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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 22, 2019 11:49:06 GMT
This ATLANTIC MONTHLY article is actually bang on the button about how the trolling activities of alt-rightists resemble the actual Nazis, who revelled in the power of the lie and of violence as assertion of superiority over the untermenschen who believe in rational discourse rather than self-assertion through naked power. This is why Ven. Fritz Gerlich summed up Hitler's evil (before the Nazis murdered him in Dachau) by calling him an oathbreaker, and it is this feature which I find most repulsive when I read holocaust denial writings (as I do occasionally for the purpose of intellectual exercise). Once you get their wavelength and come to terms with their high-and-mighty moral tone over the 'persecution' of the poor peaceful nazis, you can see that they are gloating over the prospect of deceiving people with their lies and perhaps causing pain to some stray Jew or other decent person. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/mosque-shooter-troll-like-original-nazis/585415/I must say (despite my resolution to drop this thread) that I think that's a rather poor article. A handful of quotations from observers is used to build a case that the Nazis used "weaponized insincerity". What always strikes me with regard to both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks is how open they were about their intentions and their contempt for democracy or procedure. This is why I think fears of "sleep-walking" into fascism or totalitarianism are silly. In fact, political correctness reminds me of both Nazis and Bolshevism, and other totalitarian doctrines, in that it has a "Year Zero" attitude just like them. Claims which were once considered bizarre, such as that a woman can be anatomically male, are treated as sacrosanct, while things that were once considered trivial, such as ethnic jokes, become taboo. When you have a situation where comments or images or jokes that were perfectly acceptable ten years ago become unthinkable, you are dealing with a revolutionary and subversive doctrine such as Nazism or Bolshevism. Humour, tolerance and common sense are always the enemy of all totalitarians. There is also the element of arbitrariness-- just as anyone could fall victim to a show-trial in Stalinist Russia, anyone could tweet or say something ill-advised which will destroy their career or lives today. There is no internal logic-- feminists who were once impeccably right-on become enemies of the people when they won't accept transexualism. Here is an example of a lack of common sense in the above article: "Both race itself and whiteness by extension are biological fictions made real only by society’s embrace of both concepts; the pseudoscience concocted to justify such definitions changes with political necessity. The shooter’s definition of who counts as white would not have applied 100 years ago, but white supremacy is a nostalgic ideology, one that looks at the past not for wisdom or knowledge, but for fairy tales of pristine white societies that never existed." Can anyone believe such nonsense? "Pristine white societies that never existed" overlooks that, yes, most Western societies were overwhelmingly white until recently-- not that I care about that, but for what it's worth. Similarly, the idea that whiteness is a biological fiction is just ludicrous-- the sort of thing someone can only say when they feel safe contradiction is taboo. Again, I don't care about race myself, but this is just patent nonsense. And in fact everybody (especially leftists) uses the term "white" all the time, in a perfectly comprehensible way which leaves nobody baffled. Just as the smallest child can look at anyone and know, in the vast majority of cases, whether they are male or female straight away.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 1, 2019 21:47:01 GMT
The Nazis were open about their intentions in some contexts, not in others - remember Goebbels explicitly commended the Big Lie technique of propaganda. It is indeed shocking to read MEIN KAMPF and see how much of it prefigures the nazis' crimes - but part of their power derived from the same factor as the anarchists in THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY (you will recall that they planned bombings and assassinations around a table in a public place, speaking at the top of their voices, so everyone thought they must be practical jokers because real revolutionaries wouldn't possibly behave like this). At the same time, while they actually publicised some of their crimes to spread fear en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre they concealed others: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incidentMost notably, they did not proclaim the genocide of the Jews to the world, but announced it to select "honour groups" with the aim of binding them together by shared publicity complicity. Part of the point of both Nazi and Bolshevik propaganda was not only to fool the naive and arrogant (e.g. Shaw and the Webbs' denial of the Ukrainian famine on the basis of carefully-conducted tours) but to spread complicity by getting people to deny, even to themselves,what they knew at some level to be true (cf Orwellian Doublethink). The point about the article's reference to "a white race that never existed" is twofold: (1) In the American context, there has been a black population in the US since the C17 (not to mention the Native Americans and the Latinos, the latter not being regarded as "white" by the racists under discussion). It is not really possible to understand the American experience without including them as participants/agents. (2) The "scientific" racist writers of the early C20 to whom some people calling themselves alt-right appeal, took the view that certain ethnic groups which would now be described simply as "white" (e.g Slavs and Mediterranean peoples) were inferior to the "Nordics" of northern Europe: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-nationalism/583258/
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Post by hibernicus on May 16, 2019 22:17:18 GMT
Jonathan van Maren links to the story of a US conservative movement activist who got sucked into the alt-right milieu and is now left picking up the pieces after becoming disillusioned: thebridgehead.ca/2019/05/13/katie-mchughs-story-exposes-the-anti-christian-underbelly-of-the-alt-right-movement/#commentsA few points - (1) The story gives a sense of how the mainstream conservative movement in the US has developed a mechanism of self-recruitment, how conformism feeds into this, and how some of its products react by being attracted to the dark side. (2)It also gives a sense of how self-consciously intelligent nerds can be attracted to the idea that they are an intellectual elite oppressed by mindlessly spawning zombies. The element of WASP anglophile snobbery which has been endemic to US conservatism since the late C19 also plays a part here - part of the attraction of eugenics for late C19 and early C20 WASPs was the idea that they were a select few being outbred by a formless tide of Jews, Papist Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans etc (see HP Lovecraft and late WB Yeats passim). (3) And part of the attraction of the milieu is awareness that openly identifying with the far-right is career death, so that they are bound together by the sense that they are a persecuted legion of the damned (with the occasional twinge, as when Ms McHugh's lover occasionally advised her "Get out while you can - it's too late for me").
