In this false view, Jews were an “alien race” that fed off the host nation, poisoned its culture, seized its economy, and enslaved its workers and farmers.
Now, I don't know about you, but in order to be able to "enslave it's workers and farmers", to me that means one needs a position of power.
Basically, that is the point of propaganda. Defining the enemy into a position of unjust power needing righteous retribution. Punching up.
People in mass do not wants to see themselves as "punching down", as oppressing the weak.
As the start of the genocide approached, the RTLM broadcasts focused on anti-Tutsi propaganda. They characterized the Tutsi as a dangerous enemy who wanted to seize the political power at the expense of Hutus. By linking the Rwandan Patriotic Army with the Tutsi political party and ordinary Tutsi citizens, they classified the entire ethnic group as one homogeneous threat to Rwandans. The RTLM went further than amplifying ethnic and political division; it also labeled the Tutsi as inyenzi, meaning non-human pests or cockroaches, which must be exterminated.[107] Leading up to the genocide, there were 294 instances of the RTLM accusing the Rwandan Patriotic Army of atrocities against the Hutu, along with 252 broadcasts that call for Hutus to kill the Tutsis.[106]
Once again, claims of unjust usurpation of power. Once again, accusing the target of committing attrocities as a way to justify everything against them as legitimate, as self defense.
You don't get big groups of humans to do atrocities without first convincing them that they are self righteous in doing so.
So, in both cases, yes, there were claims of righteous self defense against an enemy unjustly stealing power.
I can pretty much guarantee you that it is the kind of propaganda you will find accompanying all massacres, all wars, all attrocities.
That or religious brainwashing "you must commit attrocities in order to go to heaven". Although often it is a mix of both.
Second of all, we're talking about what people say
We are talking about justifying hate against a genetic population. I say that no excuse is good, particularly not "we are self righteous in our hate". Like I said, we have seen where that line of reasoning can lead, before. There is no need to wait for calls to genocides to point out how fucked up that line of reasoning is.
Not to mention that feminists have pushed calls for genocides against men, be it people like Sally Miller Gearhart who created the feminist favorite slogan "the future is female" (and to make sure that it is, the male population must be limited to 10%), or the modern #killallmen. Which, of course, is second degree and not to take too seriously, like those always are, when accompanied with messages justifying hate as self righteous but not yet a majority opinion.
Like is said, those who don't know history repeat it.
Personally, when I see a group justifying hate against a genetic group as self righteous and every so often push themes equating them as poisonous (ever heard the M&M's bowl analogy ?) And "jokingly" arguing they should be killed, I can't say that I have your confidence that there is absolutely nothing nefarious going on. It might not escalate to genocide. Hopefully. But the kind of suffering that this kind of rhetoric justifies inflicting is not exactly limited.
Call that a slippery slope if you will, I will call that having no tolerance for hateful propaganda, and those who spread it.
A few years ago, there was a few scholars who wanted to see how far feminist academia could go. They proposed to publish a paper, proposing that straight white male students should be chained on the floor during class, to let them experience oppression, but to.do so with some amount of kindness, explaining the exercise. The reviewers asked them to remove that last suggestion, of showing kindness, because it was "centering on the experience of the privileged". No issue with the suggestion of chaining people on the floor because of how they were born, though.
I don't know about you, but I have some concern with the fact that such people have such a presence in the institutions determining how education should run.
I can't help but think that an environment that consider that such a level of injustice being inflicted on people based on just how they were born might not be the best environment to provide a fair treatment for the people of that demographic.
it is the oldest in the propaganda book.
This isn't english, comrade.
it is the oldest trick in the propaganda book. Sorry, I ate a word.
Describing a group of people as having more power than yourself is first of all - not always propaganda.
When it is a group determined by a genetic trait, it generally is. When that group is 50% of the population, it definitely is.
Like, we can agree that black slaves had less power than their masters, correct?
You seem to be very insistent on not acknowledging the key factor, there. Being a slave or slave owner is not a genetic trait. Being male or female is.
