this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Is nazi the only word you have for a authoritarian and militant group? I have no love for Israel, but I have less love for your limited vocab. As a immigrant who learned English in his 20s, I know that two groups can both be bad without being the same group.
"lets have some nuance here" "You just call everyone you disagree with a nazi" "as a" "both sides are bad" "authoritarian" ... BINGO!!
Yes, if you discuss complex things with the depth of understanding of a six year old, call everything evil a Nazi, and don't understand that the world is not made up of pure , good people and Nazis, I bet you get to fill out a lot of imaginary bingo cards , since those get to work by your made up rules. The real world does not.
Man I quit reddit because of shit comments like this.
A Nazi is just an end stage authoritarian, once the malignancy has become terminal. There are other words, but only dishonest people care to make the distinction.
No. Nazi means national German socialism workers party, which was a german political party that did some notable things, like starting WW2, the Holocaust. You may want to look them up, the history is interesting.
Two things being similar does not mean they are the same thing. Is every end stage cancer pancreatic cancer to you? Is every war just the great war to you ( I know you have not heard of WW2 yet).
If you cannot understand that nazi actually is a word with meaning, and not just something you say when you think a group is authoritarian or evil, than you have absolutely no room in you brain for the slightest glimmer of nuance or basic comprehension of anything.
Given that fascism inherently utilizes pretense and labels to control the framing of every argument, I counter with the assertion that, "a Nazi is, as a Nazi does." If an individual deifies the authority of the government and worships its power by oppressing other individuals, that person is a Nazi. That goes for every cop that enforces unjust laws, every politician that executes a prisoner, every political party that goes to war, and every corporation that justifies profit at the expense of the wellbeing of a laborer. You're free to disagree, but you're just helping Nazis hide behind whatever logo they're currently wearing.
You do know that people being evil or fascist predated the Nazis, often has different motivationions than the Nazis, and are sometimes done by people who have huge disagreements with Nazis right? Many of them predate the nazis, are unaffiliated with them, and were persucuted by them. Your argument is literally that everyone bad is a Nazi. Re read your response if you think I am not representing you fairly, because that is exactly what you say. By no means am I giving Israel or anyone else a pass for being evil. I am also not giving nazis a free las for being evil. I think to understand why Israel is evil, what exactly are doing, and how the world should deal with them, you need to understand some very basic things they are not.
They are not dragons, despite them killing others in order to enrich themselves. They are not UFOs, despite flying around in secret missions and kidnapping people. They are not Nazis, despite being fascist and trying to rid their land of non jews. Just because nazis are bad, and Israel is bad, does not mean they are the same thing. People act evil for many different reasons, some of which are similar to each other. Israel is not as similar to nazis as your over simplified troll logic would like them to be.
What you need to understand is that malignant authority has been the one nemesis to the human condition throughout history. No matter what they call themselves, what period of history, or whether they're seen as heros or villians. The one, "boogeyman" who has proven themselves indefensible in every scenario are the Nazis. So when I tell you that Israelis are Nazis, I'm challenging you to MEANINGFULLY describe the difference. The Gaza Strip is Auschwitz. Prove me wrong. On the ground, in the world created by their authority, there is NO difference.
You're assuming that I'm stupid because I don't adhere to your rigid definitions of fascism. I'm assuming that you're intelligent enough to understand the concepts on an archetypal level. Hopefully I've proved you wrong, and hopefully you'll prove me right.
Two points. You are incorrectly using the term nazi to mean evil. That is not what the word means. What would you call evil before the 1900s? I will not disagree that Israel is in someways evil, but nazi is not the word used in English for evil, as you are using it.
Secondly, I grew up and lived in Gaza. It is not a concentration camp, or an extermination center. It is a warzone. It is groups of people fighting over their territory.
We probably roughly agree on what facistm is, and that both the Nazis and Israel are fascist. However, the word for a fascist authority is not nazi. It is fascist authority. Do you understand that yet? It is like calling all apples granny smith, and then getting aggressive when someone tells you to call them apples, and that some apples are not granny smith apples, despite all apples having some similar properties to granny smith apples.
Point 1: This is your one strike for you to define my arguments in defiance of my words. I will just block you the next time YOU decide what I know.
I'm not using Nazi as a synonym for evil. Evil is subjective and nebulous. Evil is an illusion. Nazis believe that all of their victims are evil. It's the ultimate projection of their own ignorance. I've already told you that Nazis are emblematic of malignant authority, which always manifests in the same way; the deification of the hierarchy of authority resulting in self justification of acts against individuals to perpetuate its own existence. What would I call malignant authoritarians prior to 1900? I'd still call them Nazis. What people hate about Nazis is that their genocide was undeniable. Most are perfectly OK with prisons, wars, and slavery as long as it serves their own comfort. "Nobody panics when things are going according to plan, even if that plan is horrific." If you insist on a historical definition, I would consent to "Mammon Worshippers," as they were known in the time of Christ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammon
Point 2: Your denial doesn't change reality. Whether you're being honest about growing up in Gaza or not, when authority decides where dissidents can live with walls, borders, or laws, they've created a prison. When authority decides that it can use violence to enforce a prison, it enacts a genocide in the prison, which is now a concentration camp.
Point 3: You are free to disagree, but again I iterate that by adhering to the definitions enforced by Nazis you are expanding their influence and validating their narratives. Authority ALWAYS depends on pretence to establish in-groups and out-groups. It ALWAYS hollows out the individual until nothing but a murderous and obedient drone remains, and if it fails, it always throws the "degenerate" into the slave camps.
What? Why are you so overwhelmingly confident in your statements? Why are you so quick to dismiss anyone who has even the slightest disagreement to your quite aggressive and absolutist opinions?
Also it's unclear to me why Nazis are the "end stage". They were definitely evil and neo Nazis today are definitely fucked in the head but you have not given a causal reason for why or how all authoritarian movements become Nazis.
Given that fascism inherently utilizes pretense and labels to control the framing of every argument, I counter with the assertion that, “a Nazi is, as a Nazi does.” If an individual deifies the authority of the government and worships its power by oppressing other individuals, that person is a Nazi. That goes for every cop that enforces unjust laws, every politician that executes a prisoner, every political party that goes to war, and every corporation that justifies profit at the expense of the wellbeing of a laborer. You’re free to disagree, but you’re just helping Nazis hide behind whatever logo they’re currently wearing.