Astral Codex Ten

Nazis

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Nazis

Article

Nazis is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 15, 2023 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “A grim reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene””; “Two years prior, at the previous elections, the Nazis had polled 810,000 votes”; “cooperation between the Nazis and the Communist Party”. It most often appears alongside Germany, Nazi, Nazis.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 15, 2023
  • Last seen: August 04, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Beroe: Eugenics inspired the Nazis (and 1920s Americans) to do very evil things. But Islam inspired Osama bin Laden to do very evil things, and we rightly believe that it’s fine to practice Islam as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to do evil things. Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad. What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity1, but even if we restrict the label to the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about 300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people. Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really wasn’t2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even genetic.
Inline links: 1, 2
As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew. His successors were utterly and inexcusably confused about the topic, and conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes; once these were were removed from the population by killing or sterilizing their carriers, nobody would have negative traits anymore. A grim reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene”. Today, Germany has exactly as many schizophrenics as any other country, because there are thousands of genes involved in schizophrenia, and all the deleterious variants are present in some frequency in the healthy population. But see footnote 4 below.
Inline links: conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes
Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
In 1920, the DAP added two words to its name and became the National Socialist German Workers' Party or, as its enemies would call it derogatorily, the Nazi Party. At the same time, Hitler quit his army job to focus on growing the movement. Drawing on his artistic experience, he designed an emblem for the party to rally around: the now-familiar black swastika in a white circle on a red field.
Hitler worked so hard to grow the party that he nearly became the party. Concerned by his burgeoning influence, the other members of the Party’s committee decided to take Hitler down a peg. They investigated whether they could ally with other parties to dilute Hitler’s absolute control. On discovering these plans, Hitler threatened to resign from the Party. This would have been disastrous for the Nazis: Hitler’s electrifying speeches brought in most of the Party’s funds. The committee refused to accept Hitler’s resignation. Sensing his bargaining power, Hitler turned the tables on the committee—if they wanted to keep him, they would need to formally acknowledge him as dictator of the Nazi Party.
Hitler was a long way from assembling a nationally viable movement, but the Nazis gained significant political cachet within the German state of Bavaria.