Even given the political kinks of the writer, who is probably just a kid after all, it's not a terrible article. There are some reasonable take-aways.
. That 'Signal' existed. It's pretty interesting really, I've got a few hardbound volumes in one of my history book hoards. Worth looking at.
. Propaganda is everywhere. The hard part is seeing it in your own world, not others'.
. History is complicated. Historian's fallacy is real. Watch out.
. Nazis will fascinate people for a long time. I honestly think that a big part of it is their use of symbols, imagery, snappy uniforms, bigger-than-life super villains. An absolutely ridiculous belief system, but that never stopped groups of people from buying into things.
Of course sociology is largely self-serving BS (see: Stanislav Andreski: Social Sciences as Sorcery) but then so are a lot of other soft disciplines. You can't blame these people for riding a wave. To tie it back into the article, much of sociology is an attempt to program people with your own belief system, not to understand and predict. Perhaps it's just the advertising business with a figleaf of science.
> If this extreme myopia does in fact define us as a people, an artifact such as Signal asks us to consider: What if our enemies know us better than we know ourselves?
Well, yes, most of what students have learned in schools in the last decade would have been considered enemy propaganda even only a decade or two prior. The object of most theory taught in schools is intended to "destabilize," hegemonic ideas, which is literally a propaganda tactic. Educating young people to adopt an identity of being victims who are not held to the standards of their ostensible oppressors is an old recipe, and one the Germans used to great effect after Weimar, which produced the necessary shame to enable the cruely and zeal of the national socialist movement. It was borrowed from Russians who had recently deposed their Czar less than two decades earlier. The narrative and aesthetic promise of renewal was borrowed from Italy's fascists, who were a just tin pot nationalist movement compared to the totalitarianisms of Russia and Germany. Just like Stalin, Hitler used communist movements with populist fascist narratives and aesthetics as a vehicle for a totalitarian movement, which is defined by its total war on truth itself.
If destabilizing propaganda from that era bears some resemblance to the current day, it is because most of the cognitive frameworks we were taught to understand the world through come from the same sources.
You're touching on something interesting, which is the difference between political narrative and politics-as-action.
In politics, narratives are not true or false in the scientific sense. They're created purely for persuasive purposes, as expedient air cover used to justify social actions.
Factually the narratives may be completely true but selectively chosen, partially true and distorted, or even completely untrue.
The social actions - which can be horrific and impossible to justify on their own terms - are sold via narratives to disguise them and make them palatable, with the aim of increasing the power of the ruling group.
Signal is a superb example of creating a selective narrative by copying the style and tone of a successful publication to make it more credible and persuasive to its middle-European middlebrow target audience. Of course all the harsh racism was removed because that was the entire point.
Western academic Marxist theory, on the other hand, is a superb example of failing to understand narrative - which is ironic, because Critical Theory is supposed to be the best tool ever created for narrative analysis.
It isn't, because it doesn't understand its own politics, never mind the practically-oriented opinion management machinery of Capitalism, or the condescending cynical dishonesty of Far-Right Nationalism.
In reality it's intensely tribal and exclusive, and this makes it an incredibly soft and easy target for its enemies.
>In politics, narratives are not true or false in the scientific sense. They're created purely for persuasive purposes, as expedient air cover used to justify social actions. Factually the narratives may be completely true but selectively chosen, partially true and distorted, or even completely untrue.
The people ok with this are what the world religions typically define as Evil, which generally reduces not to violence, but to deception. From what I can tell on the interwebs, post-Marxist thinkers, particularly Gramsci and the social constructivists are the architects of this total deception as politics view.
Atheists may not percieve the difference between what they see as the One Big Delusion, vs. Everything is a Delusion and to them there is only power and solidarity, but the crux of this constructivist view of narrative is a belief that decieving others into committing violence is more politically legitimate than committing it onesself. As though deception were somehow a virtue. Deception is certainly powerful, but not virtuous, except to people who can't tell the difference.
The enemy propaganda in Signal was designed to establish the edges of a wedge to destabilize western social order and make it vulnerable to the chaos that totalitarian movements require for their atomizing hall-of-mirrors effect. Helpfully to them, we have all the ingredients of an unmoored society ready for liquidation. Such interesting times.
I had two writing classes at the university which were driven by activist professors. The first I fought and got a bad grade. The second I parroted and got a good grade. That was enough for me to understand the lesson.
