They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
press.uchicago.edu
press.uchicago.edu
I remember reading this long before the Internet and thinking that it made sense. The world was literally going insane around the author but nobody noticed. It happened through an accumulation of no-crisis baby steps, year after year.
The mass adoption of the Internet has caused me to reconsider. Every crackpot I've ever encountered thinks exactly the same thing, namely that we're all asleep while <major issue> continues unabated. How can we be so blind to it!
This is not to dismiss the author, who clearly saw some shit, but rather to point out the very fine line between crackpot and prophet, at least when viewed on the surface.
It's easier to paint a prophet as a crackpot if everyone else is putting time and energy into finding fault with them. You can vilify anyone, especially those that look different.
This applies in much lower stakes environments as well: the workplace, relationships. It's surprising how reliably someone's attitude can flip from "if ever X, I'll quit" to "X isn't that much worse than X-1, this isn't worth making a fuss about" if the change happens slowly enough.
But I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those German citizens who would have gradually become part of the Nazi machine.
I think it's perhaps safer to recognise the line between good and evil runs through every person, and not be presumptive to think of oneself as being part of a select group of virtuous people.
I can think of many recent occurrences where people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue.
Their propagandists on state TV even stated recently discussing Ukraine that Nazism = political nationalism + totalitarism. Which obviously doesn't apply to Ukraine, yet absolutely describes Russia.
Russian propaganda that “Ukraine is a Nazi state” is stupid, but you have to understand that “Nazism” means something quite different to Russians than to most Westerners. Most Westerners focus on the Nazis’ genocidal Antisemitism; in Russia, the focus is more on the Nazis’ genocidal Russophobia. That different focus makes the propaganda seem not quite as ludicrous as it does in the West, especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian), which the Russian government paints as Russophobic discrimination.
Russia now resembles more Tsarists imperial wars mixed with communist practices.
no. Just read his war declaration speech. Classic Nazism. They had "master race" and inferior "races" of Jews and Slavics. Putin has master nation of Russians and inferior Ukrainians. And he is using that the same was as Hitler as a reason to claim the master race's/nation's right to the territory and to conduct ethnical cleansing and genocide there.
>especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian)
The "War and Peace" opens with the scene of an aristocratic party in St.Peterburg where French language - de-facto language of Russian nobility in the years before - is totally banned because of Napoleon invasion.
Hitler didn’t see Jews as Germans who had been corrupted into viewing themselves as non-Germans. On the contrary, he insisted full-blooded Jews could never be Germans, no matter how much they wanted to be-even if they completely rejected their Jewish identity. There was a tiny minority of Jews (the Association of German National Jews) who supported Hitler - how did he repay them for their support? He sent them to the camps.
Hitler is not the only bad genocidal man in world history. It is super possible for Russia to be fascist, genocidal while also having important differences against Hitlers ideology. Being different then Hitler does not make one good or defensible.
That sounds almost benign, like just a minor difference of opinions, when taken that way out of the context. The context though is the declaration that anybody resisting that conversion back to Russian and insisting on being Ukrainian is to be killed. Another, wider context, is the deep contempt (which Russians in theie Great Russia chauvinism fail to notice as well as to acknowledge when pointed out to) Russians have for Ukrainians in general which is well illustrated by usage of "hohly" with various level of offensiveness for example, as well as pretty deep mutual anymosity between Russians and Western Ukrainians. (Note: i grew up in USSR as a Russian by mentality, and i'm half-Ukrainian by blood, so i have some idea what i'm talking about here)
Anyway, Nazism isn't about why some are deemed inferior. Nazism is about deeming some inferior and acting violently upon that belief.
Nazism is when violent xenophobia becomes state ideology. That is invention of the 20th century.
That’s a quote from the Roman general and consul (joint head of state) Manius Acilius Glabrio, in the early 2nd century BCE. The quote is given by the ancient Roman historian Livy - ancient historians often invented speeches for their subjects, so Manius Acilius probably never spoke those exact words, but Livy believed they were an accurate representation of his beliefs. So, rather than being a 20th century Nazi invention, violent xenophobia was the state ideology of the ancient Roman Republic.
Unfortunately, even say just a year ago i, like many, wasn't able to recognize Russian Nazism even though it was right into our faces - it looked to me just like strong authoritarianism with imperial ideology colored by Great Russia chauvinism. Today it is pretty clear to me that all the last 22 years, right from the apartment building bombings by FSB in 1999, we had the Russian Nazism rising. It finally dawns on more and more people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashism
I shared a quote by an ancient Roman general and politician saying the peoples of the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Levant were “the most worthless peoples among mankind and born for slavery”-how is that different from Hitler’s view that Slavs were an inferior race who ought to be enslaved? If there is a difference I don’t see it. But if the Roman Empire was practising “Nazism” 2000 years before Hitler was even born, maybe “Nazism” is somewhat of a misnomer for the generic phenomena (as opposed to the specific instantiation of it in 20th century Germany)
Nazism is fascism plus violent xenophobia of specific, ie. of "superiority", kind, like "master race" in case of Hitler or "master nation" in case of Russia. In my original comment i specifically mentioned practically the same definition given by Russian propagandists - "totalitarism plus political nationalism" (fascism is a totalitarism). For example Italy was fascist, yet it wasn't really nazist. Roman Empire wasn't a fascist state, thus it was also not a nazist state. USSR had totalitarism, yet it wasn't a fascism, and USSR also didn't had a nationalism ideology. Putin's Russia has both - fascism and "master nation" ideology, and thus Putin's Russia is a nazist state.
Ancient Romans believed they were a “master race/nation”. As the quote I provided demonstrates, they believed that “inferior” foreign nations - such as Thracians, Illyrians, Macedonians, Syrians - were “born for slavery”. That is exactly the same as what the Nazis believed, there is no significant difference between ancient Roman and Nazi beliefs on this topic, except for the identity of the “superior race”.
> Roman Empire wasn't a fascist state, thus it was also not a nazist state.