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 9, 2020 22:50:05 GMT
A review/summary of a new book on the attraction which the form of gnostic occultism known as "traditionalism" (a la Julius Evola or Rene Guenon) has for many contemporary far-rightists. One of the most dangerous features of this mindset is the way in which it tries to colonise trad Catholicism, and other religions such as Orthodoxy, by paying outward lipservice and retaining externals while replacing the substance of the Faith with its own prideful delusions. Beware of geeks bearing gifts. unherd.com/2020/04/the-mysticism-of-the-far-right/
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jun 26, 2021 14:46:14 GMT
I've been watching the show Designated Survivor which features Kiefer Sutherland as the only survivor of an assault on the Houses of Congress during the State of the Union address, making him the new President. It's a good show, I recommend it.
At one point it features a right-wing terror organization called Pax Americana, which is described as Alt Right. What's remarkable is that you never get to hear the beliefs of Pax Americana, other than a reference to the family being the cornerstone of society.
As I've said on this thread, I'm not Alt Right, but it's interesting how the term is being used as an umbrella term for any politically incorrect viewpoint. If Trump can be regularly described as a white supremacist, what do any of these terms mean?
I honestly think many voices on the right are being silenced in our society, not because they are hateful and extreme, but so people can't hear how reasonable and far from hateful they are
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 6, 2021 21:55:04 GMT
Oh, I agree that many legitimate views are being falsely smeared as fascist. All the more reason to analyse, understand and denounce genuine far-rightists and racists because it's the correct thing to do. The idea BTW is not to ingratiate ourselves with the darkside, it's primarily to educate and confirm our own people in the faith, and secondarily to appeal to such neutrals as we can reach. One of my favourite novels is James Hogg's MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER, which is about a Calvinist who becomes so consumed with the idea that he is one of God's anointed and beset by the foes of the godly (the novel makes it clear that said foes do in fact exist though they are less dangerous than the protagonist thinks) that the Devil is able to tempt him into committing all sorts of crimes in the name of righteousness. Calvinism lends itself to this sort of mindset for many reasons, but it's not the only political or religious faith that is susceptible to it; I have encountered fundamentalist Marxists and self-professed Catholic traditionalists who sounded uncomfortably like that protagonist. Sometimes I see a bit of him in myself.
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Post by Young Ireland on Nov 26, 2021 21:26:41 GMT
I've not been a fan of the Burkean since it got hijacked a few years ago, but I'm shocked that it is continuing to plumb new depths. Today it interviewed a Nazi apologist with no attempt to rebut his arguments. The man's claim that the Nazis were really small government types would be laughable were the subject matter not so serious - a regime that required children to join state-sponsored youth organisations, encouraged them to spy on their parents, set up affiliated groups covering every facet of German life, is the exact opposite of a small government. Note also the praise of Francis Parker Yockey - a man who dedicated his magnus opum to "the hero of the Second World War", and who held anti-semitic views to the point where he considered the Soviets preferable to the Americans (gulags and all) on those very grounds. Free speech is one thing, Nazi apologia is quite another and the sooner the Burkean is placed in the dustbin of history, the better IMHO. Link provided for information only: www.theburkean.ie/articles/2021/11/26/thomas777-an-interview-with-the-internets-cultured-thug
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 28, 2021 23:43:02 GMT
Anyone who is familiar with the terminology of Nazism and neo-nazism will recognise it all over this interview, from the interviewer as well as the subject. Quite a lot of the terms (the Nazis as "the European leadership") are straight out of IMPERIUM. He's not saying that the Nazis were small-government types; he's saying they did not abstractions such as Law or State but the embodied will of the Leader or the Elite. (This form of government is known as tyranny, which is precisely personal rule bound by no law.) His profession to be a Christian is best understood when he calls the Nazis defenders of Christian civilisation; clearly he sees Christianity as an European tribal religion. Straight out of the bottom of the sewer, and the exact opposite of Burke.
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