White supremacy was the cause for the worst wars of the 20th century. A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier (again) than Islamic extremists taking over most middle eastern nations due to the resources that will be available to them.
> White supremacy was the cause for the worst wars of the 20th century.
I'm not sure this is accurate. Perhaps you could say that racial supremacy justified some of the worst wars of the 20th century, but "germans are better than slavs" barely pattern matches to "white supremacy", and "japanese are better than koreans/chinese/etc" doesn't at all. As for justified vs caused... There's a fine line to be drawn here, but I think it's worth drawing. Would Germany and Japan have gone to war without views of racial superiority? Quite possibly. Both were in rather poor strategic situations in the 1920s, and war was an acceptable way to resolve that at the time. Would they have poked the world's largest powers with a stick without that superiority to fall back on? Perhaps not.
White Supremacy was a key platform of the Nazi Party, which initiated World War II. Their definition of "white" including most of Western Europe but essentially none of Eastern Europe. While Slavs and Russians were better than the Roma (aka Gypsies) or Jews in Nazi eyes, they were accorded a lesser status than Germans or other Western Europeans.
In absolute terms, more Russians died as a result of Nazi action than any other group.
This is not a matter of perspective. This is what actually happened.
If you recognize that racial supremacy goes hand-in-hand with the imperialistic expansionism of Nazi Germany and Japan, I think it's fairly apt descriptor of one of the major causes of the war.
The parent assertion was "White supremacy was the cause for the worst wars of the 20th century"...
gaogao switch the convo to "racial supremacy". Not to say that it doesn't have something to do with wars of the 20th century.
It might even be seen that by making this switch and excluding non-imperialistic wars, we would be minimizing the atrocities and war crimes committed in Africa and the rest of the third world against native populations.
> Are you seriously denying that Nazis were motivated by ideology of racial supremacy?
I'm not even going to acknowledge this statement. How on earth did you made this cognitive leap?
>A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier (again) than Islamic extremists taking over most middle eastern nations due to the resources that will be available to them.
Reckless speculation considering the latter did happen. You're fearmongering in order to drive censorship and oppression of viewpoints you disagree with.
How is he fearmongering? A white nationalist uprising is quite literally relatively recent European history, and resulted in the torture and slaughter of tens of millions.
Before Al Queda, the West's biggest fear was domestic white nationalist terrorists like Timothy McVeigh.
EDIT: It's very disturbing that so many people don't understand what the Nazi platform was all about. The supremacy of the "Aryan Race" was literally a platform of the Nazi party from the beginning. The subjugation of Jews was a part of the party platform from the beginning. The use of paramilitary squads to enforce ideological purity was a part of the party from the beginning. And it just got worse from there.
The battleground was fascism vs. capitalism vs. communism. Fascism was, at it's core, reactionairy to the rise of communism and it's dishonest to describe it simply as "white nationalism".
Furthermore, for a "white nationalist" movement they spent a whole lot of time killing and oppressing other "whites".
Fascism started as a reaction to modernist political ideas that developed out of the enlightenment (like egalitarianism) and existential concerns like the perception of national decline (which fascism usually blames on decadence and libertine behaviors). It may have taken hold due to anti-communist sentiment, but that's separate from its philosophical underpinnings (which for fascism are a bit shaky)
Communism is problematic to them because it tries to eliminate social hierarchies deemphasizing national identity. Liberalism (in the classical sense) is problematic to them because of its (perceived) amoral decadence and its ability to empower "undesirable" "outsider" individuals to garner power inside a nation through wealth.
> They were primarily concerned with Pan-Germanicism.
If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities. What was it about those people that made them not fit the category of "German"?
The answer from clearly documented history is that the Nazis systematized the categorization of humans on their deeply flawed model of the Aryan "race", and singled out those who didn't fit for subjugation or extermination.
Conversely they also planned to further "purify" their own people by planning to subject Scandinavian populations to forced interbreeding programs upon conquering them, and kidnapping "Aryan" children from neighboring countries.
> If that was the case, then why did their policies include the murder of millions of German-speaking Jews, Gypsies, and people with disabilities.
Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German. Re: disabilities, it's a mix of rabid utilitarianism (they were called "useless eaters") and a belief that disabilities stemmed from corrupted bloodlines (hence the term mongoloid -- it was a popular theory that retardation was the result of Europeans/Asian intermarriage).
> Because Jews and Gypsies weren't considered ethnically German.
What defined German ethnicity?
