james_nicoll

"No Jew can be a member of the race" is "not non-senseless" -- meaning, therefore, it's sensible?

*boggles*

I'm not surprised someone at the National Review thinks that because racism appeals to "sensible" people it therefore must make sense.

I actually do think that using the word "senseless" to describe the violence of the Holocaust is inaccurate and maybe thoughtless, for reasons not too dissimilar to the ones stated in that article. Nazi violence, even if it ultimately amounted to base brutality, didn't appear out of nowhere. It was the outcome of a coherent, albeit abhorrent, ideology that preyed on very real and in some cases legitimate grievances and difficulties. That's worth remembering, especially at a time of economic and political upheaval when ideologies that are not too different can gain credence for exactly the same reasons. To me, "senseless" violence is something like Sandy Hook, not the Holocaust.

What any of that has to do with Benghazi, however, other than that the American right is still trying to make fetch happen on that front, I have no idea.

The slight problem is that it WAS senseless – concentration camps were kind of normative in and of themselves, take a potentially troublesome minority group, such as native americans or boers or whoever, give them a special prison to keep them out of the way, that was normal and in place before the war in germany for the jews, and while that's horrible it's not holocaust horrible.

The entire world found the logic underpinning mere ww1 style concentration/internment camps perfectly sensible during ww2, spirit of the times, $[phrases that allow speaker to pretend the internment of asian americans didn't happen], etc...etc...

But now imagine you're in the middle of a life and death struggle for survival as the nazis decided to be in the 40s; you're gonna waste how much fuel moving all the inmates of the ghettoes and the west german concentration camps all the way to the middle of poland? And you're gonna waste how much fuel operating furnaces to burn the bodies of disabled people and jews? And you're gonna waste how much money and R&D time on turning common pesticides into something you can use in gas chambers? And operate specialised factories that do nothing but convert civilian zyklon-B into gas chamber Zyklon-B? And you're gonna waste how many physically able to fight troops to man the death camps and oversee the work camps? And you're gonna do all this when the worst possible thing the prisoners are gonna do is try to leave your country, thus rendering any "threat" they might provide moot?

This math does not make sense, ergo it is "senseless". Violence for violence's sake even. The nazis effectively just being evil because they felt that only by being evil could they prove their own superiority to themselves.

Slavery and work camps and death camps are always and ever will be the sickness of a nation with an inferiority complex, not the actions of rational agents responding to neccessity.

Now if someone will just assert that the central premise of Watch on the Rhine is not a form of holocaust denial I will happily go on an even longer rant.

"that preyed on very real and in some cases legitimate grievances and difficulties which had absolutely nothing to do with Jews"

fixed that for you.

Bruce

Did I say otherwise?

Perhaps I don't have a correct understanding of the dog whistles (left or right), but it seems to me that prefixing an adjective like "senseless" to the front of "violence" pretty strongly implies that there is semsible violence.

Certainly, Obama's administration, with its drones and the killing of Osama bin Laden and other things advocates the use of violence in some situations.

So I'm not sure what the National Review is objecting to. That Obama called an attempted genocide (well, genocides: they went after more than just Jews) as "senseless"? Or that really, the Holocaust was sensible?

I mean, I can even see the possibility of distinguishing between the various tenets of Nazism that "make sense" and separating them from the genocidal justifications--saying that parts of Nazism make sense. I don't know enough about Nazism to assert that is true or false; I suspect they had some economic stands that weren't totally stupid, but most of the stuff I've heard is atrocious. (To do so would take more time and inclination than I have: some of my relatives suffered in the occupation of the Netherlands, so I'm biased to think that Nazism was a turd with a candy coating: it must have had something attractive to make so many people flock to it, but when they bit into it and started chewing, what they got was fecal. Fecal actions and a fecal ideology.)

These are the kind of people who prove Hannah Ahrendt's phrase.

Blech.

Doing whatever is necessary to stop someone who's attempting to commit violence is something that I would call "sensible violence".

I know some people who suggest that passive resistance would have stopped the Nazis. (Hey, it worked to get the British out of India, right?) Whereas I believe that when one is faced by a group who are committing genocide, they'll be very happy to deal with someone performing passive resistance.

So I'm not sure what the National Review is objecting to.

That Obama is alive.

It's kind of like the Republicans Accuse Obama of Using Position as President to Lead Country.

The things that "made sense" about Nazzism was that it preyed upon the fact that people were in legitimate dire straits and offered them a way out (even if that way out had no way of sustaining itself), that it was opposed to an ideology, Communism, that was demonstrating it wasn't candy and flowers (even as it depended on bullies and thugs to be its messengers in the streets), and that people could feel pride in their country (by assuming that it was the greatest nation on Earth and special and they were the greatest people, at the expense of scapegosats to blame all their problems on).

