It is important to note that pre-WW1, Germany was considered to be one of the most sophisticated societies in the world. That's where everyone worth a shit with a mind wanted to be. It's quite curious how the best were corrupted.
That was due to the loss of the war and the followup economic devastation brought by the reparation payments that caused a lot of issues in the economy at large, followed by the 1918 flu pandemic that also caused serious issues (and with 25M dead, even more death than WW1 itself!).
One might be tempted to again draw parallels to today's situation in the US, with the US having lost the war in Afghanistan as well as everyone having suffered through years of Covid.
One might be tempted to again draw parallels to today's situation in the US, with the US having lost the war in Afghanistan as well as everyone having suffered through years of Covid.
Not disputing your point, but what blows me away is just how unapt your comparison is. We didn't 'lose' the war in Afghanistan. We chose not to fight it aggressively and eventually got bored with it, and then Biden let himself get rope-a-doped into following Trump's plan for unwinding it. Whatever, no biggie, we're over it.
And COVID was nothing like losing a world war. The very notion is ridiculous. Inflation in the US during COVID reached 12%. Inflation in the Weimar Republic reached 12 digits.
And yet we voted like a country with no options left. Like a country that had been destroyed and saddled with the bill by the victors... like a pariah nation full of desperate, starving people with nothing to lose. We fell for the first con man to come along waving a Bible and blaming somebody else.
What would things be like in America now if we actually had faced a genuine crisis like Germany's post-WWI downfall? My guess is, we're about to find out... because that's what we just voted for.
I compared Covid with the 1918 Spanish Flu, and that comparison is fair to make - if not by the death count, at the very least by the economic consequences. In fact the economic consequences of Covid are worse than those of the 1918 flu because the world is far more interconnected now than it was back then.
> What would things be like in America now if we actually had faced a genuine crisis like Germany's post-WWI downfall? My guess is, we're about to find out... because that's what we just voted for.
The thing with inflation is, of course the pre-WW2 inflation was ridiculously higher in numbers. But the consequences in the life of the wide masses - struggling to survive every day or at least every payday - are pretty similar. And that's why people don't necessarily vote "for the 47th", they vote "against who is in power currently" - a pattern we see across the Western world, with some countries falling to the far-right, while in others like Poland or the UK the far-right actually loses.
The key thing that makes the US and to a degree the UK unique is that both countries only have a two-party system. The UK got lucky, they got the authoritarians in power while the crisis was ongoing so they elected a democratic alternative, the US got the shorter end of the stick and now has to suffer through the 47th's period instead of having an actually social-democrat, Green or even a moderate Conservative third option.
Presumably this is being downvoted by idealogues, but it's absolutely correct. A couple of years ago I went to an exhibition in Munich on this subject, of surviving material from the era.
It was a German doctor of the 1920s who pioneered the idea of giving trans people what was effectively a doctor's note against police harrasment, an ancestor of the modern paperwork transition process.
I guess OP is referring to stuff like Trump's baseless claims that DEI was a factor in the recent plane crash. I hope we can agree that that's an absurd position regardless of our own perspective on DEI.
A single person's allegation of being passed over is a long way from proving that DEI policies contributed to staffing shortages. Moreover the audio from the recordings shows that the helicopter was warned and advised to avoid the plane, suggesting that staff shortages were not a crucial factor.
If you want to discuss the helicopter in particular, there’s also questions why a pilot who had been in multiple desk jobs for multiple years was flying a high risk route like that — and the possible reasons the military promoted her and allowed her to attempt this with questionable competency.
> There’s lots of disqualifying psychiatric and personality conditions
Looking at your link, I can see how the conditions specified there would make someone less effective as a soldier. I can't say the same for gender dysphoria.
Back in the 60s homosexuals were insisting that their sexuality was legitimate and demanding that everyone else accommodate this belief. Many at the time viewed it as a false belief contrary to biological law. That was wrong then, and this is wrong now.
I've met plenty of trans men and women that I wouldn't have known they were trans if they didn't tell me. What kind of effort are you thinking about in this case?
What about the women who are really butch? Or the effeminate men? Would you want them excluded too, or would a genital inspection be considered sufficient to qualify them?
The broadest one is that new definitions of woman and man have been imposed which not just accommodate people who sometimes manage to successfully masquerade as the opposite sex (like some of the people you've met) but the ones who do not do so at all. According to these new definitions, merely stating that you're a woman or man (or somehow, neither) is enough to make it real.