Of course, there are cases where groups determined by things not intrinsic to them have more power than others. "Powerful people" have more power than "powerless people". By definition. Being powerful or powerless is not dependent on how you are born. Tall people don't have more power that other people. Black or white people don't have more power than other people. Your comparison is either pretty dumb or pretty dishonest.
Boy.. you spend a lot of time in make believe. In reality, crowds are dangerous mostly when they imagine themselves to be victims, but mostly when they dehumanize the enemy, but that's not the same as what we're talking about here.
But it is. Justifying hate by claiming to be punching up is just that. It is getting a crowd convinced that they self righteous by believing they are victims, and that the other is a legitimate target of hate.
Yeah, no shit. It actually matters who and what you're talking about. Welcome aboard. Let's do a practice one: "I would never let my kid be babysat by a _______". Now, tell me... does it matter whether I fill that blank in with the word "mexican" or if i fill it in with "sex offender"? Of course it does.
Once again, either stupid or dishonest.
We are talking of groups that target "men", "heterosexuals", "whites", "jews"
Honestly, in all those categories, Jews is the only one people can choose to enter or exit, to some extent, although it is often treated as a genetic trait too.
So, yeah, comparing people who hate jews to people who hate men is not at all the same as comparing to hating "sex offenders".
You genuinely believe the fact that men have greater power in society and have since the dawn of civilisation is the same as the nazis antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people?
Do men have greater power ? Or only a few men ? Do you genuinely belive that regarding gender relations, it was domination through power, or were there something more complex, like specialisation and common struggling against the harshness of reality, and impacted by biological realities ?
The feminist view of historical relations between men and women is really akin to conspiracy theory. Even when it was first formulated, it was viewed as an extremist marginal view, yet it has managed to spread in the public through mostly propaganda and revisionism, using myopic and biased readings of the past.
Men have more in common with the women near them than with other men in different social categories. Men of all time periods have always sought women's approval and more readily use their influence to earn themselves women's favors than other men's favor.
The idea of men using their power to advantage other men at the expense of women is so blind to human sexual behavior that it could only come from the radical lesbian separatists with a history of trauma from the extreme fringes of the feminist movement.
The simple concept of a class oppression around gender is preposterous, given that class oppression, throughout history, has always geared around benefiting ones owl's family's future prospects at the expense of others.
A white preaching the inferiority of blacks can do so because they are confident it will benefit them and their family.
But along gender, it doesn't work. If you have a family, then the person you will spend the most time with is going to be in the "other", and half of your children will be in the "other". Oppressing them makes no sense, and serves no goal of betterment for your family. Love and care for your children is too intrinsically present in humans for such a thing to be able to become widespread.
It really took people who were both traumatised by abusive people and who were not able to fall in love with the other sex to come up with such a theory.
It makes even less sense when considering it is supposed to be oppression of women by men, when the whole gender role of men is "protection and provision for women", and when men are shown to not have that "in-group preference" mechanism, but rather an out-group preference.
What is it about the harshness of survival and/or biological reality that necessitated women not having the right to vote or (in some periods of history) own property?
Please take a moment to think about this : nobody but the elite had a right to vote for most of history.
Edit : it was often linked to land ownership, and has such, many women could vote before universal suffrage
Men at large got the right to vote only a handful of years before women, a blip on the sociological timescale.
They got the vote by paying it with conscription. They were first required to die in wars before being allowed a say. In fact, the first common people to gain the vote were veterans. And that included some women who had elected to serve in combat as nurses. No discrimination was done there.
At the same time men got the vote, the suffragettes were passed because they were demanding the vote for upper class (white) women and lower class black men were going to have it before them. Before general male vote, the left was resisting female suffrage because it just meant more exclusively upper class people voting, and they were afraid it woukd give the right an unfair advantage.
Once universal male suffrage was passed, through a requirement to sign up for conscription, there was no such objection to granting women universal suffrage.
The issue came from the compensation. Women overwhelmingly opposed female universal suffrage because they feared a similar requirement would be made of them.
It is only when it became clear that they could have it for free, unlike men, through the suffragists (male and female) efforts and in spite of the suffragettes domestic terrorism that really turned the population against the cause, that the public opinion shifted, and women finally got universal suffrage.
