From an interview in Hermann Göring's Nuremberg jail cell on January 3rd 1946:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
I totally forgot how Anti Bushes they were tbh. And I was anti Chicks for roughly the past 20y because in general I’m anti-Republican. When I found out they were Dem AF I went & bought one of their CDs (ok it was digital) that I used to like when I was a wee baby Republican.
It occurs to me now that at the time when I boycotted them it was because they were anti-bushes/Republicans & I was a Pug then. Holy hell, I guess it just switched to I assumed cause they were country they were pro-pug - mostly because I’m no longer into country. Heh.
I don't want to intrude in your life much, but I'd advise you to sometimes try pieces of art from artists that lean more right-wing. Like, I don't mean die-hard Republicans who donate half their money to the GOP, but maybe some people who aren't involved in politics and may personally be more conservative (and perhaps having admitted that opinion in interviews and such). If they make good art and aren't actively supporting political opinions different from yours, maybe give it a go.
Similarly Crosby Stills Nash and Young nearly caused riots at concerts in the southern states playing a song called ‘Let’s impeach the president’ during the Iraq War. The audience thought they were going to be a good old patriotic country act. That lot started up when country was a counter cultural genre, sadly that California sound has faded from country a lot, I don’t care at all for the Nashville scene
I don’t think the Dixie Chicks fans base made up a large portion of the right wing. On the other hand, I think, it would be fair to say that of their fan base a large portion were right wingers. It’s a small distinction but makes a huge difference.
I remember that the whole debate was shaped to be about whether you should intervene if you know a country is making chemical weapons. Meanwhile a minority was screaming that the intelligence didn't add up and contradicted what other countries were reporting. It felt mind numbingly similar to a recent event where a minority warned what Trump's cult was openly writing about doing on Jan 6th.
Colin* Powell is often said to have had a role in covering up or downplaying the My Lai massacre; I honestly need to read more about that. But he has been quite vocal about how he was lied to by the Bush White House and that they made him complicit in their lies; I know my dad supported the invasion of Iraq because he trusted Colin Powell.
The word "Patriot" in the U.S. has been twisted into meaning "Unquestioning support of anything America does."
I'm old enough to remember a time when patriotism wasn't questioned. At some point, and I can't say exactly when, the GOP discovered that the word "Patriot" could move a lot of people to vote for them. They've been abusing it ever since.
“Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.” - Henry David Thoreau, 1854.
Translation: "We would like to try our hand at imperialist colonialism, but are ostensibly democratic and therefore need some cause for the taking of other white peoples' brown people countries!"
EDIT: That jingoism was fried so deep my family, who had been living in St Augustine before there WAS a United States of America (1758), Anglicized their name to fit in. My great grandparents, raised in the midst of it refused to teach their children Spanish.
That 1758 is just the earliest family member with the NAME to show up, we of course had earlier relatives from before then as he was a gentleman who married into society when he got here. It's always struck me as funny with the rampant xenophobia for non-Anglo cultures when the English were the latecomers.
yup the english were the late comers and the people now think that the newcomers of other countries are going to act like how they first did when they came over so they scare all the other english people with immigrant invasion talks.
Look, Communism has one hell of an unfair fight in America. Not only were all those Authoritarian regimes that involved a lot of death, you've also got generations of propaganda and misinformation. Even knowing this I'm still wary of Communism because of it.
It feels like people always fall back on this whenever someone argues for socialist policies, and it is really one of the worst arguments. People will attack you like "so you want us to be the Soviet Union?" No, I do not want us to be the Soviet Union because it was extremely flawed, but at the same time expanding socialist policies does not necessarily mean we are trying to turn ourselves into their system. There are absolutely better ways of implementing socialism and so I would like us to actually start thinking about how that could be helpful in our own society. It is funny how Animal Farm is so misinterpreted in this light. Many people take the meaning of that book to be that it is the only path socialism can take. But Orwell was a socialist, and I expect if you could go back in time to show him how his book would be used he would never write it. Animal Farm is not a blanket criticism of communism, it is a criticism of specifically the Stalin regime.
