The answer, sadly, is no.
:O)
Although I have never met her, I feel reasonably sure that Sophia is not a Nazi Zombie. In fact, I would venture to say that she is nothing like a Nazi Zombie and unless anyone gives me even the smallest reason to think otherwise I will continue to insist that this is the case.
She did however snag my "zombies" on Daily Kos.
She caught them both, which is just plain sad.
It is Sophia 2 and Karmafish nuffin.'
{Rats!}
Which, of course, also leads me to wonder just what the hell is going on with this woman that she knows me so well that she could accomplish this?... but whatever.
It's really none of my business, I guess.
I knew that she was onto me when I saw that she had registered as a "follower." I did not know exactly what the fuck a follower is, but I knew that I did not want Sofia as one. That much I knew, for certain.
And I knew my goose was cooked, for sure, when Volley made a point of challenging me about one particularly nasty, ugly, stinky person.
Nonetheless, there is a significant question here.
The real question is what makes a Nazi a Nazi?
This is a good question. It's hardly an original question, of course, but it is also the very question that lead to my most recent demise on that bastion of universal brotherhood Daily Kos.
What makes a Nazi?
Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School sought to answer that question after World War II, leading to theories around the "authoritarian personality." John Dean sought to revive this intellectual trend during George W's administration with his book Conservatives Without Conscience.
Daily Kos represents an example of this top-down, authoritarian mind-set. The funny thing about that, tho, and the ironic thing, perhaps, is that Markos did not particularly encourage it. Not from what I saw. It's an organic authoritarianism and an insecure desire for group-think that just developed naturally because people are people.
What we know for sure is that most actual Nazis, that is, most regular German party members, were just that. They were regular volk. Your average day-to-day Nazi was not running around with a little Hitler mustache killing people. No. Most were no different than human beings anywhere at any time.
And that is the real point, I think. The Nazis were not an anomaly, but normal human beings.
And the same goes for your average Klansmen and the same goes for the reviled group of your choice. Take your pick. (How about the Khmer Rouge?) These people whom we love to hate are not evil people, but normal people who go along with an agenda of hatred because they actually believe it is the right thing to do.
That's what a Nazi is, really.
This is not an original insight, but it is something that we should consider.
These people who perpetually and forever hate on Israel, thus encouraging violence against Jews, do so not so much out of malice... although there is malice aplenty... but because they honestly believe that they have a moral imperative to expose the Jewish state for the vile and racist and colonialist and imperialist, racist state that they constantly tell one another that it truly is.
Nazis, whether Arab or European, are actually moralists. They believe in the rightness of their cause and do so on grounds of social justice. I like the way that Pilar Rahola put it in her 2009 speech when she says that it is:
not possible to totally explain the present-day imbecility of anti-Israelism. Both drink from the fountain of intolerance and lies. Also, if we accept that anti-Israelism is the new form of anti-Semitism, we conclude that circumstances may have changed, but the deepest myths, both of the Medieval Christian anti-Semitism and of the modern political anti-Semitism, are still intact. Those myths are part of the chronicle of Israel.
For example, the Medieval Jew accused of killing Christian children to drink their blood connects directly with the Israeli Jew who kills Palestinian children to steal their land. Always they are innocent children and dark Jews. Similarly, the Jewish bankers who wanted to dominate the world through the European banks, according to the myth of the Protocols, connect directly with the idea that the Wall Street Jews want to dominate the World through the White House. Control of the Press, control of Finances, the Universal Conspiracy, all that which has created the historical hatred against the Jews, is found today in hatred of the Israelis. In the subconscious, then, beats the DNA of the Western anti-Semite, which produces an efficient cultural medium.
And we get plenty of this type of material on Daily Kos on a daily basis, do we not?
I think that we do.
But, I can tell you with total assurance that the Huff Post is much, much worse.
No question.
Peace to you, please, Sofia.
Cheers!
And my sincerest apologies to Volleyboy1.