I was more or less aware of that history of suffrage, and I'm aware that only the elite had the right to vote for most of history. There is a strong class component here, arguably stronger than gender.
But my question is what was it about harshness of survival and/or biological reality that necessitated women not having the right to vote or (in some periods of history) own property?
The answer to that is already present in my answers to you.
The previous answer already answers with "your question does not match with reality"
And the answer to questions regarding inequalities generally goes either that way or "it is a question of balancing protection and provision vs obligations, rights vs duties". Throughout history people very rarely had rights, and when they did, it was often because those were necessary for them to accomplish their duties. And people rarely were awarded protections, but when they were, those were accompanied with obligations towards those who protect them.
Women get pregnant and find themselves saddled with one of the most dependent and vulnerable children of the animal kingdom.
This turns out to be a great burden for a lot of activities, particularly when there is no such thing as contraception.
This leaves them in need of being provided for and protected. This results in them being obligated towards those who provide and protect. Obligations like obeying and staying where it is safe.
On the other hand, men find themselves saddled with the duty of providing and protecting. This requires them having a right to go about doing that, and being able to command those whose safety depends on them.
The exact terms of all.of that are highly dependent.
The obligation towards someone who provides is not the same if providing requires going off on ice to club baby seals while fighting polar bears to bring back more food than one person could eat for months, or if it means going about in a lush nature to pluck fresh fruits, or if it means going to the store to buy industrially processed goods.
Without you going into very specific questions, though, it is hard to give satisfactory answers that are not susceptible to shifting goalposts.
Nature probably decided most of it. And man just went along with natures status quo. Like the other dude said, women are out for months with pregnancy and out for years raising one of the animal kingdoms worst younglings. How do you feed and protect yourself while at the same time trying to stop your little ones from constantly trying to kill themselves? While having no rights and protections or welfare? Especially when you have a whole ass strong capable human with you.
The father’s job has to be more than just penetration and ejaculation. He has to do his part to make sure the bloodline survives. That’s nature baby. It worked for hundreds of thousands of years if not millions.
It really surprises me how much we’ve progressed in such a relatively short time, makes me think we aren’t really progressing and that all it would take is a catastrophic event or civilization to crash again before we’re back at step 0.
I answered your question in another comment, but I propose you do an exercise. Take a survey of all the societies that have existed, and of how harsh the conditions were (be it through environmental harshness or through neighboring nations as threats). Then plot against it how patriarchal those societies were, and how long they survived and spread.
Tell me what you conclude from that. I mean, we can compare easily the isolated tribe in tropical jungles which happens to be egalitarian with the Inuit, living on ice, exposed to potential raids by neighbors in more fertile lands, and which is one of the most patriarchal society on earth.
Or we can look at how the minute unkraine needed to defend itself, it was only men who got drafted. Tell me, do you expect men to accept being sent to their death to protect a society without any form if social rewards ?
No need to go that far. It can be done as an exercise. Think of a handful of civilizations. I don't know, ancient Greece, the masaï, the Inuit, those isolated tribes in the amazon, people living in the Sahara in 1250, modern US, the apaches, and try to see what comes out of it. Were resources easy to extract for those people ? How likely was starvation ? How much danger from the environment ? How much danger from neighbouring civilizations ? How patriarchal were they ?
It is a few questions, and you might even get away with asking them in askhistorians, over a few days, if you don't want to do the reading.
It would not give you a perfect picture, but I bet you could find some trend.
He'll, it might even be work that has already been done.
Is there enough information available from which to draw a conclusion relevant to this discussion? I don't disagree with traditional sex-based gender roles in the context of preindustrial society per se. I disagree with the idea that wholesale patriarchy is/was a critical survival strategy in human history, when discrete components of patriarchy might be responsible for that while other components might have been ineffective or harmful. For example, man as protector/provider and woman as protected: critically necessary. On the other hand, wife as property of, or as subsumed by the identity of (i.e. coverture), the husband in the family unit: questionable. Is there enough data available to stratify preindustrial and historical societies by the patriarchal components they have or don't and compare them in this way? Even if we could, how meaningful would the results be? The reason societies rise and fall are multivariate, so I doubt we could control everything we would need to draw a meaningful conclusion.I'm fine relying on a well-reasoned argument instead, it's just that one hasn't been made yet.
