New Left Watch

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does the fact that on tumblr recently I saw somebody in all seriousness describe Hitler as 'someone who believed very deeply in inequality and privilege' count for this thread?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does the fact that on tumblr recently I saw somebody in all seriousness describe Hitler as 'someone who believed very deeply in inequality and privilege' count for this thread?

Hitler did so believe and put his beliefs into reality to the extent possible, did he not?

The problem with describing Hitler that way isn't a problem with accuracy.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm going to attempt to kill with silence the (repulsive) article that Marokai linked to and explain what I mean about the Hitler thing. Understatement isn't always a bad thing--famously it's key to some forms of comedy, to name the most obvious example--but when it's deployed with the kind of glurgy earnestness that it was in this case, it's hard not to suspect that this person is minimizing Hitler's atrocities by talking about them in the same terms as obviously much more minor problems. Furthermore it's hard not to come to the conclusion that a discourse of oppression entirely centered around concepts like 'privilege' is completely insufficient to discuss much of anything seriously and implicitly encourages this kind of vapid thinking. This is a generation of activists who can be confronted with the example of a regime that killed millions and millions and millions of people and without a hint of irony describe the man at the center of it as having 'believed in privilege'. The profound lack of historical awareness (and awareness that a difference in degree can be so enormous as to become a difference in kind) inherent in a statement like that doesn't come from nowhere. Personally I think that the quote in DC Al Fine's signature, despite its unfortunate source, has it more or less right: It comes from a pathological desire to avoid anything smacking too much of a serious belief system--a belief system like Judaism or Christianity or Marxism that provides some of the language with which these sorts of things were traditionally discussed and through which they were traditionally understood--in favor of a constant reaffirmation of not being that [small-c] 'conservative', not being that 'old-fashioned', not being that 'boring'. 'Don't trust any episteme over thirty', dontcha know.