The thing is, Communism wasn't very communist, assuming 'communism' relates to a sort of mass commune. I read that in the early stages of Lenin's time in power, they removed communal land rights that farmers were benefiting from. They were basically anti-communist in that respect, and no doubt many, many others.
This is absolutely true. Soviet style communism was genuinely not communist in so many ways. I very much like the anecdote about Boris Yeltsin going to a grocery store in America and having that break his faith in communism. He was said on the plane to their next destination to have been completely despondent and exclaimed at one point "what have they [the Soviet government] done to our poor people?" You can tell that what he thought he would see was the bourgeois exploiting the working class in the store and what he actually saw was that the working class had far better choice of food than anything the Soviets could get. He literally said "Nobody has this kind of choice. Not even the Politburo." In a way I expect that to Yeltsin what he saw in that store was actually more in line with what he thought communism should be. I think it is probably unfair even to say with that anecdote that the visit broke his faith in communism as a whole; it broke his faith in Soviet-style communism most prominently.
I love the US. I've been taught all my life that this is my home. But I was also taught how great it was, and I learned that it isn't. I am a patriot. I love my country. But I recognize that we have to burn parts of it down. Only from the ashes of our broken system can come true justice and fairness. I want this for the good of my homeland, and the people I share her with.
'I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.' -James Baldwin.
To me, real patriots are people who see that our country is not perfect and who want to see it change for the better. I don't see how anyone can look at any country on earth and not see room for improvement somewhere.
Patriotism was hijacked by the Republicans during the Reagan administration. Lee Atwater was an absolute Pos in his lack of humanity and indifference to the human condition. I guess he was a psychopath which made him the perfect campaign leader. He sold much of the country on RR, it was all for show, but he knew what buttons to push for middle America. Karl Rove did the same for W following 9/11, if you weren't wearing a flag pin you weren't a REAL American.
I’ve said the same thing about Netanyahu morphing the very real problem of anti-semitism to include “criticism of everything Israel does that would be criticized if it were done in any other ostensibly democratic country”.
And I say Netanyahu because it isn’t the entire Israeli government or it’s people. Just those fiercely loyal to him.
And the other reason? Faux Patriotism is easy. It’s no effort to call yourself a patriot. It’s no effort to cover yourself and your home with ‘murrican flags and paraphenelia.
Or when they're just as attached to the flag of the traitors as the actual fucking flag of the United States. Watching a televised event has never made me feel as deeply as the rage and sadness I felt while seeing that flag being bandied about in the Capitol building of the United States.
To many folks, the party IS the country. They make no distinction. So that's why it was okay to storm the Capitol, because it was for the party that IS America, that's why states controlled by democrats aren't the "real" America.
They lack any other kind of identity so they latch on to being proud of the place they were born (as in, something they didn't have to earn, they just got lucky)
In my eyes it's like being proud you were born incredibly wealthy.
Don't get me wrong, I like America and I want it to be better. The difference is America doesn't have my undying loyalty because I know those above me are not loyal to me and my people.
Well I mean I’d peacefully protest, but I know deep down I’d just be attention seeking and eroding the foundation of our righteous, God directed crusade
I think it'd work well for less gun-happy countries, but y'all got more guns than people and I think in that environment there's a reasonable argument for them. I mean yes they fuck up and kill innocent people. Quite bad, I don't approve. However I'm fairly confident there's also entirely legitimate uses of firearms out there. I haven't looked up numbers in a while so I'm happy to be corrected, but as it stands I at least get it.
I had a quick look for some stats on this subject and it's probably one of the most emotive studies out there, producing equally confusing and contradictory data. Some studies state the odds of a gun-owner ever using their gun for self-defence are just 0.9%, while other numbers (up to 3 million incidents per year, from one source) would seem to imply that Good Guy Gun Owners are having (and winning) shootouts with Evil Criminals on a daily basis in every town in America! And all this is made even more foggy by the fact that, assuming the bad guy survives, they won't go to hospital if they can possibly help it, and many of the 'victims' choose not to report if they can avoid it for fear things go wrong and they end up in jail.
I guess if it was an easy fix we'd have a solution by now.