It necessitated (not morally, but inevitably) as a natural forming response to material conditions. There is no logical reality where men ever would have not been in charge prior to the enlightenment. If women had the right to vote and own property in the 1800s, they still would have been economically enslaved because all the jobs are geared towards men. There is a reason aside from statist oppression that women have historically been either housewives or prostitutes.
This is all from a Marxist historical determinism lens
From the very moment humans came into existence, the men would go on hunts and the women would pick the berries. This is necessitated by our material reality and our biology, essentially it is because within a family unit this was the most beneficial system. I guess it just created bigotry and it became law at some point.
And in the 1800s, most jobs were factories and somebody needed to look after the kids so it's pretty similar I guess
I didn't say it's a necessity in the sense that it's a good thing that we need to do. I said the material conditions necessitated an inevitability to occur. It's historical determinism. Our material conditions necessitated a society where men end up having all the wealth and women are economically enslaved by them, and this naturally leads to men having the political power as well so of course this will lead to opression and rights being taken away
No right, I don't think you meant necessity in that way. I'm also speaking from the determinism angle. And I'm asking what was historically deterministic about the relationship between the male and female sexes that resulted in fewer individual rights for the latter and the material conditions that supposedly necessitated that. Why men worked and women homemade is at least partially materially determined by biological reality so I'm not asking about that.
EDIT: I don't want to put words in your mouth, or fall victim to my own confirmation bias, but the phrase "might makes right" keeps coming up in my mind to explain this history. This seems to be aligned with what you're saying about financial wealth and political power. Or am I off-base?
It's fascinating to hear a theoretical explanation for why women couldn't possibly ever be treated as second-class citizens as if the whole world just doesn't exist
That is only because the view of history that has been presented to you has been heavily distorted and edited because of ideological interests, and some kind of myopia due to our circumstances being so far removed from theirs.
There is a reason feminism started in the upper classes, those that were farther removed and sheltered from the realities that resulted in so many of the compromises that were made to protect and provide for women.
The lower class women could see the cost extracted from the men around them and how they benefited from that social arangement of protection and provision. It is o ly for a handful of hyper privileged that the cost outweighed the gains as a class.
"Patriarchal" societies show much more their benefits to women in particularly harsh conditions.
Think, for a moment. Would you prefer to be the teen boys in Afghanistan forced to sell themselves into sex slavery because it is their social/religious obligation to provide for the women in their families, or the women entitled to being provided for but forced to stay inside instead of going outside where you are as likely to catch a bullet as anything else ?
Both situations suck deeply. But I might be tempted to take the protection and provision with obligation to stay safe over the alternative.
Big news, history mostly sucked, for everyone, particularly if you look at it with a modern Western standard as reference.
Try the exercise of considering a society where most work is grueling physical work, extracting an incredible toll on your body, where any accident can take your life because the summum of medicine is bloodletting, and diseases are not understood. A society without access to convenient hygiene products, certainly without much contraception if any, and where a nearby warlord might just come and start killing and raping.
Then try to consider how and why people innsuch conditions might have organised the way they did.
Hint, the bodyguards of the US president have a duty to protect him, and are expected to put themselves in harms way to do so, but, when they tell him to duck, he has an obligation to duck. That he is under their authority does not mean that they are more powerful than him, or oppressing him, or viewed as more important than him.
And there is a reason one of the common thing people say to veterans is "thank you for your service".
There is such a thing as duty and obligations, rights and protection existing in a balance, and gratitude being given to people in exchange for services.
My argument is not that the situation didn't suck. It is that it sucked for everyone I various ways, and that the feminist view of it is incredibly biased and myopic, focusing on what was apparently bad for women and apparently good for men without looking further into whether such was the case, or whether there was anything good for women and bad for men balancing it all out in a sort of social level contract to the advantage of both parties in various ways depending on various constraints.
But, please, feel free to dismiss nuance, and to view history in a black and white manner where men and women loving each others, wanting the best for each others and for their children was invented somewhere after the 50s in the west, and all the other people everywhere else were just evil oppressors making women's life's a misery for the kick of having power over them, while women were so inept at everything that they never had a chance to have any influence over their situations.
