[PeanutCurry]

I'm obviously being a bit facetious when I say this, but are there really few things worse than nazis? I'm not expert on the subject of neo-nazis or the nazi movement, so maybe this seems more complex because of my position of ignorance. But none of the statistics seem to imply that nazis are more than simply intellectually repulsive and socially disgusting. That's not to say that nazi affiliated groups never commit crime or kill people. But by the numbers they seem like a very small blip on the crime radar compared to groups like the Sinaloa, MS-13, ISIS, Boko Haram, or the Lord's Resistance Army.

I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past. But there are actual talks about further restricting freedom of speech in America being put forth by some groups because of the attention that's being given to white supremacists and nazis right now with seemingly little attention being given to identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups actually have in the modern context.

[dang]

> I realize the significance of what the nazis accomplished in the past

Generic ideological tangents are a pox on HN to begin with, let alone when people are having flamewars about Nazis, and this is flamebait to the point of being a parody of flamebait. It has the effect of trolling whether you're intentionally trolling or not, and the effect is all we care about. Please don't post like this again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032574 and marked it off-topic.

[reitanqild]

I'm not expert on the subject of neo-nazis or the nazi movement, so maybe this seems more complex because of my position of ignorance. But none of the statistics seem to imply that nazis are more than simply intellectually repulsive and socially disgusting.

Eh. The statistics about nazism is clear: they have killed a few million people over the last 100 years.

That is more than about everyone else except maybe the various communist regimes who together are in the tens of millions range IIRC.

Almost anyone that argues Hitler was agreat guy and nazism is great and should be ruling today are also arguing for continuing to kill people.

[PeanutCurry]

I don't see how that's a particularly useful view of what the statistics reflect, especially since I clarified in the same post you quoted that I was speaking with regard to nazism in the modern context.

Further, it wasn't simply nazis in the abstract that killed those few million people, it was nazi controlled Germany. It seems dishonest to ignore that aspect of the history because you gloss over all of the political maneuvering allowed the nazi party to become the force that it was such as the Reichstag Fire Decree. On top of this you ignore the history of antisemitic racism in early 20th century Europe that allowed the nazi party to gain enough popularity to attain traction as a political party.

Your point that anyone supporting the spread of nazism is supporting the actions of the nazi party that existed in Hitler's Germany is valid. However, in America this sort of speech is not as distinctly illegal as it is in much of (all of?) Europe and so from an American perspective a discussion needs to take place about how to approach the topic because for us blanketly outlawing nazi groups because of their beliefs would erode some part of the general freedom of speech that we operate with. Whether that erosion represents the loss of anything of value is debatable, but it would none the less represent a decrease in our overall speech protections. This is where my point about evaluating and qualifying the reach and influence that groups like this actually have becomes relevant, because a rational discussion would be dependent on this sort of information.

[Akujin]

A Nazi is way more dangerous than an Al Qaeda member and yet we would have zero problem taking down a terrorist website because it can radicalize people.

Radicalization of people is quite literally spread like a disease. The internet has allowed this disease a means of spreading unlike ever before in the history of man.

Being tolerant of such communities that call for the violent overthrow of the government, institution of a fascist government, and the genocide of entire populations of people is like allowing a cancer to spread.

This train of thought is quite literally a cancer on humanity that needs to be chemo'd out of existence.

It's literally worse than Child Porn by many orders of magnitude.

[adnam]

Islamist terrorism is much more prevalent than far-right terrorism http://henryjacksonsociety.org/2017/03/05/islamist-terrorism...

[icebraining]

...in the UK.

[adnam]

And elsewhere

[briandear]

Communists killed multiple millions more. Yet Fidel Castro had world leaders at his funeral. The anti-Jewish progroms of the Soviet Union happened yet protesters who carry hammer and sickle flags aren’t treated with the same vile contempt as those who carry Nazi flags.

Che Guevara’s face is plastered across all manner of pop culture and products yet that face represents communism and for some reason, it’s culturally acceptable?

[jwdunne]

Communism as an ideology doesn't have racism as a cornerstone. It's just that it's very easy for people who want to do that to sieze power. Karl Marx never wrote in his manifesto that whole ethnic groups should be eliminated because white Germans are superior.

Racism and genocide is at the heart of Nazi ideology. It is steeped in the ideas of racial superiority. This is why their symbols are culturally unacceptable: they literally mean "I am better than the Jews therefore they should die".

[barsonme]

...which means (or, at least is should mean) absolutely nothing.

Both Nazi and Communist regimes have killed staggering amounts of people in horrible and brutal ways. They're both repulsive.

Like, who really cares whether your ideology has hate as a cornerstone if you still commit genocide by starvation and throw millions in gulags to die? "Oh man, I'm dead but at least they didn't hate me while they slowly starved me to death!"

[jwdunne]

I think you're mistaken. That's like saying we should attribute blame for Islamist terrorism to Islam itself. They're Muslims right? Wrong. Just because someone does horrible shit in the name of a cause does not mean the cause itself is at fault.

Communisms fault is that it's far too utopian in practice and easy for someone like Stalin to hijack the process leading to what you describe. In fact, communism as defined by Marx looks nothing like what the Soviet Union was.

I am a democratic socialist. The USSR was a socialist republic. Do I support what the Soviet union did because I'm a socialist? Hell no! Do I support Nazism because they were called the National Socialists? No and I reject any association of that nature. It's flat out wrong.

