BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

uziq wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

If you really want to get a win over the Democrats and American left, claiming Hitler was left wing is the dummy way of going about it.

The Nazis did get their idea of central economic planning from the Soviet Union. Roosevelt followed the Germans and Italians when he advocated for the New Deal. It's not his fault the communist and fascist both came to the conclusion that free market capitalism won't solve economic crisis.

A better argument is: Roosevelt and the Democrats took the worst ideas of Fascism and Communism.

& yes, well, central economic planning came about out of necessity along with several other unignorable political realities, like mass suffrage and workers' trade unions. what we are discussing is the origins of mainstream/major party politics itself. the most important thing is that the right and left seized these new forms of mass organisation/mobilisation (not to mention new communications technology, bureaucratic apparatuses, and national identities) towards VASTLY different ends. if you don't carry the analysis that far, you end up accusing everyone of being a Nazi, or hitler a left-wing revolutionary. it's meaningless drivel.

Hitler did want a welfare state but only for white people. German white people. It's almost as if people want to confuse that fact since it dovetails too well with what the modern American right want. Maybe not a welfare state but to maintain traditional Christian culture and prosperity.

Last edited by SuperJail Warden (2020-02-25 15:57:16)

uziq wrote:

that is a vastly different end.

you understand absolutely nothing of marxism if you think that it is interested in nation states or ethnicities.

the whole formation of nationalist regimes was arguably in response to the much-better-organised communist internationals, which stressed solidarity between all workers of all nations equally, as being exploited under an international system of capital.

again, if you don't keep some of these very basic tenets in mind, the right/left divide goes all to shit and doesn't have any coherence.

I wasn't saying you were wrong. I was better explaining what the Nazis actually wanted.

Jesus Christ, Jay. Is your degree from Prager U?

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I like talking about World War 2. I read a lot about it.

Do you think the Nazis could have won World War 2?

Why always 'Nazis'? It was the Germans we fought in WW2.
I've noticed there's a steady rewriting of history to replace 'German' with 'Nazi'. Some kind of creeping rehabilitation?

Technologically the Germans were way ahead of everyone else, by years or decades.
Without Hitlers poor strategy and poor decision making on technological issues they could easily have won the war.
But no, he decreed jet fighters should be used as bombers, a small number of heavy tanks should be built instead of a large number of light tanks etc.
Invading Russia, failing to have a heavy bomber force and putting resources into capital ships instead of aircraft carriers did not work out.

Dilbert_X wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I like talking about World War 2. I read a lot about it.

Do you think the Nazis could have won World War 2?

Why always 'Nazis'? It was the Germans we fought in WW2.
I've noticed there's a steady rewriting of history to replace 'German' with 'Nazi'. Some kind of creeping rehabilitation?

Technologically the Germans were way ahead of everyone else, by years or decades.
Without Hitlers poor strategy and poor decision making on technological issues they could easily have won the war.
But no, he decreed jet fighters should be used as bombers, a small number of heavy tanks should be built instead of a large number of light tanks etc.
Invading Russia, failing to have a heavy bomber force and putting resources into capital ships instead of aircraft carriers did not work out.

Blaming Germany's defeat solely on Hitler is unfair to Hitler (?!). He did go against his general's advice against attacking France and that was a major success. All neutral observers believed that Russia was going to lose the war when Germany invaded. All prior evidence pointed to Operation Barbarosa being a doable plan.

Germany could have won World War 2 and I push back strongly against people who think otherwise. But I don't think Hitler's decisions when it comes to technology is what screwed the German war effort. The lack of oil and the near limitless industrial capacity of the Soviet Union and United States is what did it.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

I like talking about World War 2. I read a lot about it.

Do you think the Nazis could have won World War 2?

Why always 'Nazis'? It was the Germans we fought in WW2.
I've noticed there's a steady rewriting of history to replace 'German' with 'Nazi'. Some kind of creeping rehabilitation?

Technologically the Germans were way ahead of everyone else, by years or decades.
Without Hitlers poor strategy and poor decision making on technological issues they could easily have won the war.
But no, he decreed jet fighters should be used as bombers, a small number of heavy tanks should be built instead of a large number of light tanks etc.
Invading Russia, failing to have a heavy bomber force and putting resources into capital ships instead of aircraft carriers did not work out.

