I think both are good, Ur-Fascism is a larger read, when Yonatan also gives a good summary, and a more - this is a root thing, and it expands out like this.
People also seem to think almost like actual WWII nazis were some kind of unimaginable monsters that invaded humanity and made it commit unforgivable atrocities. Especially pop-culture likes to portray them as aliens on moon or time-traveling kung-fu masters, which is great way to ridicule them, but has a side effect of making them seem like an almost imaginary threat from outside. In reality, they were just humans, guided with human instincts, emotions and desires, who cared about their friends and families just like anyone else, and who gained political support on many of the same tactics that are in use also today.
With right conditioning, you and your friends are also capable of becoming nazi-like. If you don't realize that, you may end up surprised one day.
You elided a sentence right before: "Punching Nazis is a minor control mechanism: it silences the danger without amplifying its speech."
...which legitimizes the use of violence against "Nazi's" for whatever value you assign to that. Your quoted fragment just disclaims the effectiveness, while the article still clearly supports the idea.
I got the complete opposite from the article. The very next sentence is:
> Historically, there has been exactly one solution for Nazis. It did not come cheap.
I read that as “punching Nazis isn’t enough on its own, you must kill them until they can no longer act effectively against you, then outlaw their ideology.”
> There are a few other articles of Nazi belief: for example, that acting ("the will") is better than thinking (a sign of weaker races).
Perhaps this explains the otherwise strange title of the film "Triumph of the Will".
Interesting info here, if these points are true. However, initiating political violence by punching people seems counterproductive. Punching is an act carried out at an individual level, so unless you need to engage in self-defense against a specific individual who is actively physically attacking you, you're the aggressor.
I don't know if the statement in the article is true. The belief wasn't that acting is better than thinking but that "will" is better than hope, that they would win in their struggle for world domination because they were more determined. Turns out, others were more determined than they were.
This is typical of Americans' understanding of the events leading up to the Second World War. It seems that a lot of the wartime propaganda still holds sway, reducing many to view this part of history as having an almost cartoon-like simplicity.
For example, what Zunger labels point 05.17 "[When the Nazis came to power in Germany], They held angry public rallies which often included violence." This is true. But there's a lie of omission here. These sorts of intense street demonstrations were incredibly common in Weimar Germany (and before that, even), with a lot of street clashing between left-wind and right-wing groups, including paramilitaries. These didn't begin when the Nazis came to power and are not indicative of Nazism per se. Filtering one's view of history through that bias misses many important points that one could apply to the world today.
Nazism was an ideology tied to its particular time and place in history. Redefining it to mean "socialism for members of the nation. And they decide who's in and who's out." is wrongheaded. This definition would seem to apply to any modern nation with social welfare programs and citizenship requirements tied to nationality like Israel or the PRC. Are these countries practicing Nazism or is this definition wrong?
There are some important lessons to learn from that period though. For example: power vacuums get filled quickly. Governments that are derelict in their duty to keep order get challenged by upstart "governments." It's right to ask if one's government is turning a blind eye to "angry public rallies which often included violence" and get worried if that's happening. Sadly I think this has been happening in the USA.
We have literal, open and proud Sodomists, who drink gallons of piss, text their 100 butt-buddies monkeypox pics, and drive global viral pandemics. The concern is warranted.
Nazism can't be forklifted into 2020s USA, _even if_ someone texts his mom Hitler pics. That guy is LARPing, like many do, and killed and injured people in the process. It's awful that this happened but it's still not proof that Nazism is not he cusp of emerging in the US. There are others who are convinced the US is on the brink of a Leninist coup. They are also wrong, since that too can't just be forklifted to another place and era.
It's a strange thing about today: many people want it to be some other time and place and try hard to pretend that it is. It's kind of understandable that much of this centers on WW2, given that a lot of the patriotic mythos in the US comes from that time. Maybe because it's the last time the USA won a major war and got to feel heroic, write history, etc.
The article doesn't talk about communism because it doesn't have to. It isn't talking about how it happened historically, it is talking about it's ideology, which is independent of its history.
(4) Nazism conceives of the world as a struggle between races.
(5) That's not "race" in the 20c US "black/ white" sense; Jews, Slavs, Britons, and so on are all "races," too.
(6) And Nazis believe that races have certain characteristics, which are passed on through the blood; and that they are bound to some land.
