thanks AV

This is absolutely inaccurate and borderline revisionism. Germans were not held at gunpoint to heil Hitler or risk being shot, the average german was perfectly happy and enjoyed the comforts naziism brought them. This inaccurate portrayal does nothing but abstract naziism to be an entity that only exists under specific horrifying conditions and not the reality that for the vast majority of Germans they were happy to be nazis.

Please go read about nazi germany before you make up some fanfic about how it was just like the wolfenstein games. “They Thought They were free” is a book entirely centered around the experiences of the average German during the nazi regime and not one word of your description is in his book.

From Milton Mayer:

These ten men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers. Nobody ever gave them a free sample of anything on the ground that what they thought of it would increase the sales of the product. Their importance lay in the fact that God—as Lincoln said of the common people—had made so many of them. In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.

Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.

despite being controlled by democrats

As a direct result of it, in fact.

Im glad this was what stood out in my comment lmaoo

Are people here being deliberately obtuse or are these reddit shills also operating on lemmy bc who tf cares this much about defending arstechnica? Every comment has like five downvotes. Who cares enough to downvote this and go through the comments to downvote every comment?

It’s very clearly true that reddit is using their platform to boost stories by websites with ownership of reddit. Who needs this explained to them in baby English? It isnt that hard to understand or accept, this is also why people are here instead of reddit.

I thought this was a picture of a menu in a restaurant

Took me way to long to figure it out

go back to Ireland

Sis… do you think Ireland had colonies?

Orwell really didn’t miss

I was worried I might have gone too far off topic with my rant so I actually really appreciate the honest reply. I’m glad I wasn’t off base.

I just feel like the more nefarious thing to do is to silo people with bad ideas so they can reinforce each other out of sight of people who could reasonably talk them out of their spiral. Like you said, Im sure the .ml people are self selecting but there’s also an aspect of being defederated or ostracized for simply having an .ml username that makes them unable to get a reasoned debate out of people who claim to want a marketplace of ideas.

If they were truly so ideologically captured that they would kill you for saying Stalin was a bad leader they probably wouldn’t be on here defending it. They’d be doing whatever psychotic militant commune shit the patriot front is doing.

We all seem to agree that patriot front is worse than whatever .ml is doing but the fact that .ml is publicly available to be scrutinized, and there are entire pages dedicated to going in their comms explicitly to get banned for bad faith, means the size of the outrage is not commensurate with its output. Idk who on .ml is plotting a communist coup but unless that’s what they’re doing I see no reason to be planning on imprisoning anyone who defends china.

There’s real, material right wing threats in our country that have real power. Why are we on lemmy yelling at the weird kids table for playing their card game none of us care about? Like you said, even republicans who voted for this are just as much victims of propaganda as the best of us. We’d be better off pointing people towards the actual cause of our problems instead of trying to blame a fringe group for holding us back.

I’m saying we need everyone, and we can bicker about how much state intervention is too much once we no longer have to worry about concentration camps being filled with dissenters.

Thanks again for really putting thought into your reply and understanding where I’m coming from. Every time I mention .ml I’m worried that someone somewhere is gonna tag me and have me brigaded for “defending” them. I don’t care what they’re doing. I know its not nearly as destructive as what republicans have been doing and I don’t see anyone on lemmy posting trophies of the republicans they’ve caught detaining someone illegally. Let’s focus our energy on the real threats while we still have enough bodies to choke up the combine. I fear we are losing daylight fast.

As excessive as defederating an entire instance is, think about how insane banning anti-zionist speech across an entire instance is.

It’s not like its one gardening sublemmy or the diary of Anne frank guy, its an entire instance banning a specific form of antifascism. That’s unhinged and their justification is flimsy as hell.

If you wanna stay on that instance spam them with pictures of children in Gaza 24/7 until they ban you or reverse course on this decision.

It’s plainly an attempt at palestinian erasure. They decided to ban anti zionism the same week Israel announced they would be exporting 1 million Palestinians to Libya and occupying Gaza permanently. It’s not an accident, or for their safety, or German law, its genocide and feddit apparently wants to mandate it big brother style where you cant talk about eastasia.

It’s insane. Power tripping mods to a new stratosphere. Nobody should just be okay with this. Speaking for palestine without fear of being banned is one of the main reasons a lot of us left reddit in the first place. Don’t bring that shit here!

This I think goes to show how the mainstream obsession with “tankies” as an ideological group is no different than the people screaming about “libertarians” in the 2010s

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

Now, also just like the libertarians of the 2010, there are like five specific people who hold inconceivable sociopolitical and economic power who ARE in fact attempting to force reforms through governments, undemocratically, to achieve these undeniably horrific outcomes because it does in fact suit their personal ideological aims.