However much we may disagree... and he cannot be happy with me about this most recent skirmish or idiocy or whatever one might call it... I know the guy is a very smart guy with a very big heart.
Calling them Nazis helps little and is not accurate. They behave more like Bolsheviks as I see it anyway.
ReplyDeleteCalling them people who are effectively aligned with Nazis would be more accurate. The Mufti gets dismissed as if he was an out of touch altruist who left no trace. And he is not alone. There is affinity for the Nazis by too many Arabs, past and present, and cooperation is not hard to find.
Funny, one could call Israelis fascist without reservation. No one would blink. But dare hint that some Arabs might have their own such tendencies and one becomes a racist Islamophobe. I mean, who cares if it's so?
As for the anti-Israel frothing, it is rather antisemitism that is at play in its various forms. It is practiced under a different rubric, and many sincerely and accurately believe they are not antisemitic, but they practice it. The activists do so with greater intent and actually violate their own liberal principles in the process.
That bothers me, to see this disconnect. I see Rahola's most telling question as this one:
"Why when Israel is the only country in the World which is threatened with extinction, it is also the only one that nobody considers a victim?"
I think the Orwellian argument goes far. I am proud not to be aligned with the adversaries of Israel. I know what they think about human rights.
As for the activists, to the extent they stand for human rights, it is selective, and too often based on the very same prejudices they decry in others, although they proclaim to be the moral guides of humanity.
Speaking of OWS
ReplyDelete"It isn’t just a few crackpots engaging in anti-Semitism incidents at the Occupy Wall Street protests. Apparently, the main organizer behind the movement – Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn – has a history of anti-Jewish writing.
Back in 2004, he wrote a highly controversial Adbusters article entitled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” which peddled some of the more feverish theories about American Jews, neoconservatism, and the Bush administration (emphasis added):
Drawing attention to the Jewishness of the neocons is a tricky game. Anyone who does so can count on automatically being smeared as an anti-Semite. …
Here at Adbusters, we decided to tackle the issue head on and came up with a carefully researched list of who appear to be the 50 most influential neocons in the U.S. (see above). Deciding exactly who is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the U.S. is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of them are Jewish........"
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/10/13/occupy-wall-street-kalle-lasn/
"Nazis, whether Arab or European, are actually moralists."
ReplyDeleteExactly right.
Jew-hatred -- anti-Jewish racism -- unlike all other forms of racism, views the people who are the objects of that racism not as being intellectually inferior, but, rather, as being evil and powerful and secretly controlling the world.
Jew-hatred -- anti-Jewish racism -- racist antipathy toward the collective of the Jewish people -- is Moralism -- the worshiping of one's own ego, and the protecting of one's own ego, and the projecting of one's own flaws onto a particular small group of talented well-accomplished other people, and the blaming, and accusing, and scapegoating, and vilifying, of that particular small group of talented well-accomplished other people, and the projecting of one's own ego onto a symbolic figure or concept and the worshiping of that symbolic figure or concept. Moralism is a manifestation of extreme self-conceit and is a result of profound ignorance and lack of integrity -- stupidity and dishonesty. Moralism is an evil wrong view, and is an evil wrong view of which the holding results in the doing of evil.
Christianity, Islam, Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Anti-Zionism: all of these are political manifestations of Moralism; all of these are political forms of anti-Jewish racism.
By the way,
Karl Marx was a malicious, sanctimonious, ethnically Jewish-European, anti-Jewish racist. The excerpts from writings of Karl Marx that are presented in the following blog elucidate this fact, and were, to me, informative and enlightening and shocking. That the extreme anti-Jewish racism of Karl Marx has been almost completely obfuscated in Western societies is a testament to the anti-Jewish racism that is a deeply engrained part of the culture of culturally Christian-European (Christian and post-Christian) societies, and is a testament to the deep profound Stockholm syndrome that almost all Jewish people are experiencing to various degrees.
Marx & Friends in their own words
marxwords.blogspot.com