the alt-right

yeah, we're talking about that a bit over on the videogame racism/sexism thread

milo is bad at everything except getting attention. remember his first foray into media world fame?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/mar/01/the-kernel

I see one of the intellectual godfathers of this whole mess is finding an elusive next level

Hitler was NOT anti-gay. He refused to purge gay Brownshirts from Nazi ranks saying he had no problem as long as they were good fighters

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

how dare you smear the name of Adolph Hitler

i could have posted this to any number of current threads right now but might as well stick it here. what's really creepy about the alt-right, about the revelations in recent days, about the movement in general, is the self-satisfied gleefulness of the hatred and the manner in which these people thrive on making others feel subhuman, which by itself has always been around but now people are more willing to put their names and faces out there and not hide behind online personas as much. the alt-right figureheads are throwing chum into the water and seeing who flocks to them and organizing from there.

how dare you smear the name of Adolph Hitler

― frogbs

and about the lying fake news claiming he "only has one ball"...

Fucking weird tweet. I can't tell if Dinesh is just randomly praising Hitler or if that's part of his current campaign to associate the left with fascism, i.e. being not anti-gay is a left-wing thing and Hitler wasn't anti-gay, therefore Hitler was left-wing.

(obviously Hitler was in fact anti-gay)

When it suited him.

i mean really:

The beginning of the Nazi terror against homosexuals was marked by the murder of Ernst Rohm on June 30, 1934: "the Night of the Long Knives. "Rohm was the man who, in 1919, first made Hitler aware of his own political potential, and the two were close friends for fifteen years. During that time, Rohm rose to SA Chief of Staff, transforming the Brownshirt militia from a handful of hardened goons and embittered ex-soldiers into an effective fighting force five hundred thousand strong ­­ the instrument of Nazi terror. Hitler needed Rohm's military skill and could rely on his personal loyalty, but he was ultimately a pragmatist. As part of a compromise with the Reichwehr (regular army) leadership, whose support he needed to become Fuhrer, Hitler allowed Goering and Himmler to murder Rohm along with dozens of Rohm's loyal officers.

For public relations purposes, and especially to quell the outrage felt throughout the ranks of the SA, Hitler justified his blatant power play by pointing to Rohm's homosexuality. Hitler, of course, had known of Rohm's homosexuality since 1919, and it became public knowledge in 1925, when Rohm appeared in court to charge a hustler with theft. All this while the Nazi Party had a virulently anti­gay policy, and many Nazis protested that Rohm was discrediting the entire Party and should be purged. Hitler, however, was quite willing to cover up for him for years ­­ until he stood in the way of larger plans.

* * *

The Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and a year later Rohm was dead. While Rohm and his men were being rounded up for the massacre (offered a gun and the opportunity to shoot himself, Rohm retorted angrily: “Let Hitler do his own dirty work”), the new Chief of Staff received his first order from the Fuhrer: “I expect all SA leaders to help preserve and strengthen the SA in its capacity as a pure and cleanly institution. In particular, I should like every mother to be able to allow her son to join the SA, Party, and Hitler Youth without fear that he may become morally corrupted in their ranks. I therefore request all SA commanders to take the utmost pains to ensure that offences under Paragraph 175 are met by immediate expulsion of the culprit from the SA and the Party.”

Hitler had good reason to be concerned about the reputation of Nazi organizations, most of which were based on strict segregation of the sexes. Hitler Youth, for example, was disparagingly referred to as Homo Youth throughout the Third Reich, a characterization which the Nazi leadership vainly struggled to eliminate. Indeed, most of the handful of publications on homosexuality which appeared during the Fascist regime were devoted to new and rather bizarre methods of “detection” and “prevention.”

Rudolf Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler’s personal thoughts on the subject: “He lectured me on the role of homosexuality in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the reproductive process precisely those men on whose offspring a nation depended. The immediate result of the vice was, however, that unnatural passion swiftly became dominant in public affairs if it were allowed to spread unchecked.”

* * *

The tone had been set by the Rohm putsch, and on its first anniversary-June 28, 1935, the campaign against homosexuality was escalated by the introduction of the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour.” Until 1935, the only punishable offence had been anal intercourse; under the new Paragraph 175a, ten possible “acts” were punishable, including a kiss, an embrace, even homosexual fantasies! One man, for instance, was successfully prosecuted on the grounds that he had observed a couple making love in a park and watched only the man.

Under the Nazi system, criminal acts were less important in determining guilt than criminal intent. The “phenomenological” theory of justice claimed to evaluate a person's character rather than his deeds. The “healthy sensibility of the people” (gesundes Volksempfinden) was elevated to the highest normative legal concept, and the Nazis were in a position to prosecute an individual solely on the grounds of his sexual orientation. (After World War II, incidentally, this law was immediately struck from the books in East Germany as a product of Fascist thinking, while it remained on the books in West Germany.)