You realise what the etymology of “fascist” is? It comes from Latin “fasces”, which is a special type of axe which was used in the Roman Republic and Empire as a symbol of state power. The Italian fascists adopted the same symbol, and the word, because they saw what they were doing as taking Italy back to the past glory of the Roman Empire. So ancient Rome was the original fascist state which 20th century fascists adopted as their model.
Mussolini didn't really care about religion. He only made Catholicism the state religion because he thought that by doing so he could buy the Catholic Church's support; which only partially worked, it continued to be somewhat of a thorn in his side for the remainder of his rule. In seeing religion primarily as a tool to be manipulated to political ends, as opposed to being driven by personal religious belief, Mussolini actually has a lot in common with ancient Roman politicians, many of whom had a very similar attitude towards religion. If the end policy result seems quite different, that is more due to differences in historical circumstance than a fundamentally different ideological starting point.
And just like fascist Italy, ancient Rome had a state religion, and everyone had to pay lip service to it – the state didn't care if you believed in it in your heart, but criticising it publicly could get you killed. Much of the ancient Roman persecution of Jews and Christians was because they refused to pay lip service to the state religion, and dared to express their disbelief in the state's Gods publicly rather than privately. Likewise, Fascist Italy didn't care if you sincerely believed in Catholicism – Il Duce himself didn't – so long as you publicly pretended to believe in it. The primary difference is that the Roman state religion, being polytheistic, was often willing to import foreign gods - although the government reserved the right to decide in each individual case whether a given importation was to be permitted or prohibited, and a number of foreign cults were indeed banned – while Catholicism as (a branch of) an exclusively monotheistic religion generally isn't willing to do that (although it has some history of importing figures from other religions as Saints – the Gautama Buddha was accepted into Catholicism as Saint Josaphat, but he was later dropped as a Saint once his non-Christian origin became clear–although some of the Eastern Orthodox churches still have him as one; many argue that the Irish Saint Brigid is a Christianisation of the Irish Goddess Brigid; others argue that Our Lady of Guadalupe is a Christianisation of the Aztec Goddess Tonantzin, although that is somewhat more disputed.)
Was fascist Italy a totalitarian state? It officially claimed to be one – when the liberal opposition used "totalitarian" as a pejorative, Mussolini decided to reclaim the epithet and wear it proudly ("yes, we are totalitarian, totalitarianism is great!") – but Mussolini never gained absolute power: the King and the Church acted as independent spheres of power, and Mussolini never managed to gain as much control over either as he wished – when Hitler asked Mussolini to join World War II on the Axis side, Mussolini had to ask the King for permission, and was told "No" several times before Victor Emmanuel eventually said "Yes". Mussolini's position in Italy was always much weaker than Hitler's in Germany or Stalin's in Russia (or even Franco's in Spain), and while fascist Italy did persecute political dissidents, the persecution was far milder than that of the Nazis or Stalinists. (I'm not defending Mussolini here, who undoubtedly was a bad person who did numerous evil things and brought his country to near-ruin – but in many ways a lesser evil than Hitler or Stalin.)
i think you're conflating absolute power and totalitarianism. Though they may co-exist occasionally, those are 2 different things. Absolutism is about unchecked power of the ruler over state, while totalitarianism is about control of the state over all aspects of the citizens' lives. Roman Empire like say France of 17th century or like most of the kingdoms/empires in the history was absolutist (Magna Carta in 1215 started that slow process of non-absolutist kingdoms appearance in history). In absolutist state the will of the rule is the primary source of the things, and may be codified in the laws or may be applied just at whim. A totalitarian state isn't necessarily absolutist. It may be absolutist like the USSR during Stalin while it may be not absolutist like the same USSR during Brezhnev. In totalitarian state people are typically oppressed based on the laws of the state driven by ideology, not because of the whims of the ruler. The whims of the ruler if happen, like in case of Stalin, come in addition to the totalitarian state oppression and don't change the nature of the state, and may naturally disappear with the death of the ruler while the totalitarian state would continue its existence.
Looking at pre-20th century history the closest to totalitarianism would be the Church's tight control over all aspects of the people lives in the Middle Ages. That Church's power wasn't absolutist - it wasn't performed purely according to the whims of the current Pope, instead it was mainly driven by the Church's ideology, and while Popes changed the state of total control of the Church over people would go unchanged for centuries. Compare that Church's power with the power of the kings at the same time - the kings could do whatever they want, kill/punish whoever they wanted, yet they didn't maintain such control as the Church.
The Roman Empire had no compunction about interfering in any aspect of citizens' lives. If it engaged in less interference in practice than many modern regimes, that was simply because there was far less for it to interfere with. Consider the education system – in modern times, education is near-universal, and so regimes seek to control the education system in order to influence the thoughts of the mass of the population. If the Roman Empire had universal schooling, it is near-certain that the imperial government would have done the very same. But, it didn't – the bulk of the population was illiterate and uneducated, while fee-paying private schools served the children of the affluent. The government never sought to regulate those schools, simply because it did not see any point in doing so. Why should the state care about the school curriculum when 95% of children never went to school, and the most of the 5% who did would have been children of regime insiders anyway?
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both subordinated all civil society organisations to state control. What did the Roman Empire do? Well, civil society – as understood today – largely didn't exist in ancient times. There were few formal civil society institutions, and those few which did exist were generally religious in character, attached to Temples/Churches/etc. And the Roman state heavily interfered with religious institutions – in the pre-Christian period, major Pagan temples were generally government-owned and with state-appointed clergy. If anything, the adoption of Christianity as a state religion saw a modest decline in government control of religion, simply because Christianity had an organised clergy not under direct state control, whereas the Pagan clergy were far less organised and hence far more amenable to direct state interference.