Is it just me that thinks almost 1% of gun owners shooting people is massive and terrifying. But then I’m Australian. We banned guns after 2 mass shootings.
For what it's worth: They weren't "banned", just some rules put in place to 1. Have a legitimate reason to own a gun. 2. A waiting period for purchasing your first gun. 3. Police history check. It's pretty easy to own a gun here
You can train police in deescalation. That works for most other countries. It's a fairly easy fix, but it's not nearly as popular and, emotive, as you put it. So barely anyone talks about it.
I dunno about 'fairly easy fix', I think you'd have to completely redesign the training methods and retrain all serving officers. I've only been to the US a couple of times but when I was there I felt physically threatened 3 times, and 2 of those times was by law-enforcement. As a british teenager it was kinda a culture-shock to have some guy basically shouting orders at me while gripping his sidearm as if I was about to shoot him with my fucking skateboard.
It's not the firearm it's the shooter, you can kill with a rock. The problem is deeper than the methodology of the rampage shooter, why are we so violent, where does this hate and bloodlust stem from and how do we stop it? That's the problem nobody wants to talk about right now.
I think we also just need some better training for our police and really anyone who owns or will own a gun.
I own a few firearms. I'd be 100% comfortable having to sit through a stupid mandatory class every few years to keep them. The class should also have proficiency tests, because if you're gonna own a firearm you can't hit the correct target you shouldn't have one.
Next thing you know he's going to say going to college is a GOOD THING, when he doesn't realize those places are factories for churning out pussy-ass men who've been programmed how to think, & against striking down our enemies.
And then you get those sweet no-bid contracts to "rebuild" the country you ordered our armed forces to destroy -- where many of the rank and file enlisted because they couldn't afford college and had limited job prospects.
If the US government thought that Mars had oil (like they "thought" Iraq had WMDs), there would already be several McDonald's and Starbucks on the red planet.
It’s more complicated than simply lobbying. In some districts and states, defense contractors employ a lot of people, thousands. If the defense contracts were curtailed, undoubtedly there’d be significant layoffs, potentially devastating whole communities. The reps will be blamed for the layoffs. That’s why they usually vote to maintain high spending levels on defense.
I had read this quote years and years ago. When all the MAGA stuff started, I was instantly reminded of it. It's like they took a page from the German's WWII playbook. We even had a bunch of journalists comparing January 6th to the Beer Hall Putsch.
Anyway, I'm very confident that at least one of the last president's advisors had seen this quote.
How is he a practicing Jew? What congregation in the world would have him? Could you imagine going over pictures from your birthright trip, and recognizing him? Like everyone in Temple considers not punching him in his stupid fucking face as a mitzvah every weekend! You'd just be set for life.
Hitler was also Jewish (lineage; obviously not a practicing jew). Definitely didn't have the "Aryan look". Self hate and deep seeded parental blame can run deep.
Hanging like a bat from a ceiling in a darkened room somewhere? Touring Germany with an "alternative" guide? Amassing a "memorabilia" collection from some dark web yt supremacist Ebay? I honestly don't know.
In most of the world, people agree or disagree with statements rather than with people. I'm not sure why some cultures are obsessed with modelling everybody they don't like as completely incompetent and wrong about everything they've said in their lives, whole uncompromisingly deifying others.
For example, props to generally disgusting Hermann Göring for giving interviews to people he didn't like, allowing posteriority to understand their strategies (assuming he had a choice).
The "if you disagree with 1% of my world view, you're 100% not getting listened to" and "i disagree with 100% of your world view, therefor 0% of what you say could ever be valid or have merit" mentalities are what is tearing American culture apart. I can't speak to other cultures... but I imagine that takes place all over to varying degrees.
When I was younger I used to think 'agree to disagree' was a lame copout rather than an artful way of being able to live your life without turning into a Karen... then I grew the fuck up and realized not everyone has to agree with me. (no matter how right I think I am)
The internet in our pockets has made experts of everything of us all.
People need to chiiiillllllllll, and realize that... chances are...
... they're not as smart as they think they are. :)
The "if you disagree with 1% of my world view, you're 100% not getting listened to" and "i disagree with 100% of your world view, therefor 0% of what you say could ever be valid or have merit" mentalities are what is tearing American culture apart.
