(07-27-2016 07:00 PM)Saga Wrote: In the interests of brevity, I'll leave aside the points I made which were avoided by non-argument responses and focus on those that are still in contention.
Nope. Go ahead and list them so that I can both prove your assertion wrong and dismantle your apparent arguments that I missed.
Quote:That WWI was an avoidable disaster for Germany is not propaganda, but rather observable fact.
Facts are facts. The opinions of armchair generals one-hundred years later are not "facts" but opinions.
Quote:However, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the German government crucially gave assurance to Austria-Hungary that it would give military assistance in the case that an invasion of Serbia would be followed by a Russian declaration of war against Austria-Hungary; from that moment on, it had effectively committed itself to the prospect of a two-front pan-European war, a possibility which was made all the more likely given that Austria-Hungary now had a much stronger geopolitical position.
I can't read this sentence
at all. It's a single, run on sentence. Someone else give it a go. You can restate it if you wish.
Quote:Quote:Austria-Hungary then pursued war with Serbia, invaded even after Serbia offered considerable concessions, which then brought everyone else into war through treaties. It wasn't Germany's fault alone, but the German government had the chance to quell the crisis and did not take it.
You're talking mechanics, not broader geopolitical motivation and considerations that actually compel people to war.
Quote:With regard to the western front (which is what really bled Germany into defeat), Germany violated Belgian neutrality, giving Britain formal casus belli; pre-war German plans counted on passing through Belgium, and persisting in this even after Belgium and Britain made their positions clear was highly unwise, and in the long term it turned out to be ruinous. In the end, as Bismarck predicated, disaster came from "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans".
You're arguing mechanics. Why? As some type of convoluted theory that allows you to place fault with the Germans, ignoring the over-arching geopolitics? It seems like a constipated exercise.
Quote:As for British participation in WWI and WWII, I think British involvement was ill-advised, and in both cases they were far worse off for their pains despite ostensibly being on the winning side. This disproves your assumptions about my views.
What disproves what assumption, specifically?
Quote:Explain to me the political framework of "tradition", including how it incubates political power for the populace.
Quote:This is a good example of how utopians reflexively invert the national interest. In conservative philosophy, tradition (defined as the intergenerational cultural, social, religious, civil, linguistic and artistic inheritance of a nation and people) is not meant to serve politics; instead, politics is meant to serve tradition.
You, on the other hand, think that traditions (previously defined)
1. You're avoiding my specific challenge.
We were speaking in regard to political systems. You appealed to "tradition" as an alternative to a specific political system. I asked you to tell me how your suggestion, in tradition, incubates political power that would allow it to politically counter the forces that fascism was attempting to counter. Because you suggested it as a superior political alternative. Now, you are telling me that I am "utopian" for thinking that you were suggesting something political, at all, in "traditionalism". You're jostling the semantics around, and avoiding my challenge, in an attempt to keep your argument alive.
2. You've defined nothing, still, yet I have no doubt that you will keep spinning your wheels, loudly, trying to convince yourself and me that you are actually talking about something specific. You've only listed broad categories under which systems fall.
3. Political power challenges political power. Nothing else. I have no issue with going to church and the nobility, except when you are appealing to it in an anti-intellectual fashion as an actual cure for communism. It doesn't stop communism today, and it didn't then. Because communism is an actual political framework with teeth, and what you suggest is not excepting for monarchy. But that's not what you referred to, specifically, and we saw that get beat as well with the newer revolutionary social technologies. Big time beat. In fact, liberalism and its later manifestation in communism made all of those "traditional" things its bitch and it continues to do so. Going to church is not a political solution for society other than a mild-to-weak values reinforcement and, for many Christian sects, it even acts as a sociopolitical liability that leaves the door open for more sociopolitical destruction.
The real issue is that you don't understand politics and political power. And that's okay. I'm not trying to shame you for that. I'm merely pointing it out because you are insisting on belligerently arguing a case that you say that you have, but still fail to provide any structured logic for. And so now its come to this.
Quote: that encapsulate a nation's character are worthless except when they further your political purposes...which means your objective is not the good of the nation but rather the good of your ideology.
Don't get emotional about it. It's clouding your comprehension of what I am writing, respectfully.