(7) There are a few other articles of Nazi belief: for example, that acting ("the will") is better than thinking (a sign of weaker races).
(8) And that the strength of a race is most strongly exemplified through the untrammeled Will of its leaders.
It doesn't need to talk about communism because it is independent of it.
>You can't have historical discussions of Fascism/National Socialism without first discussing Communism.
This is the most baffling whataboutism topic to me (because of how common it is, and how obviously fallacious it is). There are, of course, plenty of cases where you can reasonably have a conversation about fascism or communism without the prerequisite of examining its relationship to the other. You may criticize people for omitting such context in cases where its absence is conspicuous, and you probably should, since I think that's the more realistic goal people who put forward this provocative fallacy are usually trying to get to.
Nothing you mentioned has anything to do with communism AS AN IDEOLOGY, though. So why discuss it? It could have been any group based on the logic of your comment.
Yonatan rightly categorizes Nazism as an ideology centered around race. Unfortunately, he then veers off to finger-pointing modern day political discourse as a means to justify "punching Nazis". My previous comment was aimed at the crowd that thinks " punching Nazis" is a zero-sum game of villain and hero. It has more nuance, and should be understood in a previous historical context.
Yonatan, Yonatan. He's the world's most effective Nazi recruiter. I wish he'd stop.
Here, and elsewhere, he openly calls for violence against "Nazis". That's a label he has habitually misapplied to a variety of people who explicitly denounce any violence (clearly, in contrast to Yonatan) and dehumanization (clearly, in contrast to Yonatan).
What a beautiful combination!
1. By abusing the term "Nazi" to broadly apply to people who are not, he creates a group of people sympathetic toward other folks who are called Nazis AND antagonistic towards people who sling the term
2. By openly calling for violence (why is he allowed to do this?), he creates a sense of urgency and panic in those people: "We MUST band together to stop these deranged antifascists before they have the chance to give us irreversible brain damage for existing in public. Who exactly are they?"
Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 1978) is an American neo-Nazi, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and white supremacist.
Hmm...
(...) Spencer has advocated for the enslavement of Haitians by Whites and the ethnic cleansing of racial minorities from the United States, additionally expressing admiration for the political tactics of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell. He was a featured speaker at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, among other neo-Nazi rallies that Spencer has headlined.
You're posting an article which is about Richard Spencer being a white supremacist, and which explicitly calls him such in the article's byline, and not even defending him with a "full statement" but a description of an unsourced quote within a paragraph describing his attempts to soften the image of his white supremacist ideology to make it more palatable to the public.
Meanwhile the source for the claim about slavery appears to contain something closer to a full statement, from his own podcast:
On his Altright.com podcast in February, Spencer lamented that the United States military never engages in war “for the right reasons,” which he said are when “you want to dominate someone, you want to take their territory, you want to take their women.” And if those reasons don’t suffice, Spencer said, he believes it is acceptable to go to war simply for “vainglory.”
When one of his guests began to complain that the United States Navy sent ships to provide humanitarian aid to Haitians after a hurricane devastated the country last year, Spencer had another idea for what the military should have done.
“Exactly, no. You should go enslave them. That would actually be a proper war aim,” Spencer said, before apologizing for “really going nuts” and then retracting that apology because “you need to go nuts in order to prove a point.”
Spencer said he hoped white people in America get so frustrated with the military’s humanitarian efforts that they “flip over into this domineering type, and I obviously hope that happens.”
“This is the kind of thing that’s truly traditional and historical. You display your power. Phallic symbols in the center of the capital city. That’s what it’s all fucking about,” Spencer said.
I'm not about to get into a quote for quote debate with a green account trying to defend the integrity of a neo-nazi on the internet, though. So let's just split the difference and say he only sometimes supports slavery under certain circumstances, and in certain company.
> You're posting an article which is about Richard Spencer being a white supremacist, and which explicitly calls him such in the article's byline
Yes. I figured you'd trust an article written by someone who largely agrees with you more than an article written by someone who largely does not.
I will find and listen to the podcast. I suspect what I'll find is what can be read between the lines of the "Right Wing Watch" content you copied and pasted into your comment: It's better to be respected than dominated, and it's better to fight war for your own benefit than for someone else's benefit
Am I a Nazi for "defending the integrity of a neo-nazi on the internet"? Should it be legal to assault me and give me a concussion?
https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list...