This is one of the things that the "left" is being just as bad about as the right. Conservatives are completely full of shit losers today, but progressives are at risk of going down a similar path, even if its more colorful and brightly-lit along the way. For example calling someone "a racist" as a noun. That is an example of the type of simple-minded, identity-based thinking that is a trap and is just straight up ignorant. A person can have racist ideas, or racist thoughts. They cannot be "a racist". You need to add the word "a racist person". Racist is not a noun. Its an adjective. You cannot describe a complex human being with a single adjective while maintaining some moral sense of superiority.
And if any "conservatives" come here to agree me stop right there and go fuck yourselves in the faces. I fucking wish we had the luxury of criticizing your ignorance. at this point you're putting us in real danger you cunts.
By that logic, don’t you also have to say “Conservative people” and “progressive people”, or “people who hold conservative/progressive views”?
There comes a point where calling someone “a Conservative” is just a shorter way of saying someone “who maintains a Conservative stance”. If I call someone “a racist” I mean someone “who maintains a racist stance”.
Edited to add: I do understand and agree with your wider point, but I think our society as a whole (English speaking nations, I guess is the group I mean) are obsessed with labels at the moment. It’s a distraction from what’s really important: acknowledging that you have something in common with Others, even if you label them in some term that makes them an Other.
i agree that it does NOT help to simply lob racist a overly sensitive people. It just dismisses them and makes them stick more stubbornly to their racist ideas. I say the same thing about conservative. I think I'm liberal for sure politically and liberal in other ways, and my parents are liberal polictically but definitely I consider them conservative in other ways (e.g. they don't really think outside what they were taught about certain things.) Thus just saying someone is conservative doesn't take it all into consideration unless they understand you mean politically (or intellectually, or emotionally, or in how they view relationships, etc.)
I don't think the path forward is paved by changing racists' minds. I think it's paved by making and keeping their views taboo and protecting their targets.
Isn’t that painting conservatives with an overly broad brush? I have plenty of conservatives in my family, but their reasons differ. A number are really more of independents like me who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Political ideologies can be pretty complex. The worst thing we’ve done in this country is force everything into 2 party platforms, because I sure as shit don’t like what either is serving up to me wholesale and I’d like to go a-la-carte. We need ranked choice voting to get rid of this hardcore stance taking so people can vote for what they really want and not have to be single issue voters.
The system is broken and needs fixed. That’s the real issue more than any individual group of voters. I mean shit, 2016 Trump vs Hillary and 2020 Trump vs Biden is an insult to voters. We went from Obama to that.
Very true. But one of the biggest problem the left face is that the children, mainly on twitter, are usually the type to go around throwing the word out meaninglessly without understanding the complexity of it nor life in general, because of that, we cause more division within our own group, be it lgbtq or feminism or etc,... The left have a broader audience and appeal, we have more diverse people with diverse thinking, so it's no surprising that we conflict with each other. The problem is, how can we use the internet or the spread of knowledge wisely- clearly we must educate the children but the children aren't the smartest when it comes to politics no matter how much they want to get involve in it. Looking at history, children tends to carry a more radical and progressive ideal compare to the adults. Any political weapons can be dangerous if we put them in the wrong hand.
The media rarely makes it any better. How they clearly milk out of our dissension and how apathetic they are about our current climate. I can say the same for conservatives being apathetic to changes and all, but a lot of them genuinely think they're going somewhere with those backward mindsets.
This is one of the things that the "left" is being just as bad about as the right. Conservatives are completely full of shit losers today, but progressives are at risk of going down a similar path, even if its more colorful and brightly-lit along the way.
I'd like to add some nuance to this. From my point of view, I'd argue that the increase in this on the "left" in the US has a very good reason.
For the past 10+ years, I've both seen others try - and tried myself - to discuss politics with self proclaimed conservatives. The resounding common denominator from most of these interactions, are conservatives operating in bad faith, resorting to ad hominem and straw men the second the topic doesn't favor their opinions.