I didn't imply, or at least mean to imply, that these things are worthless in general. Churches have various degrees of ability to encourage family life and community, which is the beginning of political power
when it works well. It's just that the mainstream Christian Church, especially as it stands today but also back then, is often too weak in its community creation. It also counters this community creation effect by other doctrines.
'Nobility" is to vague of a concept, on its own, to stand as any type of "pillar". Monarchy is not, but its social technology was antiquated and has been bested. Though I would not oppose to its return. It's just not going to happen as long as what can destroy it exists.
Quote:Thus, your view isn't nationalist, but rather abstract theory that pretends to be nationalist when convenient while undermining the nation to serve itself.
Word salad. Absolutely meaningless and wholly unsupported. Its sounds sufficiently combative, though.
You're still trying to have a conversation on a topic that you clearly don't understand.
Quote:Quote:The communist-globalist political framework is well documented. It's even logical, in its blueprint for social evil. I bet we could even merge it with the undefined "tradition" because of the latter's inherent vagueness.
Quote:Wrong. Marxism denies the value of tradition, and reduces the importance of national character down to political efficacy. This is indiscernible from what you've written above.
My bolded comment was pointing to (suggesting to the conversation) the fact that Marxism has merged itself with much of Christianity.
Marxism is more than happy to infiltrate and rot, from the inside, any semblance of something that competes with its power in the social sphere. There is a long history of Marxist infiltration in the Church.
Quote:If it varies, it does not exist as a political framework, and it does not offer a political framework that can defend itself against the very specific, and politically strong framework of communism.
Simply, if it varies, it offers no coherent way to incubate political power.
Quote:And since you view tradition with the same hostility as Marxism
^^ Here, you are telling me what I feel to set up your argument.
In this specific instance, you are lacking a sufficient rhetorical standard. That's me being polite.
Quote:your self-justification is essentially saying that you wish to trample and destroy the national character yourself so that communists can't.
You're absolutely wrong and you are either a. not comprehending what I write or 2. intentionally mis-characterizing what I wrote to make you feel better about your argument.
First, your "national character" is a term that I suspect is largely either defined by you, or else those who sympathize with your views.
Undoubtedly, you think that you are appealing to religion, culture, custom, and history. And I agree that all of those things are a part of it. But are they most of it? Really? Are they truly cohesive stuff of community, that causes it to work together? Or is it something else that causes certain human beings to stick together and cooperate, that is perhaps more primal and innate?
Second, I certainly never said that the things that you are appealing to should either be trampled or go away.
I did reference a very specific politically contentious point in history wherein I feel that it was non unjustified to reject the internationalist Church out of wont for self-preservation against a strong enemy that may have been making use of the Church. This is further addressed later. Though, I also reject your view of the mainstream Christian Church, across all such denominations that are considered to be such, as an integral part of civilization. It's too new. I accept it as a tool. But that's another conversation.
Your rabid assertion that "(my) self-justification is essentially saying that you wish to trample and destroy the national character yourself so that communists can't" is setting up a strawman to attack. It's a weak arguing style, and I won't entertain it.
The topic at hand was:
I stated or variously implied that you were wrong to appeal to these things (tradition) as a political solution against the primary enemy of the West. Not only can their framework for providing a legitimate defense not be articulated, as you have shown, but these institutions historically have been proven to be too weak to stand, as political solutions, against the enemy. I'm fine with them in any other role but as a delusion that they can be used to effectively politically counter internationalist communism and its associated ideologies.
And, simply, there is no more time to argue with people like you who fail to come to grips with both historical and modern reality, and who cannot articulate a conceptional grasp of power let alone a strategy to survive against hostile power. This conversation is nothing more than the entertainment of the middle of your education on these matters.
Quote:After this, we find another self-defeating line of reasoning. The German language varies...does this mean there's no such thing as German? Clearly, variation does not imply nonexistence, and the variation in nationality necessitates a variation in nationalism.
Again with the attempt at meaningless semantics that have nothing to do with the specific topic at hand, a topic that is flush with its own very specific considerations and nuances. And, beside that, your analogy is not analogous in the least.
German dialects are small variations on a single grammatical framework that an be articulated. Every language, or dialect, has a grammatical framework that can be articulated. Your tradition does not have a specific political power framework that can be articulated. And if a specific political framework can not be articulated, then "tradition", as a general concept, is not viable as a serious political framework against the specific framework of the enemy.