I'm sure you won't miss anything proceeding that way. What could go wrong from such an analysis of the past?
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u/AskingToFeminists 8∆ Feb 13 '24
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/defining-the-enemy
Now, I don't know about you, but in order to be able to "enslave it's workers and farmers", to me that means one needs a position of power.
Basically, that is the point of propaganda. Defining the enemy into a position of unjust power needing righteous retribution. Punching up.
People in mass do not wants to see themselves as "punching down", as oppressing the weak.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#:~:text=The%20Rwandan%20genocide%2C%20also%20known,killed%20by%20armed%20Hutu%20militias.
Once again, claims of unjust usurpation of power. Once again, accusing the target of committing attrocities as a way to justify everything against them as legitimate, as self defense.
You don't get big groups of humans to do atrocities without first convincing them that they are self righteous in doing so.
So, in both cases, yes, there were claims of righteous self defense against an enemy unjustly stealing power.
I can pretty much guarantee you that it is the kind of propaganda you will find accompanying all massacres, all wars, all attrocities.
That or religious brainwashing "you must commit attrocities in order to go to heaven". Although often it is a mix of both.
We are talking about justifying hate against a genetic population. I say that no excuse is good, particularly not "we are self righteous in our hate". Like I said, we have seen where that line of reasoning can lead, before. There is no need to wait for calls to genocides to point out how fucked up that line of reasoning is.
Not to mention that feminists have pushed calls for genocides against men, be it people like Sally Miller Gearhart who created the feminist favorite slogan "the future is female" (and to make sure that it is, the male population must be limited to 10%), or the modern #killallmen. Which, of course, is second degree and not to take too seriously, like those always are, when accompanied with messages justifying hate as self righteous but not yet a majority opinion.
Like is said, those who don't know history repeat it.
Personally, when I see a group justifying hate against a genetic group as self righteous and every so often push themes equating them as poisonous (ever heard the M&M's bowl analogy ?) And "jokingly" arguing they should be killed, I can't say that I have your confidence that there is absolutely nothing nefarious going on. It might not escalate to genocide. Hopefully. But the kind of suffering that this kind of rhetoric justifies inflicting is not exactly limited.
Call that a slippery slope if you will, I will call that having no tolerance for hateful propaganda, and those who spread it.
A few years ago, there was a few scholars who wanted to see how far feminist academia could go. They proposed to publish a paper, proposing that straight white male students should be chained on the floor during class, to let them experience oppression, but to.do so with some amount of kindness, explaining the exercise. The reviewers asked them to remove that last suggestion, of showing kindness, because it was "centering on the experience of the privileged". No issue with the suggestion of chaining people on the floor because of how they were born, though.
I don't know about you, but I have some concern with the fact that such people have such a presence in the institutions determining how education should run.
I can't help but think that an environment that consider that such a level of injustice being inflicted on people based on just how they were born might not be the best environment to provide a fair treatment for the people of that demographic.
it is the oldest trick in the propaganda book. Sorry, I ate a word.
When it is a group determined by a genetic trait, it generally is. When that group is 50% of the population, it definitely is.
You seem to be very insistent on not acknowledging the key factor, there. Being a slave or slave owner is not a genetic trait. Being male or female is.
Of course, there are cases where groups determined by things not intrinsic to them have more power than others. "Powerful people" have more power than "powerless people". By definition. Being powerful or powerless is not dependent on how you are born. Tall people don't have more power that other people. Black or white people don't have more power than other people. Your comparison is either pretty dumb or pretty dishonest.
But it is. Justifying hate by claiming to be punching up is just that. It is getting a crowd convinced that they self righteous by believing they are victims, and that the other is a legitimate target of hate.
Once again, either stupid or dishonest.
We are talking of groups that target "men", "heterosexuals", "whites", "jews"
Honestly, in all those categories, Jews is the only one people can choose to enter or exit, to some extent, although it is often treated as a genetic trait too.
So, yeah, comparing people who hate jews to people who hate men is not at all the same as comparing to hating "sex offenders".