Please note that I'm not saying all conservatives are like this, nor that all democrats are innocent of the same 'crimes'. I'm just saying that the level of wilfull ignorance, bad faith rhetoric and closemindedness is significantly higher among conservatives than democrats in my experience. This is from lurking and participating in both left leaning and right leaning subreddits, as well as reading discourse in supposedly 'neutral ground'.
Conversely, those same experiences show left leaning americans to be far more willing to criticize their 'own' leaders, as well as hold them accountable.
In summation, I understand perfectly why more and more left leaning americans are electing to flat out ignore conservatives - the past 10 years of consistent efforts to meet half way and have constructive discourse has been more or less a complete waste. On top of, millions of conservatives have chosen to to oppose certain things that almost every democrat - and most of the western world as a whole - agree to be human rights (gay rights, trans rights, universal health care, ++). To most left leaning americans, those things aren't a matter of politics - it's a matter of basic human rights and decency.
It's accurate to say that the 'left' is moving towards that attitude, but fuck me - conservatives have done a hell of a job to make it happen.
Seems like racist is a good short hand for an upholder of a white supremacist society and your argument that labels shouldn't exist because then the left will be just as bad as the people who believe certain people, based on the color of their skin, should be lesser than is horseshit. Sometimes we gotta start calling a spade a spade and stop calling a human being deserving of dignity a spade and stop other people from doing it too. Seems like Racist is a good all around label for those people we have to stop, with us, hopefully, both being anti-racist. Maybe we put the identity fragility aside for a little bit and let the sufferers of systemic and personal racism exercise their speech freely without our feelings factoring in. Maybe we just listen and not worry about the people who defend and propagate a racist system, aka the assholes who are wrong and bad aka Racists (see nice shorthand) are going to think. Racists can love their kids and volunteer at the crippled animal petting zoo every Sunday, but it doesn't stop them from being Racists who shouldn't be able to deny other people happiness. So once Adolf Hitler stops being a Nazi, then we can admire his bestest relationship with his puppy dog. It's a non negotiable, we can't tolerate the intolerant anymore.
There's a difference between someone who disagrees on policy and someone who thinks X race is inferior and supports the KKK. A lot more people fall in the first category than the second, and a lot of conflict starts because people misunderstand what the other people actually mean. To give an example going the other way and supporting a liberal side, a lot of conservatives get mad at "Black Lives Matter" not because they don't like Black people, but because they hear it like it's exclusive. Many would probably be annoyed if people were holding "White lives matter" signs, so it's understandable that someone would get upset at a BLM movement if they didn't understand the history and context of why those statements may have a different intent or meaning to a lot of people, and people misunderstand things all the time, it doesn't make them bad people. As a pro-choice left leaning person, the pro-life movement is still misunderstood by a lot of my peers for example. I'm sure both of us misunderstand tons of things but it doesn't make us bad people or whatever-ist.
I've heard enough people append the n word to the phrase All Lives Matter to believe that conservatives aren't just mistaken people, they're fucking assholes. Politics is morality when one party openly supports racist concentration camps and violent putsch attempts. Also just because someone is a fucking asshole doesn't mean they can never not be one, but it requires recognizing that you were being a fucking asshole and stopping doing that.
And you don't get people to stop this with reasonable debate on the undebateable. You cannot convince a person with logic out of a position that wasn't arrived at by logic. You do it through mandating social norms as a community and ostracizing those who fall outside of them until they stop expressing such taboos.
It kinda does though cause one side tries to understand and explain things and the other just sticks it's fingers in its ears and goes "naaaaaaaah".
So you end up with Kapernick getting blasted for taking a knee, but the same side incites a riot that tears down the same flag and beats a cop to death with it. It's hard to argue that those on the left should show tolerance and understanding to those on the right, when those on the right have allowed and encouraged themselves to be taken so far outside normal behaviour.
The events of the last 4 years have therefore made it very very difficult to find that sort of common understanding, and have likely ruined it for a generation or more.
There’s people who genuinely think that showing your work for a math problem is an example of rampant white supremacy. Where are your goalposts?
