RadixJournal - December 16, 2022


Negative Theology

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Hitler Churchill
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Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

134.68

Word count

703

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the anti-Holocaust ideology of the Nazi regime and its impact on our understanding of history and the world, and the role of anti-Semitism as a key component of that ideology.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 When I was growing up in the 90s, you would turn on cable and cable television, that is, and the history channel would almost literally be the Hitler channel.
00:00:13.480 It was Hitler's henchmen at 8 p.m., Hitler versus Churchill, the battle that defined the century at nine, and then the Holocaust. It was just endless black and white programming involving all of it, involving the Holocaust maybe to a less degree. It was mostly Hitler and maybe some D-Day in there too. 0.72
00:00:37.440 So we're obsessed with Hitler. He is endlessly fascinating and grotesque, at least in the way that he's represented, etc. But it's not just that. It's that we have, like, liberalism has a negative theology and a kind of negative morality.
00:00:59.620 And so, you know, even conservatives will stress this, is that who are we to judge anyone's lifestyle? You know, who are we to tell them you can't become a woman or you can't be a sexual pervert or you can't consent to this or that?
00:01:22.440 And maybe even that you can't take this illegal drug on your own time, so long as it's not hurting. This is the so-called non-aggression principle. And it is a, you know, effectively, if you are not harming anyone but yourself, you are free to do that.
00:01:41.420 And that's the kind of libertarian form of it. I think the liberal form is just a kind of more robust and kind of self-exploratory version of that negative morality.
00:01:56.060 So it's, we're going to start, you know, we're going to start recognizing multiple sexualities, and we're going to start recognizing new forms of sexual experience and new identities, and there are new minorities that we didn't even know about that we're going to recognize.
00:02:15.580 So, but it's all negative. And so, but it's all negative. And so, it's all about not being Hitler, in effect. And Hitler is at the very center of this ideology. So, it's this negation of like any form of affirmation, and just a positing of not Hitler as your moral compass. 0.61
00:02:35.080 And this goes along with like other forms of negativity. I mean, if you go to Germany, it's becoming like this in the United States, in a way. But in Germany, it's pretty intense, where any new memorial in the town is more or less about the Holocaust.
00:02:56.880 So I remember one of the last times I was in Berlin, wasn't the last time, but anyway, I was in Berlin, they had just announced this Holocaust memorial. And it was these like, weird, dark curved shapes, all that almost looks like tombstones in this huge array. And it was extremely monotonous. But I think more than that, I was kind of unnerving in the way that postmodern art can be.
00:03:24.300 And so, it was this way of like, the monument affecting you, demoralizing you, the monument unhinging you, the monument unnerving you.
00:03:37.040 And so, the public space that might have had an image of Frederick the Great, or Goethe, or whatever, is kind of being replaced by this negation of a monument, a kind of anti-monument, this contemplate the Holocaust injunction.
00:03:56.400 And what marks our time, and what marks our time, and I do think it's kind of changing, and how this will play out is interesting, but what marks our time is this negative theology and negative morality.
00:04:11.040 A negative morality of not Hitler, a negative theology of not Hitler, and a negative theology of the Holocaust. 0.72
00:04:16.820 So, you're placing this, like, negation, literal annihilation of human beings as a kind of like, the center of Jewish identity, and in a way, Christian identity, too. 0.77
00:04:30.020 Um, I think this is profound.
00:04:34.800 And I also think it's probably unsustainable as well.
00:04:38.640 Like, what does it mean that we can't, you can't assert a myth, ultimately.
00:04:44.380 You can't, like, and the only more, I mean, people might have sexual morality in their own personal lives.
00:04:51.960 Surely many do, but it's, morality is ultimately about collecting the herd and pointing in a certain direction.
00:05:03.580 And in an anti-morality, you can't do that.
00:05:06.440 In fact, collecting the herd and pointing in a direction is the kind of thing that Hitler might do. 0.88