ethnic background looks quite different to yours but who are no less Spanish.
What I mean in that statement is that Nazis believe that “race” - as in “Germanic”, “Hispanic”, “Black” (they tend to lump all sub-Saharan Africans together), “Middle Eastern” - is a useful way of classifying people, and that substantial differences in things like intelligence and physiology between humans are primarily the result of these categorisations.
But none of that is mutable, is it?
Your DNA isn’t going to change, but those ethnic groups are transient things rather than an inherent feature of reality. An ethnic group is ultimately a relative thing. Some “African-American” people might be genetically closer to the African people from whom their ancestors came than the other ethnic groups living in America, but they’re not simply “African” - they are a separate diaspora. Those ethnic groups change their makeups over time.
It’s not like, say, elements. 1,000 years from now, the average genetic makeup of any given ethnic group will be observably different from how it is today, but a Hydrogen atom will still be defined in exactly the same way as now. Nazis believe that races are a concrete, reified structure that doesn’t shift over time - it is a “pure” and “natural” state that becomes degraded and diluted by what they term miscegenation, rather than a fuzzy construct that changes over time.
Let’s say you were born in Spain and your whole family has lived there for centuries, but your family are black - say, some of your ancestors arrived from North Africa long ago. I would still call you Spanish, but a Nazi would call you African (or more likely some kind of slur). They care about the colour of your skin more than your actual background. Likewise, no matter how many generations your family has lived in a country or how well they pass, Nazis assert that if any of your ancestors was a Jew, you are also a Jew, and that as a Jew, you are inherently inferior to non-Jews and consequently a racial contaminant.
Just adding to this, following this same supposedly biological argument that advocates for a natural and morally correct path for the furthering of genetic lineages, Nazis persecuted homosexuality, bisexuality and trans people as a national policy, shutting down sexology research institutes, literally burning years of scientific advancements, and revoking official acknowledgements the Weimar Republic granted transgender people. It’s often forgotten, but the inherent homophobia, biphobia and transphobia of neonazis and adjacent movements is not a recent development at all: https://www.advocate.com/news/holocaust-lgbtq-victims-german-parliament
I wonder how anyone stereotyping individuals based on far-distant ancestors square up these beliefs with hominid evolution. I guess the answer is “they don’t”.
That or some pseudoscientific bullshit. Or just lying. Plenty of Nazis call the “out of Africa” theory politically-correct propaganda and assert without evidence that white people are a different species from sub-Saharan Africans.
They may be talking about ethnicity vs race? Google says in basic terms, race describes physical traits, and ethnicity refers to cultural identification. Race may also be identified as something you inherit, whereas ethnicity is something you learn.
So ethnicity is certainly mutable
My criteria for what makes “a Nazi” are something like this.
A belief that race is an immutable genetic concept, that reproducing outside one’s race is inherently wrong, and that some races are inherently superior to others; most often the superior groups are “white”, while the “inferior” groups include Africans, Jews and travelling people
Reverence for cultural “tradition”, real or imagined, with any departure from these traditions classified as “degenerate” and dangerous to society. For example, a belief that avant-garde art is immoral and without value because it doesn’t root itself in what are popularly perceived to be the artistic traditions of “the west”, a neat line from Greek marble statues to Wagner.
Hatred of diversity, seeing it as a plague that rots a society. For example, the belief that women are unfit to hold a social position outside of motherhood, that non-heterosexual sexualities are “degenerate”, that allowing people from another race to exist in your race’s society inevitably leads to that society’s destruction, that gender as a concept is a “mental illness” because only two biological sexes exist and each biological sex has a set-in-stone role demanding a certain presentation and certain values, that societies which follow one religion must not allow followers of another religion to exist within it.
Heavy use of absolutism. Everything is either wholly good or wholly bad. Nothing can be a mix of good and bad, or neutral. And everything is a matter of utmost urgency. Anything that is “bad” is an existential threat to all that is “good” and must be immediately and utterly annihilated.
An authoritarian outlook. Anything opposed by a Nazi must be forbidden by the full force of the law. There is no space for differences of opinion, or a nuanced debate, or reviewing the facts. If they oppose something, whether it’s big or small - the use of marijuana, reformative justice programs, abortion, media with female protagonists - it must be banned under pain of death.
Violence. To a Nazi, the use of violence isn’t an escalation, but the norm. They have no qualms about beating people to death simply for espousing an opposing view, or even just for existing if some aspect of their existence offends their beliefs. Likewise, their rhetoric often alludes to the indiscriminate or nonchalant, even gleeful use of deadly force - “physical removal”, “showers”, etc.
Shameless hypocrisy. The people who say “facts not feelings” as a rebuttal are often the same people whose beliefs are motivated almost entirely by feelings, and will happily mock others for trying to use evidence in their arguments instead of simply saying “it’s common sense”. They will shame someone for being rude and aggressive while also calling them the N word and telling them that on “the day of the rope”, they’ll be among the dead.
Veneration of strong leaders and mocking of “weakness”. Consensus-builders are seen as spineless “cucks”, while people who enforce their every arbitrary whim with total force are held up as “based” exemplars of good leadership and models to be emulated. People who are comfortably being themselves in ways that aren’t conventionally masculine are addressed with slurs and told to kill themselves while ignorant, bullying asshats are applauded for “rustling jimmies”.
You can all of these criteria without being a member of a National-Socialist party, or even identifying as a Nazi, but if you do meet most or all of them, your ideology can be pretty confidently described as Nazi-like.
Yeah well it’s really much easier to call someone a Nazi as an umbrella term for such indivuals rather than some scientific term no one really understands. It’s kinda actually taking from the playbook they use themselves: associate something with a negative connotation.
But I thought a nazi was anyone I disagreed with.
Man, being thoughtful and specific seems like a lot of work.