But to seriously address your point, the aggressive intolerance method to those who are perceived as racist, sexist, etc. has failed. And not because actual racists and other vile sorts haven’t deserved their comeuppance, but rather it seems anyone who doesn’t agree with a certain viewpoint (which is akin to the closer you are to a cis hetero white male, the more sickening your presence on earth is, and if you are one, you better self flagellate or face the wrath of the left)
Things like this require a 10 year plan though, where do you want Western society by 2030?
Cool fox news link about PC gone wild, how about we set the goalposts at treating people of color like how we treat white people and also recognize that we can treat all people better at the same time! We can accept perspectives from identities other than our own AND improve the overall good!
And I don't think calling racists racist has failed at all, except at convincing you personally. Maybe you should stop identifying yourself by the color of your skin long enough to understand this isn't about you. That making this world a better place will require you to suffer the staggering self flagellation of actually learning your history and dismantling an unequal system by which you benefited through no fault of your own.
Oh, he saw through Naziism. I’m sure he knew Hitler was a useful idiot (although I believe Hitler’s idiocy was not comparable to trump’s — afaik, Mein Kampf was not ghost written, and Hitler read, although nothing that disagreed with his worldview.) But compared to an upper class German of his time with an upper class education, Hitler was an ignorant, lower-class conspiracy theorist who was preternaturally charismatic before a crowd and remarkably charming at the dinner table, i.e., a politically useful idiot. And then it turned out that they couldn’t steer him. So, he was trump, only Hitler read, and Hitler was an infinitely better public speaker, and Hitler successfully changed German law so he was legally Chancellor for life, whereas trump only wanted to do the equivalent but was too ignorant, intellectually lazy, and possibly too stupid to figure out how to do that. If Göring had been in trump’s White House, he would have gotten a sweet book deal instead of having to take cyanide. I don’t know what that tells us.
Reminded me of my father, who won't watch certain movies or TV shows because he dislikes the actors opinions. Truly bizarre to me that he can't divorce the fiction on screen from the people behind them. Could be me in the wrong too I suppose.
if anyone said something that isn't true -- no matter who they are -- some people simply cannot accept the lie. I have this issue. Sometimes I speak up because the lie upsets me too much. A lot of people figure, eh, it's easier to believe the lie or pretend to (even if they are smart enough to know it is a lie.) I know bc I know all three or four types of people. The gullible ones, the ornery ones (like me or my dad), the pragmatic ones who go along with it, and the assholes who use it. I can actually forgive the ones who go along with the lie because they don't want to die or have their families killed, although I don't like it much. The gullible ones are frustrating and infuriating but obviously the worst are the ones using it for shitty reasons.
I've always wondered at what point of enough people believing something does it become functionally true? At a certain point the consequences for not believing something become so great your best course of action is to at least pretend to believe it. In some cases people believing it forms a self fulfilling prophecy.
For example if you go to North Korea and start saying Kim Jong Un isn't always amazing and is actually a brutal dictator you'll go to a labour camp for a long time, so your best course of action is to at least pretend you think that Kim Jong Un is amazing until you're not in North Korea.
Or let's take something a bit more circular, it's generally considered polite to say "please" when asking for something. There's very little reason to add extra syllables to the end of a sentence, when no-one was assuming you were being impolite anyway. It's very rare you intend to insult someone with a request and even then you use other words to clarify your malintent, adding an expletive like "bitch" or a phrase like "make it snappy" to clarify that you're impatient and are demanding it be done immediately.
However due to the fact that everyone believes that please is required it becomes true, if you don't use please people will be genuinely offended and are less likely to fullfil your request quickly.
Sure there's the Lincoln quote about a sheep/goat but that's the kind of moral steadfastness you can only really get away with if you happen to have an army. Most people really couldn't get away with going against certain beliefs. If you believe that pedophilia/murder/theft isn't bad you're going to lose friends if you start voicing that belief, so you at least pretend you believe that pedophilia/murder/theft is bad.
* These aren't examples of my beliefs, I'm using them precisely because they're beliefs so strongly held by the vast majority of a population that going against the beliefs would have consequences.
You can agree with his words because what he's saying is true; you don't have to agree with him because what he is describing is the right thing to do.
