Society

An article of 27 May 2011 in Der Spiegel describes the German occupation of Poland in WWII. Hans Frank had the task of clearing eight million Jews and Poles out of part of Poland. His job was to make room for ethnic Germans. These ethnic Germans were imported from around the Baltic and from Volhynia and Galicia in western Ukraine.

The article recites that in 1940, Frank told a reporter for the Völkische Beobachter newspaper the following:

“In Prague, for example, large red posters were hung up announcing that seven Czechs had been executed that day.” That had made him think: “If I had to hang up a poster every time we shot seven Poles, we’d have to cut down all the Polish forests, and we still wouldn’t be able to produce enough paper for all the posters I’d need.”

It’s quite a boast. More to the point, who back in Germany at that time knew of Frank’s boast?

The Völkische Beobachter was the paper and party organ of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party). It had a circulaton of over 120,000 in 1931. By 1941 its circulation was over one million, and by 1944 it was one million seven hundred thousand. Its last edition appeared in April 1945.

So when Frank made his boast, it was quoted in the newspaper of the Nazi Party with a circulation of almost one million.

In 1940, the population of Germany was almost seventy million. It was greater if we include the countries and territories Germany annexed, but let stick with Germany itself.

Three and a half million Germans were in the armed forces. So that means the newspaper circulated to one in sixty six of the population in Germany. And it was a spectacular quote.

So it seems reasonable to say that it was commonly known in Germany that the Governor-General of Poland was executing Poles in their thousands, and proud to boast about it.

We often hear a complaint that newspapers are forgetting their role of delivering the facts and instead are intent on forming public opinion. They are accused of relaying only what fits the newspaper’s own ideology or direction or interest.

So, the argument runs, a newspaper should separate fact from opinion and give out the facts and then be explicit where it wants to give an opinion. This raises the question of whether it should give an opinion at all, to which the answer would be – and why not? After all those who run the newspaper are people as well and they have opinions.

The flaw in the argument of all of this is that there are no such things as facts. Of course there are facts but when newspapers report facts those facts are filtered through the collection of attitudes, desires, beliefs etc. that form and inform the minds of the people who work in and run the newspaper.

And therefore nobody on the newspaper can actually see the facts.

It takes huge insight to be able to see the facts. The context, the understanding of man, the history of mankind – a man must know all of these clearly because he can state the facts. More than that, it takes huge insight to be able to draw back and not go along some well-trodden road originally walked by one of the greater or smaller thinkers. To do that would be to simply regurgitate and parrot an opinion that is not the journalist’s own, rather than simply looking, seeing, and analysing.

It is basic. We do not have consensus on the nature of reality. Where is the consensus between the religious and the secular? Where is the consensus between those who hold that life is predictable and those who think that outside of a small field of predictability there is an ocean of chance? Faced with this we can say that people do not all occupy the same interior universe. What chance then their agreement on facts?

So we task newspapers with an impossible job. And this is not to say that a newspaper should simply decide wholesale that it’s going to ignore a pursuit of fact and just tailor everything and everything in its message to the opinion that wants to put over in order to sway public opinion. That is a complete abandonment of its task. But recognising that it is not possible for a person to see the facts without them being slanted by their own opinion is to ignore reality.

This is the first part of a longer post (A Million People) copied here.

How not to mix things up in a world full of casual brushes with the truth – uncaring as to what is real and what is not. In principle it has always been the same for at least some of the population. Now, however, we have reached critical mass.

Each uncaring and unthinking person has access to weapons of war. A tweet ricochets off another tweet and spins off into another social media platform. Like a pinball machine full of pinballs, the machine gets hot and melts down. 

Anger, frustration, good old-fashioned annoyance – they have nowhere they want to go except deeper into the furnace.

And the furnace spits them out. It doesn’t need them except as examples of persons. It doesn’t care about them except for whatever trace they leave behind in the the social weave. 

If they all disappeared tomorrow, their loss would be calculated in loss of engagement, followers, likes, and shares.

There is a furore around Elon Musk’s tweet, with advertisers withdrawing their advertising.

Let me take you out into space a bit and look down on how the tweet came about. 

First came a tweet from Charles Weber who describes himself as a Jewish Conservative from S. Florida. His tweet contained a video advertisement of a father and son sitting in a car. The father has caught the son making antisemitic comments on social media and he tells the son how hateful it is and whether he wants to step out of the car to tell it directly to the group of Jews we can vaguely see through the windscreen.

The intent of the video advertisement was no doubt to suggest that some young people ought to think a little more before mouthing off.