This has been used to rewrite law and policy so that any man who claims he's a woman can, with impunity, impose himself upon spaces that were only ever intended for women and girls.
That's a huge change and has significant impact on the female half of the population, wouldn't you agree?
> any man who claims he's a woman can, with impunity, impose himself upon spaces that were only ever intended for women and girls
The military policy (that I assume you're defending) is to ban anyone with a "history of gender dysphoria". Your points would have a little more weight if the situation was like in 2018 when individuals could serve under the condition of being stable for 18 months in their identified or assigned gender. But not much more weight, since that is still a lot weaker than what you describe.
I think you're avoiding the point. These are individuals that have otherwise already passed military training and fitness tests to determine whether or not they are able to participate and function as soldiers. They are actively a part of our military and being thrown out.
> “Effective immediately, all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused,” Hegseth said in a memo dated Feb. 7 and filed on Monday with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Which is consistent with Trump’s order from his first term that allowed transgender troops already serving to remain.
The only quote on current troops I found was:
> Hegseth said individuals with gender dysphoria already in the military would be “treated with dignity and respect,” and the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness would provide additional details on what this would mean.
Yes. That was part of one of the recent executive orders he signed [1] which was dictating not only that care for transgender individuals in the military should cease but also that expressing a different gender identity was not compatible with being in the military. It's not even particularly vague about it. The military issued guidance against the executive order to not take adverse action, essentially only adopting the bathroom bill portion of it [2].
Fascism is rooted in ideas of purity, paternalism, and natural order. Moreover it needs one or more marginalised groups to be a focus of hatred for the general population. Transgenderism threatens all of those ideas and is therefore an especial target of hatred.
Gender non-conformance emphasizes the idea that individuals have the power to define their own identity and way of life. Even if authoritarians don't care about gender specifically, they still don't want people getting funny ideas about self determination.
Specifically fascist authoritarians are likely to be concerned about gender non-conformance because their mythologies often often emphasize a society that's organized around men who can go to war and women who support them as homemakers.
There's been a few posts on HN suggesting reading Timothy Snyder. When the Nazis began labeling "enemies", they kind of didn't know where to stop. So it was Jews, non whites, gays (today it would be all lgbtq), communists, the list was big. When they invaded Poland, they ran into combinations of things they hated, so now they were dealing with Jewish Communists (whereas in Germany they were just Jews, or in Russia, they were just Communists). Their evil just combined and combined into a form where they had to hate everything ...
> The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have already seized. Even a single individual can be absolutely and reliably dominated only under global totalitarian conditions. Ascendancy to power therefore means primarily the establishment of official and officially recognized headquarters (or branches in the case of satellite countries) for the movement and the acquisition of a kind of laboratory in which to carry out the experiment with or rather against reality, the experiment in organizing a people for ultimate purposes which disregard individuality as well as nationality, under conditions which are admittedly not perfect but are sufficient for important partial results. Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination.
and
> Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of intellectual or erotic social behavior, to certain freshly invented "crimes," would render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude and no opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above all it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all, could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude the totalitarian domination. The so-called "Volksnutzen" of the Nazis, constantly fluctuating (because what is useful today can be injurious tomorrow) and the eternally shifting party line of the Soviet Union which, being retroactive, almost daily makes new groups of people available for the concentration camps, are the only guaranty for the continued existence of the concentration camps, and hence for the continued total disfranchisement of man.
> The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible: "How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one's own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in absolute solitude. That is why we are subdued no matter what happens." [Rousset]
[..]
> The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.
> This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed by man's conscience which tells him that it is better to die a victim than to live as a bureaucrat of murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family — how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?
> Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total.
[..]
> If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and refuse to be misled by the common-sense assertion that they are Utopian and unrealizable, it develops that the society of the dying established in the camps is the only form of society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely. Those who aspire to total domination must liquidate all spontaneity, such as the mere existence of individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most private forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seem. Pavlov's dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model "citizen" of a totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced only imperfectly outside of the camps.
Thank you for that. You quoted the author of the phrase “Banality of Evil”:
Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept of the banality of evil.[15] Her thesis is that Eichmann was actually not a fanatic or a sociopath, but instead an average and mundane person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself,[16] was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society".[17] Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional.
I wanted to quote much less, but it proved difficult, since wanted preserve some kind of "self-containment" of the point. It always feels wrong to take one of the many "quotable bits" from her books, because thinking one knows what there is to know is treacherous, doubly so with this subject. The whole book is very much worth reading, now more than ever.
