Looking through the preview of the book, Griffin emphasizes the paradox between the desire for the new and fascist glorification of a mythical past. Toward that end, he opposes the reduction argued for by this OP.
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My understanding about Griffin, based on the AI interpretation, is that he regards nazism as providing people with emotions, where modernity caused a void of alienation.
I also regard nazism as providing people with emotions, but in essence only the feelings of doing their best, and no other emotion. The emotional void is caused by people conceiving of choosing in terms of selection of options, which cuts off emotions from decisions. And then the feelings of doing your best which are associated to the idea of selecting the best option, then compensate for these morbid emotions.
So that is actually a very similar explanation to the explanation by Griffin.
Only the intellectually lazy do that. You seldom have such a total collapse of an ideology as you had with nazism. Nazism is a dead ideology, upheld only by the tiny fringe, who basically want to be outrageous. Using the Hitler-card immediately? Perhaps beating a dead horse is more safe and easier rather than attempting to hit a wild bronco, which can kick back. And at the present many just use terms like “nazi”, “fascist” or “communist” as swearwords with little linking the present to the actual historical context and thinking.
No other emotions? Really?
How about anger and hatred against those “traitors” that perpetrated the “Dolchstoss”? How about hatred against the Jewish financiers and the Jews in general? Or instilling and justifying racism? Have you ever listened to a whole speech that Hitler gives and noticed the way he milks an emotional response from the crowd?
Nope, nazism, according to you, just provides one emotions to do your best?
That’s very strange.
(Seems that we might need the old PF’s guidelines here.)
All knowledge is necessarily embedded with subjective elements for understanding. That’s basic Kant, not some radical postmodernist approach, nor a driving motivator for the Nazi genocide.
“The lesson drawn” references what humans learned of themselves from the experience. Punishment references a response to whatever we learned, so this comment is confused.
Regardless, it’s factually incorrect to say government imposed hate speech suppression meaningfully exists in the US, although perhaps in Germany it does, but that has to do with antisemitic views having literally nearly destroyed their country not so long ago.
If private citizens don’t allow hate speech with impunity, that isn’t because of postmodernists, that’s just free speech responding to free speech, hateful or not.
The reasons for the rise and fall of Nazism needn’t be summarized into a single reason, but Jewish hatred was unquestionably historically embedded and exploited and formed a driver for the genocide.
Of course danger is associated with hate. It’s often a motive.
Pay attention to the implications of your comments. You throw in here the platitude that constructive criticism is necessary for personal advancement, but in the context of this thread, we’re speaking of literal genocide motivated by ancient embedded suspicion and hatred. Nazism was not “tough love” aimed at elevation of the Jews. It was an ideology offering a slew of evil rationalizations (including hate) for murder.
To the extent you mean to say that had the Nazis been more objective in their assessment of the threat Jews actually posed to civilization, they wouldn’t have arrived at their final solution, I suppose that might be true, but I’m really not willing to entertain the idea that genocide would morally be justified under any scanario regardless of the reason. That is,even if we could show that the Jews (or any group) failed some objective racial inferiority/superiority test, that still wouldn’t have warranted their purge.
The Holocaust was related to the belief in eugenics, which started in England and spread to the US, where it became established doctrine in spite of having been built on pseudoscience.
Americans came to their senses and ditched it primarily because of being confronted with the most horrifying version of it in Germany.
So a lesson was temporarily learned, but it’s apparently been forgotten again because the pseudoscientific framework of eugenics is back, in people like what’s his name, Tesla guy.
No, that’s not what I said at all.
Widespread accusations of hitler and nazis, not just by a few lazy people.
Nazis identified personal character as a matter of fact of racial science. Emotions are irrelevant for matters of fact. I already explained this. That you find it strange that people would have the feelings of doing their best as their primary emotional basis, is no argument.
I quoted what you said.
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My argument is that nazis identified personal character as a matter of fact of racial science, while properly personal character is identified with a chosen opinion. So my argument is that nazis rejected subjectivity fundamentally.
Griffin begs to differ. There were competing factions of designers and planners. A number of winners were futuristic:
Taken together, such facts suggest that, even if by the late 1930s Hitler had allowed the Rosenberg faction to win the cultural battle over recognizing the Aryan qualities of aesthetic modernism in painting and scyulpture,38 he deliberately allowed the Goebbels faction to win the Nazi Kulturkampf in the sphere of architecture. Despite such ‘evidence’, the historical imagination of some historians still seems unduly influenced by the traumatic impact on the sensibilities of liberal humanists of the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937. This national act of ritualized iconoclasm directed against a list of indexed artists reflected Hitler’s concession on pragmatic grounds to Rosenberg’s fanaticism about the extent of cultural cleansing necessary to purge German culture of all that was alien and dangerous to it, at least as far as painting was concerned. As a result, Goebbels’ defence of jazz and modern cinema, and his enthusiasm for Italian Futurism and the figurative expressionism of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is widely ignored because it does not fit the ‘reactionary modernist’ narrative.