Fascist Italy was a different situation again – Mussolini sought to subordinate all civil society to the state just as the Nazis and Soviets had done, but was forced to compromise with the Catholic Church and permit it to retain its own independent Church-sponsored civil society organisations, which functioned as alternatives and competitors to the state-sponsored ones. Italian citizens had a freedom to choose between two competing ideologies (Fascism and Catholicism) – a relatively narrow freedom, but nonetheless one which was denied to those ruled by the Nazis or Soviets. The military was another area in which Mussolini failed to implement totalitarianism – Nazi soldiers swore allegiance to Hitler, Soviet soldiers swore allegiance to the Soviet State, but Italian soldiers swore allegiance, not to Mussolini, but rather to King Victor Emmanuel III. As a result, many royalist/monarchist opponents of Fascism found a refuge and power base within the Italian military – nothing parallel could be said about the Wehrmacht or Red Army.
Comparing Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, I think it can be argued that only the last was complete totalitarianism, whereas the former were less than fully "total". In the Soviet Union, the economic sphere was fully subordinated to the state; with private enterprise, private property and private wealth severely restricted (if not abolished entirely). By contrast, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany allowed private enterprise and property to continue to exist, and both regimes permitted the wealthy to keep the bulk of their private wealth, provided they did not politically oppose the regime, and were not members of persecuted minorities. While both regimes did interfere with the operation of private businesses to a degree, they never sought the complete state control of business decision-making which existed in the Soviet Union.
> In totalitarian state people are typically oppressed based on the laws of the state driven by ideology, not because of the whims of the ruler. The whims of the ruler if happen, like in case of Stalin, come in addition to the totalitarian state oppression and don't change the nature of the state,
Why does it matter whether one's oppression is driven by "ideology" or "whim"? I can't see why this is an important distinction. And it seems rather orthogonal to the question of whether the state has "total" control over society. One regime might be highly ideological yet with significant spheres of society maintaining independence from state control; another regime might be founded on personal whim and the ruler's megalomania rather than any coherent ideology, and yet subject every aspect of life to those whims.
> and may naturally disappear with the death of the ruler while the totalitarian state would continue its existence.
Historically, many absolute monarchies have had no particular ideology, yet saw a succession of absolute rulers lasting centuries, as the role of absolute ruler is successively passed from father to son. The particularities of whim may change with each generation, but it is still whim; and sons likely inherit much of their whims from their fathers.
> Looking at pre-20th century history the closest to totalitarianism would be the Church's tight control over all aspects of the people lives in the Middle Ages
I think the mediaeval Catholic Church was actually far weaker than many people today think it was. It did not exert much control over the average person's life at all; many mediaeval clerics bemoaned that the majority of the population rarely went to church, and often acted quite disrespectfully on the occasions they did, indulged in widespread drunkenness, promiscuity, unmarried cohabitation, adultery, prostitution, etc, and that the government mostly didn't care. Even within the Catholic Church itself–very many "celibate" clergy had mistresses and illegitimate children (including bishops, cardinals, even Popes); homosexual activity was widespread in many monasteries (which while a capital offence, few were actually prosecuted–generally only the indiscreet, unlucky, or those who had made powerful enemies.) Many viewed religion as a fitting subject for mockery, and got away with it far more often than most today would think they did. Those who sought to establish a competing religious ideology to the Church's frequently faced execution, but those who decided to just ignore it all and quietly live their lives as they saw fit were largely free to do so.
That is a huge oversimplification. Nazis viewed Slavs as inferiors to be enslaved, but they saw Scandinavians much more positively. Hitler admired the British Empire, and prior to the outbreak of WW2, Nazi propaganda was pro-British - Hitler had hoped to recruit Britain as an ally, and was disappointed when it became an enemy instead. Nazi policy towards conquered nations was complex, ranging from genocidal extermination at one extreme, to promoting enhanced minority rights at the other (which they did for the Frisians in the Netherlands and the Bretons in France). Even for Slavs the policy wasn’t purely enslavement - some were to be forcibly assimilated as Germans instead (the Sorbs), and the Nazis were keen to play different Slavic groups off against each other (which is how some Ukrainian nationalists ended up volunteering to fight for the Nazis)
Maybe it's like being a part of a bad company. It's too big a machine for you to meaningfully change, and the only way to remain on board is to help it along.
Is it realistic to resist and live comfortably? No, but you have the choice, and the choice you make is a reflection of your character.
It's interesting because any two random people might not agree on which side is "worse" in this regard. People often think they're immune to the tactics and propaganda of the other side, but they'll frequently fail to see the same or very similar stuff happening on their own side, or they'll downplay it because it doesn't affect them so much personally.
You can think about how you handle current events:
If you live in the US, how did you handle the Trump presidency?
If you live in Russia, how are you handling the current situation?
A few weeks ago a Russian colleague of mine IMed me looking to move out of the country. That night I told my wife how lucky I felt that we didn't need to leave the US when Trump was in power.
It seems like the institution of presidential debates that has been a hallmark of our democratic process for decades was destroyed by the GOP just yesterday, so speaking in the past tense as if the damage has ceased is a mistake.
Your greatest chance of being anti-Nazi, for instance, would have been just to be a card-carrying Communist.
> unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality
to suggest otherwise would be to say that most people don't, but most people will help others - a lot of support is going to Ukraine which would simply not if Ukraine were the aggressor (and I acknowledge such ethical behaviour is patchy and sometimes not there but often it is).
One of my favorite sayings (even though I am not religious at all) is, “therefore but by the grace of god go I.” It is about realizing that so much of our behavior is dictated by circumstances. We don’t like to think of it that way, but it is true.
One of my favorite essays of all time is called “A muscular empathy” (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...). It is about using this idea, and thinking about why we would behave the same way as all these people who we would like to believe we would have been better than if we were in their shoes. My favorite quote from it:
> It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, or if we were slave masters, our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.
> Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.
> That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
One of the best things that ever happened to me was becoming a member of a group that I was previously prejudiced against.
Case in point is that nearly every terrible political act in history has been perpetrated by someone proclaiming to be fighting the good fight. They all had their rationalisations. I can’t think of any examples of political groups that declare themselves pro-evil.
In a sense, this is encouraging. It means there is widespread low tolerance for transparently evil ideas.
In another sense, this indicates we have widespread low capability to determine which ideas are actually virtuous, and which merely have a veneer of virtue (masking great harm).
