It's not exactly a lie if you preface that it's a lie beforehand.
Simply put: If you're offering an olive branch, offer an olive branch rather than using it as a pretext to make further snide insinuations that you then feign ignorance of until the brazenness of your insincerity is laid too bare to deny and prompts you to switch to condescension over calling it out.
There's a profound difference between "This is going nowhere, and I think we both said things that we'll come to regret in time, so can we just call a truce?" and "I doubt a dolt like you is smart enough to know what a fool you're making of yourself, so why don't I just lie and say this was a draw? That should make you happy, right?" The former is an attempt to deescalate and end things relatively amicably. The latter makes a half-assed pretension of the former, but is really just another salvo that hardly even makes a token effort of hiding under the pretext of a white flag. So too is it with what I was responding to here. Don't use an olive branch to offer further insult.
It's kind of telling that you criticize me of making snide insinuations in your first paragraph, then go on to make snide insinuations of your own in the second.
I'm really not interested in hashing things out further.
Never mind that I laid that out as such as a direct response to you confusing my being irked at that rhetoric as me contesting your citation of Fahrenheit 451, functionally requiring that I further clarify the point lest I leave the misunderstanding hanging...which you just proceeded to mock me for doing.
Again, you're doing everything yourself that you're accusing me of.
I say I read what you posted. You said I didn't.
Rather, I called you out on the factual wrongness of what you said about my post.
And I went over your post
yet again and once again, you're describing the actions of the Nazis. Not exclusively, but largely.
It's an explanation of a potential cultural difference that may have led to this spat between us in the first place. It's an attempt to deescalate by providing context about my perspectives and why certain examples are familiar to me that, in light of the assumptions you made about me and why I cited one such example, I reasoned were not shared by you.
First, I can assure you that whatever cultural differences exist between Australia and the United States, an understanding of the Nazis/WWII isn't one of them. Heck, I'd actually wager that most Australians would at least know the basics of McCarthyism - certainly I covered it in modern history.
Second, that's not the reason for the spat. I'd be happy to have let it go, but since that hasn't happened, here's the reason, as far as I can tell:
You posted a link to Nazis. I assumed that you were referring to Nazis directly. You've stated that it wasn't, that it's a point about book burning in general.
Fine. I'll accept that's the case.
...I'm increasingly uncertain that you know what that phrase means. To ascribe motivation is to speculate on the rationale employed in undertaking an action. And yes, I am not innocent of that, as I have accused you of lashing out because my image made you self-conscious, which is indeed ascribing motive to you.
Really? An image of Nazis makes me "self-conscious."
I mean, wow. Just, wow.
It is not, however, something that is present in that paragraph you quote, nor is that paragraph a complaint that you ascribed motive at all. Rather, that paragraph first showcases a rather egregious factual error on your part that strongly implies that you didn't do more than skim the post in question and instead are making assumptions about its content that bear little-to-no resemblance to its actual content. It then goes on to state quite simply that the motivations you had been ascribing to me were incorrect and that my prior post had been to better explain my perspective and rectify that error.
What I'm trying to do is deescalate and end this tangent, ideally in a way that doesn't result in either of us bringing it back in by taking potshots at the other when talking to other users. But you are making that very difficult.
Fine. Since you keep harping on it, I'm going to reply to your post piece by piece:
More accurately, you ascribed significantly more meaning to my usage of the image and extrapolated from that an argument that I never made. Ie, you started with the premise that I must have gone out of my way to find an image relating to the Nazis, that this should not be a natural point of reference for me, that therefore I must have turned my nose up at what you believe should have been more readily available 'more neutral' examples, and thus concluded that my intended meaning could only have been "these people are literally Nazis because they're burning books", else I would not have used that image. In actuality, my meaning was "this echoes something very unfortunate that we generally recognize as as an action that on its own merit is not to be replicated" and used an easily recognizable and universally condemned example to illustrate that point that book burning is an otherwise despised practice.
I'm honing in on this, because I disagree with the point more than anything else. I don't find this a credible train of thought, because I don't buy the idea that book burning echoes the Nazis (or any other group) ipso facto. It really depends on the context and intentions.
Not to put too fine a point on it, book burning is pretty universally condemned as a bad thing on its own merit
I agree in the abstract, but book burnings rarely occur in the abstract. Not the Quran burning, not the Nazi burnings, not anything.
and, like it or not, the Nazis are probably the single most famous and recognizable example (with the "bibliocaust" - as Time termed it - of May 10, 1933 being especially notorious and striking in its preserved imagery). They certainly weren't the first, and they sadly weren't the last, but they're arguably the most easily recognized example of the act in history.
That's likely true, but again, context.
For instance, I've already mentioned the Canadian book burning debacle, and as much as I despise it, it's silly to compare the burners to Nazis, image or otherwise. If I post an image of Nazis in response, my view is that I'm implicitly implying a link.
Fuck's sake, the alternative you chastise me for not using is Farenheit 451, which was partially inspired by those same burnings. Heck, the man himself referenced them in the introduction (1967 edition): "I ate, drank, and slept books...It followed then that when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven, it is a sinful practice, and I carried that with me."
