In any conflict, the immoral actions of the enemy has a tendency to be exaggerated, overemphasized and focused on in order to justify the immoral actions done to defeat the Other.
This can be done in advance of the conflict (To justify invasions or interventions), during the conflict (To justify immoral actions that reach the home population) or after (To justify the treatment of the enemy after the conflict and to justify any actions during the conflict).
It does not matter whether the enemy actions are real or fabricated. It only matters that you can make the population believe that it justifies immoral actions against the enemy.
This goes for Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria etc. It goes for Ukraine. It was also the case during and after WW1 and WW2.
For a current example, in Ukraine, it does not matter whether the Bucha massacre was done by Russian soldiers before retreating from the area or Ukrainian SBU / Ultranationalist militas. That is a minor detail, the real story of Bucha is how it was used for extreme escalation in Western arms supplies to Ukraine and even to this day is used as justification for Ukraine targetting civilians with no valid military value such as firing anti-personnel mines into Donetsk City.
I tend to believe that the democratization of information has also led to the moralization of information. This is neccesary, because the common man has to believe in the "neccesary evil" in order to support the objectives of the elite class. Take the example of Ukraine, many europeans (Outside of Poland/Baltics and UK) were deeply against lethal aid supplies to Ukraine. So many european governments were limited to sending humanitarian or defensive supplies like helmets and border armor, such as Germany or Denmark. But once the "EVIL RUSSIAN FASCISTS!!!!!" had commited the Bucha massacre, supplying Ukraine with whatever lethal aid you could was the Right Thing To Do.
This also means that the "Justification Propaganda" CANNOT be questioned. Holocaust Denial is not about the facts. In fact, insisting on the facts IS denialism in so far as the facts do not align with the justification propaganda!
Brian how did you .... manage to make such a U-turn in the content. I mean I never took you for one trick pony *( If I may make one pun THIS WAS IT FOR ME ;) )* but I thought you were a biologist and this is totally outside that but quite interesting, not so much because I agree or I disagree but it has its depth, if you know what i mean !
I always envisioned the site being generalist in the first months, but as long as there was something breaking in the virus/vaccine realm that seemed more urgent and other stuff could wait. However, as that cooled down, it didn't really seem that "other stuff" was being very interesting, not like in 2020 and 2021 with the riots and election etc. Now the world is going crazy again so I feel like I can go political without being boring.
A fine piece Brian, I look forward to seeing more. So, should we see the concentration camps primarily as a failure of the administrative state to solve the problems that it created? Unz is a little nutty but there is a lot that I appreciate in his work. Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most was the other end of this myth-the righteous entry to the war, although I think that I first saw it in Michael Senger rather than Unz, Unz has good material on how FDR tried for years to provoke Germany into war and only succeeded by aggressively placing the Pacific Fleet in harms way and got his backdoor to war. Is it Pearl Harbor denialism if you don't deny that it happened but deny that it was unprovoked?
It happens that Pearl Harbor trutherism is in the Reason issue that prompted Unz's Holocaust Denial post. The Reason issue is linked in the post; the Pearl Harbor article, by PL Greaves, Jr., is very good, though introduces nothing conclusive to suggest that anyone wanted the fleet demolished as opposed to wanting a less dramatic pretext. So it's left to conspiracy theory territory - all these very conspicuous decisions to nudge local officers to be unprepared. Certainly Washington could have simply had the fleet come back at any time, it wasn't serving any use in PH, and new equipment was all sent to the Philippines (where MacArthur let it get destroyed on the airfield, a separate self-own) or to Allies. The pointlessness of even having hardware in Hawaii is the most galling fact, really.
So the argument appears to be that Hitler was not the inspiration for the holocaust, but merely the guy who perceived the anti-Jewish sentiment in his midst, and rode it to power. And then once Hitler gave people the excuse to act upon the animus in their hearts, they did so of their own volition, not because they were just "following orders."
I guess the obvious question is, where did that latent anti-Jewish sentiment which Hitler perceived, and which animated his rise, originate? And are we encumbered by similar hatreds today which will morph abruptly from unspoken sentiment to visceral and violent repression when the movement gains a persuasive avatar, as did Europe in the 1930's?
As I said, I could only barely capture the nuance in Eichmann In Jerusalem alone. And if the subject is European antisemitism broadly then one must consult Origins of Totalitarianism; but I've never finished that one.
"The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modern race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous.” - Ch 3
I think in the abolishment of nobility and state-enforced Christianity, European commoners at the turn of the 20th perceived Jewish financial success as a proxy embarrassment. This is also evident in Dostoevsky's resentment of Jews - they are the avatar for the ruin of nobility. But then if there were no more nobles how do you explain being poor to the poor? So I don't think chances were high getting through the 20th without a Holocaust in Europe, even if you time-travel and shoot Hitler in the crib. This is not an adequate answer, one is probably not possible.
Jews were pretty much a part of society in Germany and Austria prior to Hitler, among them some of my ancestors. They intermarried and were accepted. There will always be bigots. The post WWI depression in Germany made it easy to look for scapegoats. The same can happen here.
Stalin wasn't Jewish and in fact was gearing up to start a major persecution of Jews when he kicked the bucket. Stalin gets the blue ribbon for Bolshie troublemaking. He makes Lenin look like St Francis of Assisi.
When you have an over-production of elites they have to have a following or they become despondent and may consider suicide.
To what extent is the LGBTQ+ and transgender movements an instance of elites who are not in power trying to carve out a position for themselves, a nation to rule?
That is an interesting observation and something I didn't consider.
I wonder how Skoptsy (a failed movement from Russia that has some similarities) relates to what we see currently. Perhaps, at the end of the day, every declining polity is going to have its Skoptsy movement.
I would have thought that in the face of declining wealth and living standards they would double down on traditions, but maybe they used focus groups and determined that such an approach was not gonna work so they went with one that is going to reduce their movement's size in the future but perhaps has short-term benefits.