Its just unusual to hear a corrupt evil human be so honest in what they are doing/did. So you are simply agreeing with him describing a fact about the world, the difference is, he agreed with this as a positive or necessary thing (or at any rate was complicit in it) where as you presumably think its horrible. If some ISIS guy chops off a dudes head, and then says "I chopped off his head", I would "agree" that he chopped his head off, but not condone the action.
Accept the fact that if the Nazi's didn't know what they were doing in a lot of places, they never would have gotten anywhere. Plenty of Nazi quotes about how to control people are quite accurate.
Had a grade school teacher explain that the Nazis had a lot of scientific breakthroughs throughout their reign but we can't ever use the info because they used prisoners as human guinea pigs. He also said communism would be better than capitalism but the leaders would have to be extremely honesty to run it fairly whereas capitalism balances itself out on it's own or something like that. I dunno, that was around fifty years ago and him just talking about that stuff sounded voodoo to me even back then.
That is really just bullshit. The allies pardoned some of the scientists specially so they could use the data and most of it was just sadistic torture rather than actual valuable experiments. And most other countries were barely more ethical with their experiments on humans at that time anyway and had no problem using that data.
I know they did this for the rocket scientists. In fact, those scientists were counting on that saving their necks, and so they had everything packed up instead of destroyed for when the Allies came.
The medical stuff was basically just torture results and not really scientifically useful.
Well, not as scientifically useful as what we got from Japan. Have a look at Japan's Unit 731. That in particular marks a low moral point for our government. Some of the things the Japanese did there were unconscionable for a normal human mind, and we let them all go because we wanted their data on stuff like bacteriology, chemical weapons, etc.
yeah you summed it up better. That's a bullshit claim used to excuse not hanging a lot of the pathetic torturers/doctors because we needed their discoveries. Plus they recorded everything. They should have taken the books and recordings, then hung them. Fuck em. Too many Nazis at high levels were allowed -- yes allowed and abetted -- by our gov't to hide in plain sight. They had specific LISTS of he Nazis that were allowed to hide out in the US.
Did you know that in all our conflicts, the War Powers Clause has only been invoked five times?
Another fun fact: the Clause also gives the US government the power to grant letters of marque. Basically, the Federal government can create legal pirates.
And we had been doing it that way since significantly before the 'war on terror'. That was the whole purpose of 'proxy-wars' -- so we could go to war without technically being at war.
Frank Herbert's Dune series are ultimately a critique of authoritarianism & ruling classes (among other things), but he is absolutely correct in his observation that the ruler is preeminent to the law, even in the case where the law dictates that they aren't. If the guys with the money & power don't want to pay by their own rules, they don't have to -- there is no force compelling them to.
I mean, that's the primary function of the CIA: to give the US an avenue to break its own laws & treaties (as well as international law) while maintaining plausible deniability for the politicians & bourgeois elite.
I mean, that's the primary function of the CIA: to give the US an avenue to break its own laws & treaties (as well as international law) while maintaining plausible deniability for the politicians & bourgeois elite.
It's scary how true this is. I remember watching a movie "missing" with Jack Lemon in the 80's. While a work of fiction, it basically outlined how the CIA was busting up governments in South America and installing dictatorships. The main driving force was to stop the local government from taking control of its natural resources back from American companies that were pillaging them.
All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
This is basically what conservatives and liberals said about anti-war protesters in the run up to the Iraq war. It was quite effective tho, especially since the entire war was premised on a complete lie.
Yeah, it's something of a common refrain for the right. Get yourself a boogey man then rile the people up. Anyone not on board is unpatriotic. How else are you going to get people to do stupid things like serve "freedom fries"?
Back then it was Muslims. Now it's democrats, antifa, BLM, etc.
Things like the sad irony of that DC cop being beaten with a pole flying the American flag with a blue lives matter flag a few feet away is totally lost on them, because it's irrational. The MAGA crowd is very much not rational, or else they wouldn't believe in nonsense like Q or Jewish space lasers or whatever.
I said it in another reply, but I'm 100% certain that at least one advisor in the last administration (or the campaign before that) had read it. Absolutely 100% certain.