Being far from Constitution-loving capitalists as it’s possible to get does not make one leftist. Your perception of what makes one leftist is badly distorted. At the extremes of ideology one finds people for whom the cause is more important than the truth. This typically occurs when adherents conflate being true to the cause with being correct.
Consider this possibility. The writer loathes Nazism to such a degree that she hates to agree with Nazis (the real ones from Germany in the 1930s) on anything. This speaks to other things but does not suggest that both she and Nazis are leftist. It is absurd to think that a political movement will have no good ideas. As such one can find agreement or praiseworthy aspects of odious political movements. That does not suggest complete or even significant overall agreement with said political movement.
I suggest that you are letting your adherence to your political ideology cloud your intellectual thinking.
The Nazis were literally funded by the German corporate right - especially Thyssen - and corporations like IBM offered invaluable practical support during the Holocaust. There was at a minimum well-documented financial and managerial support offered by elements in the the US.
How is "corporate right" defined? I don't know that much about how corporations expressed political positions in the 20th century, but what would we call FAANG today? They're certainly corporate, but don't seem very "right". Or are they "right" by default because they're corporate?
In any case, corporations seeking policy favorable to their cause from big government tends to appear leftist in that it is similar to what the leftist on the street wants - the government engineering the society towards some outcome as a priority over protecting the liberty of the individual.
I'm trying to sort this out in my own head. I know we normally think of business as "right", but it seems that businesses transform in to leftist behavior when the government is of a size and inclination to make winners and losers.
Yes, but so what? Leftism is often supported by rich benefactors. This only looks like a gotcha if you believe that the sort of people who talk about oppression by the rich want to walk the walk. If you look at what they do rather than what they say there is no contradiction. Here are some examples.
The Guardian pays hundreds of writers to rail against capitalism and is funded by a massive trust fund based in the Cayman Islands created via the sale of Auto Trader and related magazines. US universities are filled with people writing articles suffused with anti-capitalist rhetoric, yet are often funded by endowments from rich capitalist benefactors. Tech firms donate heavily to the Democrats.
Marx railed against capital his entire life. He claimed to be fighting for the workers, yet he employed a servant and hardly worked in the sense the working classes would recognise. The rare times he had paying jobs, it was always journalism in which he was advocating for his views. He was instead supported by a constant stream of handouts and loans from his rich capitalist friend Engels, a factory owner, along with his own family. Engels invited him to visit his factory but Marx didn't take him up on it.
Taking money from rich capitalists whilst claiming to be struggling against them is very common to see, it's not a contradiction.
Despite its name, it’s important to note that Nazi’s were strong on government ties to private enterprise and at no point ever would think to abolish private enterprise. In fact, Marxists and communists were considered political enemies sent to gulags whereas you don’t see that kind of treatment of right-leaning groups.
Similarly, looking at present day, we see modern day Nazis forming within right-wing political groups and allying heavily with right wing political groups while attacking groups that are left-leaning, including “socialists”.
I think the evidence starting you in the face doesn’t require such mental gymnastics.
> These sorts of people are notorious for being unable to recognize that Nazi-ism was an ideology of the hard left, an ideology that the academic classes are extremely susceptible to.
There is pretty substantial disagreement amongst historians and political scientists (see Kershaw, The Nazi dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation, which unfortunately I don’t have to hand.) This dispute predates 1968. Many bog standard liberals or centre-right types, insofar as such classifications apply to historians, subscribed to the Nazism as totalitarianism thesis (whilst, crudely, a Marxist view was that it was an outgrowth of the contradictions of bourgeois liberal capitalism). The view that it was hard-left was pretty fringe in the 50s and is still fringe now. There are several good reasons for this—amongst which is the fact that Nazism was an essentially illiterate tradition, in the sense that it had no meaningful intellectuals, whereas Marxism is an extremely literate family of ideologies—in fact, arguably at the expense of a proper connexion to actual reality. So the notion that there is even a substantial body of Nazi intellectual output with the same importance as, say, Lenin had to Soviet life, seems rather misconceived. (This of course is subject to the caveat that Marxists are very argumentative people and one can probably on nearly any given question find Marxist authors who disagree; Nazism, by contrast, barely developed a canon of authors, and had little theoretical unity or basis, so whilst there were substantial contradictions in utterances there were relatively few in practice, which is all we really have—and indeed on that metric there was quite substantial diversity amongst the various Marxist states—even Maoism and Stalinism differed in their choice of revolutionary class, for example, and then if we take Pol Pot, Tito, Juche before the constitutional revisions about a decade ago, and so on, there is even more diversity.)