They say majority of Russian people really support Putin and his war on Ukraine. Similarly many Germans supported Hitler and his invasion of Poland. I think the situation in Russia is now very similar to the early Nazi Germany.
It could happen here too. But I hope and pray if there's anything good about Putin's war it is it makes people realize Fascism is alive and well, and will not go away by itself.
What makes you think it hasn't? How do you know all those drone strikes were on bad people? How do you know that standards of evidence before employing military force haven't been slacked off to the point of meaninglessness? How do you know those secret FISA courts are actually giving full and complete due-process? How do you know that every person in the world's largest slave-labor force definitely deserves to be there? There is an awful lot of stuff that one could point to as being fascist in the modern US system.
And we have a habit of "military adventurism" ourselves... we got ourselves into Iraq through acts of aggression, and that's far from the first.
This is precisely the problem discussed in the article and the comments here - the framing of "us, good wholesome people who love our country, vs dirty vile Russians who support an evil military aggressor" is itself the result of propaganda and messaging. No country is going to message themselves as being the bad guys.
Most people support their country because it's what one does, and there's immense social pressure to do so. And we tend to rationalize away the bad because "well, there's always some bad, but it's mostly good". Most people really don't have (and aren't allowed to have) a full picture of whether the sum is actually good or not, we just assume it.
So in the end, Germans support German tyranny, Russians support Russian tyranny, and Americans support American tyranny, because that's what one does. Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?
That was precisely my point, I said there's Nazi-minded people in every country. It's not country against country but democracy vs. autocracy. Unfortunately when autocracy takes over it is very difficult to get democracy back, you can't vote to go back to democracy any more. But as long as there's still little bit of democracy left, what you can do is vote for more democracy, not less.
The counter-argument is that Russians have had to develop a different breed/species of political thought: https://www.ft.com/content/6d96dc89-fb9a-4d18-a980-5044861ff...
Not that quiet protest can actually change anything in the short-term, unfortunately.
https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/November%202021%20Airpo...
These are US airstrike counts since 2014. They stopped counting once a Taliban agreement was reached. Now we all know these were all done for freedom and only bad people get bombed, but I wonder what Americans would think if the aftermath of every one showed up on their twitter feed.
“I was just following orders…” etc etc
SEE: https://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link...
From the Wikipedia article on German PoWs in the US during WW2 (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the...>):
>Scholar Arnold Krammer noted that in his years of interviewing prisoners he never met one who admitted to being a Nazi
The Ukraine invasion made me see how Russia is today, and it doesn't take much to turn a society into a fog of nothingness. A bit of leeway regarding police forces, a bit of good old propaganda, and now you can't speak, nothing is true anymore.
Western countries have flaws, yeah the media spread bullshit depending on which interests each channel has, US police is too gun-ready, the financial world is rigged, etc etc but so far people can still speak up, it's a subtle but crucial difference.
Of course, it all blends together... There was insidious breadth in their messaging... They would do things like go to elementary schools and cherry pick the most pathetic and weak (who "happened" to be stereotypically jewish-looking) child and then pick a child known amongst their peers to be athletic, intelligent, and handsome/beautiful (and who "happened" to be Aryan-looking) and then they'd talk 'scientifically' about the distinctive features of the two races, and the physical differences between the two children, espousing the 'good genes' of the Aryan looking kid.
Even today, in 'more virtuous' societies, people love to think of themselves as superior to others in some capacity. It's less common to emphasize the inferiority of others, especially using race as a basis, but at the end of the day, we're talking about basically the same human tendency toward contempt.
I know (I would say) that I wouldn't become a Nazi, but only because I'm aware of how easy it is. But something similar I can't recognize?
The best approach is probably to stay humble and assume you can't tell the difference between good and bad.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UlZ7DC...
The first measures against Jews were also taken instantly.
Meaning, whether you felt free or not severely dependended on who you were - generally you needed to be pro Hitler to feel free.
> "Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better."
I have since about 2010, sensed better. Snowden helped me trust my instincts. At this time I am left with no moral choice whatsoever but to speak up about the direction of technology and what we are helping to create. It now seems like a Pascal's wager. If I'm wrong it won't matter and I'll simply look like a fool. I am really, really praying that I end up looking a fool.
When bad people rise to power, they often do so vilifying one or more other groups. The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.
You can't reduce politics to a game of pattern-matching where every time someone says something which pattern-matches to "you called someone bad people!" you should react just like the last time someone said it. Sometimes people are bad, sometimes they're not, and there's no shortcut to figuring it out other than by taking the time and effort to actually figure it out, (Which isn't really a shortcut at all.)
The problem is that if you place yourself in a random time and party, you are more likely to be a Nazi than a Jew, because a crucial element of evil is the power to do it, which is associated with having greater numbers, and that rigs the odds so that your random insertion will be among them rather than their heroic enemies.
"Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule..."
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-r...
If you place yourself at a random time of trouble you will 2 to 1 find yourself behind the eyes of someone indifferent or scared neither victim nor victimizer.
Regarding your examples, I couldn’t possibly comment, for obvious reasons.
This! Absolutely. Technological backlash is one of the grave dangers I address in Digital Vegan. Anti-intellectualism lies just beneath the surface in a technological society that is out of touch with itself and has alienated its members through the very technology that could unite it. It grows prone to regressive catastrophes like Mao's brutal projects and of the Khmer Rouge you mention. "Strong Leaders" attach themselves easily to ruralism, "back to basics" and other regressive ideologies. In many ways I think Putin may be one of them. Technological cults beget anti-technological cults.
A problem is that nuanced (but 'inconvenient') tech critique gets labelled as precisely that regressive anti-intellectualism by those who profit from technologically mediated alienation. Simply count the allusions to Luddism in responses to my comments. That "shutting down" and trying to place reasoned technological critique as beyond discussion is mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and is the road to trouble.
No. When times get tough, everyone is naturally drawn to their own. Visit any prison.
> The odds are not in our favor, collectively, we will be tricked as well.
Nobody is tricked. The person who appeals to the masses' self-interest will become leader.
