Racism Part two

[Mister_a]

1 minute ago, fruitvilla said:

Possibly, but I suspect it is a fair bit more complicated than that. We would be advised to take a look at how the brain takes hold of ideas and implements them.

Yep for sure.

[foreveryoung]

I'm not sure why people are avoiding the real answer with complicated theories. In reality, she said the holocaust was not about racism, because she, like many people of colour, do think racism only effects them!

She was told to apologies no doubt!

[Keyblade]

31 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

I'm not sure why people are avoiding the real answer with complicated theories. In reality, she said the holocaust was not about racism, because she, like many people of colour, do think racism only effects them!

She was told to apologies no doubt!

That would be an interesting theory, if people of colour weren't also victims of the holocaust. Sounds like she's just ignorant of history.

[Panto_Villan]

49 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

That would be an interesting theory, if people of colour weren't also victims of the holocaust. Sounds like she's just ignorant of history.

Sadly she said the Holocaust was “white people on white people” so clearly she doesn’t know people of colour were among the victims.

[Keyblade]

6 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Sadly she said the Holocaust was “white people on white people” so clearly she doesn’t know people of colour were among the victims.

I was going to say that her ignorance was thinking all Jews are white, which is a weird thing for her to say considering she identifies as a Jew herself. I can only guess that she's one of those people who think the Jews were targeted for religious reasons.

[Chindie]

2 hours ago, fruitvilla said:

Well the thoughts that crossed my mind were:

• Could it have been about religion, Jews killing Christ 'n all. Not that Hitler cared about Christianity?
• Could it been about the Jews disproportionate success in society?
• Simply different habits and customs?
• Looking for a scapegoat?

One one hand we have people saying there is no such thing as race and then those same people turn around and say it is all about race? Maybe you are right it's social Darwinism gone mad? Most of the people carrying out the atrocities would have been Lutherans and Catholics not some vague religionist in the upper echelons. 

Nazism and the Jews is complicated and simple simultaneously.

A fundamental tenet of the ideology was that all peoples are defined by their race and that the races have an inherent hierarchy. At the top were Aryans, and Jews and Slavic people were at the bottom viewed as mongrel, subhuman races who were essentially barely more than animals. 

That aligned with their nationalist ideology whereby they believed that Jews were a harmful element to any nation's success, most notably believing that Germany's failure in the First World War was in part due to Jews 'stabbing Germany in the back'. This line of thinking ties into historic anti-Semitism - blood libel, Jesus guilt, etc etc - which probably all boils down to Othering ultimately.

That in turn meant that the Nazis simultaneously felt that the Jews were a cancer to the German nation, and were also a threat to the Aryan races because they could infect the racial purity of the nation and undermine the inherent racial advantages of the Ubermensch... As a result they felt the very future of the worthy peoples of the world was at stake and that's all you need to start an industrial murder system of every undesirable you can find...

[HanoiVillan]

An aspect that we tend to overlook is that antisemitism was rife throughout Europe for as long as there were Jewish communities; it was not some completely alien imposition dreamed up by the Nazi party. Violent, bloody pogroms against Jewish communities happened across the continent with a fair degree of regularity. The difference in national socialist ideology was the strength of feeling they brought to bear, the sustained consistency of their focus on race-based hatred, and the organisational/administrative capacity they created and dedicated to inflicting that violence (ie that the violence now came primarily from the state, not the mob).

[Chindie]

Something that gets overlooked in the Nazi genocide stakes is they did not not just send Jews to the camps and ovens. Jews were the biggest single group and the actions were absolutely devastating to the Jewish population (there wasn't, and never has been, that many Jewish people, and the Nazis killed 6 million of a small number...), but they weren't alone. Anyone the Nazis viewed as undesirable went to the camps - be it their race (or 'race', given Nazi ideology on that was pure nonsense), their beliefs, their orientation, their health... They killed gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, political 'opponents', etc etc. They wanted to exterminate anything they felt was a threat to the purity and power of the German nation.

[Wainy316]

31 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Something that gets overlooked in the Nazi genocide stakes is they did not not just send Jews to the camps and ovens. Jews were the biggest single group and the actions were absolutely devastating to the Jewish population (there wasn't, and never has been, that many Jewish people, and the Nazis killed 6 million of a small number...), but they weren't alone. Anyone the Nazis viewed as undesirable went to the camps - be it their race (or 'race', given Nazi ideology on that was pure nonsense), their beliefs, their orientation, their health... They killed gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, political 'opponents', etc etc. They wanted to exterminate anything they felt was a threat to the purity and power of the German nation.

Yep and I'm sure a 'cleansing' of Africa would have been next in the pipeline should they have won the war and managed to drain the Mediterranean.  

[PussEKatt]

The German people were actually "trained"to hate Jews.In a text book for kids around 9/10 yesrs old would be a math problem similar to this.

"If you have 10 Jews and you kill 3,how many do you have left.(taken from "The twins of Auschwitz"book,also Hitler made radios extremly cheap and virtually ordered everyone to buy one.Goebeles then filled everyons head with Nazi propagander.Long before the war started the Nazzies had a special hospital where they got rid of kids/people that were not the full quid or had disabilities. 