Whose traditions would they double down on, though? Doubling down on traditions is the classic response of a monocultural, monoreligious society. It does not really work for explicitly multicultural societies.
No, to unite multicultural societies you need something foreign to every culture, thus rabid LGTBQ+ becomes a requirement. That is also why the most rabid LGTBQ+ countries are the US and Canada.
I don't agree. LGBTIQ+ ad infinitum is a way of carving up the middle class jobs for those who are members of the club (in this regard a US study from the late 1930s of Eastern Europe might be of interest as for example increasing urbanization meant that local Catholics came into conflict with middle class Jews for such jobs). Of course the mandates for LGBTIQ+++ came from on high and their motivations are a little less transparent but likely, other than transhumanism, include sterilizing the population (ie eugenics is the motivator) something that many of the adherents of LGBTIQ++ might be in collusion with due to the 'climate change' narrative which gives a way out for them morally for their genocidal tendencies.
In Mark Jacobson's non-fiction book the "The Lampshade", the author attempts to determine whether a lamp he came into possession of is made from human skin and whether it potentially came from a holocaust victim. The effort turns into a greater attempt to ascertain whether the stories of "human lampshades" had historical merit.
Something that stuck with me is his visit to holocaust remembrance museums, one of which contained lampshades of dubious origin which were not permitted to be scientifically analyzed. He was told by a curator (paraphrasing, it's been a while), "Even if these are human lampshades, there were no human lampshades". The people in charge of these items saw the risk of, truthful or not, a focus on the worst but singular excesses of the holocaust diminishing the importance, and threatening the credibility of, the tragedy overall.
The twilight of the post-WW2 zeitgeist and its repercussions are, I think, severely underappreciated. WW2 and the immediate post-war era will soon pass out of living memory. When I was grade school we'd have WW2 veterans speak to the class at least once per year. I doubt most zoomers have ever met a WW2 veteran.
As you adroitly point out - as WW2 and the holocaust moves from "history" to "mythos" (purely with regard to how the human brain functionally interprets narratives, regardlessof "truth"), the application of their interpretive frameworks as a means to interpret modern events becomes more twisted and reductionist - and subject to malicious narrative constructionists.
Anyway, I wanted to say that I appreciate your willingness to venture into the minefields surrounding this topic because I think we are at the very perilous point in a historical cycle in which the next epoch's narrative framework is crafted. They seem to always be written in blood.
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters"
You're echoing my thoughts, here. I always wondered why the 6 million numerical was such an untouchable point when the simple horror of man imprisoning and killing their brethren is repulsive enough. Who cares about the actual number when the atrocities and how they were achieved is the thing we don't want to repeat?
Ironically a number of Jews who survived through the war in Germany perished in the Allied firebombing of german cities.
In any period of human history there are various inconsistencies and uncomfortable truths; these be covered over later by the creation of convenient myths, which are then concretised by time and repetition into 'reason'.
A good example from the Covid era is the myth that masks were advised against as a noble lie to protect supplies to health workers. The real reason (IMHO) is deference to the WHO and their fixation that covid was spread only by droplets from symptomatic indiviuals, (despite infection rates and other evidence dramatically proving otherwise.)
This led to the initial response being catastrophically wrong, and the resulting high death toll of the elderly and infirm used to fear-monger and justify a 'reset' into the panic induced measures of coercive lockdown, whereby various political, academic, bureaucratic and media elites really did lose their heads and not for the last time unfortunately.
I wanted to understand what drove Hitler's rage against the Jews and other 'inferior' peoples.
The first third details the horrific conditions that were imposed on Germany after WW1... ya'll know the drill about wheelbarrows of $$$ to buy bread... but it was much worse than that -- the Germans were actually starving ... women were forced to whore themselves for bits of food. The monumental and impossible reparations they were saddled with ensured the once powerful and proud nation would be ground into the dirt for decades.
Mr Hitler was not pleased with this situation and much of the first 3rd of the book is dedicated to describing the on the ground situation after the war.
Then he turns to the blame game - in his opinion the German bankers had sold out the country in exchange for the promise of a promised land - this would appear to support his assertion https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration
It does not matter if you or I agree - what matters is that he fervently believed this is why Germans were starving. Period.
And what matters is that he was able to convince a large number (the majority?) of Germans that the Jews were to blame for their desperate situation. This was a receptive audience given anti semitism was a popular them globally....
We all know what happened next...
The evil that was carried out by men and women -- who were just normal folks -- without any remorse or sympathy for the victims cannot really be described as banal...
Banality assumes they were asked to perform kill as if it was a mundane office job ... and nobody even thought about it. They just did it.
That is not correct. They surely did think about it and they wanted to do it - because they believed they needed to eliminate the people who had caused their country to lose the war -- resulting in their horrific collapse.
Nothing banal about that. This is what they believed (again it does not matter if they were right or wrong - it is what they believed).
And they believed they were acting rationally -- they were not zombies mumbling kill kill kill - they actually believed they were saving their country - prodded by Hitler -- one only watch this to see that he was their messiah and he was gonna fix things https://youtu.be/V4clb83HBeU
Fast forward to:
“I’m sitting here staring in the face at the biggest and probably the broadest asset bubble — forget that I’ve ever seen, but that I’ve ever studied,” Stanley Druckenmiller said at the May 2023 Sohn Investment Conference.
My brother was in New York just before covid and a cab driver remarked t the effect 'these corrupt Jews bankers are f789ing us up'
One could imagine a situation similar to post WW1 Germany -- where again the bankers are blamed ... an American Hitler could emerge spewing vitriol about bailing out the banks and printing trillions of dollars (to reward the bankers) driving the country into the gutter... who are the bankers???? Yes of course -- Dimon ... Soros ... etc...
This could easily turn into another Holocaust... and there would be nothing banal about it.
Fortunately this won't happen cuz they are pre-empting the collapse by exterminating us.
Well, all that could be true and it wouldn't necessarily be more instructive of the capacity for human evil in the name of vengeance or expansion than the Turkish->Armenian genocide, the Russian->Circassian genocide, the British reply to the 1857 Indian Rebellion, etc. etc.
