I'd actually argue its worse if their guiding principles guide them to bad behavior, because they have a ready made defense and social insulation around their bad behavior.
That's really at the heart of the evil of the Holocaust. It did not happen because good people were possessed by an evil spirit or tricked by propaganda or whatever, these aren't people acting out of character or at odds with their moral senses. It happened because people allowed themselves to be convinced that an evil was a good, because the propaganda they encountered reinforced their preexisting biases and inclinations.
To the point above, its not the case that fascists lack any set of guiding principles, its that their priorities are perverted from the normal. It's not they don't perceive e.g. murdering members of the designated out-group as evil, its just that their principles either recast those people as less human (making the murder ethically neutral at worse), or that allowing said people to survive will result in far worse outcomes for society at large (making the murder ethically commendable).
That's true, but I still wouldn't call the average (neo)nazi's world view "consistent". They believe(d) jews owned the world, that white men came from the lost continent of Hyperborea, that communists were allied to the jews in an international plot to undermine the "white race".
There are many reasons one would fall for such falsehoods, but I don't think reasoning your way into a twisted ethical paradigm is one of them. In other words, I think you have to reject rationality and reasoning altogether to get to this point.
I do believe fascists lack a proper set of guiding principle. They act purely out of a desire to fit into the in-group.
And you are right that there was no inherent predisposition to nazism, anyone can, under the wrong circumstances, fall into that.
> That's true, but I still wouldn't call the average (neo)nazi's world view "consistent". They believe(d) jews owned the world, that white men came from the lost continent of Hyperborea, that communists were allied to the jews in an international plot to undermine the "white race".
> There are many reasons one would fall for such falsehoods, but I don't think reasoning your way into a twisted ethical paradigm is one of them. In other words, I think you have to reject rationality and reasoning altogether to get to this point.
I think you're conflating fringe myths with the actual core ideology. The leadership's principles were coherent, even if built on lies. People don't need to reject rationality to fall for it, they just need to rationalize cruelty within a warped framework.
> They act purely out of a desire to fit into the in-group.
That's pretty reductive don't you think? Though warped and morally indefensible, they definitely have defining principles. It's unwise to treat your ideological enemies introspect and intellect as inherently inferior to what you perceive as your own.
> [...] there was no inherent predisposition to nazism, anyone can, under the wrong circumstances, fall into that.
I get the point, but I don’t buy the 'anyone' angle. Some people just aren't predisposed to that kind of thinking or behavior, no matter the environment.
> The leadership's principles were coherent, even if built on lies. People don't need to reject rationality to fall for it, they just need to rationalize cruelty within a warped framework.
I wouldn't call fascist leadership coherent either, it's what eventually leads to the downfall of any fascistic regime. The leaders end up believing their own lies, the nazis thought the aryan race was undefeatable, and engaged in too much warring. I do still think you have to reject rationality to believe the lies and internalize the rhetoric. You can't be rational and believe in the lies.
> Though warped and morally indefensible, they definitely have defining principles.
I mean, yes, technically. My understanding of "defining principle" may be slightly different from yours. To me, you don't really have principles if you're able to align your opinion with the party's new line on a whim.
> It's unwise to treat your ideological enemies introspect and intellect as inherently inferior to what you perceive as your own.
You are very right on that.
> Some people just aren't predisposed to that kind of thinking or behavior, no matter the environment.
You're right, that was a slight hyperbole. Here, I wanted to refer to the psychological studies done on nazis after the war, that found nothing out of the ordinary with those men.
> you don't really have principles if you're able to align your opinion with the party's new line on a whim
That's really most people though. Look at the clear but arbitrary alignment of leftists and rightists on whatever popular issue appears. They somehow never manage to agree and it's not always clear which side they're take in advance. Leftists used to oppose illegal immigration and implemented tough drug sentences, now they're the opposite. They hated globalization until Trump also worked against it and then they loved it. Did I mention Trump worked against globalization and suddenly rightists turned against it too, even though it seems like a pretty fundamental part of right wing's preference for the free market? Free speech went from left to right. Anti-semitism went from right to left. Don't mask then do mask and demonize anyone who does the wrong thing at the wrong time. Gloat about unvaccinated people dying of covid and wanting them to be denied medical care is barely a step removed from supporting the use of gas chambers on them. There's a Nazi in most people. Not everyone, but enough to commit a genocide in the right conditions.
