Morrison and Morales are golden gods

[arbre_rieur]

Four pages from ACTION COMICS 1 (heh, feels weird to say that)...

The first page of the issue:



This Glenmorgan guy is described by the cops as "Mr. Metropolis," very, very rich and powerful. The police arrive to rescue him from Superman.





With Lex Luthor's help, the authorities manage to lure Superman into a trap.

Comments

[crabby_lioness]

There's a huge and very stupid taboo against calling people "Nazis" in the US. Because of idiots who don't know what the word means and bandy it about with impunity, you can't say someone is acting like a Nazi even -- especially -- when they are technically acting just like a Nazi. It's highly annoying.

[salinea]

Are you kidding? I watch the Daily Show & the Colbert Report, and people seem to call other people (as in politicians etc.) Nazis all the freaking time, pretty often in ridiculously offensive and contrived ways. Especially on Fox.

As far as I can see, there should be more of a taboo against calling people "Nazis".

Though when one sees how the extreme right (which is pretty much the right by now) of the US behaves, I kinda wish they'd put the fascist insult back in use.

[crabby_lioness]

Alas, Godwin's Law is used to shut down debates even more often than the mention of Nazis is. Since all mentions are considered "over the top" the subject never gets discussed in a rational manner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

"you can't say someone is acting like a Nazi even -- especially -- when they are technically acting just like a Nazi"

Unless they're herding Jews into gas chambers or invading Poland, they probably aren't acting just like a nazi. More often, they're doing something that the person making the comparison wants to say-or at least imply-is just as bad as herding Jews into gas chambers or invading Poland.

[crabby_lioness]

That's hardly the only thing the Nazis did, for good or ill. They're a fascinating bunch really.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

They wore pants, too, but you wouldn't say "he's wearing pants so he's a nazi."

Calling someone a nazi isn't just saying "this person is doing something similar to something that the nazis did," it's saying "this is the kind of person who herds Jews into gas chambers and invades Poland, and if he's allowed to continue with what he's doing now, it'll end up with gas chambers and invasions." The comparison isn't informative except in the case of literal nazis( I include Holocaust deniers in that catagory, not because of their antisemitism, but because they're doing posthumous PR for the actual nazis of 40s Germany). Rather, it's a rhetorical device. Short of the type of things that I mentioned, it's always possible to use a less inflammatory comparison.

I once came up with an imaginary conversation between John French and Genya Ravan to illustrate this point:
JF: Don acted like a nazi when I was in his band
GR: That's terrible. You know who acted like a nazi to me? The nazis. What did Don do to you?
JR. He yelled at us a lot, He did a lot of mind games and he was a bully.
GR:Oh, the nazis put me in a concentration camp and killed most of my family.

[crabby_lioness]

The Nazis pioneered an awful lot of techniques that enabled them to get into the position where they could send Jews to Polish death camps. If you disallow any comparisons to others before they get to that point, you won't be able to stop the others before they are doing the equivalent of sending Jews to death camps in Poland.

[salinea]

but then you can do a specific comparison and source it; it doesn't have to be "that person is such a Nazi" cuz that's inflammatory and Godwin-esque and seldom helpful?

[crabby_lioness]

How often have you seen me making comparisons without explanations?

[salinea]

Often.

They don't call it the Godwin meme because it's rare.

Seen it just two days ago at the latest.

[crabby_lioness]

I said "me" but you're actually making my point. You say you often see it used incorrectly. If that is the case then we need to spend more time pointing out the correct usage and not shy away from the topic altogether.

[salinea]

but what do the correct usage refers to if not historical Nazis and neo-Nazis? You confuse me. I have no idea who you wish to call Nazis, and how that would correct the usage.

[salinea]

ah, sorry, I didn't realise the "me" part, totally misread that. I wasn't trying take you to task on that topic.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

Calling someone a nazi isn't going to stop them from doing anything and it's not the only way to criticize someone.In my imaginary dialogue, not being a nazi doesn't mean Capt. Beefheart was any less a horrible (or incredibly screwed-up to the point of taking it out on others if you want to be charitable) person.

If I call someone a nazi because they don't like Jews, I'm also giving the person who calls anyone who supports gun control a nazi some legitimacy and it devalues the word.

[crabby_lioness]

You're conflating Nazism with Anti-Semitism. That's a mistake. The Nazis found Anti-Semitism convenient to their purposes, but it was never their main motive for their actions. That mistake is one of the very reasons we need to talk about Nazis freely.

