albionfagan wrote:I think Nazism as an ideology stands out for its fundamental cruelty and nihilistic violent heart. It is the collision of all the most malevolent strands of European thought throughout the 19th Century. Colonialism/Eugenics/Racism/ the list goes on. I struggle to see anything that could draw me to Nazism apart from pure hatred of something else.
I'm aware of I am obviously euro-centric, and I do not deny the horror of other regimes (The USSR stands out for its totality), but I still can't quite see anything as on a par with Nazism. Even pure Fascism lacks the intrinsic cruelty that is so central to Nazism.
Then again, perhaps the most chilling thing about Nazism is that exposes humanity for what it really is (amongst other things). I tend to dismiss people like Ghengis Khan as living in an era when we couldn't really expect much more. But of course we could, if there is an inherent morality? If there is not, then the Nazis are no worse than anyone. That's the most troubling aspect for me.
The interesting aspect about Nazism for me has to do with how the Nazis recorded everything meticulously. They kept great records of everything. In a documentary it was explained the reason why the documents were so orderly and well kept and filed was because they wanted to let the future generations of German Nazis to know that they were
doing the job right!For them it was not a series of crimes against human rights or humanity--it was recording for posterity the acts that were in keeping with their deepest held beliefs about the social order and their role in it.
Some of them would make lamp shades out of human skin. They did it for being efficient and not wasting a resource. The rights of that human being was never considered because they were not really human. They were a resource that had to serve the needs of the real humans. No real empathy there or identification with the enemy.
Can not waste valuable bullets on some of these people who are enemies of the state. So tie them together and throw them in a river and let them drown in a big row of drowning and save some valuable bullets.
Go and dig graves for the cadavers. Smelly, tough and highly unpleasant work. Once they did the work of digging the holes in big muddy ditches they would then shoot the gravediggers or hit them on the back of the head and have another one of the prisoners cover the hole up with dirt that the previous shot in the head prisoner would dig. Be efficient. Use labor to the very end.
Children hiding from counts for health. Too skinny to work. Sent off to be gassed. So the children in deep fear would throw themselves in the mass latrines swimming in waste and who knows how stinky and disgusting they had to stay in it for hours waiting for the coast to be clear and clean up and go to their cold beds to pretend they were not picked for execution.
The horrors of these actions taken by a state drunken with the idea of creating a perfect society and being dedicated in making sure the ones threatening it from manifesting is truly dreadful and horrific.
Yet, Germany was one of Europe's most sublime and elevated European cultured civilizations eh?