To consider your argument—
> in their own analyses of their enemies they were inseparable from the Soviets they were fighting
This seems to elide the obvious places where they would be different, viz., the sort of society they wanted to build. Now, you might subscribe to the, shall we say, totalitarianism thesis of liberal and liberal-conservative historiography—and that’s perfectly respectable as a view!—but one ought to at least discuss this to a certain extent.
> even after the defeat of the Nazis and the fall of the USSR, in the western world this type of racist leftism was not wiped out as commonly assumed but merely retreated to its stronghold in academia
It’s really not obvious whether you’re referring to bog standard social democrats who primarily focus on class or randos on Twitter who advocate the extermination of whites. Whatever it is, the latter clearly have far less institutional power within the left than advocates of the total extermination of their racial enemies did under the Nazis.
> The exact sort of people who are obsessed with equating Nazis and conservative white men are also the sort of people who write glowing reviews of Nazi propaganda magazines
Perhaps the author is indeed this sort of person, but in that case you could probably try finding something to cite. I have no doubt that such people exist, but it is rather lazy to sneer at, let’s say, at least a third of the political spectrum (on a crude left-centre-right trichotomy) on the basis of one article.
I studied sociology in Spain. Here going to uni you can't choose much what you want to study so you have to go through every roadblock and eat that theory timesinks.
There's too much activism in the field. I know people in social sciences hate to talk about this because they see as an attack from outsiders that they don't understand the limitations of current methodology, but it's true. It's too much to deal with.
My university had some ideological diversity among professors, yet I was subject to veiled attacks from professors who feeled that I asked to many questions or that I wasn't aligned with them. Such as talking about me to other classes in a demeaning manner, saying I was too liberal, and trying to frame me.
I went to uni in my mid 20s and I am actually someone who was poor, who comes from an unstructured family, and who had to do all the route from basic education to uni by myself, while working and living in less than desirable places, so I'm one of those "oppressed folks", and I clearly saw that being from that background and confronting them didn't sit them too well. And I wasn't unpolite or anything, I just had questions and wasn't 18, nor shy.
This of course translates to other dynamics, like publications and grants. In Spanish there are some publications who I would classify as "serious" in the field (like REIS) yet some obvious ideological BS slips from time to time.
There was also plenty of network effects for getting money for research, and some other professors, which I personally considered more... professional, or serious, or whatever you want it, where affected by this dynamics because their personality didn't allow them to play office politics. It was a shame, and seeing that is one of the main things that prevented me to pursue an academic career.
One of my professors told me once something that IMO is very true. Fields like sociology are in desperate need for outsiders. Not everything is activism nor far-left propaganda (google functionalism, symbolic interactivism, systems theory to name theree schools of the top of my head) but if nobody who's willing to fight BS stays (like myself), it will just perpetuate, and there's an actual need for this field to develop further.
This seems to be a pretty thin rebuttal. There’s a perfectly sound case against calling Trump a Nazi—which is not what the article does. It’s not really very obvious what your objection to the actual content of the paragraph is. Then you seem to jump on sociology simply because it’s in the submission headline—but it’s far from clear that the article is a representative example of the practice of sociology, so it’s rather mysterious how you get from whatever was in the article to the claim that sociology should be named ‘far-left propaganda’. I’m afraid I don’t really see any substantive content here, and posting that is, I thought, the point of this website.
Yes. But physics has a layer of abstraction on top of the replication problem, if you will.
If you were to go through the physics literature, you would find studies that are hard to replicate. Maybe even my dissertation. ;-)
The "studies" that are hard to replicate in the social sciences are testing what I call isolated factoids, such as: If you give children a chance to eat a sweet snack, they will tend to become criminals as adults. There is no way to test this factoid except by carrying out more identical studies and hoping that statistics will converge in favor of an answer.
Instead, physics can attack a problem from multiple angles, especially by connecting different factoids with a web of relationships based on theory. If it works out, then you end up with a web whose structure remains reliable even if you knock out even a large number of studies. For instance I don't think we'd consider abandoning Maxwell's equations if we discovered that much of the early experimental work done in support of developing those equations was faulty.
This is why I actually think that replication is not actually the gold standard of science.