Saying that Nazism is always and only about Anti-Semitism stops people from seeing where the exact same techniques the Nazis developed are being used by other groups in other parts of the world to this day. That is a great wrong.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

"Talking about nazis freely" and calling other people nazis aren't the same thing and arguing that anti-semitism wasn't a large part of the nazi ideology seems very tenuous. Their rise to power was based in a large part on antisemitism. One of the ways hitler got the support he did was by giving Germans an "other" to unify against and it's a simple matter of historical record that the nazis were responsible for numerous antisemitic laws and actions.

You actually sound like you're contradicting yourself. At one point, you say that one can call people "nazis" if they're doing something similar to what the nazis did, at another, you think that it's a mistake to call people nazis if it's based on antisemism, even though the nazis were inarguably antisemitc.

No one ever said nazism was only about anti-semitism. Right now, I'm very uncomfortable with this thread. Two people have made arguments that sound very close to the "Jews make the Holocaust all about themselves->the nazis persecuted other people but no one talks about them, just the Jews->there's nothing special about what happened to the Jews->the nazis weren't especially antisemitic" argument that I've heard in the past from Holocaust deniers. I'm hoping that it was unintentional on your part and that of the other poster.

[crabby_lioness]

I said the Nazis were not only about Anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was a convenient prejudice that they played upon in their rise to power. They were not going to go out and invent a prejudice against a minority when there was such a handy one lying around.

However, in other parts of the world the same techniques the Nazis used have been used to rile up hatreds against other minorities when their wasn't a single Jew around. Forex, the Khmer Rouge used similar techniques in Cambodia against the ethnic Chinese and the Hmong. Are we forbidden to point out the similarities in the tactics used simply because Jews were not a major target in that instance? That is what makes me uncomfortable.

[philippos42]

As someone who's studied both, I consider Pol Pot to be more offensive than Hitler, albeit more contained. Hitler wanted to conquer and assimilate several nations, but he did seem to love Germany in his sick hopped-up-on-uppers way. Pol Pot tried to destroy his own society to rewrite history with himself at the beginning. I don't think there are too many of us familiar with Cambodia in the 1970's who would pretend he was somehow "less than" a Nazi.

[salinea]

Two people have made arguments that sound very close to the "Jews make the Holocaust all about themselves->the nazis persecuted other people but no one talks about them, just the Jews->there's nothing special about what happened to the Jews->the nazis weren't especially antisemitic" argument that I've heard in the past from Holocaust deniers.
Can you point them out to me? I ask as a Mod of the community.

[junipepper]

I'd like to point out that the SIX MILLION Jews that were tortured and murdered during WWII by the nazis and their collaborators is a *very* sensitive topic for a lot of people. It's not something *I'd* particularly want to discuss on a comic books forum, but maybe that's just me.

[crabby_lioness]

????????

I guess it's been a while since Brought to Light. I grew up seeing brutal politics discussed in comic books.

[salinea]

I'm sorry you're finding this discussion uncomfortable. You're absolutely right it is a sensitive topic. At the same time, I don't see why this being a comic book forums makes it impossible to discuss. Comics as a medium can and has been used to talk about the Shoah, and they shouldn't be off topic for this community, many characters in mainstream comic books also have root in WW2 and everything that goes with it; and they also shouldn't be off topic for this community.

Perhaps we should treat it as something worthy of a trigger warning, in order for people who will be made uncomfortable by it to avoid threads on that topic? Would that work for you?

[whitesycamore]

...what did Captain Beefheart do that was horrible (I am asking out of genuine curiosity, not Beefheart-apologism)?

I like Safe As Milk. And I always thought Zappa was the evil one! Zappa.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

Look up the period before Trout Mask Replica when the band lived together. According to several members of the band, Beefheart was a physical and psychological bully. They compared that time to being brainwashed in a cult.

The other side is that any of the band could have said "screw this, I'm leaving" and none of them did, and that Beefheart was something of an insecure mess. Later on, he became more secure and less unpleasant to work with.

None of which means that Zappa can't be evil, too.

;P

[philippos42]

Well, refusing to raise the tax the rich for your wars of conquest is not considered a defining trait. Nor even selling out those who got you into power. Invading everybody, stealing your countrymen's stuff & sticking them in concentration camps, making up crap about how you're descended from the highest caste in south Asia instead of a bunch of forest barbarians--that's what people think of as distinct.