I still just don't get this nazi thing
It's literally nothing other than an adjective that means bad. That's it. There's nothing complex about this, nothing galaxy brain, nothing interesting, no deep seated ideology you can unfurl from analysis. It's bad. That's all it is. That's all it always has been.
George Orwell criticized this in 1946 and he was only the first post-Nazi critic, the criticism of it dates back to at least the French Revolution when critics pointed out that Enemies of the Revolution was whoever was currently out of favor. This applied both in Paris to the active revolutionaries, and also in rural France to the religious and those who refused to served the Revolution's armies. And the only reason that's "the start" point is that it was the first time post-Enlightenment, post-liberalism that the concept was outlined in what we now understand as standard political language. The idea goes back obviously farther to the beginnings of "Western" civilization in Greece.
MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
That liberalism thread is a perfect encapsulation of this. Very few people in that thread are saying anything at all. Lots of "I'm not a liberal, I'm a leftist/socialist" posts with zero explanations as if we are supposed to know, although we do and can infer, what they mean from this. You see it in any thread where people start to criticize capitalism or the Democratic Party or Amerikkka too much and Kirblar and others must crack down on it because it starts to spill beyond the borders of acceptable good/bad narratives. Yet there is no analysis applied in other threads, when someone says "eliminate all cops" it's known that this is not serious, it's a performative statement. Same when they demand JonTron, a parrot mind you not a human being, is a leading Nazi along with PewDiePie and that YouTube is deliberately leading a Nazi movement with THQNordic and Ubisoft. No one thinks they literally mean this, they know it is simply an airing of grievances against cultural enemies who pay them no mind and of which there are no consequences, unlike in cases with others such as journalists like Kotaku and
Waypoint VICE Games, to criticizing the Nazi supporters like the New York Slimes who signal boost Nazi Shitbag Supreme Trump who has established a totalitarian regime. (Remember to vote!) Everyone knows it doesn't mean anything literal, it's just bitching against bad things that everyone can agree on.