Clearly it wasn't the ability to speak the language, or being descended from many generations of ancestors living in Germany, otherwise the Jews and Roma both would have been considered German.
Clearly there was something else attributed to them that didn't fit the definition of "German". It was that they weren't considered racially German. Race is literally what the Nuremberg Laws were about:
Given the preponderance of clear historical evidence for the Third Reich's racially based rationale for its actions, one wonders why would anyone try to water it down to the more innocuous seeming rationale of "German ethnicity".
I'm not sure I understand your contention. Pan-Germanicism was about uniting ethnic Germans. Are you implying that there's no ethnic difference between a German and an Ashkenazi Jew or a Romani?
No, I'm saying that the way that the Nazis defined German identity was their biological model of "racial" classification, and not a cultural feature like ethnicity. The Nazis then (as today), have an explicitly biological notion of identity, not cultural.
I'm not making that up - it was right there in their laws that I linked to.
Otherwise, why shouldn't people who had been living in Germany for generations, speaking languages closely related to German (Yiddish, German Romani), be considered German?
How can you interpret those laws as being about anything but racial categorization - unless you have an agenda to sidestep and downplay the fact the Nazis repressed and murdered people whom they saw as not being part of their own presumed "race".
The point I was making above was that Nazis were concerned about German-ness (well, Aryan-ness) not whiteness. Classifying them as white supremacists is generally incorrect.
The problem with that argument is that the Nazis considered the German "race" to be the paragon of "whiteness", and other less-German white peoples, like European Jews, to be degraded. They absolutely conflated "whiteness" with their idealized German identity.
There is also historical conflicts between ethnic Germans and other ethnic groups. The Nazi's had a plan to exterminate most Slavs which includes Poles, Russians and Ukrainians after they won the war.
Slavs were explicitly not German according to the Nazi's definition. However, they were interested in re-absorbing ethnic Germans from Slavic territories.
Fascism was not "reactionary". It was, in many ways, a sibling ideology to 'communism', but with glorification of violence, a broadly "irrational" (i.e. explicitly anti-intellectual, and almost relishing in the use of blatant propaganda as a means of influence) attitude to mass politics and either nationalist or (in the more extreme Nazi version) racially-supremacist ideology as major selling points. "White nationalist" is somewhat inaccurate as you point out but "reactionary" is totally wrong, and Soviet propaganda is the only reason why some people today still think of fascism as "conservative" or "reactionary".
It is absolutely reactionary, but it's a reaction against enlightenment thinking. This explains many of its key attributes: Use of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, and rejecting egalitarianism.
It's also why it's not easily dispatched by enlightenment thinking... it survived those battles back in the 20th century and ultimately had to be put down with exercises of power (often military, sometimes social, rarely diplomatic).
Fascists gained power in Italy, Germany, and Spain as a direct result of anti-communist sentiment (and in the case of Germany, a failed communist revolution). Mussolini's early writings were directly proposing nationalism as the answer to communism's failures. Everywhere fascism had success it was because it was pitted against the threat of communism. I don't know how the rise of Fascism was anything but reactionary.
I agree that facism's rise was tied to nationalism's rise.
But we're talking about the root causes of WWII. And one of the Nazi party's specific goals when invading Poland was to exterminate the Jews and Roma (Gypsy) populations of Europe.
Yes I disagree with white nationalism. And Islamic extremism. I don’t buy your point :).
Islamic jihadis do control a few middle eastern nations. But they are quite powerless in front of the west. Even having access to natural resources like oil doesn’t protect the extremists (do I even need to give examples?). The most concerning Islamic state is Pakistan as it has nukes.
But if far right folks take over Austria or Germany again, or other European states or Russia or the US, they will control massive economies, WMDs and have the ability for complete domination in a way never seen before.
Let’s just say it is better to be in control of any European nation as opposed to Libya, Syria, Iraq or Iran.
This is historically illiterate. WW1 was a war between Imperial powers both sides of which were entirely white. WWII was caused by a German supremicist movement opposed to all non-Germans — it’s not as if the Polish are non-white.
White supremacism is supported by a fraction of a percentage of white Europeans. Support for Islamic fundamentalism is substantially higher in the Muslim world.
(Plenty of Europeans are opposed to large scale immigration, but you’re not conflating that with white supremicism are you?)
What do you mean white supremacy was the cause for WW1/2?
Edit, this is an honest question. It's my impression these wars were caused by nationalist movements. The first didn't even involve "whites" until later and it certainly had nothing to do with white supremacy.