But Arendt is dealing with bureaucratic figures, particularly Eichmann, a loser who is genuinely motivated by nothing other than a desire to please superiors and grovel for scraps of status. And most of his work by man-hour was in forging networks with German Jewish leaders to coordinate deportations.
In terms of the Banality of Evil ... how about the fact that 8 billion humans are complicit in
1. Animal experimentation - we do the most horrifying things to rats, dogs, cats, monkeys etc... so that we can have tear free shampoo and makeup. We hack them up to try out surgical techniques. And the bureaucrats (scientists) do these things without the slightest remorse. We all know this is happening -- but we too show no remorse -- we do love our tear free shampoo!
2. Industrial farming -- this is the stuff of nightmares... chickens stuffed into tiny cages -- fed growth hormones -- surely driven out of their minds... then hacked to pieces on assembly lines... and it's often far worse...
Ardent has benefitted from this ... we all know this is going on ... every second of every day ... on a gargantuan scale.... and here she is calling the Nazi bureaucrats banal....
We have an entire civilization that is built upon 'evil'.... 8 billion ravenous predators are fed ... by industrial nightmarish farming ...
Do we feel guilt? Remorse? Nah. We head to the super market on a regular basis to partake in the evil ... checking the prices on the best cuts of chicken sacrificed on the alter of the devil ... who gives a f789 ... the option is to starve...
There's banality for you... the Nazi bureaucrats are chump change.
How about I run for the position of Global Emperor -- on a single policy --- if we are going to conduct experimentation that leads to beneficial products and treatments for humans ... then the testing must be carried out on humans. If we agree on that then we need to determine which humans are used for the experiments.
Do we hold a lottery? Do we designate anyone over 80... perhaps we choose the disabled... what about welfare bums? Why not one in every 10 lawyers? Or given the current situation perhaps we designate doctors and nurses to be our crash test dummies?
Hahaha ... yes of course you'd say that. You are a human - right?
Feel free to explain why my wonderful dog -- who would not harm anyone - who is loyal and adds joy to my life ... should be chosen for an experiment over one of your family members? Why should he be tortured so that your children can have effective bug spray?
Children are rather venomous creatures if not kept in line ... (see Lord of the Flies)... why not experiment on some of them?
"Your response demonstrates the evil of the human species."
Jordan Peterson explained people like you quite clearly. They think they are "good people" with no blemish or flaw. They would never, no never become a Nazi!
People like you think they have all the answers and would love nothing more than forcing those answers on the people around them, controlling them. Your subsequent comments confirm this: "Well then ... It looks like I'll need to establish the empire... by using force!"
Curiously, you base your understanding of reality on... fictional novels, like "Lord of the Flies".
Fauci approves tests and scientists carry them out and you judge everyone that is not you to be evil. You see a problem in testing things on animals and your solution is to ... test it on other animals, human animals.
You are no better than the evil you decry.
You want to test humans with chemicals and do not know who to choose, and when I suggest we choose the people demanding we test things on humans, you call me evil. Not the person making the policy (ie you), but the person suggesting we limit choices to the policy maker (you).
You make a bed and call evil the person suggesting you now lie in it.
BTW - I have read a theory that suggests humans were put on the planet for the purpose of releasing carbon by burning it ... which of course benefits plant life ... we've done our job and are now being despatched :)
Your dog is domesticated. Wolves are not so pleasant to other mammal species. Your dog relies on you for food and shelter. It affects the way that he? relates to you.
Is that what you're after - a domesticated human mammal?
A wolf does not conduct horrifying experiments on other animals ... a wolf does not carry out the nightmare of industrial farming... a wolf does not engage in industrial warfare or torture...
A wolf kills to eat as do all predators. Wolves live in a manner that is sustainable - they do not pave over the planet nor do they think to use petro chemicals to create enough food to feed 8 billion wolves -- they are not 'smart' enough I suppose
Humans are an aberration ... a destructive species... and that is why we are on the verge of extinction. I suspect we'll set the record for the species to go extinct in the shortest period of time.
It was all downhill from the moment we harnessed fire... then we compounded the disaster by using our big brains to farm.
I find that there's a lot in your description here that accords to what Matthias Desmet tried to do a year ago. Blame the victims.
This "project" of the last few years was organised at very high $ levels (very low human on es) and put into operation by those of few morals in the upper middle classes. Those who were forced to jab up to keep their jobs are not the perpetrators, as you and Matthias would like to try to make out, but the victims.
I don't see the parallels ... Desmet essentially says blame nobody ... mass formation is like a hurricane that forms from nothing ... therefore there is nobody to blame...
I suspect Desmet is a false actor ... supporting the school of thought that there is no mastermind -- and no malicious intent ... and that translates into no pitchforks gathering at the castle - there is no castle... it's basically a mindless mob of zombies
What I am suggesting if that there are masterminds .. but that they have what they believe are well intentioned motives for what they are doing... Hitler believed the Jews f789ed Germany therefore they were legit targets for extermination ...
With respect to the folks orchestrating the Rat Juice extermination ... to be committing such atrocities surely they must believe they are doing so out of necessity -- to not do so would result in a much more horrific end game.
I agree with them. I prefer not to be on the receiving end of mass murder rape cannibalism ... and for those who survive -- starvation and cancer from the 4000 spent fuel ponds that will left unmanaged.
There is a reason why every single country on the planet has signed on to this
Trillions lost by other businesses - over 1 trillion alone lost by the travel industry - yet no pushback from the billionaires who own hotels and airlines. Funny that.
Putin and Xi are two of the wealthiest men on the planet - not enough money to bribe them to inject Rat Poison into their citizens - let alone the leadership of every leader of every country on the planet
They control countries - the MSM - medical boards - militaries -- social media -- they control everything -- and they are gonna sell dodgy meds to make money?
Why not put a call into the Fed - he fellas - here's the account - drop a trillion in there cuz it's gonna cost you a whole lot more if we push the dodgy meds and shut down the world.