Farenheit 451 is a less charged example. You're asking me to look at an image of Nazi book burnings and not make any connection to the context of Nazi book burnings.
Not that the world of Farenheit 451 really applies to the Quran burning either, but it's less charged.
Hell, the simple fact of the matter is that, as an American, the Nazis are my point of reference for book burnings. Were we guilty of book burnings ourselves in the throes of McCarthyism? Much to our enduring shame, yes. And the parallel is not lost on us, not then and not now. Actual quote from a contemporary memo in the State Department about the blacklists: "We cannot screen [for "Pro-Communist" books] without looking like a fool or a Nazi". Per the American Library Association: "The memory of fascism is keen in Europe and Europeans know that book burning marked the beginning of fascism in Italy and Germany". Per the New York Times in reference to the book burnings at Drake, North Dakota in 1973, " Book burning! Shades of Adolf Hitler and Fahrenheit 451!" Per Vonnegut: "Books are sacred to free men for very good reasons...Wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them".
Yes, that's all true, how is any of it relevant to the Quran burning? A protest against Islam/Islamism/Iraq isn't facism, or communism, or censorship.
I don't know what it's like in Australia, but over here the Nazi's book burnings are the most familiar example and inevitable point of comparison, even before accounting for their increased familiarity through
pop-culture. Moreover, they're what we'd expect to be a common point of reference on discussions and especially on an international board like this.
If you mean a common frame of reference on discussions on book burning, then no, I don't agree. The reason is that the Nazis burnt books for specific reasons/under specific ideology, which is true of numerous book burnings. If I'm going to start making comparisons to Nazis, I'd want valid reasons to do so.
Pretty much everyone knows about the book burnings under the Nazis. Not everyone would recognize the book burnings under Pinochet. They're the familiar example that we point to as an easily recognized intellectually repressive regime. We don't point to book burnings as bad because the Nazis did them, we highlight the book burnings the Nazis did as one of their their numerous atrocities, not dissimilar to how we point to ISIS destroying historical and cultural artifacts like the city of Nimrud as one of their atrocities.
Yes, true, again, the Nazis comitted attrocities, their book burnings were one of those attrocities, I. KNOW. And because I know, that's why it's silly (in my mind) to use a Nazi book burning image in reference to the Quran burning, because they're not equivalent in intention or scale.
As for ISIS, yes, ISIS destroyed historical artifacts. I fully agree, that's an attrocity. If a far-right nutter destroyed a Quran from the 7th century, this may surprise you, but I'd also call that an attrocity. Whatever my thoughts on Islam, or religion in general, I would never advocate for the wholesale destruction of religious artifacts. The Quran in question, however, is not a religious artifact, it's one of millions of books in print, used in an act of protest by an individual who owned said Quran. It is not remotely applicable to compare that to ISIS destroying holy sites or Nazis burning books.
Simply put, the reason that you find all of that highly skeptical is that you're still warping both my original point - such as it was - and my defense of it into something unrecognizable. I make an aside that burning books is a bad look and not a tactic worth defending, you infer that my intention is Reductio ad Hitlerum and therefore that the linked picture of a Nazi book burning must constitute an intended ringer that could adequately be expressed as "you know who else burnt books? Nazis" with the further assumption that I must be such a shit debater that I'd consider that a trump card. Or, as you put it a few posts prior, that my "entire moral paradigm seems to be that anyone who burns a book must be like the Nazis, regardless of any actual context". That is not an argument I ever made, it's a fiction you conjured up because my choice of image upset you.
Similarly, my defense of my choice of image is not that it was pure coincidence, but rather that you have misunderstood my intention, exaggerated its scope beyond reason, and repeatedly insinuated that I must have posted with irrational malice and gone out of my way to do so. As I called you out on before when I asked you to leave the matter: "You're not even trying to understand the point, you're fabricating a position for me and then condescending to me why you think I hold it". You characterizing my defense as claiming coincidence is more of the same; it's yet another strawman. I'm not claiming coincidence, I'm claiming that it was a top of my head connection that didn't - despite your insinuations - require deliberately ignoring more easily available alternatives, much less for the motives you assume must have led me to those actions you erroneously imagine I must have taken. I've repeatedly tried to explain my intent, but you won't hear it, instead insisting that I must be insinuating that book burners are being Nazis despite my repeated protests that my position was nothing of the sort.
You have done precious little else in these exchanges other than to try and paint me as one shade or another of irrational and necessarily wrong based on positions you assumed I must hold without ever so much as taking a step back to make sure you understood my point.
I'm going to respond to this as simply as possible:
-I disagree that book burning is inherently bad in of itself, it really depends on the context and intentions.
-I'm not
upset that the Nazi image was used. I'm not even
upset that you've claimed that Nazis are a moment of "self-reflection" for me (after Saelune and Revnak, I'm past caring). You can infer my emotions all you want.
-If the Nazis burning books is your top-of-the-head connection to anyone else burning books, fine. For me, they're not. Say "book burning" to me, and there's no specific image that comes to mind, because book burning has been done across time and cultures. Remember that Chinese link? We learnt about that as part of maths class way, WAY before we covered the Nazis for instance (or at least, a similar example in Chinese history, I can't remember all the details).