Well, there's "make sense" as in, "This part is actually correct, or could be correct in some circumstances, or is almost correct and just needs some tweaking..." And there's "make sense" as in, "This flows logically from the premises, so I can see why people who believed in those premises would do it." Saying, "If you believed the fundamental tenets of Nazism, this would make sense," doesn't imply any endorsement of those tenets.

So I'm not sure what the National Review is objecting to. That Obama called an attempted genocide (well, genocides: they went after more than just Jews) as "senseless"? Or that really, the Holocaust was sensible?

I think the sensible interpretation would be that hurricanes and tsunamis are senseless; mass murder and terrorism are the product of human intellect, and calling them senseless denies the deliberate agency behind them.

"So I'm not sure what the National Review is objecting to."

There is actually a real answer to this. I don't think it's particularly, er, sensible, but I'm familiar enough with the thought process that I can try to translate from conservative ideology into English.

One of the primary objections towards liberalism from the ideological right is that liberalism is fond of what they define as "moral relativism" (which is not quite the same thing as what that term means in the context of anthropology). It is a common, if not universal, belief among conservatives that the world is to some extent Manichean: there are forces of good and forces of evil, and one must be on the side of good not because of immediate benefits (which are perceived as possibly deceptive) but because it is the side of Good. (Good can be religious or not; often "freedom" in some definition is the side of good in entirely non-religious conservatives, such as non-religious libertarians.)

In other words, they believe that liberals are too inclined to attribute evil to circumstance, desperation, poor decision-making, or other more "harmless" human foibles and failings, thus masking or underplaying what is, in their view, a fundamental clash of moralities between Good and Evil. They believe that recognizing that bad things are not merely bad but Evil, and are part of a unified scheme of Evil with ideological roots that must be dug out and exposed in every detail, is essential to triumph in this sort of ongoing war.

Therefore, when Obama terms the Holocaust "senseless," what they read that as is a statement that Nazism is rootless or isolated or simply a one-time evil that is disconnected to any larger picture. They would instead argue that Nazism was part of a coherent strategy of Evil that (and this is the really important part and the thing that prompts this campaign) continues today in other forms (many who make this sort of argument would identify it with, say, radical Islam or some other more recent thing that upsets them), and that Obama is abrogating a responsibility to understand the great connected roots of this Evil and thereby providing cover for the creeping forms of that Evil that are invading US society to this day.

By calling the Holocaust "senseless," Obama is thereby disconnecting it from all the things that are wrong with the world today and, in their view, muddying the clear Good vs. Evil picture of which World War II was only one iteration, and which is still being fought. And the general feeling among those who make this sort of argument is that refusal to recognize that one is in such a struggle dooms one to losing it.

Did that article just defend Nazism? Seriously?

It would appear so. The part that jumps out at me is that "sensible" Germans were convinced. I think that statement is an oxymoron, since you lose your "sensible" cred if you're convinced that genocide is a dandy solution to your problems, IMO. Now, it isn't at all surprising is that there was an adverse reaction in Germany to the extreme measures taken to make the German people atone for WWI, but a lot of Jews fought side-by-side with Gentiles on behalf of Kaiser Wilhelm and were suffering as much as everyone else under the post-war austerity measures; no "sensible" person would have singled them out as scapegoats and decided that everything would be fantastic if only there were no more Jews (and Roma, and homosexuals, and all of the other Nazi-defined "undesirables"). That cannot ever be called "sensible".

Apparently it's OK for the sainted Reagan to have visited Bitburg, but Obama has to choose his words with more care. Fuck them.

In return for there being no memetic prophylactic handed out for this entry, here's a link without protection for James. I dare you to read the comments.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/minnesota-spending-3400-to-teach-orgasm/

Ah. Fixed now.

What I can't figure out, given his position of record on Israel, is why Squire O'bama would speak against the Holocaust.

He funded Iron Dome to the tune of $275 million and has promised another $680 million to Israel over the next three years, so...clearly he's anti-Israel? How so?

I would curse you that “איר זאָל באָבקעס בלוט און ייטער”, but that’s basically what you’ve been doing in your comments.

I gotta say, that article (and the kind of ridiculous responses here) are about the only time I've seen people actively quibbling like this over a completely standard, cliched phrase.

Are you saying that, irregardless of the importance of the subject, that all this arguing is senseless?

Next you'll be saying that Comic Sans isn't the best font.

Thank God someone is finally praising the rationality of Third Reich policy...

Merely "recommended"?

Nay, James.