I have seen the video before and when I saw it I thought it was taking a gamble. What is to say that those ‘young people’ at whom the video was directed wouldn’t imagine themselves in the shoes of the son and jumping out of the car and shouting antisemitic words?

Ah well.

So ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’ responded. Before I paste in what he responded, you should know a bit more about The Artist Formerly Known as Eric

He is not antisemitic. He is more or a man who sees things from his point of view. For example, when a person who styles him or herself ‘being libertarian’ tweeted this about Osama bin Laden

You shouldn’t read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” & become a sympathizer. You should read it to understand the motive and plan. In no way was 9/11 justified, but there were reasons besides they hate our “freedom.” They hate us being over there. And we haven’t learned

The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’ responded this way. He tweeted

You couldn’t apprase Bin Laden any more than you could Ibram Kendi, or Angela Davis. As far as they’re concerned, there is an infinite well of pain that’s owed to you.

I take that to mean the former-Eric looks at things from the point of view of the protagonists. In other words, that you should not seek to impose your narrative but to understand that there are different narratives. And recognise that our ability to do so is limited because we are not in their shoes.

That’s bollocks because in the absence of certain narratives the world is chaos. 

That’s my point of view.

So against this background, what the former-Eric said in reponse to Mr Weber’s endorsement of the video advertisement was this:

Okay.

Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.

I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.

You want truth said to your face, there it is.

And in response to that, Elon Musk tweeted

You have said the actual truth

Oh, the Jews have been pushing dialectical hatred. They have the temerity to say this is right and this is wrong.

OK. So that’s a point of view. 

I’m not really concerned with it because the former-Eric is not the boss of X (Twitter) with the power to make the world reverberate in the way that Musk can.

So what do I think is so ‘wrong’ about what Musk said when he endorsed former-Eric’s tweet in reponse to Mr Weber?

The real poverty of thought in Musk’s comment lies not in whether he’s right, or whether he’s wrong, but the fact that he’s made an exception for one group and holds them to a different standard than other groups.

He’s in good company. The last high profile person to do so was General deGaulle, who when he was president of France said at press conference that the Jews were “at all times an elite people, sure of itself and dominating.”

The truth is that if Musk looked around with an unbiased eye he’d see that what he said is true of so many groups throughout the world.

The British class system is built on superiority and their narrative.

Colonialism is built on superiority and the narrative of the colonialists. There’s dialectical hatred in full flow.

Yes, probably some Jews and their narrative of world history and the transcendent are a little mixed up. You might do the same if your sense of worth was tested at the barbed wire of Auschwitz.

Certainly some Palestinians think they are superior and that their narrative and dialectical hatred is the right one. You only have to hear their description of Jews to know that.

Trump certainly thinks some people are superior and that his narrative is right, witness his comment at a rally recently when he talked about those who live like vermin.

Now tell me what group doesn’t have a strong element of thinking they’re superior and that their narrative is right? And by extension that the opposing narrative is wrong? There’s dialectical hatred. 

The problem with the whole world is in thinking about the issues and not about the people.

Perhaps just the poor downtrodden colonised masses who bow their heads; they might not think they’re superior.

Of course not all people think they are superior and not everyone by a long chalk spews dialectical hatred. And maybe we are learning. But there’s a definite strain of group superiority everywhere.

That’s what the human race is trying to get past and bring us all together. And in order to do so we have to join in a single narrative that join us above the supposed rightness of the issues that divide us..

Bottom line – not all narratives were created equal.

The thing is that Musk didn’t make a general point about all humans having different narratives and that maybe some people have better narratives. No, he singled out Jews.

We see it a lot; people who have made Jews and Israel their hobby horse. It doesn’t need me to say again how little attention those same people give to other events and other situations that would deserve their attention if ‘Jews and Israel’ merits their attention.

But the reason for antisemitism is not to be understood at the level of world events.

And Musk did it, because he did not make similar comments about other groups and other situations. And here’s the greater point. It’s not just that Musk made his comment at some point in time. He made it now – now when feelings are at fever pitch.

I ask myself whether Musk thinks all narratives are equal or whether maybe he really has bad intent.

Another Narrative

Another narrative has to take into account the possibility that Musk did not make his tweet at three in the morning when his ‘off-switch’ wasn’t functioning properly.

I listened to his biographer and I am not sure he is qualified to describe Musk. I did learn though that Musk is training his AI model on the contents of Twitter. And perhaps therefore Musk’s tweet was designed to give food and fuel to his AI-in-training.