Live Discussion With RoamingMillennial

What if we were talking instead about the recent story of a passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines plane unconscious after refusing to give up his seat on an overbooked flight? In this analogy, Richard Spencer is basically saying that if a flight is overbooked, the airline should ask for volunteers to get off the plane. He's not commenting on what should happen if nobody volunteers even though we all know that that's a very important question. It's important because we know from reading the news that "nobody volunteers to get off the plane" can be one of the first things in a series of events that ends with a passenger getting dragged off the plane, unconscious. In that context, Richard Spencer's refusal to comment becomes incredibly conspicuous. What Richard Spencer is advocating for is not itself a violent act but it has historically served as the preamble to horrific violence. And it's important to remember that we're not talking about something as inconsequential as an overbooked plane. We're talking about nothing less than genocide. The acts of violence that his kind of rhetoric has historically preceded were some of the most traumatic events in Modern History. In *that* context, his silence isn't just conspicuous, it's incredibly alarming.

Drew Franzblau

Also she kept talking about not wanting to put words in Richard Spencer's mouth or ascribe beliefs to him that he doesn't hold, but as you alluded to, Contra, it wasn't until well after WWII started that the Nazis actually explicitly pushed for genocide, and even then that wasn't the message they were selling to the public. The Nazis, to a large extent, both gained power and pursued policies by presenting themselves as something they weren't. Roaming's seeming lack of the historical precedents here was seriously frustrating.

So Roaming Millenial made some comment about teaching someone about about Nazism with an annotated version of Mein Kampf would be wrong as opposed to just giving them the raw book, which is just bizarre. On the face of it I think it's a bad argument, but Mein Kampf (first published in 1925, by the way, which is a few years before the Nazis became important players in German national politics, so I'm not under the impression that it's really famous for any other reason than Hitler later came to power) was published in Germany in 2015 for the first time in 70 years, and it is an extremely heavily annotated edition, which is a good thing, and frankly given that my experience is that Germans take the Holocaust a lot more seriously than Americans seem to, I hesitate to say their approach is wrong.