Similarly, the significance of the regime’s qualified embrace of the modernist writers Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger, of the modernist musicians Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the modernist philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, still tends to be overlooked, along with the profoundly futural, utopian dynamic of so much of Nazi culture in practice.39 Accordingly, the modernism latent in the aesthetic solutions which the Third Reich improvised in defiance of Marx’s pronouncement that ‘all that is solid melts into air’,40 and so defy what Zygmunt Bauman called the ‘liquid modernity’41 of metropolitan life by erecting emblems of a German eternity hewn from solid stone seemingly defying time itself, have till recently gone widely unrecognized.
— Roger Griffin,Building the Visible Immortality of the Nation: The Centrality of ‘Rooted Modernism’ to the Third Reich’s Architectural New Order
The conditions of that “qualified” embrace involved highly nationalistic expression without necessarily signing up for the virulent anti-Semitism the “blood and soil” demanded. For instance, Jünger, did not accept the invitation to become a functionary of the Nazi party whereas Heidegger did.
Wagner is an interesting case of being extremely anti-Semitic along with shaping operas with as much emotional power as he could. A thumb in the eye for your description of “objectivity.”
Here is an essay wondering if Strauss belongs in the same circle of Hell as Wagner: Monsters of Music?: Wagner, Strauss, and The Third Reich
You seem to be confusing the inherent subjectivity and objectivity, that everyone is able to state an opinion, and everyone is able to state a fact, with acceptance at the intellectual level of the logic of fact and opinion.
At the intellectual level, nazi ideology asserts fact, objectivity, and marginalizes subjectivity. The main feature, in my opinion, is to objectify personal character with racial science. Which leads to an emotionless judgment on people’s personal character, asserted as fact. As was shown in the nazi handbook for the hitler youth.
So for you to say, Wagner’s music is very emotional, that’s besides the point. That’s not acceptance of the concept of subjectivity at the intellectual level.
My main argument is very simple, nazis marginalized subjectivity, therefore the lesson from the holocaust should be to learn the logic of fact and opinion. The nazi judgment is not essentially hateful, but essentially emotionless.
And then I have some other arguments to back up that central thesis, which arguments I won’t repeat here, but that you obviously have to take into account if you are responding to me.
You have not presented an argument as to how the subjectivity was marginalized. The ideology did not appear overnight. You have not presented any account of how this condition came about.
Your view of modernity is not supported by more than your claim. Griffin shows how it is not reducible to a particular set of opinions. The range of opinions underway at the time does not fit your view that opinions stopped existing.
The only work you have marginally referenced is a manual for Hitler Youth.
From these features, your argument appears to be a peculiar form of holocaust denial. The people who did it had no agency.
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You keep repeating this line, but as also Paine has pointed out, you haven’t presented an argument or how this came about. Or why this is so defining to nazism.
As I’ve already stated, many ideologies want to portray them to be based on scientific facts, so did the nazis talk about “racial science”. You seem to take this as a fact, something that populist ideology was crucially about, when it wasn’t.
Yep. Starting to look so as Syamsu isn’t willing to engage the Jewish hatred/racism/conspiracy theories engrained in the nazi ideology.
I don’t know what you are talking about. The objectification of personal character with racial science is the marginalization of subjectivity. I explained how this is caused by selectionist thinking, occasioned by the psychological pressure to do your best.
I presented no argument about modernism whatsoever, I only explained Griffin’s views about it
I guess you could argue somewhat, based on my thesis, innocent by reason of insanity, because the nazis have a conceptual disorder. But really my thesis argues that the responsibility for the holocaust is more widespread, because actually the vast majority marginalizes subjectivity. I don’t actually believe that marginalization of subjectivity is innocent. I think the reasonable and fair judgment about it, is that it is not innocent, and I have said so many times.
Is ridiculous, I explained how objectification of personal character is a consequence of selectionist thinking, occasioned by the psychological pressure to do your best. Can you actually read my post, come on.
I don’t think it’s meaningful to take as the lesson from the holocaust, don’t kill jews, because it sort of implies you can kill anyone else. So I only mention about identities in general.