Once Paragraph 175a was in effect, the annual number of convictions on charges of homosexuality leaped to about ten times the number in the pre-Nazi period. The law was so loosely formulated that it could be ­­ and was applied against heterosexuals whom the Nazis wanted to eliminate. The most notorious example of an individual convicted on trumped-up charges was General Werner von Fritsch, Army Chief of Staff; and the law was also used repeatedly against members of the Catholic clergy. But the law was undoubtedly used primarily against gay people, and the court system was aided in the witch-hunt by the entire German populace, which was encouraged to scrutinize the behaviour of neighbours and to denounce suspects to the Gestapo. The number of men convicted of homosexuality during the Nazi period totaled around fifty thousand:

1933 — 853

1934 — 948

1935 — 2,106

1936 — 5,320

1937 — 8,271

1938 — 8,562

1939 — 7,614

1940 — 3,773

1941 — 3,735

1942 — 3,963

1943 (first quarter) — 966

1944-45 — ?

The Gestapo was the agent of the next escalation of the campaign against homosexuality. Ex-chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS and head of the Gestapo, richly deserves a reputation as the most fanatically homophobic member of the Nazi leadership. In 1936, he gave a speech on the subject of homosexuality and described the murder of Ernst Rohm (which he had engineered) in these terms: “Two years ago...when it became necessary, we did not scruple to strike this plague with death, even within our own ranks.” Himmler closed with these words: “Just as we today have gone back to the ancient Germanic view on the question of marriage mixing different races, so too in our judgment of homosexuality ­­ a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race ­­ we must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates.”

It begins.

VICE tells BuzzFeed company has fired @mitchsunderland after emails to MILO were made public in @Bernstein report https://t.co/qGd4a6Gkmw pic.twitter.com/fv7Cl1W8a8

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) October 6, 2017

Separately, nice little followup

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/interview-with-bartender-who-kicked-milo-yiannopoulos-out-of-karaoke-9948271

Rudolf Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler’s personal thoughts on the subject: “He lectured me on the role of homosexuality in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said

Nixon agreed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMfVnBmpMm8

Only someone abysmally ignorant of ancient Greece would think such nonsense.

of course they wave money around and don't tip

Not that its needed but here is a nice response to Hitler was not anti gay nonsense:

Inaccurate. Whilst some homosexuals within S.A. ranks were briefly tolerated, the Night of Long Knives purge was justified on moral grounds https://t.co/Jp5L5rYTe0

— Huw Lemmey (@huwlemmey) October 6, 2017

This was quite nice in terms of some of the language in the buzzfeed piece (and others too):

I want to encourage people to consider the work that the words "snuck into" + "smuggled" are doing in these two recent articles.

— JessieNYC (@JessieNYC) October 6, 2017

lol Alfred first thing I thought of too

(fwiw just to be clear when I said "when it suited him" I was specifically referring to Hitler's overlooking Rohm's and the SA's homosexuality when it was in his interests)

xp

Hunh, I didn’t know Ernst Röhm was gay.

Also, if these fucks start doing that at your bar, how did the staff resist the temptation to either bottle them or go for the fire extinguishers?

Rohm didn't make a secret of it

SA intimidation contributed to the rise of the Nazis and the violent suppression of right-wing parties during electoral campaigns, but its reputation for street violence and heavy drinking was a hindrance, as was the open homosexuality of Röhm and other SA leaders such as his deputy Edmund Heines. One American journalist later wrote, "[Röhm's] chiefs, men of the rank of Gruppenfuehrer or Obergruppenfuehrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals."[6] In 1931, the Münchener Post, a Social Democratic newspaper, obtained and published Röhm's letters to a friend discussing his homosexual affairs.

Hitler was aware of Röhm's homosexuality. At this point they were so close that they addressed each other as du (the German familiar form of "you"). No other top Nazi leader enjoyed that privilege, and their close association led to rumors that Hitler himself was homosexual. Röhm was the only Nazi leader who dared to address Hitler by his first name "Adolf" or his nickname "Adi" rather than "mein Führer."

I'm still dying to know how buzzfeed got all their source material for that piece. its amazing.

i'm dying to read the full yarvin emails

you have a sort of weird grudging respect for him iirc?

idk respect but i enjoy reading him he has unique perspectives. particularly i'm curious what he's been saying over the last couple years tho particularly re trump and rise of the alt-right. all his writing more or less came before the current zeitgeist.

Buzzfeed reporter on Chris Hayes' show.

