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Why was Hitler so mean and hateful toward one group or another? I find it hard to believe he woke up one day and said you and you suck but these people over here are good. Taking it so far as killing?

I am a very very lazy person. I like to pride myself on being in the running with Lebowski. And to me hate takes way way to much energy. Having even the simple idea of killing has to take some effort. Kind of seems like he just set out on a life not worth living IMO

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  • When a child first hears an adult express a racist attitude they are confused and don’t know what to think. They may not even understand who is in the group being maligned or even have a concept of groups. And even if they do, they may think “huh? I didn’t realize they were all bad.” But like a lot of things you hear as a kid, it just kind of sinks in.

    And that seed has been planted. From there, confirmation bias does the rest. Anytime that growing person sees a member of that other group doing something wrong, they notice it and think “hey that’s what Dad was talking about.” Any such missteps from a member of that group get assigned to the whole group. Of course, people not in that group are judged as individuals. Classic in-group / out-group thinking, which is universal.

    By the time the person is grown up enough to think properly, they may have accumulated lots of these moments of confirmation bias. By then it’s likely that they start assigning blame to this group by default. Litter on the ground? Probably one of them. Something got stolen? Probably one of them. And of course if race relations are inflamed in general there may be plenty of active fuel for the fire. A gang of “them” beat up one of “us.” Now it’s basically war, and the person we’re talking about didn’t have to do anything or be a direct victim of anything. It’s all just socially transmitted and then reinforced through observation with cognitive bias. Incidentally, this is why we should never stop talking about racism openly, because that’s the only way to interrupt this process going on in the back of peoples minds. Yeah, sorry, Morgan Freeman.

    I am with you as a fellow lazy person who can’t spare the energy. But I can see how easily others slip into it. Hitler of course used it to galvanize people and turn that in-group / out-group energy into a political force.

  • Fascism needs a minority group to oppress, someone else to blame for all the issues makes everything easier. A common enemy also helps unite the others. Look up Umberto Eco, he wrote an essay on how to spot a fascist.

    The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

    The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

    The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

    Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

    Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Fascism is racist by definition.”

    Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

    The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”

    The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

    Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”

    Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

    Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

    Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

    Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

    Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

  • Did nobody mention Nietzsche? Nazi worldview was largely inspired by twisting out cherry picking concepts from his works. The criticism of Christian religions idealizing the meek and looking back towards ancient Rome and Greece for strong, powerful, heroic characters and gods. The ideas of existence of superior and inferior humans. Etc.

  • Some 1900 years earlier, the Roman Empire was having problems with the inhabitants of one of their recently conquered territories resisting their authority and decided to make an example of them by expelling them from their territory. They ended up scattered all over the Empire and beyond, whilst maintaining their language, religion and customs. A few hundred years after that, Rome adopted a new religion, worshipping a guy they had put to death a few hundred years earlier in that particular territory, and had to find someone else to blame, and the people they expelled were the most expedient candidate. And so, we had a millennium or two of European Christianity very unsubtly stating that the Jews were the killers of Christ, which got embellished, as urban legends do, with a number of other equally lurid myths about them poisoning wells with the Plague and abducting Christian babies for their blood. People generally (with exceptions) stopped believing in those myths, but the underlying attitudes of suspicion remained ingrained in culture.

  • You're trying to find a rationale for some thing (xenophobia) that is utterly irrational. Some people are just shit humans.

  • Worked the same for Hitler as it does for Elon en Trump. The love for hate, the need to blame, the hunger for power.

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