I didn't say that the ones that came up with the genocidal plan were going to make money from it, what I meant was that those tasked to carry it out, the politicians, the media flunkeys, were all very bribeable. Same with the likes of Fauci, Ferguson, Drosten & Bloomfield.
Also rarely mentioned but many of the guys such as Bloomfield are military trained and are arguably still in the military. But the military are not the initiators of this.
Similarly Xi being the honcho of the CCP and knowing that the CCP has it's fingers in everything in China (I know first hand as a business we owned in China had a run in with CCP flunkies - and we sold it before losing it). He's the dictator so assume he's well into the hundred billion club.
You think these two men could be bribed - by a company that is making tens of billions?
To inject their population with dodgy vaccines?
The DOD is behind this - we have the contracts - the DOD is injecting the Praetorian Guard... the US military -- for money??? And not a single entity in the most powerful country on the planet is pushing back on this? No faction within the military is rebelling?
Not a single country on the planet is resisting. Everyone is bribed to go Pol Pot...
If Pfizer is spending all the vax revenue on bribes... surely they'd have generated no profits... so what is the point? Do you believe they are faking their accounting...
If they have the power to pull that off then again that indicates they are all powerful -- why not just inform the Fed that they would like 1 trillion dollars deposited in their account - or else.
'come on man' let's be serious. This is not about money.
NMH was not my first thought - but now encountering the recent Tablet article, I can see the link. King of Carrot Flowers and the album as a whole have a morbid teen-lust energy similar to Shosha, though the latter is more well-realized imo.
RE pre-60s history, there hardly seems to be anything. The Unz article describes the chronology here - there are only a few pages devoted to the topic in the first two decades. So it's a lot like the Spanish Flu - and yes, maybe the emergence of the simplistic narrative was a reaction to amnesia, though it's not clear why Holocaust rediscovery captivated culture for a half-century and the Allied destruction of Germany never went past a few scenes in Slaughterhouse Five and Maria Braun. Unless Jewish Hollywood is an evil puppet-master over the West's imagination, but as I preview here I think it's more a question of psychic appetites.
RE lockdowns, yes, that is exactly a consequence of failure to understand how gas chambers were not needed to make a seven-figure death count plausible. You can't suddenly put the state in charge of keeping a large group of people fed and disease-free in some arbitrary location; it's no different than teleporting someone into the middle of a hill and being confused why they can't breathe. Human life requires constant support.
Ex-2000s-era hipster checking in because I haven't been able to read anything about the Holocaust with thinking of Neutral Milk Hotel for over 20 years.
Edit: Great article. Or essay. Or whatever. Also, this exact issue become a topic of conversation with my best friend over the last few months, and I'm not ashamed to say that the Kanye debacle started it.
Now I must chime in. I never bought any NMH on disc, but OAA title track (*edit: actually WYFMN) played on whatever radio service it was that sprouted up in the Winamp / Sonique era and in 2009 bought IAOS in mp3 while making a mix that also included a short interlude from Einhorn's Voices of Light, eventually including "Ghost" on the mix, so this was probably my brain unconsciously remembering forgotten 8 year-old Pitchfork copy about Anne Frank.
Ha - but it blends in with the visual and audio aesthetics too much to demand explanation. "Europe, oldenyear." Also I'm fairly obtuse when it comes to the verbal element of music.
Thus exact subject has been a topic of conversation between my best friend and I over the last several months, and I'm not ashamed to say it was kicked off by the way Kanye debacle.
In any conflict, the immoral actions of the enemy has a tendency to be exaggerated, overemphasized and focused on in order to justify the immoral actions done to defeat the Other.
This can be done in advance of the conflict (To justify invasions or interventions), during the conflict (To justify immoral actions that reach the home population) or after (To justify the treatment of the enemy after the conflict and to justify any actions during the conflict).
It does not matter whether the enemy actions are real or fabricated. It only matters that you can make the population believe that it justifies immoral actions against the enemy.
This goes for Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria etc. It goes for Ukraine. It was also the case during and after WW1 and WW2.
For a current example, in Ukraine, it does not matter whether the Bucha massacre was done by Russian soldiers before retreating from the area or Ukrainian SBU / Ultranationalist militas. That is a minor detail, the real story of Bucha is how it was used for extreme escalation in Western arms supplies to Ukraine and even to this day is used as justification for Ukraine targetting civilians with no valid military value such as firing anti-personnel mines into Donetsk City.
I tend to believe that the democratization of information has also led to the moralization of information. This is neccesary, because the common man has to believe in the "neccesary evil" in order to support the objectives of the elite class. Take the example of Ukraine, many europeans (Outside of Poland/Baltics and UK) were deeply against lethal aid supplies to Ukraine. So many european governments were limited to sending humanitarian or defensive supplies like helmets and border armor, such as Germany or Denmark. But once the "EVIL RUSSIAN FASCISTS!!!!!" had commited the Bucha massacre, supplying Ukraine with whatever lethal aid you could was the Right Thing To Do.
This also means that the "Justification Propaganda" CANNOT be questioned. Holocaust Denial is not about the facts. In fact, insisting on the facts IS denialism in so far as the facts do not align with the justification propaganda!
Questioning anything = doubting that thing = implied criticism.
To learn who rules over you, learn who you are not allowed to criticise / doubt / question.
Holocaust, suffrage, vaccines, climate change, settled science.
Brian takes aim at ever more sacred cows ;)
Brian how did you .... manage to make such a U-turn in the content. I mean I never took you for one trick pony *( If I may make one pun THIS WAS IT FOR ME ;) )* but I thought you were a biologist and this is totally outside that but quite interesting, not so much because I agree or I disagree but it has its depth, if you know what i mean !
I always envisioned the site being generalist in the first months, but as long as there was something breaking in the virus/vaccine realm that seemed more urgent and other stuff could wait. However, as that cooled down, it didn't really seem that "other stuff" was being very interesting, not like in 2020 and 2021 with the riots and election etc. Now the world is going crazy again so I feel like I can go political without being boring.
