- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.”
This has been a problem for years: Substack has a Nazi problem - The Atlantic
Substack won’t commit to removing Nazi content - TechCrunch
I don’t think this can be ignored anymore. If you’re on Substack, please consider one of its many fine alternatives. Wired wrote about a few last year.
Plus, it’s quite easy to move a newsletter these days.
Note that the largest Nazi groups today are in the “allied” nations that “won” WW2.
I read a piece (can’t find the source now, sorry) that blamed this squarely on the lack of education and remorse given to the colonial backdrop in which WW2 was fought.
Most parts of the world view WW2 as very much a European war that was imposed on unwilling global participants. The axis powers lost and Germany has since tried its best to reinvent itself while acknowledging its chequered past (check out: Vergangenheitsbewältigung), but the allied powers failed to recognise their colonial atrocities. For example, British history textbooks will loosely allude to the British empire saying that they were once a dominating global entity, but will make absolutely no mention of the numerous massacres and genocides for which they were responsible.
When wars are framed as competitions rather than tragedies, you will see the emergence of false victors instead of acknowledging lost generations. This directly results in a poor public understanding of how bad ideas can fester and hollow out any society.
Over the decades since WW2, the popular culture of the allied countries has typically portrayed Nazis as caricatured crazy monsters. They are treated as strange, other, and non-human. This seems to have thoroughly undermined people’s ability to recognize Nazism as a destructive force that lurks in people, whether they’re German or American or any other nationality. Any society has the potential to fall into this. The unreflective complacency of the WW2 victors after defeating Nazis once has led to a complete lack of awareness that it’s an ongoing job to keep your society from falling prey to fascists.
For a while the collective memory of those who lived through the war protected us, but when that generation died off the lessons were forgotten. Some fell into fascism without realizing it because they assumed they were by nature better than Nazis, while others failed to notice the threat until dangerously late.