Those people have been privately or publicly working cooperatively with Russian information warfare (or just are GRU) in order to boost the perceived popularity of their agendas.

What you’re describing, the people saying “I hate putin, but Ukraine should lay over and give up” are probably the exact targets of this effort.

Those are liberals you’re talking to. Those are the people who read all the tankie stuff and read all the nazi propaganda on twitter and came to the manufactured “centrist” conclusion that Ukraine just doesn’t really matter and the real loss is the fact that fighting continues.

It’s why donald trump, every single time he mentions it, says

there are 5,000 soldiers dying a week, on both sides: RUSSIAN and Ukrainian

It’s a deliberate attempt to frame Russia as an equal in terms of tragedy. There is no tragedy for Russia outside of the fact they’ve sent a quarter of their working age population into a meat grinder for a dying psychopaths dreams of a greater Russia under his control. Ukraine is fighting a war to maintain their sovereignty.

There’s like 500 tankies online while donald trump is in the Oval Office repeating literal Kremlin talking points to the president of Ukraine and I have to get on here and read about how insufferable it is that anon said something defensive of china. Be so for real right now.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report. (For example climate deniers using oil lobby reports of climate change being “unsettled science” to defend their position that the climate data you’re showing them doesn’t prove anything)

These people online are not the enemy, they are the only people willing to fight with you against the forces that control every aspect of our lives. This is lemmy for Christ’s sake. The faster we all realize that and move past the sticking points of which genocidal empire deserves more support than criticism the sooner we can be rid of the brokers who sowed all these conflicting viewpoints in the first place.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

There are networks that exist exclusively to push Russian and zionist viewpoints and defend them online as if they are “common sense.” It is our job to have the knowledge and courage to shout down incorrect and malicious interpretations of the world and bring forward a more nuanced and complete understanding of history and modern politics.

Attempting to exclude them entirely just offers the inexperienced a closed system to be inculcated with those beliefs without pushback. That’s why we got where we are in the first place. It’s good when Russian bots get outed in a public forum, it shows everyone there exactly what the shit looks like so they recognize it on the next Facebook post their uncle sends them. Fostering critical thought and media literacy is step one to dismantling this prison we all currently exist within.

(I’m not arguing with anything you said, your comment just gave me this train of thought and I don’t think it would make sense out of context as its own comment)

What an interesting and yet completely unsurprising thing to learn today. Thank you for taking the time to write this up!

America chose the route of social security and a mandated minimum wage instead of the state seizing the assets of robber barons and returning them to the communities that were responsible for their success.

You can see today exactly how well that worked out for the working class: minimum wage is below the poverty line and hasn’t been a living wage since the 70s, social security is being undone, and the government regulations that mandated a standard of living for working class Americans have been entirely dismantled.

This is the result of leaving the power within the capitalist class and allowing them to get away with their abuses without punishment: they do it again as soon as they get the chance.

The story is decent enough but holy shit the comments on that link are cancer

I don’t recommend looking at their 1930s issues

They’ve shown themselves to be honest dealers. Now that the antagonists have proven to be working in bad faith they can adjust accordingly. There was no implication that the trump regime wouldn’t simply go around Israel so hamas was right to take the chance on one POW.

Israel has already stated they could care less about the hostages so im guessing the thought process was “well america wants this guy out, so maybe their interests will win out and they will force aid through once their guy is let go” because, as it stands, all they have to bargain with the west are hostages. Now that Israel is admitting the hostages were just an excuse for escalating the genocide they know that bargaining with israel is basically off the table. They are trying to use whatever they can to leverage the negotiations, and show the world they are good faith operators.

As bad as this is for them they’re proving the morality of their position and a willingness to discuss an end to the conflict. The only thing opposing peace is the west. I think that’s a victory regardless of whether the terms of the deal were met, and only paints America in a worse light for not upholding their end of the deal.

Hopefully more reporting on this will expose people to the reality of the situation and get people to stop spreading zionist propaganda about how hamas won’t negotiate or release any hostages. They clearly will if anyone even remotely signals that they will make arrangements for the benefit of Palestinians. This is important to show the world that the real adversaries to peace are the ones refusing to negotiate in good faith, and hamas isn’t the one going back on their agreements.

Openly genocidal attacks on civilian infrastructure being reported daily, how long will the world simply watch and allow America and Israel to do this?

Theres no link to the documentary

If you lay it on thick enough you can almost sound like a hasbara bot, almost.

Well, you see, the idf is representative of all jews, so when you say the idf are valid military targets what you mean is all jews, obviously

I always struggled with the question until I thought about the question itself. Once I realized I was being asked: what came first? The answer became clear

The question is an illusion, there is no chicken