Comment on Are users who openly parrot literal Nazi talking points allowed here?
eureka@aussie.zone 1 day agoI want to raise a point on the “Nazi talking points” response:
- On one hand, it’s certainly more useful when a report is more specific, yes. I know plenty of fascist talking points which aren’t common knowledge or obvious.
- On the other, it sounds like they’re talking about Lebensraum - “living space”. If we look at it technically, it was a common concept in German politics decades before the Nazi Party was formed. And it’s a far cry away from the various social reforms implemented in the Third Reich you mentioned. But in context, I think it’s clear that someone on aussie.zone reporting a post for “Nazi talking points” is reporting that a post is fascistic, supporting the supremacist aspects Nazism is famous for. People surely aren’t going to report pro-vegetarian posts for this reason, or even anti-union posts (despite the crushing of worker’s organisations being core to fascism).
Lebensraum is a relatively infamous policy, and one which neo-Nazis like the NSN explicitly invoke. They’re never holding up banners saying “protect the wildlife”, “support animal rights” or “fast roadways now!”, this is the bigoted supremacy generally associated with Nazism and carried on by neo-Nazism.
If you delete all the users from your politics community that you don’t agree with, what is the point of the community?
But this isn’t just “all the users you disagree with”, or even just disagreement - if someone, when discussing an expansionist regime, tries to justify “living space”, that makes me think that person might well want me thrown in a camp and killed. It’s no smoking gun, but it’s a loud wolfwhistle.
Nath@aussie.zone 23 hours ago
Sorry. While I readily acknowledge that I don’t hang out in those circles, nor really scrutinise their rhetoric, I have honestly never heard that phrase before. In English or German. This does paint the comment in a brighter light, and I probably would have been more inclined to remove it had I been familiar with the term.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 hours ago
That’s good to see, but as of right now the Nazi’s explicit mask-off comment is still up, and they are still not prevented from commenting further in the future.
Fwiw, I didn’t learn the phrase from online discourse about neonazis, I learnt it from education about WWII in its original comment. Until reading other comments in this thread I was not even aware that it was popular among neonazis as a dogwhistle. So we both learnt something unfortunate here today.
eureka@aussie.zone 11 hours ago
Yep, exactly, and that’s why I say it’s more useful when a report is more specific - most people are lucky enough that they aren’t exposed to online neo-Nazism enough to know their rhetoric, euphemisms, codes and symbols (beyond the swastika).