The second world war got very white supremacy eventually but again, zero fucks to do with the cause. Hell America turned a blind eye to ALL of it until they got dragged in, that's how little it had to do with anything.
(Not some gun toting denier nazi here, it happened it was disturbing as fuck and it was a big deal, but please don't run around claiming this made up narrative)
"White supremacy" wasn't involved in either WW1 or WW2. And "a white nationalist uprising in Europe" is a contradiction in terms, since Europeans do not in any way identify with a "white nation" of any sort.
This whole "rah rah whites" stuff is something that people in the U.S. came up with during the Progressive Era, as a supposedly-'unifying' alternative to national/ethnic identities, some of which were quite openly "disfavored" by that time especially wrt. Central Europe. (Again, WW1 was a non-trivial factor there.) People outside the Anglo world generally think of it as quite silly and misguided, not to mention racist.
I’m not sure why this is being down voted, 'white' is very much an American concept.
British people are not French people are not Hungarians are not Greeks are not Italians are not Spanish people.
We're Europeans, but we have very distinct and different cultures and we don't regard ourselves as 'whites' - it's rare (outside radical left circles) for Europeans to speak that way.
The native people of most Mediterranean regions - Spain, Southern France, Italy, Greece and Turkey don't have pale skin - it would be odd to speak of 'whites'.
The "white people" concept is increasingly gaining popularity in Europe and especially among the European far-right though. This is due to the massive influx of non-European migrants over the past decades, which makes the racial divisions much more visible.
Likewise - there's either concern about competition from eastern Europeans (who are as pale as Brits are), or the increase in Islamic terrorism (which is obviously a religious concern rather than a racial one).
Both are not advocating any kind of racial supremacy but rather self-interest, and - like them or not - relatively common as judged by recent election results.
You should brush up on your history. First World War had nothing to do with "white supremacy" - every side whose opposition led to it was lily white, Germans, French, Belgians, Russians, British, Sebrians, whoever you point to - they where white. It was a very complex tangle of reasons that led to the war, but "white supremacy" had zero to do with it.
Second Word War, as we all know, has been mostly led by Nazis, who were, among other things, undoubtedly very very racist. However, even then they gladly paired with Japanese - most definitely not "white", Arabs - not really considered "white" by most Nazis - to achieve their goals. And they had absolutely no problem suppressing and massacring Eastern Europeans (very "white") when it suited them. Their goal was, ultimately, world domination under the aegis of the Nazi party, and their "white supremacy" was mostly "Nazi supremacy" - if you were white but not agreeing with Nazis, you were dead. So it was a standard totalitarian approach, which is no different in any totalitarian regime, racism notwithstanding. Nazis where definitely racial supremacists (though just "white" didn't go nearly far enough for them) but even if they weren't, it would end up in the same way.
And as history teaches us, totalitarian regimes like to expand, if they can, and cause wars, if they have resources for it (fortunately, North Korea has none, but even then they are trying to provoke something constantly).
> A white nationalist uprising in Europe would be deadlier
There is no white nationalist movement in Europe even close to pulling something like this off. In fact, I don't think there's even one serious "white" nationalist movement in Europe at all - most nationalist parties are specifically "nationally" nationalists - e.g. French nationalists, British nationalists, Hungarian nationalists, etc. and they couldn't care less about other "whites" as soon as they aren't French, British or Hungarian. Of course, racial movements exist too, but again - they are minuscule compared to nation-based movements.
OTOH, ISIS has already pulled off a major war in Middle East, and while it fortunately looks like they're ending up on the losing side now, it already cost major loss in life and economic damage, and it is very far from the end. Taliban in Afghanistan is far from being beaten too. They are massively in force right now, while "white nationalist uprising" is nothing but an extremely unlikely hypothetical.
Communists slaughtered more people than Nazis (of course, not due to any virtue of the Nazis). Also, the current geopolitical situation is very different from the early or mid 1900s.
That would require the capitalism to end, so I hope we never get to see that. And considering that the only realistic scenario of ending capitalism before any of the people reading this are dead is world takeover by China - you probably hope that too, once you think about it.
Capitalism only "kills" people in a counterfactual sense. For example, you might posit that, had society gone out of its way to provide medical care to a sick individual, that person still would be alive. But that counterfactual is actually pretty complicated; it requires long chains of causation and dubious moral assumptions.
Communism kills in a very real sense: it literally murders by the million and creates deadly privation where there was previously none.