We don't know where it's going or how it'll play out. But we can feel that it is already bad and is going to get worse. Some day people will try to say "we didn't know" but that will be a lie. Some of us did and tried to convince y'all. But because we aren't able to convincingly predict the future in minute detail we've been ignored.
Anyway yes, as I said. Dismiss excuse invalidate. I will truly be happy if I turn out to be wrong about this. Where will you be if you are wrong?
> Where will you be if you are wrong?
You do not know my stance on the matter. You presume, because I responded inquiring into how your senses were different, that I was not on your side. But I would most likely be in a little cabin in the mountains. I have quit Meta for the past 6 years, have de-Googled myself (in so much that you cannot really what others do), and generally agree that many technologies are more harmful to society than help. Particularly, what people call surveillance capitalism. That being said, I recognize that it is not the underlying technology that is problematic but the institutions and decision makers. If you read the article, they are recreating the exact widening of the gap between themselves and the people under the guise that they know better (since the have the data, they made it, only they understand the tech, etc.) I would never advocate for the destruction of the internet to prevent these institutions but rather educate and elucidate my peers to narrow this gap. I asked you to help close this gap by telling me what you see and your response was "you're the problem for even asking".
That is a disingenuous comment or you gravely misunderstand the issues.
There are almost no groups ever in history "opposed to technological progress", even the "Luddites" that inevitably will get mention a dozen times in this thread.
Nobody is opposed to technological progress. The opposition is to technological tyranny. I do hope you understand the difference between the two.
I would agree that the Luddites were not opposed to all technological progress, just the part that impacted their jobs. But this type of reasoning leads to the tragedy of the commons where each group refuses technology that replaces themselves. The end result is no technological progress. Anyway, "technological tyranny" is poorly defined and people just pick whatever they deem wrong as tyranny and whatever is good as a non-issue. We are under rule of the internet. Without it, society would cease to function. Are people opposed to the internet tyranny? We require a functioning society to have advanced health care, regardless of socialism/capitalism, are we under "advanced health care tyranny" because it is being used to push people into a functioning society?
Destroying equipment was a tactic, not an ideology. The worst that can honestly be said about it is that it didn't work.
> "We are under rule of the internet."
Good Lord! No! If we are "under the rule" of anything it is the Rule of Law. In Britain, unlike USA, we are "subjects of Her Majesty", such that the Law is mediated through a parliamentary democracy. You have it slightly different under a republic. Either way, despite general cynicism we are lucky enough to enjoy governments that serve us, and long may that last.
The internet is nothing but a tool. It damn well serves us. And it does so if and only if we ask it to. Your's is precisely the sort of expressions that gives me concern, please reconsider what you are saying.
> I'm confused because you are the one who said that they were opposed to technological tyranny.
Yes, sorry if my lazy parsing (overzealous response) means we're talking at cross purposes. I think we are more in agreement than not.
If there's anything we are confusing each other over it may be "what already is" versus "what we want to avoid".
respects
We don't have to know the exact form it will take. We should oppose all the forms that tech can become oppressive.
But are you seriously rejecting the post-WW2 paradigm where tech was made sacred and engineers and scientists were turned into its high priests ?
I know some people like that, but I wouldn't have expected to see them on hacker news !
The overall system and how it is applied and incentivized, not the random non-deterministic effects some of which are cool and some very bad, is the issue.
Tech introduces a governance layer with increasingly par relevancy with the rest of our civil social contract. I have to pay taxes to the city, and I also have to do it through a website. I want to go out to a restaurant, I have to pay via a toasttab app. I want to use public transportation, and its a cashless affair. I want to go to a concert, I need a ticketmaster app on an updated smart phone with geolocation services turned on (and so on). I want to get car insurance, I install an app and list my social media for discounts.
Worse, the system leverages massive network effects, so there are stronger links everyday to enforce tech and civil society, not just the civil society part. Worse, the automation will eventually start drowning the knowledge class careers as well.
While I am definitely letting my ideology leak through above, this area has a tremendous amount of research behind it so this just isn't me and my luddite buddies. Big Tech discovers it occasionally, cypherpunks(tor, pgp, bitcoin) have been on it for a while, non-technical observers (pysch, lib arts) often notice it from external evaluation especially around misinformation, and so on. MIT pioneered cybernetics research, which specifically aims for the above governance.
It's really hard to miss this dynamic if you work in the industry and look beyond your company, and even if you do miss it or don't believe your own take, there is a mountain of cross-disciplinary research on it.
Norbert Wiener was himself a devastating critic of the immediate Dr. Strangelove type conclusions his generation of peers immediately took to. At the time a comparison was made to eugenics, though I forget by whom within that circle.
It has incarnations not just in the obvious twentieth century fascist/axis contexts (Germany, Italy, Japan) but then in South America and as a Soviet version, both with leftist spins.
The most modern condemnation I have encountered (other than of economists/doco-journalists like Varoufakis, Adam Curtis etc) is from "The Invisible Committee" which offers an anarchist take [1]. []
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-commit...
[] This presents some really interesting dichotomies/contradictions for the libertarian-anarchists stereotypically of Silicon Valley.
Thanks for the link!
If you're looking for a modernist take that's not econ or journalism, the way in is probably checking out the CCRU, which still has a lot of literature on it and by it around [0], and the Cybernetic Hypothesis [1]. CCRU is like if a technically aware philosophy department discovered this and extended it into total conclusion(idk, that's not really a good explanation), Cybernetic Hypothesis is like if like arts/anarchist types did the same, and then both filter into interesting pools. Cypherpunk and early bitcoin are definitely tuned in, but with probably different motivations and outcome goals.
What sort of blows my mind is especially those first two sources offer really clear eyed commentary on 'all of this,' but they are also dated - 1990's publishing date. It's like you have to tap into sometimes hokey "the information age" literature to get a clear read on 2020's tech. What's worse is the 1990's lit theorizes fairly radical (for the time) outcomes that came very true today even beyond the usual Neuromancer/Cryptonomicon/Sci-Fi mappings, yet there isn't much discussion on it (like this thread).
edit - would check out Jaron Lanier, 'who owns the future,' for a pretty modern take that discusses the above well and he has tech bonafides.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un... [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cyberneti...