I think its a bit reductive to describe them as "arbitrary". But I think more importantly, a lot of this jockeying is exactly what's described in the article. Leftists oppose globalism for good reasons based in their ideology, rightist oppose globalism for good reasons based in their ideology, but each side assumes that the other is holding similar views disingenuously.
There's actual nuance if you care to look for it. Really interrogate your perspective that free speech went from left to right, for instance (its the least likely of the bunch to drive a flame war from either side, so that's why I'm picking on it).
Is it the case that leftist don't want people to say what they believe in the public square? Or are they instead concerned about how social media enables highly targeted disinformation campaigns, because its much much easier to flood a person's feed with dozens of seemingly-unique-and-distinct voices pushing the intended narrative? Similarly, are rightist voices actually concerned about the deafening impact of widespread disinformation campaigns on social media? Or just at being muzzled?
Antisemitism went to the left? Do you really think a neonazi would vote for the democrats? Don't you remember Charlottesville?
And free speech went to the right? Have you not seen the recent wave of censorship since Trump won the presidency? Just today, a cartoonist from the Washington Post resigned after her cartoon mocking Bezos grovelling at Trump's feet was barred from publication.
You are right that the democratic party often switches sides, like they did on immigration. That's because the democratic party is primarily an economically liberal party that holds some progressive values only when it may help win the white house, and doesn't clash with the liberalist line.
Socialists on the other hand have consistently been:
- Internationalists
- For welfare and social programs
- For high taxes and large public services
- For nationalization of critical infrastructure
- For unions, workers rights and corporate regulations
The one thing they gained since the 40s is all the social justice stuff, which is old too by now.
You don't have to be a neo-nazi to be antisemitic. You can also get carried away with the free Palestine stuff and blame all Jews instead of just Zionists. That's what leftists sometimes do.
> Just today, a cartoonist from the Washington Post resigned after her cartoon mocking Bezos grovelling at Trump's feet was barred from publication.
Yea maybe that's the start of free speech going back to the left, but for the past few years, it's been clearly a right wing thing.
You might be right about idealists who have actual principles maintaining them (as you listed) but that's not normal people. Normal people's opinions blow with the wind of their tribe.
> Yea maybe that's the start of free speech going back to the left, but for the past few years, it's been clearly a right wing thing.
I just don't buy this. The main way that the left has "suppressed" free speech has been to enforce the social more that if you say shitty things, you can expect shitty responses.
"I can't call black people the n-word without people getting angry with me" has been a criticism since we collectively decided that the n-word was a slur, and it was never a freedom-of-speech issue, just a polite society thing. I do have clear memories of people ranting about free-speech vis a vis "political correctness" during the Clinton years, and it was just as specious.
Literally the only difference is that, unlike the 1940s, the subject of slurs actually have some power to socially punish those who use them.
Nobody's trying to ban people from getting angry when you offend them and it would obviously be anti-free speech to do so. Leftists want hate speech to be a crime. Rightists protest against those laws in countries that have them.
Sartre said some things about how the opinions expressed externally by antisemites need not be internally consistent. I'm inclined to believe it applies to all fascists more broadly.
I think something that people fail to realize is that fascism is frequently a big-tent sort of movement. Like, the Nazis had everybody from the anti-Christian Thule society types all the way down to the purely self-interested who are literally only in it for the access to money and power (like Oskar Schindler, incidentally). Fascism is sort of remarkable for its permissiveness of heterodoxy in certain spheres, given how ideologically driven it is. But this can be understood by how personality driven it is. Insofar as there is a coherent philosophy at the heart of any fascist movement, it basically devolves down to "what does the person in charge believe?".
All of that said, I'm reminded frequently of the Wehrmacht soldiers who wept while committing genocide in Ukraine and Belarus. They wept for how awful and evil an act they were doing, but they kept doing it because they believed in the supremacy of Germany and Aryanism. That's really what I mean when I say a person with a consistent world view is more dangerous than a person without, because they can use it to convince themselves to do things they know to be evil.
