WI Nazism just xenophobic, not actively racist?

I'm confused. Was not practically all the governments of the world 'racist' during that period and before? Also correct me if i am wrong but hitlers 'racism' was mainly directed towards slavs,but slavs are white racially...so how is it racism?

Anti-semitism is not racism either i believe...its a category all by itself.

Can we just call it what it is?

Xenophobia? Hatred? ;)

*WE* consider Slavs to be part of the category "white". The Nazis didn't.

"Jewish" can be either a religious or an ethnic characterization. There are plenty of atheists around who consider themselves Jews, because they come from Jewish families.

The Nazis in particular held it to be a ethnicity. Converting to Christianity; or even having been a practicing, believing, devout Christian one's whole life; was irrelevant to Nazi racial categorization. If one of your grandparents was a Jew, you were a Jew.

TL;DR: people were different in the past. And sometimes foreign people really are foreign. By our standards, Nazis should have considered Slavs the same as Aryans; the actual Nazis didn't.

Still TL;DR? Try: Yes, Nazi beliefs don't make much sense to most of us now.
 
Yes. The Nazi Party would still be hateful if they got rid of the antisemitism - they were so morally deficient they'd still be hateful if you got rid of every racist trait they had. They were what you'd get if moral ebola and the world's worst serial killer had a baby, and then it went to Evil School.

I said in another thread that I was surprised that they didn't make soup from dead slave workers to feed live ones. This might have sounded like a very black joke, but it wasn't - I really am surprised, because it would have been the logical thing to do and they had already passed the stage were any moral restraint could have stopped them. I suppose they must simply have not thought of it.

The plain fact is--for whatever reason, they didn't stoop to mass enforced cannibalism. The Nazis who made soup from their prisoners are in your head, not in Germany in the 1930s-1940s. (And lord knows, what those real Nazis did was bad enough.)

Please examine your thinking. You're headed down a very dark path there.
 

amphibulous

Banned
I'm confused. Was not practically all the governments of the world 'racist' during that period and before?

Yes. But a 1 to 10 scale where, say, the Confederacy would have been a 10, the Germans would have been a 100.

Also correct me if i am wrong but hitlers 'racism' was mainly directed towards slavs,but slavs are white racially...so how is it racism?
Race isn't defined particularly well by skin colour; anti-slavic racism isn't really stupider than the KKK's variety.

Anti-semitism is not racism either i believe...its a category all by itself.
Wrong.

Xenophobia? Hatred? ;)
Xenophobia would hardly apply to your next door Jewish neighbours, who don't go to synagogue and whose lifestyle is exactly like yours.
 
I say I say I say, 'imperialism'. What is meant by this phenomenon?

Practically everybody in Germany wanted, in some clear or vague sense, to unite with Austria, for example, or Danzig. So if that is what is meant it hardly means anything, since the German People's Democratic Republic would want to unite with Austria.

Some people in Germany, who were allowed to spraff to their hearts' content under Nazism, wished to revive the dream of colonies outside Europe. If the 'Nazi' regime wholeheartedly buys into this and doesn't care about European lebensraum, then it will have a very different foreign policy, much closer to what Chamberlain was hoping for, and probably not invade the USSR; certainly not under the same circumstances. This seems to me characteristic of some sort of conservative and authoritarian regime that isn't Nazist.

But if by imperialism we mean a determination to invade and destroy the USSR - and we seem to, since we're bringing up some sort of life-and-death war against it - then that was intimately bound up with all that blood-and-soil racial-struggle muck.


We frequently seek to find ways around the fact that the kind of German regime with the most urgent reasons to make total war on the USSR was precisely the kind of German regime that wasn't going to win.

rule of thumb, they'll more likely remember the great starving, courtesy of soviet policies.

Obviously Slavs can only remember one thing at a time.
 
Well, if you look at their most famous song, the Hoerst Wessel (pulled here from Wiki), let's see what the Nazis of OTL largely appealed to the public with. You can glean a lot from songs like this, in much the same way the folk theology of Christianity is embedded in their hymns.


The flag is high! The ranks are firmly closed!

Appeal to patriotism and nationalism. We're organized

The SA march with quiet, steady step.

We're in solidarity with each other and we're well organized and disciplined

Comrades shot by the Redfront and reactionaries

We wave the bloody shirt of our comrades, appealing to martial virtues and against Communists and Reactionaries. Lots of people were really distressed about the apparent breakdown of order and streetfighting.

March in spirit within our ranks.

We argue they died for something larger than themselves and appeal to the notion of 'no greater love'

Clear the streets for the brown battalions,
Clear the streets for the stormtrooper!

Please pause for station identification

Millions are inspired when they see the swastika,
The day of freedom and of bread dawns!

Station identification and identification of goals---freedom, by which they mean national self-determination and bread---lots of memory of hyperinflation and depression here in post WWI Germany.

For the last time, the call to arms is sounded!
For the fight, we all stand prepared!
Soon Hitler's banners will fly over all streets.
Our time of bondage is nearly over!

We're winning the struggle, you should jump on our bandwagon now.

The flag is high! The ranks are firmly closed!
The SA march with quiet, steady step.
Comrades shot by the Redfront and reactionaries
March in spirit within our ranks.

Play the catchy chorus again.

Notice the absence of any explicit kill the Jew lyrics in this the most essentially Nazi song. It doesn't strike me as terribly unlikely that a Nazi party that dialed down their hatred of Jews to merely, say, one sigma from the average level of such in the German population at large, would be just as able to gain power in Germany as the OTL Nazis.
 
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We must consider not only whether the public could do without anti-semitism, but whether the ideologues and political-active people of the German far-ight could. Anti-semitism had a hearty history on the German right, especially since WW1, when the machinations of the Jews had been used by rightists - with the ascent of the government after the 3rd High Command took control - to explain how, in a war that was supposed to bring all Germans together in a cleansing national struggle, the same people still had all the money and power. They were the anti-patriotic Jews!

Anyway, anti-semitism is one thing, appealing to the psychological need for enemies and squaring some circles. The Malthusian blood-and-soil racial-death-struggle nonsense is another thing.
 
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