Nazism, on the other hand, is pretty clear. Non-whites are vermin and must be exterminated. It's their ideology and if you fly their flags you support that view. It isn't a case of association because a bad actor was affiliated. It matters because it is rotten to the core. It matters because of intent.

Karl Marx never intended for millions to starve in gulags. There is no mention of this and it isn't communist by definition. Genocide was Hitler's intent and it is Nazism by definition.

[PeanutCurry]

I have mixed feelings on this. In part because I want to be pedantic but also because I think there's multiple levels here. To be succinct, because that first sentence was wishy-washy, I don't think it's wrong to identify Islamic terrorism as being associated with Islam. THAT BEING SAID, it's not productive to have a public discourse from this perspective in my opinion because the general public is emotional and whimsical and so giving them a complicated debate only invites the opportunity for miscommunication and the development of hate in my opinion.

The reason I think it's important to identify terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Nazism, Christianity, etc. with their respective belief systems is because it empowers us to ask 'why'. Why are so many terrorist organizations affiliated with Islam, RECENTLY SPEAKING? Why has white supremacy become more visible in the American social space including the pre-charlottesville social space? I don't have the end all be all answer. But I think asking the question is important because whatever the true answer is, I think it's fair to say that it's probably regionally rooted, potentially linked to the economics of certain groups rooted in those regions, and because of the regional nature of many Islamic terrorist groups and white nationalist groups, I think it's fair to say that there is a cultural BUT NOT UNIVERSALLY CULTURAL element to it. I would make a similar assessment of the IRA in Ireland, Christian terrorists in Africa, and by now you can probably see where I'm going with this. Acknowledging the affiliations of these organizations and their beliefs is important because it explains THEM. It doesn't inform us about their beliefs, but it allows us to analyze why they have chosen to affiliate with those beliefs in a hopefully honest fashion.

None of that is meant to imply that Nazism should be viewed as American, or that Islamic Terrorism should be viewed as a sub-element of Islam, but acknowledging that these contexts exist with regard to SPECIFIC ORGANIZATIONS is important in my opinion because the root of these issues is often multifaceted and can only be combated, in my opinion, with a comprehensive understanding of these groups and their spiritual as well as political influences.

Edit: I will acknowledge when I edit an argument in the face of something that someone has pointed out. This post has already been heavily edited for my own satisfaction however because while modern examples of significant terrorism are obviously not evenly distributed across cultures, that does not mean that one culture is implicitly prone to terrorism and I'm trying very hard to keep my grammar and framing of arguments as neutral in that respect as possible while acknowledging the current configuration of terrorism, hate, and extremism across the globe.

[reitanqild]

I really want to upvote you but this

...which means (or, at least is should mean) absolutely nothing.

won't let me.

I think there have existed communist-like experiments that kind-of worked.

[barsonme]

That's fair, and I'll concede that point. I didn't add a disclaimer ("communism (at scale...)") because I felt it'd make my comment a bit less forceful.

[arethuza]

Were there any real pogroms in the Soviet Union - the closest that I'm aware of was the Doctors Plot but that ended pretty much as soon as Stalin died. Indeed a common accusation of White forces was that the Bolsheviks were Jews.

Edit: Note that I am not seeking to defend the Soviets here - just questioning whether antisemitism was actually part of their ideology.

[reitanqild]

Many groups had real problems in the Soviet union.

[arethuza]

Yes, not arguing with that, just that those weren't directly driven from Communist ideology as they were with the Nazis.

[njarboe]

Scott Alexander has a good article relating to this issue and Trump[1].

[1]http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...

[hsod]

"I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up."

I'm a big fan of SSC, but this thesis is not holding up very well

[Bartweiss]

I'm not sure if it holds up poorly, or if it just cuts both ways.

I mean, Nixon's FBI tried to blackmail civil rights leaders and drive them to suicide. Strom Thurmond was in the Senate until 2002. The Klan endorsed Reagan, regardless of what he said in reply.

I agree that Trump has been frighteningly slow to condemn white supremacy, and that it holds more sway now than it did a decade ago. But on any time window longer than perhaps 15 years, I think it's fair to ask whether Trump is consequentially worse than his peers. Less diplomatic and more overt, to be sure, but is he actually driving more racial violence than Nixon did? I don't think so. The bar has been set horrifyingly low for a long time.

There seems to be a large excluded middle. Arguments that Trump's actions are not racist in consequence look downright absurd, but the claim that they could only be caused by Klan-level racism and are entirely dissimilar to similar modern politicians seems more like rehabilitating other racists than condemning Trump.

[hsod]

Fifteen years is a long time. IMO the piece holds up very poorly once you acknowledge that Trump has been consequentially more racist than GOP candidates from the last fifteen years.

(I'm referring to "racism in consequence", I think speculating about his subjective inner state is pointless)

[zaroth]

That was surpringly entertaining, and perhaps even more relevant today than when it was written 9 months ago.

[ahhhhhhhhhh]

dude you're being pedantic about how bad nazis are, is this really worth it

[PeanutCurry]

In this instance I think it is because the point I was making in pushing a somewhat pedantic argument is that while what happened in Charlottesville, and arguably catalyzed the current popularity of nazi discussion, is obviously a tragedy it's also a highly emotional topic precisely because it's a tragedy.

This was why I concluded with the argument that we should at the same time be focused on identifying and quantifying the reach and influence these groups. Because in the wake of an extremely upsetting event it's important to emphasize the need for intelligent debate and evaluation or else the discourse becomes volatile and incapable of rational decision making.