General Discussion Thread - Juche 112, Week 30
His baseless assertions remind me of when he declared ResearchGate ‘alt‐right’, and when I asked for evidence all that he told me was ‘I was there a few times and saw their bad takes.’
Why the fuck would an alt‐right website of all things host a black researcher’s report on Fascist Italy’s mustard gas attacks on Ethiopians? That’s utterly mindless. It pissed me off because I wanted to tell people about a serious subject and the first comment that I got was an ‘I don’t like this source’ comment (and a poorly substantiated one at that). I thought, ‘Fuck, I guess that I can’t link to this one anymore.’
That said, I think that a permanent ban was too long for him.
This thread is titled “Block The Rich” but I misread it as “Block The Reich”.
I was going to ask you why I misread it like that, but I think that we all know why.
In January 1923, the young journalist Ernest Hemingway covered the Lausanne Conference for the Toronto Daily Star. His first encounter with Mussolini left him distinctly unimpressed. Ushered into a room along with other journalists, Hemingway found the Premier so deeply absorbed in a book that he did not bother to look up. Curious, Hemingway “tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French‐English dictionary—held upside down.” :::
\ Hmm… there is something awfully ominous about this.
Not only did Finland take part in the holocaust by exterminating the Roma living in Finland (or forcing them to fight in the nazi suicide squads), but Estonia also handed over Jews to the Gestapo.
Aside from that, officials confirmed a few years ago that the Finnish Waffen‐SS participated directly in Axis atrocities. While I personally wouldn’t classify 1940s Finland as a fascist state, I understand those who do and the politics that it adopted compel me to classify it as parafascist. An example from Finland’s Holocaust:
Before taking up positions of artistic and institutional leadership in Finland, [Arvi] Kivimaa had already been an established poet, essayist, and writer. […] The views Kivimaa absorbs into Eurooppalainen veljeskunta align with those expressed in a range of German‐language books sustained by the Finnish state—many written by academics who, like Kivimaa, resumed distinguished institutional careers after the war—identifying Finland within the rhetoric of Third Reich racial and expansionist ideologies for consumption by readers of both German and Finnish.
From Finland in World War II:
The widespread Finnish animosity towards the Russians was also more or less explicitly present in the studies on Greater Finland and the occupation of Eastern Karelia. In 1986 Heikki Luostarinen’s doctoral dissertation on the enemy image of Russians and the Soviet Union in the Finnish conservative and rightwing press during the Continuation War focused on the issue in detail and showed the deep racial hatred in the wartime media and mentality.
There is a lot more to be said about Finland, but to keep things short it is a gross oversimplification to summarise its alliance with the Third Reich as only ‘picking the lesser evil’.
Now, no offence, but I think that you’d be happier or healthier doing something else with your time than trying to reason with anticommunists, seeing as how they can just make up whatever stuff that they want while instantly throwing actual research into the trashcan. Are you sure that you don’t want to try something else? Exercising? Juggling? Reading more books? Even playing drunk lawn darts would be better.
I think that originally I found it while I was doing research on Romanian fascism. When I tried to recover it I looked on Research Gate and spotted this article, which looked similar, then I looked through the citations section and that’s how I recovered the book.
Your reply reminded me of this:
The responsibility of the authorities in Rome, Fiume and Dalmatia lies in their decision to send back the refugees, knowing full well the tragic fate awaiting the Jews who were handed over to the Croats. Italian military authorities described the Jasenovac concentration camp as follows:
[B]ehind wire-netting, filthy and in wooden barracks, were thousands of prisoners … clad in the barest minimum to hide their nudity, deprived of clothing and provisions, their conditions were utterly miserable, bestial even … hygiene was terrible … the camp was without sanitation, the sick were not cared for … The concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald are tragically famous. Individuals from these German camps affirm that compared with Jasenovac they were almost comfortable.
I could have sworn that several weeks ago I found a book on libgen or Google Books explicitly describing itself with something like ‘While not denying Soviet brutality, the author concludes that that the Red Army did a good job protecting Jews’ (maybe specifically in Moldovia or Bessarabia or something—I can’t remember). I think that the cover featured a monochrome photo over a red background.
Man, was I bonehead, because I glossed over that book when I spotted it and now I can’t find it anywhere! My thought process must have been, ‘Well, I’m sure that anticommunists will deny/trivialize/ignore the positive findings anyway, so there’s no point in reading.’ So I didn’t make note of it. Feck, now I’ll probably never find it again.
ETA: here it is!
Lel, 1939… aside from serving Eurocentrism, it’s an irresistible opportunity for antisocialists to put the Soviets and the German Fascists on the same level and make communists out to be ‘the bad guys’ again. Those are the only justifications. If I remember The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich correctly, the British government at the time implied that WWII still hadn’t begun yet (which they also said in 1931).