Yes that's weird isn't it. I don't believe in "suppression conspiracies" but am amazed how often deeply prescient things are passed over the first time around and must be dug up. For more archaeology dig around Phil Agre's "Red Rock Eaters" and the old Whole Earth where I first discovered Dana Meadows.
A drugged out 1990 Nick Land, the MIT crew (Meadows, Wiener), the original computers (Lanier, Agre, cypherpunks), Mark Fisher and the Occupy area, etc. etc. all come to fairly similar conclusions or exist in very similar orbits, "other research" by the same entities was or is fairly influential, but this area - cybernetic, the Concern, "idk but something isn't great" just does not exist currently and that lack of anchoring really concerns me. All that's available is ex-Social Media/adtech CEOs going on podcast apology tours like that Social Dilemma doc.
Really don't know what to think of it.
Found it (but not read yet) : from p45 on :
https://agorist.xyz/files/Agorism_XXI_I_2022.pdf
I'm guessing that they were always fundamentally opposed anyway, Land being of "bottom" and Yarvin of the "top" sensibilities (in the political compass sense) ?
I'm 30% in, and this does seem to be a potential seed for a vision of the future that the (bottom) left has been so sorely lacking since the failure of the Soviets !
You don't see something so radical often (last time would have been the Unibomber ?), since they seem to consider that the whole Western civilization has to be thrown away, including its Ancient Greek roots ?!
(But then we are in unprecedented times, with tremendous responsibility, and keep failing harder and harder, so at some point you have to wonder why...)
When your long-term goals and short-term actions don't line up, you're in for nasty weather.
Otherwise pretty smart people, but somehow they fall for the dumbest shit. Thinking back, I don't think I ever heard them express such views, and especially not be so adamant about it. They get angry when anyone points out why they're wrong. They're always right, everyone else is wrong...
I didn't believe in Fecebook/Twatter making everyone dumber (never used them myself), but maybe there's truth to that. I guess that's one way technology is affecting the masses, and it's scary because you can't stop the masses, the majority will win, as for now they're in a democracy, actively voting to destroy it and probably not even realizing it. All so a few rich assholes can gain more power.
Other than that, the centralization of everything, that just can't be good. Not only software, but hardware, too. I mean, half of the world's chips (and most of the best ones) are made on one tiny island - God forbid something happens to it.
The few big companies making computers will gladly solder everything and break a chip if you try to reuse it elsewhere, just so you throw it away and buy a new computer when the time comes (i.e. it breaks).
Can't even fix your own car anymore because disconnecting the battery means you need your onboard computer reprogrammed - at an authorized price gouge...errr, I mean, service center, of course.
Not to mention surveillance and the ability to charge you with something at any point if they ever so wish (thanks to "social media").
Technology itself is not at fault, but it does give assholes a whole lot of newpower.
Resilience is one of the big issues I work with. It's one of the topics that's not about tyranny or malice, but is in some ways more frightening. It's because we don't see it as "other inflicted" that it stays beneath the radar somewhat.
I believe in their mind, they're getting "the truth" and know better. But the reality is it's... self-propagandization.
When 50 channels say you're wrong but you find one that tells "the truth"... I dunno, it's like the common sense circuits have been fried.
Just like people in Russia are brainwashed by the state media, so do these people brainwash themselves online, likely reinforced by the recommendation systems used on the major platforms.
Which I notice on Youtube, btw, and it always skews towards some dumb/funny or just idiotic content. View a couple of funny videos and that's all I get for the rest of the month. I mostly watch stuff like DIYPerks, various machine & history stuff, tutorials on a lot of things and listen to music, but I never get good, or any, recommendations on that. Although to be completely fair, I don't subscribe to anything, just mostly look it up after Google+Wikipedia.
I don't think that it was a coincidence that a significant fraction of the "alternative" online places I was hanging out on (like Zero Hedge) suddenly went pretty crazy at the same time as the Russo-Ukrainian war started in 2014 ?
(They're typically called "alt-right" now.)
Not that this is completely new - I got my "conspiracy theory education" in 2005-2010 when I watched a pretty convincing hour(s)-long YouTube video about how the World Trade Center had supposedly been subjected to controlled demolition... and then shortly after that an even more convincing, detailed, and longer video describing how that previous video was wrong.
What possibly happened to ZH, and what you're discussing, has a good operational walkthrough here - https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye-www/blog/pdfs/Gh...
Not in a casual comment. So I took some time to write a book that hopefully contains some insights if you're genuinely interested to know.
So did a bunch of other people;
For a gentle interest to modern tech critique I'd suggest Zuboff, Rushkoff, Lanier and so on, but to be honest of you want non-fictional/sci-fi accounts of the "Nineteen Eighty Four" and "Brave New World" type then I'd recommend starting with Postman, Illich, Ellul and Mumford as these lay firmer foundations.
IBM and the Holocaust (Edwin Black) is obviously worth a read in this context.
> Obviously there are unintended negative effects
Those are interesting. But so are the intended ones.
> but I think it's not certain how they'll play out.
I'd put good money it being uncertain too. :)
Shot in the dark here, but maybe it's worth asking: how exactly are you managing your (remaining) relation with technology going forward? How do you see it (in the future, that is)?
I'm asking because I assume (this being HN) that you're somehow employed in a technology-related field and, as such, you can't/didn't just "quit" technology cold-turkey. I'm also asking because I'm sensing that I'm in the same both as you, i.e. I'm a computer programmer that has started to see more and more clearly the way technology is going and what bad things it does to our society (for me it started about 4-5 years ago, when I actually got to read Ellul first-hand, and before anyone starts asking, no, I'm definitely not a fan of what Ted Kaczynski did).
Later edit: Seen your other comments on this thread after I had written down my comment above, saw that you also mentioned Ellul and some other very interesting stuff/authors that I didn't know about, so thanks a lot "from a distance" for all those suggestions, comments/inputs like yours is what still keeps me active on this website.
