I think if we were to ‘stand in another’s shoes’, the experience would be radically different to that I had ever before experienced. The view of the world would be completely alien to my own.
Most of the way we experience the world is as a single unified perceptive ego, a ‘substance’, as it were. It persists through time, dropping properties, acquiring others, but all these are mere attributes. Everything that moves through time is the ego alone.
Perhaps this own philosophy is relative to this current train of thought. I can certainly think of many other systems of the organisation of human life. Marxism, in particular.
I am not ashamed to say, I am a Marxist. I am sorry, it is what I am, and I cannot be an anarchist. I suppose I better be honest about it. I rather like Marxism, I have my own particular relationship to it—it is, like any human culture a philosophy of goodness and we are certainly attempting to be good and do good things.
Someone put it to me quite well the other day. Australia is a very British place. At one point in time it was even more British. As the British Empire evolved over time, so did its racist philosophies of Social Darwinism.
As in Malaysia, where the British enforced a legalised colonial caste system of its own unique absurdity—so Australian bigotry has also changed over time.
I am a part of the story of Racist Australia. I have something to do with the colonisation of this land, and, by transitivity it follows that I fit into a hierarchy of British rule.
I am white now, by contemporary ‘racialist’ Australian philosophies. But my people were not always considered white.
Catholicism has a huge part to play in the colonisation of Perth too. I was largely raised outside Anglo-American political worldviews until high school. It is quite a jarring experience to then be introduced to the philosophy of the Nazi Party, then, logically, when I was very much a Yugoslavian.
Every philosophy of nationalism is ultimately a myth. I do not agree that all myths are evil, however. Is every myth a nationalism?
According to the Nazis, slavs are fit to be rather unwilling slaves to the Germans. The Germans, however, really wanted to be friends with the British—and awarded Britian the status of being Aryan.
So the Nazi racial hierarchy places Aryans at the very precipice of human perfection. Only an Aryan has an actual pathway to being an Ubermensch—Hitler supposedly being quite a good example. According to the Nazis.
Perhaps Slavs have some Arianism in them, but, as a race, the Germans did not like them. They certainly wanted their land, though. The Slav Partisans were usually all Communist. This is mere Empirical chance. The British ended up supporting the Communists, anyway, and the Slavs—even the Nazis have to admit—liberated themselves.
Slavs are barbarians, whereas other ethnicities, so the Nazis say, are mere savages. The way the logic of the Holocaust played out was very much connected to the way the Second World War unfolded.
The lesson of the Second World War is that the Nazis and their little fascist gang of dictators are actually losers. The Battle of Stalingrad very much being the turning point of the slow, eventual conquest by the Allies of the Axis.
Only a steel man came to recover
If he had run from gold, carry over
We celebrate our sense of each other
We have a lot to give one anotherSufjan Stevens.
The correct interpretation of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is that Ribbentrop is a used car salesman. Ribbentrop is New Money Fascism, and, if i recall correctly, had not thought a jot about Hitler until he had first met him.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact was all about Ribbentrop. It was his idea, and he had virtually run Nazi foreign policy—much to the grief of the actual Foreign Minister. The reason why was because Ribbentrop was possibly the best Yes Man in history. Hitler loved Ribbentrop because he always agreed with him so enthusiastically.
Molotov will, of course, with or without Ribbentrop’s wily advances, sign anything. How many of Molotov’s signatures are on the votes for executing even his closest and dearest colleagues? Stalin was actually quite impressed that the Nazis wanted to sign anything at all with him. The fact that Hitler was going to let Stalin have quite a bit of Poland was a stunning turn of events for Stalin, who had lived through the humiliating Russian territorial losses of Breskt-Litovsk. I am not altogether certain if Stalin told Molotov what to do, but Molotovo certainly wanted to sign to a lot of the same things as Stalin—like signing the Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany.
It is true that Stalin himself showed up to the signing of the Pact. He was smiling in all the photos of the occasion. I like to think of the occasion is very similar to the scene in the American mobster films where two different mafia families settle their differences, to the disadvantage of some other mafia family.
How could Stalin have sided with the Nazis?
The Communists were atheists, remember. The Nazi racial hierarchy did not factor into their worldview. Despite being a brutal, and, at times bloodthirsty philosophy in practice, the Stalinists do believe in a universal brotherhood of man. That said, I cannot really call the status of Diamat and Histomat—officially sanctioned State Ideologies under Stalin—anything but a religion by another name. Stalin could be likened to a God in some circles.
The reason why isn’t important: Stalin was the one who signed that Pact, and made it legal. That happened. His cult of personality only died with him.