There are numerous proposals better than 1939 for WWII’s first year. I’d go so far as to say that 1939 is the worst candidate of the bunch. There’s a reason that the period immediately afterward is called ‘the Phoney War’.
I am sure that antisocialists won’t mind if I classify Britain, France, Fascist Italy, and the German Reich as all being allies.
They’ll understand.
I enjoyed this paper, and the author makes some good points. Nevertheless, I have to be honest and say that his needless willingness to assume good faith on part of the U.S. government gives his thesis an almost childlike sense of innocence.
Several minutes ago I asked my stepfather (a propertarian), ‘Hey, I got a funny question: did you know that Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935?’ He shook his head. I asked my mother the same thing, and she didn’t know either.
I know that it’s an odd thing to bring up, but to me it seems like a pretty basic subject of which more educated adults should at least be aware, and yet for the life of me I don’t remember seeing anybody casually mentioning it, except for one communist in a Discord server that I frequented (and even then they had little to say about it). I have a feeling that if somebody polled thousands of ordinary Westerners on the subject, the number of respondents with awareness would be heartbreakingly low.
This ultimately goes back to why I study and share research on Fascism, because it feels so backward to me that most ordinary adults—I am guessing—are probably at least vaguely aware of the concept but unaware of many major events in its history. If we want to articulately explain why fascism is not in our best interests, we damn well should be able to mention events like the reinvasion of Ethiopia.
With a few exceptions, this is effectively a simplified version of my own essays on the subject. It is a little startling to see the coincidences.
if the developers are pro-genocide, it's unlikely they will develop anti-genocide features into their product.
…what the fuck?
I have seen a few people disparage an antisemite by calling one ‘Hitler’, but at the moment I don’t particularly remember somebody calling a generic antisemite ‘Nazi’. Colloquially, ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ are more commonly used as crude synonyms for ‘control freak’. (I myself was disparaged as a ‘Nazi’ about a dozen years ago because I ordered somebody in my Doom II server to do something.)
The Jews who willingly supported German Fascism (so‐called ‘Nazism’) were undoubtedly a small minority, but I’d argue that they are still worth examining for two reasons: to understand that sometimes there are victims who side with their oppressors, and to understand why they do. Some Jews, such as Max Naumann, were so intent on assimilation that they adopted their oppressors’ prejudices. Others were, for example, extremely patriotic, and yet others saw the European fascists as useful allies to Zionism. There was a variety of reasons. On the other hand, Jews who wanted their own variant of fascism had their own reasons. The most useful English work on this is Dan Tamir’s Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922–1942.
Collaboration with the enemy is a relatively complex subject, but very serious. In Zelensky’s case, I suspect that his support for Ukrainian neofascism is driven by survival, preferential treatment, or both: also motives that some Jews had for (willingly or unwillingly) supporting European fascism.
Neofascism is closely correlated with having a petty bourgeois or (former) military background. The petite‐bourgeoisie is frequently in competition with ‘foreign’ businessowners, and Western military culture is notoriously toxic, so the transition to neofascism is the easiest to understand in those cases. If the neofascist is lower‐class, it is possible that pseudosocialist rhetoric won him over (made all the easier by anticommunist schooling, which has nothing meaningful to say about Fascism), or perhaps a neofascist clique befriended him. There are various possible reasons.
who claimed to be a “classical fascicst”
Which almost proves that he is clueless about politics. Classical fascism basically isn’t a thing anymore; the adventurer‐conqueror campaigns simply wouldn’t be practical in a world of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which could swiftly put an end to a state’s ambitious quest for more spazio vitale. Neofascists are instead likelier to promote neocolonialism, because that’s what’s ‘in’ right now.
#NAFO is a living example of […] humour, intelligence and enthusiasm.
What the fuck is she talking about?
Uuuuuuugh, “I don’t like this source” is easily one of my least favorite responses; the respondent may as well not even post since they’re ignoring the content anyway. Yes, the Wall Street Journal is puke, but nobody lies 100% of the time. That’s why you need to learn how to read critically.
There has to be some sort of course that people can take to teach them how to properly scrutinize sources and distinguish between good reporting and rumourmongering, rather than trying to take shortcuts like that.
And what’s up with all of the repetitive definitions and attempts to accuse you of being logically fallacious? It doesn’t make the replier look clever; it’s just extremely embarrassing.
This morning I spent more than four hours reading Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, mostly because I am really interested in seeing how the Armenian massacres influenced the Third Reich. I was surprised to see that anti‐Armenian sentiment was actually very common in the Twoth Reich, to the point where some popular writers described Armenians as being worse than Jews. I am very interested in seeing how much of this transferred over to the Third Reich.
On a more personal note, I really want to sleep; I feel awful. I napped for one hour yesternight and I don’t feel tired enough to stay asleep… I’ll go retry anyway
but I’ll likely end up wasting time again.ETA: I feel better.