In a world in which the enemy did not exist, people could fuck about politically, not really cultivating power for their community and often feeling the brunt of what it is to not have any power - probably often in the form of being slaughtered or enslaved in small numbers, but low and behold someone was building something monstrous. And we live in a world after that monstrous thing was released. Fucking about with non-specific, already beaten, weak systems is not an option.
I challenge you again to articulate a single viable political framework for cultivating resistant, anti-communist power among any of your many systems that falls under the banner of "tradition". If it is politically viable, then I'll be more than happy to concede and agree that society should give it a try.
Quote:Nationalism is an inherently contextual viewpoint because nations are variable contexts, and your hostility towards contextual politics once again leads one to the conclusion that your ideology isn't nationalist.
^^This is a fun train wreck. The worst part of your arguments is that they aren't well thought out enough to be respectful of my time. It's literally a huge waste of time to respond to things that are barely comprehensible, but attack me.
Specifically, first, the above logic is circular bullshit.
A translation of your paragraph: "Nationalism is subjective according to whatever specific traditional culture exists in a location, because nations are different, and your 'hostility' toward differing cultures as representative of nationalism shows that 'your' ideology isn't nationalist".
Right?
Circular, meaningless bullshit. Does it sound better in your head before it is committed to the page? Stop bullshitting me and just bow out of the argument, or edit your commentary better to exclude logic that has not been hashed out well.
You continue to setup strawmen in telling me that I am 'hostile' to views that simply lack coherent meaning, and thus don't exist. It's not hostility to a view. I'm hostile to Marxism. It exists. I'm telling you that your logic, itself, is complete bullshit when the hard work that I need to put into comprehending it bears fruit at all.
Here is what is going on in the above quoted paragraph:
you still dance around pointing to anything specific as tradition, because you cannot articulate any of its value as a primary strategy, and instead gamble on the opposite tack when you choose to redefine this non-specific "tradition" agglomeration as "nationalist. You then use the no true Scotsman fallacy to couch my view is politically illegitimate.
I'll tell you what. Even though you are engaging in nonsense that any adult would dismiss you over, I'll play along for a moment. Okay, fine, hmmpf, I'm not a nationalist.

I really wish this emoticon had tears because that's how I feel right now.
Now, you have hypothetically won your meaningless semantic victory using your novel logic, of course ignoring that you still can't articulate a thing about political power. You're the nationalist, because nationalists are everyone, and that's where the power is, or something.
Now, what I'll settle for is being the effective
anti-communist. I really do wish that we could run this sim to see where we would both end up.
Quote:it begs the question of why you're still arguing for that war when the German leadership only accepted it after presented with a fait accompli, and when it ultimately did nothing but damage Germany permanently.
They accepted "the War" fait accompli? You need to be more careful with your syntax. I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Try again.
Quote:That aside, the nobility and military leadership did not disappear but persisted, and what you continue to ignore is that both of these manifestations of the German body politic became opposed to the Third Reich because it was increasingly clear that Germany's leaders were in it for themselves and their ideals, not for the good of Germany.
The nobility persists today in bloodline. If you aren't arguing power, then you aren't arguing. What was their legacy in the post WWI period? Wiemar Germany? Or now do they not get the credit? Which is it, did they "exist", truly and functionally, or did they not?
What I continue to ignore is your conjecture as an armchair general, who exists 80 years after the fact, and whose opinions seem to be based in an absent sense of how group power works and a desperate need to be 'correct' and re-direct the conversation innumerable times, in an effort to find any argument that you can make progress on.
I'll follow you to these places for now, even though the original arguments were weak to the primary topic, but I will again urge you to stick with the primary topic. Explain how a substitute "traditional" political system works, in detail, that can resist internationalist communism.
Quote:A mass socialist party imposed upon traditional German institutions was never in the interests of Germany or her people, and quite deservedly earned their enmity.
Assertions. No wider social context. No wider geopolitical context. No support in general. Just emotion.
Quote:Quote:The German people's true pillar was always its natural, genetically determined ability to create its society. That's the ability that was dusted-off in lieu of a false worship of the internationalist Church and its other weakened leadership.
"The proletariat's true pillar was always its natural, historically determined ability to create communist society. That's the ability that was dusted-off in lieu of a false worship of the capitalist Church and its other bourgeois leadership."