Thanks for asking. Definitely one for a personal email which I'd be delighted to chat about (follow my book site).
Also recommended: the long documentary by Marcel Ophuls, "The Sorrow and the Pity," about ordinary French and German people who lived through WW II.
The core of these were "freedom", freedom from being forced _to do_ something, freedom from being prevented from doing something, freedom from having something taken from you without just cause, freedom to have your day in court.
Now protests seem to be "I don't want _you_ to be able to say something", "I don't want you too be able to do something","I want to force you too do what I want."
It's like protesters today are working directly for our oppressors and doing their work for them, and they don't even realize it.
Made me think about how the allies made Germans face the atrocities that they where in denial about after the war, making them go to the camps, dig the graves, watch the footage [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/1420channel/videos
[2] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/german-soldiers-rea...
It does happen everywhere. European countries in NATO have been responsible for more deaths than the russians. It's hilarious. People are pretending ukraine is the only war that ever existed. Ukraine is the tamest ongoing war right now. The least civilian deaths of any serious war since the turn of the century.
> Made me think about how the allies made Germans face the atrocities that they where in denial about after the war, making them go to the camps, dig the graves, watch the footage
That is literally post-war indoctrination/propaganda. Had the germans won ww2, they would have made the british, americans, russians, etc confront their own war crimes.
Interesting book but Milton Mayer was an interesting character (he opposed the US entering WWII IIRC for example) and there was a lot of weird stuff in the book where he showed how willing he himself was to go along with the same kind of things that led to the Nazis coming to power. For example he sometimes came off as having a blind side because he was nearly McCarthyist in his treatment of communism. With 60 years of hindsight you could see he made comments that made you think he would have gone along with a corrupt regime if it was able to contain communism, no different than Germans were taken in by the Nazis.
I don't think things are that different today. All governments are shades between good and evil, and we all subconsciously ignore things governments do if it is obviously far more personally convenient to tolerate that kind of behavior. Self preservation can easily take precedence over being against evil if you are already in the "in group" that is protected by the evil.
In its issue of November 11, 1938, the Kronenberger Zcitung carried the following report, at the bottom of page 4, under a very small headline reading Schutzhaft, “Protective Custody”: “In the interest of their own security, a number of male Jews were taken into custody yesterday. This morning they were sent away from the city.” I showed it to each of my ten friends. None of them—including the teacher—remembered ever having seen it or anything like it.
1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939—until September 1, when, as the Head of the Government told them, Poland attacked their country—the little lives of my friends went on, under National Socialism as they had before, altered only for the better, and always for the better, in bread and butter, in housing, health, and hope, wherever the New Order touched them. “No one outside Germany seems to understand this,” said an anti-Nazi woman, who had been imprisoned in 1943, ostensibly for listening to the foreign radio but actually for hiding Jews (which was not technically illegal). “I remember standing on a Stuttgart street corner in 1938, during a Nazi festival, and the enthusiasm, the new hope of a good life, after so many years of hopelessness, the new belief, after so many years of disillusion, almost swept me, too, off my feet. Let me try to tell you what that time was like in Germany: I was sitting in a cinema with a Jewish friend and her daughter of thirteen, while a Nazi parade went across the screen, and the girl caught her mother’s arm and whispered, ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, if I weren’t a Jew, I think I’d be a Nazi!’ No one outside seems to understand how this was.”
Life under the Putin regime has improved material standards a lot, compared to the disasters that preceded it.
Jews were running away from Germany in those years. Quite desperately. 1938 is Kristallnacht alias November pogrom. Jews were restricted in civil service and schools since 1933. The second wave of segregation laws was in 1935.
And other Germans characterized living in Germany as "you did not knew what is fear unless you lived there" - because you could actually get to prison for a joke someone overheard.
My point here is that Nazi Germany did not became totalitarian as the war started. It was very oppressive and totalitarian long before.
"PREFACE
This is the third and final volume of a trilogy describing the role of the American corporate socialists, otherwise known as the Wall Street financial elite or the Eastern Liberal Establishment, in three significant twentieth-century historical events: the 1917 Lenin- Trotsky Revolution in Russia, the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, and the 1933 seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in Germany. Each of these events introduced some variant of socialism into a major country — i.e., Bolshevik socialism in Russia, New Deal socialism in the United States, and National socialism in Germany. Contemporary academic histories, with perhaps the sole exception of Carroll Quigley's Tragedy And Hope, ignore this evidence. On the other hand, it is understandable that universities and research organizations, dependent on financial aid from foundations that are controlled by this same New York financial elite, would hardly want to support and to publish research on these aspects of international politics. The bravest of trustees is unlikely to bite the hand that feeds his organization. It is also eminently clear from the evidence in this trilogy that "public-spirited businessmen" do not journey to Washington as lobbyists and administrators in order to serve the United States. They are in Washington to serve their own profit-maximizing interests. Their purpose is not to further a competitive, free-market economy, but to manipulate a politicized regime, call it what you will, to their own advantage. It is business manipulation of Hitler's accession to power in March 1933 that is the topic of Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
ANTONY C. SUTTON"
> the role of the American corporate socialists, otherwise known as the Wall Street financial elite or the Eastern Liberal Establishment, in three significant twentieth-century historical events: the 1917 Lenin- Trotsky Revolution in Russia, the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, and the 1933 seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in Germany.
> Contemporary academic histories, with perhaps the sole exception of Carroll Quigley's Tragedy And Hope, ignore this evidence.
> universities and research organizations, dependent on financial aid from foundations that are controlled by this same New York financial elite, would hardly want to support and to publish research on these aspects of international politics
> business manipulation of Hitler's accession to power in March 1933 that is the topic of Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
I think just those four things offer plenty of intellectual red-meat that is very interesting to explore.
Later on the eastern front he had some event that made him think of what his parents had been saying. He said something like "I realized they were right... but by then it was all too late."
Those choices that close our ears to things and choices that lead us to irreversible paths seem to be the ones that are the worst.
in the UK I voted for UKIP to go to the European Parliament in 2008~ and I voted conservative in the general election of that year.