And I love him for it!! 😄💚
A fine piece Brian, I look forward to seeing more. So, should we see the concentration camps primarily as a failure of the administrative state to solve the problems that it created? Unz is a little nutty but there is a lot that I appreciate in his work. Perhaps the thing that surprised me the most was the other end of this myth-the righteous entry to the war, although I think that I first saw it in Michael Senger rather than Unz, Unz has good material on how FDR tried for years to provoke Germany into war and only succeeded by aggressively placing the Pacific Fleet in harms way and got his backdoor to war. Is it Pearl Harbor denialism if you don't deny that it happened but deny that it was unprovoked?
It happens that Pearl Harbor trutherism is in the Reason issue that prompted Unz's Holocaust Denial post. The Reason issue is linked in the post; the Pearl Harbor article, by PL Greaves, Jr., is very good, though introduces nothing conclusive to suggest that anyone wanted the fleet demolished as opposed to wanting a less dramatic pretext. So it's left to conspiracy theory territory - all these very conspicuous decisions to nudge local officers to be unprepared. Certainly Washington could have simply had the fleet come back at any time, it wasn't serving any use in PH, and new equipment was all sent to the Philippines (where MacArthur let it get destroyed on the airfield, a separate self-own) or to Allies. The pointlessness of even having hardware in Hawaii is the most galling fact, really.
So the argument appears to be that Hitler was not the inspiration for the holocaust, but merely the guy who perceived the anti-Jewish sentiment in his midst, and rode it to power. And then once Hitler gave people the excuse to act upon the animus in their hearts, they did so of their own volition, not because they were just "following orders."
I guess the obvious question is, where did that latent anti-Jewish sentiment which Hitler perceived, and which animated his rise, originate? And are we encumbered by similar hatreds today which will morph abruptly from unspoken sentiment to visceral and violent repression when the movement gains a persuasive avatar, as did Europe in the 1930's?
As I said, I could only barely capture the nuance in Eichmann In Jerusalem alone. And if the subject is European antisemitism broadly then one must consult Origins of Totalitarianism; but I've never finished that one.
"The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modern race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous.” - Ch 3
I think in the abolishment of nobility and state-enforced Christianity, European commoners at the turn of the 20th perceived Jewish financial success as a proxy embarrassment. This is also evident in Dostoevsky's resentment of Jews - they are the avatar for the ruin of nobility. But then if there were no more nobles how do you explain being poor to the poor? So I don't think chances were high getting through the 20th without a Holocaust in Europe, even if you time-travel and shoot Hitler in the crib. This is not an adequate answer, one is probably not possible.
Jews were pretty much a part of society in Germany and Austria prior to Hitler, among them some of my ancestors. They intermarried and were accepted. There will always be bigots. The post WWI depression in Germany made it easy to look for scapegoats. The same can happen here.
Anti-bolshevism is effectively elite anti-semitism, given the vast overrepesentation of jews in bolshevism and the early to mid-USSR.
Stalin wasn't Jewish and in fact was gearing up to start a major persecution of Jews when he kicked the bucket. Stalin gets the blue ribbon for Bolshie troublemaking. He makes Lenin look like St Francis of Assisi.
There was a steady reduction in jewish elites under Stalin, which is why I wrote "Early to mid.-USSR".
When you have an over-production of elites they have to have a following or they become despondent and may consider suicide.
To what extent is the LGBTQ+ and transgender movements an instance of elites who are not in power trying to carve out a position for themselves, a nation to rule?
But the elites behind the LGTBQ+ movements are (in the west) the ones in power. So elite dynamics does not really strike me as the reason why.
I think a lot of it has to do with the declining wealth and living standards of the west relative to "the rest".
The elite justification has moved from wealth and living standards to "values".
This also goes for the elites out of power, and is the reason behind the whole culture war dynamic.
That is an interesting observation and something I didn't consider.
I wonder how Skoptsy (a failed movement from Russia that has some similarities) relates to what we see currently. Perhaps, at the end of the day, every declining polity is going to have its Skoptsy movement.
I would have thought that in the face of declining wealth and living standards they would double down on traditions, but maybe they used focus groups and determined that such an approach was not gonna work so they went with one that is going to reduce their movement's size in the future but perhaps has short-term benefits.
Whose traditions would they double down on, though? Doubling down on traditions is the classic response of a monocultural, monoreligious society. It does not really work for explicitly multicultural societies.
No, to unite multicultural societies you need something foreign to every culture, thus rabid LGTBQ+ becomes a requirement. That is also why the most rabid LGTBQ+ countries are the US and Canada.
I don't agree. LGBTIQ+ ad infinitum is a way of carving up the middle class jobs for those who are members of the club (in this regard a US study from the late 1930s of Eastern Europe might be of interest as for example increasing urbanization meant that local Catholics came into conflict with middle class Jews for such jobs). Of course the mandates for LGBTIQ+++ came from on high and their motivations are a little less transparent but likely, other than transhumanism, include sterilizing the population (ie eugenics is the motivator) something that many of the adherents of LGBTIQ++ might be in collusion with due to the 'climate change' narrative which gives a way out for them morally for their genocidal tendencies.
In Mark Jacobson's non-fiction book the "The Lampshade", the author attempts to determine whether a lamp he came into possession of is made from human skin and whether it potentially came from a holocaust victim. The effort turns into a greater attempt to ascertain whether the stories of "human lampshades" had historical merit.
Something that stuck with me is his visit to holocaust remembrance museums, one of which contained lampshades of dubious origin which were not permitted to be scientifically analyzed. He was told by a curator (paraphrasing, it's been a while), "Even if these are human lampshades, there were no human lampshades". The people in charge of these items saw the risk of, truthful or not, a focus on the worst but singular excesses of the holocaust diminishing the importance, and threatening the credibility of, the tragedy overall.