Perhaps I should have clarified. What I should have said is that replication is certainly important, but replication alone can't drive science forward or produce a reliable scientific knowledge base. At least, it hasn't done so yet.
And a science that's bolstered by the development of robust theory can tolerate a certain amount of replication failure.
It's fascinating to me that social psychology can have a replication crisis, and somehow gets turned into a replication crisis in all of the social sciences.
I think the opening of the article is unfortunate. It doesn't relate that strongly, or support the bulk of the article, which is a skim through different Signal (which as you say was a Nazi magazine).
The rest of the article is better, but still kind of surface level I feel. There are two broad strands of thought in the rest of the article: a) Signal critiques of America could be "surprisingly" nuanced and/or still resonating today and b) the tone of signal critiques show a surprising acceptance of some level of greatness of America.
I say surface level, because a) seems kind of obvious. The best propaganda is to selectively choose (and perhaps mildly exaggerate) your opponents true weaknesses/downsides, while emphasizing (or perhaps fully fabricating) your own strengths. Especially when your target is notionally the land of freedom.
For b) that's also not completely surprising. It was simply NOT feasible not acknowledge America's material strength and wealth. You could not have plausible propaganda claiming that America did not have admirable resources or industry.
Fundamentally this boils down to, Nazis were not cartoon caricatures of humans. They were humans like us, spanning the entire spectrum of temperaments, "high browness", education, and tendencies. Even more, they were humans raised in the western tradition - there were Nazis who were ever bit as informed by enlightenment thinking and greek rhetoric as we are here today. And therefore they could choose to write propaganda that would appeal or at least resonate with us to this day.
The final line however is probably the most interesting bit: "What if our enemies know us better than we know ourselves?". This line of thinking invites us to ask all sorts of interesting questions such as:
* What are the means by which we "know ourselves" - who teaches us about ourselves?
* Is our failures to change really a failure of knowledge? Amongst which group of people?
I think the sentence is meant to be read: "As many Jews as [the number of] Signal readers" i.e. equating the size of the groups, not saying that they were the same group.
I understand that. It's probably also the reason the date (late autumn 1943) was picked. But in the haste of claiming guilt-by-association and showing a razor-sharp anti-fascist mind to the reader, the author wrote a meaningless sentence, and then fucked it up. That's bad writing.
I actually do see a strong connection between a state magazine activly promoting the awesomeness of that state - while that same state is activly doing the holocaust more or less in secret.
Because people believing propaganda leads to less resistance to the Nazi forces military and diplomatically, effectivly meaning more jews could be gassed.
But .. there is likely no point here, debating this any further.
If you'd had written that wrt to something like the Völkische Beobachter, fine, but this was a rather dumb glossy, which doesn't appear to have aimed at inciting antisemitism. When it was first published, gassing hadn't been considered yet. And there has never been enough resistance from the population to overthrow the Nazis. The only thing that could overthrow them, was a war at enormous scale on two fronts, and I don't see how a Finnish or Flemish publication could have affected that in any significant way. It's just too far fetched, too "wings of a butterfly". You could just as well argue that the Chicken Dance is responsible for us letting our guards down, which led to 9/11, which led to the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Signal was intentionally not using aggressive antisemitism the same way, whole nazi germany got very soft before the olympics 1936 in germany - to spread a false image. Propaganda. So people not yet occupied get a wrong image like "maybe the Nazis are not so bad after all and we can still do buisness". German resistance groups struggled hard to get evidence out. And then it was not believed, because of propaganda like this.
Signal on its own might have been not that big factor, but it was no random butterfly, but willingly part of the bigger propaganda machine, which main purpose was to support nazi domination, which includes the holocaust.
. That 'Signal' existed. It's pretty interesting really, I've got a few hardbound volumes in one of my history book hoards. Worth looking at.
. Propaganda is everywhere. The hard part is seeing it in your own world, not others'.
. History is complicated. Historian's fallacy is real. Watch out.
. Nazis will fascinate people for a long time. I honestly think that a big part of it is their use of symbols, imagery, snappy uniforms, bigger-than-life super villains. An absolutely ridiculous belief system, but that never stopped groups of people from buying into things.
Of course sociology is largely self-serving BS (see: Stanislav Andreski: Social Sciences as Sorcery) but then so are a lot of other soft disciplines. You can't blame these people for riding a wave. To tie it back into the article, much of sociology is an attempt to program people with your own belief system, not to understand and predict. Perhaps it's just the advertising business with a figleaf of science.