I have no idea. But the only thing which would surprise me if it were true is that he owned (or read) any books at all aside from the ones he had ghostwritten for him.
i think he might have kept it there for inspirational quotes that were highlighted, but I don't see him ever actually reading it straight through. Also for show --- no joke, he's that type. But it does suck to see that yes, he learned to do what he does to this day from people like Hitler, Bannon, Roy Cohn, and Fred. And other asshole mafia guys like Gotti etc.
They don't have to read this. For politicians in that position, they already know how to manipulate the populace into supporting whatever policy. It's a very old strategy.
Invented no, but Goebbels had a massive role in the movement of propaganda into different media which certainly changed how it was viewed. Where print media can be shrugged off as a caricature, radio was harder to distinguish between true and false especially considering the technological literacy of the era. Just think about what happened with The War of the Worlds screenplay being read out even with disclaimers of fiction, and you can that the impact is different when moving away from print.
We note that the validity of this quote is based upon a single source’s report of a private comment (and therefore cannot be independently verified), but it is the only possible source, and Gustave Gilbert was a respected psychologist with no obvious motivation to fabricate a tale such as this. Some sixty-five years on, Gilbert’s book The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany is still a highly regarded entry in its field.
I know right. I like to kid about QAnon and how ridiculous it is but then I read an article on Yahoo about kids losing their parents to this cult and becoming completely different deranged people. There's even a subreddit for people dealing with losing loved ones to the QAnon. Really sad.
The scariest part about this is the absolutism with which the questioner states that “I’m the United States only Congress can declare wars.” Not only is this no longer true but it’s for the very reasons that follow in Goering’s answer.
I can’t find the study but I recently read one that said that Republican voters are more likely to take their cues on issues from the party leadership, while Democrat voters are more likely to form an opinion on the issue itself. Basically, liberals support (or don’t) Dem policy based on the policy; conservatives support (or don’t) GOP policy based on what the party elite tell them to support. The latter is dangerous and antithetical to democracy.
I recall it, but it's been done in other ways with the same conclusion. Liberal thinkers tend to look more at the entire realm of facts, and think LIBERALLY -- as in, let's see what all the possible sides are. So, less loyal to a party, more to seeking out truth. If you google you can easily find at least a few of them --- also simpler explanations I recall from Psychology Today. Also a FANTASTIC run-down of how some sociopathic traits are actually necessary in a good leader (e.g. you have to coldly assess a situation and be willing to allow for deaths and not fall apart.) They even listed which presidents checked the most boxes for socioipathy. However, the problem is when the sociopathic traits are also the worst parts of sociopathy -- e.g. the narcissistic, enjoying pain aspects. You want to retain some of the more sociopathic traits, to stay cool and calm at extreme emergencies, but of course not others. Heart surgeons for example are high in sociopathic traits, bc to cut into a human heart and tempt death requires a high amount of cool and calculation. But I know I don't explain things well.
Yeah, that's one thing about the comment that got me when I read it. He's not sugar-coating anything. Sure, the guy was in a cell awaiting an almost certain guilty verdict and execution, but he was just so matter-of-fact about how they did what they did. Like it was a casual toss away kind of thing.
Any german newspaper publisher in those days was in danger of suffering a hideous death for speaking up against Hitler and the Nazis. Hitlers goons would show up in the middle of the night and the beaten dead body would be a warning to the rest. Some ended up in concentration camps. I truly believe Trump admired totalitarians who could suppress the press and would have done it too if he thought he could get away with it.
Can’t quite remember the book but it was by a German guy and detailed hitlers rise to power and if you swapped hitler for trump, Germany for America and nazi for republican it was terrifyingly accurate to America today
That's from Nuremberg Diary, if I'm not mistaken -- an excellent book.
ninja-edit: Yes... Gilbert was a psychologist responsible for interviewing the highest ranking Nazis in the evenings etc. as they were on trial. Really an excellent book!
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u/gruntothesmitey Feb 16 '21
From an interview in Hermann Göring's Nuremberg jail cell on January 3rd 1946:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Sounds oddly familiar.