The twilight of the post-WW2 zeitgeist and its repercussions are, I think, severely underappreciated. WW2 and the immediate post-war era will soon pass out of living memory. When I was grade school we'd have WW2 veterans speak to the class at least once per year. I doubt most zoomers have ever met a WW2 veteran.
As you adroitly point out - as WW2 and the holocaust moves from "history" to "mythos" (purely with regard to how the human brain functionally interprets narratives, regardlessof "truth"), the application of their interpretive frameworks as a means to interpret modern events becomes more twisted and reductionist - and subject to malicious narrative constructionists.
Anyway, I wanted to say that I appreciate your willingness to venture into the minefields surrounding this topic because I think we are at the very perilous point in a historical cycle in which the next epoch's narrative framework is crafted. They seem to always be written in blood.
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters"
You're echoing my thoughts, here. I always wondered why the 6 million numerical was such an untouchable point when the simple horror of man imprisoning and killing their brethren is repulsive enough. Who cares about the actual number when the atrocities and how they were achieved is the thing we don't want to repeat?
Ironically a number of Jews who survived through the war in Germany perished in the Allied firebombing of german cities.
In any period of human history there are various inconsistencies and uncomfortable truths; these be covered over later by the creation of convenient myths, which are then concretised by time and repetition into 'reason'.
A good example from the Covid era is the myth that masks were advised against as a noble lie to protect supplies to health workers. The real reason (IMHO) is deference to the WHO and their fixation that covid was spread only by droplets from symptomatic indiviuals, (despite infection rates and other evidence dramatically proving otherwise.)
This led to the initial response being catastrophically wrong, and the resulting high death toll of the elderly and infirm used to fear-monger and justify a 'reset' into the panic induced measures of coercive lockdown, whereby various political, academic, bureaucratic and media elites really did lose their heads and not for the last time unfortunately.
I'd like to take a rip at Ardent and her 'Banality of Evil' thesis.
The thing is ...
A few years ago I listened to https://www.audible.com/no-search-results?keywords=Mein+Kampf%3A+The+Ford+Translation (odd - I paid for this and it's in my library but it's no longer available)
I wanted to understand what drove Hitler's rage against the Jews and other 'inferior' peoples.
The first third details the horrific conditions that were imposed on Germany after WW1... ya'll know the drill about wheelbarrows of $$$ to buy bread... but it was much worse than that -- the Germans were actually starving ... women were forced to whore themselves for bits of food. The monumental and impossible reparations they were saddled with ensured the once powerful and proud nation would be ground into the dirt for decades.
Mr Hitler was not pleased with this situation and much of the first 3rd of the book is dedicated to describing the on the ground situation after the war.
Then he turns to the blame game - in his opinion the German bankers had sold out the country in exchange for the promise of a promised land - this would appear to support his assertion https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration
It does not matter if you or I agree - what matters is that he fervently believed this is why Germans were starving. Period.
And what matters is that he was able to convince a large number (the majority?) of Germans that the Jews were to blame for their desperate situation. This was a receptive audience given anti semitism was a popular them globally....
We all know what happened next...
The evil that was carried out by men and women -- who were just normal folks -- without any remorse or sympathy for the victims cannot really be described as banal...
Banality assumes they were asked to perform kill as if it was a mundane office job ... and nobody even thought about it. They just did it.
That is not correct. They surely did think about it and they wanted to do it - because they believed they needed to eliminate the people who had caused their country to lose the war -- resulting in their horrific collapse.
Nothing banal about that. This is what they believed (again it does not matter if they were right or wrong - it is what they believed).
And they believed they were acting rationally -- they were not zombies mumbling kill kill kill - they actually believed they were saving their country - prodded by Hitler -- one only watch this to see that he was their messiah and he was gonna fix things https://youtu.be/V4clb83HBeU
Fast forward to:
“I’m sitting here staring in the face at the biggest and probably the broadest asset bubble — forget that I’ve ever seen, but that I’ve ever studied,” Stanley Druckenmiller said at the May 2023 Sohn Investment Conference.
My brother was in New York just before covid and a cab driver remarked t the effect 'these corrupt Jews bankers are f789ing us up'
One could imagine a situation similar to post WW1 Germany -- where again the bankers are blamed ... an American Hitler could emerge spewing vitriol about bailing out the banks and printing trillions of dollars (to reward the bankers) driving the country into the gutter... who are the bankers???? Yes of course -- Dimon ... Soros ... etc...
This could easily turn into another Holocaust... and there would be nothing banal about it.
Fortunately this won't happen cuz they are pre-empting the collapse by exterminating us.
Well, all that could be true and it wouldn't necessarily be more instructive of the capacity for human evil in the name of vengeance or expansion than the Turkish->Armenian genocide, the Russian->Circassian genocide, the British reply to the 1857 Indian Rebellion, etc. etc.
But Arendt is dealing with bureaucratic figures, particularly Eichmann, a loser who is genuinely motivated by nothing other than a desire to please superiors and grovel for scraps of status. And most of his work by man-hour was in forging networks with German Jewish leaders to coordinate deportations.
In terms of the Banality of Evil ... how about the fact that 8 billion humans are complicit in
1. Animal experimentation - we do the most horrifying things to rats, dogs, cats, monkeys etc... so that we can have tear free shampoo and makeup. We hack them up to try out surgical techniques. And the bureaucrats (scientists) do these things without the slightest remorse. We all know this is happening -- but we too show no remorse -- we do love our tear free shampoo!
2. Industrial farming -- this is the stuff of nightmares... chickens stuffed into tiny cages -- fed growth hormones -- surely driven out of their minds... then hacked to pieces on assembly lines... and it's often far worse...
https://t.me/leaklive/11666
https://cubeoftruth.com/av
Ardent has benefitted from this ... we all know this is going on ... every second of every day ... on a gargantuan scale.... and here she is calling the Nazi bureaucrats banal....
We have an entire civilization that is built upon 'evil'.... 8 billion ravenous predators are fed ... by industrial nightmarish farming ...