Blaming Germany's defeat solely on Hitler is unfair to Hitler (?!). He did go against his general's advice against attacking France and that was a major success. All neutral observers believed that Russia was going to lose the war when Germany invaded. All prior evidence pointed to Operation Barbarosa being a doable plan.

Germany could have won World War 2 and I push back strongly against people who think otherwise. But I don't think Hitler's decisions when it comes to technology is what screwed the German war effort. The lack of oil and the near limitless industrial capacity of the Soviet Union and United States is what did it.

Probably Japan attacking Pearl Harbour is what did for Germany, the US would did not enter the war to protect Britain and wasn't going to, Europe was already gone.

That and supply lines and attacking Russia when they have a winter.

I remember one time when I was doing LSD with a few friends, we were in my friend's parent's library, and one of the guys (we call him Putin, another LSD-fueled story for that one) randomly pulled a book off one of the shelves about the Nuremberg Trials. He opened it to a random page and started reading as if he was super engaged in the book.

Every time people talk about WW2 history and get in to these little arcane discussions about how if the French had just done a better job fortifying the Maginot Line, or if Rommel had just one more African victory, right before my eyes glaze over, I think about that moment and chuckle to myself.

Wait a minute, if Democrats are Liberals, and Liberals hate freedom, doesn't that mean democrats hate democracy?

How can they call themselves democrats if they hate democracy?

Shows how stupid they are.

that wasn't meant as an insult to anyone talking absolute sense about ww2 above. i am sure everyone here has read more than a few books about ww2. i published history books for a few years and know that about 70% of all history bought off-the-shelf by Joe Public is either about nazis, the world wars, or henry viii or some shit. (it just makes it all the funnier that jay accuses my reading of being somehow esoteric and bias; i have edited and produced dozens of books on world war 2, nevermind being familiar, and having to be familiar necessarily, by profession, in order to commission and sell new books, with the work of the most eminent historians on the topic.)

this is the sort of stuff that jays' festering little armpit of the internet are more concerned with:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi … ck/567233/

Perhaps the most striking reveal of D’Souza’s present attitudes is found in The Big Lie, in his references to the Tulsa riot of 1921: “In that incident, supposedly in retaliation for an atrocious rape of a white woman by a black man, thousands of racist Democrats rampaged through black neighborhoods, burning homes, looting businesses, killing dozens of people, detaining hundreds, and leaving thousands of blacks homeless.”

'The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left' you can file that one next to another book that has been mentioned here recently, 'Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning' by jonah goldberg. i.e. polemical tripe. here's a review from that hotbed of radical leftism, the Reviews in Hstory academic journal:

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/783

Goldberg’s book is a publishing phenomena not only featuring at the top of the New York Times bestseller lists as a hardback but also, as Goldberg himself has noted in the blog he runs about the book, going into a third printing in the UK. That is enough to make many historians, used to important articles and books receiving scant if any attention from a wider public, rather envious. It is best then to point out straight away that Mr Goldberg is not a professional historian, and neither, despite the presence of some scholarly apparatus in the sense of endnotes, is his book a work of academic history. Rather Mr Goldberg is a US right of centre political commentator – who has also written for The Times in the UK – a controversialist and, as befits the modern age, a blogger.

[...]

Perhaps curiously for a man of the right Goldberg’s polemical technique tends towards what is sometimes known as the ‘Stalinist amalgam’. That is to say that if A is somehow associated with B and B, whether known to A or not is associated with C then A and C must be closely linked. This is a knockabout style of argument that has little room for the nuance that is or should be the hallmark of much of the best history.

[...]