I was completely bought in by the populist talking points that Farage and Cameron were touting, and I was warned not to buy into populism but my mind at the time thought: "Well, if it's popular, what's the problem? They're supposed to work for us right".
The reality is that people will tell you what you want to hear. I started watching a British series called "Hustle" (about a fictitious band of conmen and grifters which we follow as they rip off comically awful people) but I noticed some patterns in the way that the cons were set up and how people like Farage speak. I noticed that it's all deflection, indirection, 10 lies a minute so that when you refute one of the lies (usually the most outrageous) the others kinda fade into the background and are assumed to be true.
I think what made me snap was when I started looking into the things that were claimed much more closely: the EU regulations on "bendy bananas", and I realised it was all fluff. Farage himself being chair on the fisheries committee of the EU but constantly complaining about fishing rights of the UK.
I felt betrayed, like I'd been grifted.
but it's much too late, and the damage is done.
Not at my hand directly perhaps; but by many people being taken in by dangerous confident grifters.
Why is this relevant: because I don't think I stick out particularly, if I can be taken in, anyone can -- we like to think we make our own choices, but usually that is not the case.
I’m suggesting that I fell for populism, the end result of that populism isn’t what I’m talking about really, just the feeling of being tricked and that it happened to me: a person who was brought up to think critically.
I’m not special. Neither are you probably. That’s my point.
Not that Cameron is Hitler. That’s obviously not true. Cameron only killed 30,000~ people due to NHS cuts. Not systematic genocide. It’s not at all the same.
Cameron campaigned to stay in the EU
> Farage himself being chair on the fisheries committee of the EU but constantly complaining about fishing rights of the UK.
you've been grifted again if you believe EP committees have any legislative role whatsoever
they're nothing like UK select committees
I am making the point that we can buy into ideology that is antithetical to our own rather easily.
Not everyone who voted for the Nazis wanted Nazis. They didn’t win a popular vote and hell: who the hell would think that world war 2 would happen as a result.
I’m equating my “being duped” with nazi voting Germans.
There are many parts of the EU that are democratically deficit, or anti-democratic, notably the Euro shared currency without shared monetary policy.
Edit: s/monetary/fiscal
Yanis Varoufakis's book "Adults in the Room" showed just how unpleasant the EU can be for its citizens.
See: the United States of America.
The brutality of slavery? "Not my problem. I had nothing to do with it. CRT is the real problem dividing us anyway"
The absolutely evil treatment of indigenous people? "Christopher Columbus was a hero for discovering the New World"
The Confederacy? "Oh, it was just a state's rights issue."
Japanese internment during WWII? "But did you hear about the Nazis?"
The treatment of refugees at our borders? "Here's why separating children from their parents is actually a good thing!"
today, the press would simply declare America's enemies to be cartoon villains who were born evil and as a result incapable of understanding
what contemporary America understands about Nazis is basically the vision presented in Raiders Of The Lost Ark
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L Shirer
Goes into excellent, albeit sometimes boring, detail about the culture of the greater German region at the time and how it made Nazi Germany possible, and then obviously the rise and fall of the Nazi Party.
Edit: I don't mean it as a joke. If you read just a little about how Germany post 1933 functioned, it was nothing like social media today. The level of threat and risk and associated violence is nowhere similar.
If the article makes honest impression that it is the same, it is not representing Germany well at all.
"Meanwhile on Russian state TV: Host Evgeny Popov says it's time for the Russian people to call on Americans to change "the regime in the U.S." before its term expires "and to again help our partner Trump to become President."[2]
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/russia-airs-ultimate-revenge-plan-180...
[2] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/150894331048376730...
Trump wasn't elected because of Russia. He was elected because the voters were and are upset and he represented an opportunity to stab the establishment in the eye (whereas Hillary fully represented the establishment). Trump won for the same reason Bernie Sanders came so close to winning his party's nomination, and the establishment detests Trump for the same reason they dislike Sanders (even though he's far more palatable to them than Trump is, they still don't want him in power either).
* please also note: just because the voters are upset and choose someone like Trump, that obviously doesn't mean they're acting rationally toward their own well-being, don't confuse the two things. They can be upset, they can be choosing something that isn't in their best interests in terms of solving their various problems (eg healthcare costs), and they can be throwing a voter tantrum (perceived anti-establishment), all in one.
Russia likely had a marginal effect in both elections, but you'd think they were brainwashing everyone into voting for Trump somehow based on the primary narrative being hyped.
As an US outsider I really wish similar statements were true but I'll believe it only after elections. There are plenty of US folks who would ie vote for anybody who would keep their guns their own, no matter how ridiculous piece of s*t otherwise. And other polarizing topics where its easy to score some populist points.
They don't see him as an insider President. They see him as an outsider non-politician and wrecking ball that is fought by the establishment at every turn.
Not understanding why Trump was considered a 'outsider' and 'non-establishment' is just a tip of the iceberg. It is very very easy to understand why people viewed him this way. If people don't know this then they don't know a lot of other things they should.
One of the major reasons that Trump won was because he wasn't a professional politician. His competitors had somewhere between 20-50 years of being lying sacks of shit politicians. Almost none of them have any life experience outside of law and running for office.
He had 0 years.
So it was very easy for him to attack other people on their shitty track records and they couldn't act in kind.
Once he had 4 years of being a lying sack of shit then it was easier for them to counter him. His original tactics were much less effective second time around.
Anyone who had even a cursory glance at Trump's history, particularly his legal history, already knew he was a lying sack of shit.
A large part of the right already believes that our elections have been "stolen". I see this kind of talk from Russian state media as an effort to lay the foundation for the left believing the same thing the next time the right wins.
In a lot of ways this is a much easier strategy to pull off then actually having to manipulate voters into voting a different way than they would have anyway. All you have to do is persuade everyone in the country that if their side didn't win the election it was because of fraud or foreign interference, and you've created a situation that is ripe for unrest that will distract the country from any kind of meaningful foreign policy.
The left believes the 2000 and 2016 elections were both stolen.
It was all perfectly legal.
In 2000, global climate catastrophe was still denied.