Do we feel guilt? Remorse? Nah. We head to the super market on a regular basis to partake in the evil ... checking the prices on the best cuts of chicken sacrificed on the alter of the devil ... who gives a f789 ... the option is to starve...
There's banality for you... the Nazi bureaucrats are chump change.
How about I run for the position of Global Emperor -- on a single policy --- if we are going to conduct experimentation that leads to beneficial products and treatments for humans ... then the testing must be carried out on humans. If we agree on that then we need to determine which humans are used for the experiments.
Do we hold a lottery? Do we designate anyone over 80... perhaps we choose the disabled... what about welfare bums? Why not one in every 10 lawyers? Or given the current situation perhaps we designate doctors and nurses to be our crash test dummies?
Nothing banal about that solution
I think you'd handily loose the election for Global Emperor running on a single plank like that.
Well then ... It looks like I'll need to establish the empire... by using force!
What's your point Eddy? I've vegan btw so your chicken guilt won't work on me.
I assume you use shampoo... medicines... health care...
All tested on defenceless animals
Going vegan does not absolve anyone
Why do you - Fast Eddy - support Animal experimentation and industrial farming?
Ya but I also hope for The Final Solution ... extermination .. extinction.
You didn't answer the question. Why do you support animal experimentation and industrial farming?
There is no choice.
And that is why my desire is for humans to be exterminated -- that is the only way to stop it.
No lottery necessary. The people that suggest the policy are used.
Hahaha ... yes of course you'd say that. You are a human - right?
Feel free to explain why my wonderful dog -- who would not harm anyone - who is loyal and adds joy to my life ... should be chosen for an experiment over one of your family members? Why should he be tortured so that your children can have effective bug spray?
Children are rather venomous creatures if not kept in line ... (see Lord of the Flies)... why not experiment on some of them?
https://fee.org/articles/dr-fauci-s-federal-agency-spent-424k-cruelly-experimenting-on-and-euthanizing-beagles-expos%C3%A9-reveals/
How about if I am Emperor I choose - how about I choose your children? Your grand kids? You?
It is best to stay onside with me -- in the off chance that I do become Emperor...
Your response demonstrates the evil of the human species. You betcha I'll be celebrating when this shit show sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
"Your response demonstrates the evil of the human species."
Jordan Peterson explained people like you quite clearly. They think they are "good people" with no blemish or flaw. They would never, no never become a Nazi!
People like you think they have all the answers and would love nothing more than forcing those answers on the people around them, controlling them. Your subsequent comments confirm this: "Well then ... It looks like I'll need to establish the empire... by using force!"
Curiously, you base your understanding of reality on... fictional novels, like "Lord of the Flies".
Fauci approves tests and scientists carry them out and you judge everyone that is not you to be evil. You see a problem in testing things on animals and your solution is to ... test it on other animals, human animals.
You are no better than the evil you decry.
You want to test humans with chemicals and do not know who to choose, and when I suggest we choose the people demanding we test things on humans, you call me evil. Not the person making the policy (ie you), but the person suggesting we limit choices to the policy maker (you).
You make a bed and call evil the person suggesting you now lie in it.
Uh huh.
I agree - I am part of the problem.
I am not casting stones.
All I am saying is that the planet will be better of without the humans.
And that moment is fast approaching https://www.headsupster.com/forumthread?shortId=220
BTW - I have read a theory that suggests humans were put on the planet for the purpose of releasing carbon by burning it ... which of course benefits plant life ... we've done our job and are now being despatched :)
Come on man --- all I want is for humans to be exterminated. And that is about to happen.
As for Lord of the Flies... imagine dropping 20 random 14 year old boys on an island -- let's throw in 5 girls. I think we know how that would end
Your dog is domesticated. Wolves are not so pleasant to other mammal species. Your dog relies on you for food and shelter. It affects the way that he? relates to you.
Is that what you're after - a domesticated human mammal?
A wolf does not conduct horrifying experiments on other animals ... a wolf does not carry out the nightmare of industrial farming... a wolf does not engage in industrial warfare or torture...
A wolf kills to eat as do all predators. Wolves live in a manner that is sustainable - they do not pave over the planet nor do they think to use petro chemicals to create enough food to feed 8 billion wolves -- they are not 'smart' enough I suppose
Humans are an aberration ... a destructive species... and that is why we are on the verge of extinction. I suspect we'll set the record for the species to go extinct in the shortest period of time.
It was all downhill from the moment we harnessed fire... then we compounded the disaster by using our big brains to farm.
I find that there's a lot in your description here that accords to what Matthias Desmet tried to do a year ago. Blame the victims.
This "project" of the last few years was organised at very high $ levels (very low human on es) and put into operation by those of few morals in the upper middle classes. Those who were forced to jab up to keep their jobs are not the perpetrators, as you and Matthias would like to try to make out, but the victims.
I don't see the parallels ... Desmet essentially says blame nobody ... mass formation is like a hurricane that forms from nothing ... therefore there is nobody to blame...
I suspect Desmet is a false actor ... supporting the school of thought that there is no mastermind -- and no malicious intent ... and that translates into no pitchforks gathering at the castle - there is no castle... it's basically a mindless mob of zombies
What I am suggesting if that there are masterminds .. but that they have what they believe are well intentioned motives for what they are doing... Hitler believed the Jews f789ed Germany therefore they were legit targets for extermination ...
With respect to the folks orchestrating the Rat Juice extermination ... to be committing such atrocities surely they must believe they are doing so out of necessity -- to not do so would result in a much more horrific end game.
I agree with them. I prefer not to be on the receiving end of mass murder rape cannibalism ... and for those who survive -- starvation and cancer from the 4000 spent fuel ponds that will left unmanaged.
There is a reason why every single country on the planet has signed on to this
Yep, money.
Money? Tens of billions earned by pharma.
Trillions lost by other businesses - over 1 trillion alone lost by the travel industry - yet no pushback from the billionaires who own hotels and airlines. Funny that.