I found Dan Lyons' apology that he sent today after I called him out for saying he'd apologized (he hadn't) and wowie zowie oofa doofa pic.twitter.com/cG7rONZQws

— 💀zombië queen💀 (@UnburntWitch) October 7, 2017

no longer sure how to respond to my friend's political beliefs. He says he does not support the alt-right, but he thinks they have a legitimate reason for being an advocacy group. Obviously I disagree with this and think it's laughable, but he's always trying to forge a middleground while clearly sticking to his conservative line beliefs. I don't think the middleground exists. By not denouncing their intentions he's kinda enabling them

maybe re-characterize alt-right as driven by hippie leftist "free thinking" canadians and see if that doesn't inspire some denouncing?

http://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2017/10/07/19373764/patriot-prayer-group-planning-surprise-rally-sunday-during-portland-marathon

Q: Why do current fascists tend to accuse social justice movements of a "cultural marxism" that they draw back to the Frankfurt school? I'm not very educated on those guys, but from everything I've heard of Marcuse, Adorno, etc. it doesn't feel to me like they'd be the biggest standard bearer of current leftist concerns?

because it is more trv kvlt that way

Q: Why do current fascists tend to accuse social justice movements of a "cultural marxism" that they draw back to the Frankfurt school?

First off, it makes them feel educated and intellectual, even if they are only parroting talking points and have no clue what they are talking about the moment they stray from those talking points. Next, this argument impresses many of their listeners, who are almost certain not to know the first thing about the Frankfurt school and will marvel that the speaker knows so much about it. Lastly, it places the 'debate' on unfamiliar ground, so that the person armed with rote talking points adapted to that ground can 'win' more easily against a less-prepared opponent.

To these you can add the advantage that average American instinctively scorns European leftist intellectuals, just on account of widespread prejudice against foreigners, intellectuals and socialists.

iow, it works in their favor, even if it is arrant nonsense.

arendt nonsense

(tips hat to Mordy)

hey im being doxxed by the proud boys

badge of honor

On the appearance of Cultural Marxism in a WH doc from this summer, and how it connects to the John Birch Society and even John Wayne complaining about Marcuse from 1971

Also, like with many/the majority of Bircher conspiracies, the ethnic makeup of the Frankfurt School has something to do with it

the main flaw with the cultural marxism argument afaict is that derrida + foucault have been far more influential on critical theory imo than adorno or benjamin. the primary argument - that politics are downstream from culture and that the academy has exerted influence on the culture - has some relationship to reality. but the obsession w/ the frankfurt school feels like more of a consequence of wanting to link communism to the academy as its primary influence. there's some truth to the idea that major leftist ideologies (post-colonialism particularly) are closely related to communism but unless you're in the weeds on these things and can see how sometimes these connections were tenuous, or relationships of convenience, (or the USSR piggybacking on convenient ideologies), or can see that communism itself is a changing/malleable concept and not monolithic, it's too convenient to just be like - "oh communism did this" and these guys were the communists of the modern academy.

Yeah, I just feel like all the supposed sins the alt right throws at what they call cultural marxism - basically boiling down to identity politics and intersectionality, issues of race, feminism, etc. - have much more obvious antecedents on the left. As I said, I'm not well read on the Frankfurt school, so might be totally wrong, but I haven't known those guys to talk about race and gender much? Like even the existentialists fit much more closely, as far as right-wing talking points go.

But yeah I'm probably overthinking and it's all just down to "marxism" having a sinister ring in the US.

also has something to do w/ The Authoritarian Personality which despite adorno's participation strikes me as a break from the frankfurt school and not a continuation

The last few eps of the Philosophize This! podcast have been about the Frankfurt School

none of them know anything about adorno. "cultural marxism" is the equivalent of "cultural bolshevism" ---- lump all the changes in culture that enrage your target audience together, and insist that they have something to do with a vanguardist conspiracy which is consciously pushing an agenda, now in our Elite Liberal Colleges.

Adorno probably knew more about and had a greater love and desire to preserve Eurocentric Western high culture than anyone in the current alt-right.

he absolutely did

adorno said the revolution should have been the moment of "philosophy's realization" and he lamented that this moment was "missed." his marxism was about fulfilling the highest promises of modernity/the enlightenment while overcoming its violent aspects. the frankfurt school was absolutely not against "the west" as such. if people on the alt right believe that it is because they are morons.

i think if you read around you will find ppl on the alt-right (eg mcdonald) who do lodge specific critiques at adorno's writing tho as i said above ime it's almost exclusively from authoritarian personality w/ maybe some out of context quotes from other works. of course when km discusses frankfurt school he makes the antisemitism implicit in the conspiracy theory explicit and surely the "jewishness" of frankfurt plays a role in its popularity.

Mentioned in the New Republic article, but I think recent alt-right prominence of the Frankfurt School bogeyman comes via the Breivik manifesto. Breivik cites Michael Minnicino's 'New Dark Age: the Frankfurt School and Political Correctness', a '92 essay published in Fidelio and available online. Fidelio is the journal of the Schiller Institute, whose wiki page I am enjoying now.

Good call. (Graun article about why Breivik feared the Frankfurter Schule)

"hey im being doxxed by the proud boys"

where is this happening, chaki? Fuck those guys to hell and back

the use of the term cultural marxism is basically meaningless nonsense, completely uncoupled to what the frankfurt school actually was about. i almost never see it used to denote anything other than social liberalism. it just adds the insinuation that the terrible movements for racial justice, lgbt rights, migrant rights etc. are caused by a cabal of jewish academics