Quote:Perhaps you could explain why your vision for Germany seems to display so many similarities with Marxist paradigms. The fact that utopian political programs share a common philosophical root might be one observation to make.
So, you substituted words into my paragraph to attack the substitution? You need to read on how to avoid fallacious arguing. You're a waste of time, otherwise. Your new paragraph is rhetorically meaningless and illegitimate in its attempt to draw any meaningful parallel.
You're basically arguing that it is "Marxist" in politics to assert the innate potential of any tribe to create anything social.
You're also demanding that we accept that the Church is the default anti-Marxist institution if we are to accept your pseudo-rhetorical analogy.
I reject your assumed foundation of your argument, as the Church's history and ideology clearly is not always separate from ideologies that Marxists also hold.
Third, it cannot be argued that the Church was and is not internationalist, as it is expressly so, or that it was effective at staving off Marxism. Because it held some social ideologies in common with Marxism, a rejection of the Church was one means of cutting off some internationalist ideology within German society that left them politically vulnerable to Marxist ideology.
Thus, a rejection of the Church (and it wasn't completely rejected, was it?) would not imply Marxism. Your argument that because two movements would reject an institution, it makes them similar movements, is yet another rhetorical fallacy.
You seem to have trouble arguing, and the problem lies mostly in your over-confidence in your various attempts at making analogies, your over confidence in making logical proofs, and your unabashed continuous use of fallacies that are well beyond simple ad-hominems that I could over-look. You tend to make these fallacies more core to your arguments.
Quote:Moreover, your argument is again self-defeating. If Germany's "true" political pillar was always innate, then on what grounds do you object to any form that Germany might take?
Again? That's funny coming from you, considering your arguing style.
Let me, for clarity, quote what I wrote before I comment:
Quote:The German people's true pillar was always its natural, genetically determined ability to create its society. That's the ability that was dusted-off in lieu of a false worship of the internationalist Church and its other weakened leadership.
The first line refers to the fact that everyone's political pillar is innate. Not just Germany.
The true "political pillar" is what enables groups to create political power. That's it. It's not a comment on how that power is used or judged in any era. It merely refers to any group's relative ability to create a society and a state that they perceive to be in, and that can adequately defend or otherwise pursue, their self-interest.
This creation can variously exist in a state of consistent chaos for some groups who lack the ability to build society and power for themselves, and other groups are more efficient at it than most of the rest of the world.
The second line refers to a politically detrimental deference to replacements for that pillar; insofar as they are increasingly complete replacements and not merely compliments. These replacements are not nearly as efficient in creating political power, and thus they lead to a diminished if not eliminated result in the accumulation of power. Thus, when they are over-emphasized they lead to a weakened political defense against politically powerful out-groups who would care to exploit or harm them for their own ends.
Quote:Additionally, the fact that you've cast aside any possibilities for variation in this theoretical "true" German society means that this has nothing to do with the will or history of the German people, and everything to do with the ideal of Germany you've formed in your imagination.
I've done no such thing. You're setting up strawmen again. It's typical of your arguing style, and its exhausting. I'll be finished with you after this. You're absolutely not worth the continuing effort. We can agree to disagree, and I'll see you on the other side of things.
Where did I cast aside "variation"? Exactly? "Variation" is a matter of degree. There are variations between two brothers, two cousins, and two distant members of what can generally be considered to be the same tribe. Your variation exists in every exchange, every moment of the day, and it all averages out across large numbers to give a sense of a cohesive result.
Quote:In this way, you confuse your utopianism for Germany, just like the Jacobins confused their theoretical perfect republic for France.
You should really stop mentioning religious concepts that you little understand the history nor the current function of. And, again, with the fallacies.
Quote:Lastly, you think the churches that had helped build Germany from the time of Charlemagne (before there was a Germany) were un-German, but a socialist party invented in 1920 is the true voice of Germany?
I love this last statement, because it summarizes a complete lack of understanding of the core of the entire conversation.
Churches are not "un-German".
I'm unsure as to what most of your semantic attachments mean in general, but this invention is now what is on the table.
You seem to be arguing against yourself, caught within your pseudo-historical and pseudo-political concept of "tradition".