Putin and Xi are two of the wealthiest men on the planet - not enough money to bribe them to inject Rat Poison into their citizens - let alone the leadership of every leader of every country on the planet
They control countries - the MSM - medical boards - militaries -- social media -- they control everything -- and they are gonna sell dodgy meds to make money?
Why not put a call into the Fed - he fellas - here's the account - drop a trillion in there cuz it's gonna cost you a whole lot more if we push the dodgy meds and shut down the world.
The DOD is behind this. This is not about money.
I didn't say that the ones that came up with the genocidal plan were going to make money from it, what I meant was that those tasked to carry it out, the politicians, the media flunkeys, were all very bribeable. Same with the likes of Fauci, Ferguson, Drosten & Bloomfield.
Also rarely mentioned but many of the guys such as Bloomfield are military trained and are arguably still in the military. But the military are not the initiators of this.
Putin is surely the most wealthy man in Russia - without a doubt he'd have more cash than any of the uber wealthy oligarchs... https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/wealth/theories-emerge-on-how-russian-president-vladimir-putin-amassed-his-fortune/news-story/cf013358da803d59a7397ac96aaddfda
Similarly Xi being the honcho of the CCP and knowing that the CCP has it's fingers in everything in China (I know first hand as a business we owned in China had a run in with CCP flunkies - and we sold it before losing it). He's the dictator so assume he's well into the hundred billion club.
You think these two men could be bribed - by a company that is making tens of billions?
To inject their population with dodgy vaccines?
The DOD is behind this - we have the contracts - the DOD is injecting the Praetorian Guard... the US military -- for money??? And not a single entity in the most powerful country on the planet is pushing back on this? No faction within the military is rebelling?
Not a single country on the planet is resisting. Everyone is bribed to go Pol Pot...
If Pfizer is spending all the vax revenue on bribes... surely they'd have generated no profits... so what is the point? Do you believe they are faking their accounting...
If they have the power to pull that off then again that indicates they are all powerful -- why not just inform the Fed that they would like 1 trillion dollars deposited in their account - or else.
'come on man' let's be serious. This is not about money.
This is what it's about https://www.headsupster.com/forumthread?shortId=220
I have a personal objection to war in general, and specific. I also object to murder, in general and specifically.
Lets say you have commandeered the state apparatus, and their media, and now want to wage war.
I object to this.
I object.
I object to people, for whatever reasons and arguments they make, that we should raise army's against our enemy.
I objet I object I object. It solves nothing.
Pruning for not being a response to thesis of this post.
No USS Liberty in your copypaste? I am disappoint
-What is your point, imbecill? Comparing to these geniuses of course, as are all other people including me:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221118093710/https://www.biblebelievers.org.au/repute.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20160828003528/http://www.radioislam.org/quotes/q001-050.htm
-That there can be smoke, without fire?
https://www.docdroid.net/BZHplSm/the-complete-list-of-the-1030-jewish-expulsions-in-human-history-pdf
-That organized Jewry/"Israel" does not occupy the US?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpNb9OVfE6M
https://redice.tv/red-ice-radio/how-the-israel-lobby-took-control-of-u-s-foreign-policy-and-public-opinion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVJRegoC2Os
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAvvmp5MOVU
-That organized Jewry does not own the reality description?
https://thezog.wordpress.com/
https://eta-45.blogspot.com/2013/07/who-controls-your-mind-2013.html
-That the criminality of Judaism is not mind blowing?
https://odysee.com/@Lasse_Karagiannis:f/The-Laws-Against-Non-Jews-In-2-Mins---YouTube:a
What's your problem with the USS Liberty, it is even reported in Israel that US Milittary intelligence know it was hit deliberately:
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2017-07-11/ty-article/but-sir-its-an-american-ship-never-mind-hit-her/0000017f-e48c-d7b2-a77f-e78f76800000
You must be either stupid or young and because of that stupid.
Please go touch some grass like a good goyim
NMH was not my first thought - but now encountering the recent Tablet article, I can see the link. King of Carrot Flowers and the album as a whole have a morbid teen-lust energy similar to Shosha, though the latter is more well-realized imo.
RE pre-60s history, there hardly seems to be anything. The Unz article describes the chronology here - there are only a few pages devoted to the topic in the first two decades. So it's a lot like the Spanish Flu - and yes, maybe the emergence of the simplistic narrative was a reaction to amnesia, though it's not clear why Holocaust rediscovery captivated culture for a half-century and the Allied destruction of Germany never went past a few scenes in Slaughterhouse Five and Maria Braun. Unless Jewish Hollywood is an evil puppet-master over the West's imagination, but as I preview here I think it's more a question of psychic appetites.
RE lockdowns, yes, that is exactly a consequence of failure to understand how gas chambers were not needed to make a seven-figure death count plausible. You can't suddenly put the state in charge of keeping a large group of people fed and disease-free in some arbitrary location; it's no different than teleporting someone into the middle of a hill and being confused why they can't breathe. Human life requires constant support.
Ex-2000s-era hipster checking in because I haven't been able to read anything about the Holocaust with thinking of Neutral Milk Hotel for over 20 years.
Edit: Great article. Or essay. Or whatever. Also, this exact issue become a topic of conversation with my best friend over the last few months, and I'm not ashamed to say that the Kanye debacle started it.
Now I must chime in. I never bought any NMH on disc, but OAA title track (*edit: actually WYFMN) played on whatever radio service it was that sprouted up in the Winamp / Sonique era and in 2009 bought IAOS in mp3 while making a mix that also included a short interlude from Einhorn's Voices of Light, eventually including "Ghost" on the mix, so this was probably my brain unconsciously remembering forgotten 8 year-old Pitchfork copy about Anne Frank.
Ha - but it blends in with the visual and audio aesthetics too much to demand explanation. "Europe, oldenyear." Also I'm fairly obtuse when it comes to the verbal element of music.
Thus exact subject has been a topic of conversation between my best friend and I over the last several months, and I'm not ashamed to say it was kicked off by the way Kanye debacle.