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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/06/18 in Posts

  1. I'm not sure who you're talking about, but unless you are accusing me of turning a blind eye to some atrocity (and I can't imagine you are), I don't see how this is relevant to the topic at hand: the American far right. I've been to Germany, met a lot of people, and, as far as I've seen, Germans are extremely busy people, who occupy themselves with pretty much every activity imaginable (from extremely productive, scrupulous, hard work in the daytime to some of the most libertine expressions of sexuality I've ever seen, at night). Except for one: wallowing in shame. Haven't seen anyone do that. So I find it hard to accept that Germany's defining characteristics are self-denigration or any kind of wallowing. I also haven't come across any expressions of pride over that period of German history (and they really shouldn't be proud of it), but there was zero wallowing. To me, they appeared to have moved on from it, and are now occupying their time with entirely unrelated things. To the extent the people I met had some interest in politics, it was in the economy, and the various issues of the day, not anything to do with Nazi rule. There are of course activists on the far left and the far right who scream and shout their talking points all day, but every country has those. People like that don't define Germany any more than they define any other country. They're irrelevant extremists no one outside their little circle takes seriously.
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  2. I agree with the fact that the American "alt right", and even the people who openly call themselves Nazis or white supremacists, are a joke. Immature idiots playing around, pretending to be big bad Nazis. They don't really mean what that entails, and would crap their pants the second they were asked to actually back up their pretend beliefs with action. But that's because the US is a prosperous, peaceful country with an effective judiciary that upholds property rights, free speech and religious freedom. Those aren't conditions a far right ideology would thrive in. Americans have it way too good to fully embrace an ideology that requires absolute submission to the state, and demands that individuals literally sacrifice their lives and their souls, in its service. Which is why it doesn't make sense to judge how dangerous the far right potentially is based on their current level of support. What makes far more sense is to judge the potential danger based on what happened in the past, when conditions became more accommodating to a strongman promoting this brand of fanatical, extreme altruism. What happened is exactly what the Nazi ideology means: millions of citizens of civilized, culturally rich nations willing to happily die and commit moral atrocities of the highest order in the service of the state, and do so with no regard to any of the values, decency or rationality that was integral to the culture of these nations for hundreds (or, in the case of Japan, over a thousand) years through their amazing, rich, benevolent history.
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