YOU see Churches as German, and thus because I argue against their political usefulness you necessarily perceive that I see them as "un-German".
The reality is that I see them as neither, but as a social institution that is open for use, or rejection depending on their current usefulness or possible liability, for the sociopolitical interest of any one tribe at any point in time. It's the same possibility that exists for any tool of its nature or for any tool of any other nature, other than what is innate and thus what persists as the foundation of being.
Your thinking is rigid and basic on these matters. And I simply don't care.
Quote:Laughable. The NSDAP was hostile towards traditional German institutions because, like you, it scorned German tradition, which proves my point.
You may as well just mix up a bunch of letters at this point into nonsense words. It would be as discernible to me. Seriously, I have no idea what you are trying to say. You were doing okay until you failed to define your point that you say that you are making, thus making the entire paragraph useless.
And you're still setting up strawmen and misdirecting the argument, out of angry desperation. You take a disagreement with the primary political usefulness of your "tradition" in Germany as "scorn", which shows me that you are not prepared to argue on any level that doesn't completely waste my time.
Quote:No it isn't. You just made that up. Utopianism can be nationalist, and the largest utopian ideology, still in the world, is hyper-nationalist. You obviously haven't a clue about utopianism, its manifestations, nor its history.
Quote:Utopia literally means "no-place", and as there is no nation called "no-place", utopianism and nationalism are incompatible paradigms.
You're really uneducated on this topic. No offense.
Quote: the other begins with speculative ideals in the heads of would-be revolutionaries.
This specifically is true, but your dichotomy is absolutely false.
Quote:Thus, utopianism seeks to impose its abstract theories upon the nation, invariably crushing much of the nation and her national character in the process.
The abstract theories part is true, your latter assertion is an ignorance of the modern world that I wouldn't be proud of writing so arrogantly about.
I know that you think that your idiosyncratic and absolutely meaningless implied (and aforestated) definition of nationalism supports your pet theory, but it doesn't and the largest revolution in world history stands in defiance of your self-delusions. If you can't name that revolution, then you don't belong in this conversation. Everything is going over your head. And it is.
Quote: In this regard, German fascism is indistinguishable from Jacobinism or Bolshevism: the nation, subjugated and silenced, is forced to serve and suffer for the ideal of the revolutionary; this is contrary to nationalism, which seeks to formulate ideas capable of serving and ennobling the nation.
All made up bullshit/unsupported assertions, no doubt not your own but something that you gleaned from some writer with a political interest in re-defining modern anti-communist nationalism to not be such an obstacle to internationalism/communism. Note the craven shaming. Those writers are pretty ubiquitous.
I bolded the part that highlights your poverty of understanding of political power, or in other words what works to serve and ennoble the nation.
Quote:As a result of these categorical differences, nationalism and utopianism are not compatible, and you've made it quite clear which you prefer.
Did you have fun talking yourself in circles?
Quote:Maybe you should begin with noting that your examples are those of the victories of internationalists and communists, in Paris over the reign of the "Traditionalists" and in Berlin, after they were forced to fight the entire West and almost successfully did so, in alliance with the communists.
Quote:What we have in Paris 1794, Berlin 1945 and Moscow 1991 (all three of which you seem to possess little to no understanding, since you erroneously describe Jacobins as "traditionalists")
Because you didn't better define the events of one date during the French Revolution, and I didn't catch precisely what you were referring to only by a single year during that long period, I don't understand all three? Nice logic.
Quote: In chasing after their imagined German empire that was supposed to stretch from the Irish Sea to the Urals, the Third Reich betrayed what Germany in actual fact was and ruined her through their unhinged hubris.
Oh, I see. You have an agenda. I'm arguing from a place of logical structure in what it takes to build political power and oppose communism, and your primary aim is to, willfully or not, ignorantly misrepresent history to oppose fascism. Likely out of either political self-interest, or an emotionally rooted misunderstanding of history. The perseverance was a little bit odd, considering that you have never attempted to say anything meaningful about political systems other than make emotional assertions, false analogies, and liberally use fallacy in an attempt to shout me down.
Quote:In the relationship between the nation and ideology, Jacobinism, Bolshevism and Nazism are functionally analogous. German fascism was nothing but abstract utopianism dressed up in nationalistic clothes: Jacobins wearing lederhosen.
No sale on the BS. Good luck with it.