As much to the point (because Goldberg denies that fascism has any specific meaning) is his failure to focus on the history of US fascism around the Ku Klux Klan or to grapple at all with the holocaust. Of course it is possible to find atrocities where many ended up dead whether one looks historically at the record of some colonial regimes, the Russian Gulag or Year Zero in Cambodia or at more contemporary examples. However the industrial scale of murder in the concentration camps remains, fortunately, unique. The fact that Goldberg does not take this issue as seriously as it merits has received a serious rebuke from the New York Times reviewer.

can you tell what jay has been reading lately? 'stalinist propaganda'. 'people are too sensitive'. lol. it's all like a bad joke. 15 years on D&ST and jay's only contributions are a bowdlerization of the last 2-3 books he has read, like some ill-prepared goldfish going into an exam.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-26 01:41:10)

your a very unintelligent person. it has socialism in the name!!!

i agree, these are conscious ploys by alt-right/right-wing commentators to fadge over the history and get their own bunch of industrialists and plutocrats firmly fixed in the white house.

when you have to have two-page discussions literally rewriting the whole terminology book before you can even start making sense, it's a warning sign that the sources you're reading are probably off the deep-end and not according with the norms of the discipline (if they are even practitioners of that and not just blogger-opinionators or agitprop film makers ...)

though i have to say, dilbert, it's a bit confusing how you gleefully rub your hands from the sidelines and abet this behaviour when it's 10 people being shot by a right-wing extremist in germany, or a man being stabbed inside a mosque only last week, as 'evidence of the great people having enough' ... this is all shit from the exact same fascist playbook. 'we're not like hitler the Leftist except when we are'.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-26 05:08:45)

progressives 'figured out' in their originary texts that all struggle comes from class struggle, which is to say economic struggle.

people living in multicultural societies with secular governments would get along fine if they were emancipated from their narrowly defined class roles (so the thinking goes). this is why early communism was internationalist and appealed broadly to all workers in all countries, regardless of background. that's not to say it is monocultural or multicultural; rather, it's to point out that the entire idea of a 'culture' is primarily economic, that is, a nation contains several cultures locked in struggle against one another depending on their economic base, and that workers in all countries have more in common than divide them according to skin colour or national cuisine or whatever.

no massive income inequality, no massive opportunity inequality, no entrenched privilege or squabbling over artificially limited resources -- then no racial or ethnic tension (so the thinking goes). in this it is obviously massively utopian, not to say fucking messianic.

it's not like you're presenting a view that left thinkers have never contemplated. the Left was ideologically formed and theorised at a time of immense national tension and conflict, ethnicities and 'peoples' pitched against one another. the late-19th century was the era of pseudo-scientific, neo-darwinian politics, where international conflicts were waged in terms of 'races' making claim to their 'racial homelands' and conquering naturally 'inferior' civilisations. the Left has already read these scenarios before. the point is that they are historical materialists, and view everything as having an ultimately explicable materialist cause, viz. economic inequality or some such.

you're too much of a racial essentialist to really get it. but the idea is that if everyone has a fair share of the national wealth, a fair share of fulfilling labour/work, and a fair and engaging role to play in a society, then there won't be any violence. the causes of tension are materially constructed, and can be deconstructed. you're too lost constructing racial hierarchies of intelligence, or measuring black people's skulls, or whatever.

over the last 100 years the left/progressives have diversified, post-marxified, etc, into many different viewpoints. not all of them are so openly abolitionist of the nation model, which was more befitting the aims of the early revolutionary era. now you have sensible social democrats of the left, your bernies and your corbyns, who are quite happy discussing things like questions of what makes a nation/a citizen, immigration figures, etc.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-26 06:01:05)

well, that raises the real nub of the matter, which is that it's pointless to ascribe 'multiculturalism' to progressives, anyway. the entire multicultural project as it was conceived and launched in europe, and to a lesser extent the US/australia/etc, was an echt-liberal project. it was all done in the name of relaxing the movement of labour for market-based reasons. whilst it's true to say the left have historically been internationalist, it's far from true to say that they've been interested in wiping out native workforces by inviting in cheap 'brethren' from abroad. this is market logic at work, including the introduction of rampant competition, not socialism.

the traditional right and the traditional left have both been broadly critical of multiculturalism, though for different reasons. plenty of letftists have critiqued its particularism (as opposed to the original spirit of universalism) as well as the tit-for-tat identitarian exchanges, precisely because they obfuscate and blur over the economic underpinnings of inequality. the left is just as critical of radical feminists and gay rights etc. in this perspective. hence why 2 parodic figureheads of each camp, such as jordan peterson and slavoj zizek, actually broadly agreed on lots of things.

it's the liberals who created the current mess. 'new labour' was not a left-wing project. it was a centrist rebranding.

Last edited by uziq (2020-02-26 09:30:49)