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Aswad -> RE: Feminazis and Godwin's Law (2/25/2012 4:25:05 PM)
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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
So, in this account, to qualify as a "nazi", it is sufficient to " impose their doctrine on women, taking on the role of oppressor to "correct" or "protect" these "poor, weak sisters of ours that haven't our strength and insight".
No.
As is often the case with words, the meaning is divorced from its original constituents.
Like respect now means something other than review, which is why two words exist with the same (in the sense of being cognates, "spectare" borrowed, "view" not) constituents. The fossilized compounds have developed differently. Similarly, you will find in colloquial use the term "to be nazi about something", which generally has the sense of being excessively strict, overly regimented or the like. It does not imply that one is a national-socialist, has national-socialist attitudes about something, or participated in the holocaust. Nor does its use imply a failure to comprehend the magnitude of the holocaust (or any of the other times in history such has happened).
The term is used here, too, where it is free of the association that was brought up on pg. 5, despite being a loanword (probably... it's also possible it's simply been coined in two places at once). Why not take a cue from what's working for 'slut' and use the opportunity to rehabilitate the word by stealing it from the opposition and using it in a meaningful manner that makes the distinction they fail to make?
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Doesn't that make all men "nazis"? Because that is exactly how men have treated women consistently for the thousands of years since since the dawn of Western civilisation up to the advent of feminisim.
Am I personally responsible for the actions of every man that went before me?
Even the O.T. was never that harsh, with the whole N generations thing.
And you're underestimating the spatial and temporal scope.
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A bit of balance and perspective please.
Yes. We can laugh at anything. Poke fun at anything. Call men pigs, defective, misogynists, and so forth. Ignore the Armenian genocide circa 1930-1940 and mostly downplay Nanking. But we can't reference a popular conception of a trait about a group (nazis) because they were the perpetrators of the Holocaust, that of militant authoritarianism. And we can't have a term for the kind of woman that would engage in excesses ranging from banning the right to stay at home, up to calling for the extermination of 3 billion men as a means to fashion a utopia, an ends justifying said means.
Balance and perspective sounds overdue, but I'm not sure I'm the one without at the moment. [:D]
When's the last time you visited a place that had been levelled by nazis? Or met a survivor from a concentration camp? Did you compare notes with someone that survived what Turkey did? Or, on the subject of women, have you seen what the Red Army did in Germany and along the route there? Or the Japanese in China?
But, fine, let's use the Holocaust, and the camps, and the people in them. Some of them have found the ability to smile and laugh again. To joke. Betimes on the subject of nazis. To stop venerating the Holocaust as some sacred event that must not be defiled by its inappropriate mention nor by levity, and instead say "sometimes shit happens, and that was a flaming pile of a Mexican hangover, let's learn something, pay our respects to the dead, and move on into our future, a key lesson in our backpack to make it better than the past, where we shall no longer dwell."
I have the utmost admiration for those who were able to do so.
And, in part from that example, I choose not to place the nazis on some pedestal. I choose to joke about them, and the things they did around the world and at home, good or bad. I choose not to let the spectre, their legacy, stand in the way of this irreverence for the nazis and their works. Veneration of dead tyrants and their exploits isn't really my thing. They had characteristics, like all humans, and some of them are kind of iconic. Like those we should rather call 'fascist', except the latter isn't so catchy.
In the tech field, the term "death march" is sometimes used with this same irreverence. Maybe the techs all need a good dose of balance and perspective. After all, as you no doubt know, The Death March was ... not exactly humanity's brightest moment.
Or can we continue to carry analogies and metaphors and the like across such a huge gap, as a testament to one of the good things about our species?
Health,
al-Aswad.
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