Edited February 3, 2022 by PussEKatt

[Mister_a]

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland: Amazon.co.uk: Browning, Christopher R: 9780141000428: Books

This is a good read for those interested in what went on in Nazi Germany, especially when viewed through a human lens.
A reserve battalion ordered to exterminate Jews that consisted of mainly civilians, and the interviews with them about what went on and who did what and why.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning (goodreads.com)

'Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. '

[Chindie]

Just now, Wainy316 said:

Yep and I'm sure a 'cleansing' of Africa would have been next in the pipeline should they have won the war and managed to drain the Mediterranean.  

Mentioning Africa, there's evidence to suggest that they were so concerned about racial purity that when they conquered French colonies in Africa they sent white POWs back to occupied Europe and left black troops in Africa, as if even introducing non-Aryan prisoners to Europe was a threat to their purity.

They even got so deep in the racial ideology stuff they divided up Britain by percentages of Aryan/non-Aryan white ancestry. They believed the British upper class was more truly Aryan, and the rest of us were all lower races that just about passed as human, like the entire country came from Small Heath.

[MakemineVanilla]

5 hours ago, Mister_a said:

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland: Amazon.co.uk: Browning, Christopher R: 9780141000428: Books

This is a good read for those interested in what went on in Nazi Germany, especially when viewed through a human lens.
A reserve battalion ordered to exterminate Jews that consisted of mainly civilians, and the interviews with them about what went on and who did what and why.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning (goodreads.com)

'Browning argues that most of the men of  RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. '

Jordan Peterson recommended that book, and said it should remind people that had they been ordinary Germans, back in the 1930s, they would have just as likely been Nazis, as most Germans turned out to be.

I think that reading about the Nazis and generally studying the subject of Germany in that era, does offer insights into how the whole disaster happened.

Although Alan Bullock's Hitler book was the standard work for decades, I think Kershaw's two volumes offer more depth.

Kershaw's book, The End: Hitler's Germany, which details the plight of German in 1945, just reveals the madness of ordinary Germans, as incomprehensible.

[bickster]

3 hours ago, MakemineVanilla said:

they would have just as likely been Nazis, as most Germans turned out to be

Not remotely true iirc the maximum party membership reached was 8 million and that was with anyone in a good number of professions having to join to actually get a job (Doctors / Judges / Scientists / Engineers etc). That was never more than 10% of the population Germany

[WhatAboutTheFinish]

8 hours ago, bickster said:

Not remotely true iirc the maximum party membership reached was 8 million and that was with anyone in a good number of professions having to join to actually get a job (Doctors / Judges / Scientists / Engineers etc). That was never more than 10% of the population Germany

Not convinced by this reckoning. Given that estimates of the size of the german army during the war tops 13 million, these figures would indicate that at least 5 million people were fighting for the Nazi’s but not party members. Does this make them Nazi’s or not?

[magnkarl]

3 minutes ago, WhatAboutTheFinish said:

Not convinced by this reckoning. Given that estimates of the size of the german army during the war tops 13 million, these figures would indicate that at least 5 million people were fighting for the Nazi’s but not party members. Does this make them Nazi’s or not?

Being part of the Wehrmacht isn't the same as being a rabid Nazi. For this reason alone SS was deployed to go in after the Wehrmacht to get rid of Jews, Roma, Jehovas Witnesses etc. Many high ranking generals in the Wehrmacht were actually quite against the racial policy and would not contribute to the slaughter. The Wehrmacht kep Hitler's state growing, hence he didn't penalise them until the end (see Rommel and Paulus as two examples). The push to try to get rid of Hitler came from the Wehrmacht, with many high ranking officers seeing Hitler as a rabid madman. You also have to take into account that Germany had conscription, so many non-nazies were forced to serve, or else be sent to camps\killed.

[Panto_Villan]

9 hours ago, bickster said:

Not remotely true iirc the maximum party membership reached was 8 million and that was with anyone in a good number of professions having to join to actually get a job (Doctors / Judges / Scientists / Engineers etc). That was never more than 10% of the population Germany

The fact they weren’t card-carrying members of the party doesn’t mean they aren’t supporters though (as the size of modern political parties relative to their voter bases shows).

In a wholly free and fair election 37% of Germans (13.7m of them) voted for the Nazis. And 17m of them voted for the Nazis a couple of months after they seized power.

There were probably more Nazis that the membership figures suggest.

[MakemineVanilla]

10 hours ago, bickster said:

Not remotely true iirc the maximum party membership reached was 8 million and that was with anyone in a good number of professions having to join to actually get a job (Doctors / Judges / Scientists / Engineers etc). That was never more than 10% of the population Germany

For accuracy, only counting actual party members as Nazis, is probably the way to go, but the casual usage on VT forums seems to suggest that generally a broader definition is found acceptable, and is rarely challenged.

Mea culpa!

Edited February 4, 2022 by MakemineVanilla

[Xann]

Farage & Nazi Propaganda.

[lapal_fan]

22 hours ago, Chindie said:

Mentioning Africa, there's evidence to suggest that they were so concerned about racial purity that when they conquered French colonies in Africa they sent white POWs back to occupied Europe and left black troops in Africa, as if even introducing non-Aryan prisoners to Europe was a threat to their purity.

They even got so deep in the racial ideology stuff they divided up Britain by percentages of Aryan/non-Aryan white ancestry. They believed the British upper class was more truly Aryan, and the rest of us were all lower races that just about passed as human, like the entire country came from Small Heath.

In which case you can kinda underst..