Nobel Winner Says Internet Might Have Stopped Hitler 290
There can be little doubt that the internet has changed everyday life for the better, but Nobel literature prize winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has upped the ante by saying an earlier introduction of information technology could even have prevented World War II. "Who knows, if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded — ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day," he said. I have to agree with him. If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries before the invasion of Poland, and one of history's greatest tragedies might have been averted.
It did'nt stop Bush !! (Score:1, Insightful)
*ducks*
what about darfur? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's been happening well into the days of the Internets Revolution and nobody's done a god damn thing about it
Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice sentiment, but we have the internet now, and yet still, right this very second, the genocide in Sudan and Zimbabwe is very active. Not to mention the fact that the internet existed in the 90's, yet the 90's saw the worst genocide since the Holocaust and Pol Pot, with the (very preventable) genocide in Rwanda.
So, yeah. It's a nice fuzzy sentiment, but the recent and current active acts of genocide in the world are pretty clear evidence that it's just not true.
Le Clezio sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
. If England had been able to send a "Stop Hitler Now!" petition to 10 friendly countries, those countries could have each sent it to 10 more friendly countries
So an internet chain mail would have stopped WW2. Right...
Newsflash : Hitler didn't cause WW2, he was the catalyst. The root cause of the war was the german people's resentment of the Versailles treaty, and particularly the war reparations and the way the French treated the Ruhr people when they failed to pay up. Hitler was considered slightly ridiculous and bizarre until he started to tap into the boiling anger the germans had inside them.
Re:wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what about darfur? (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason is: nobody cares about Darfur.
It's nowhere powerful or/and resource-rich to be interesting for the West powers.
Re:Treaty of Versailles (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Importance of the Minds of a General Popula (Score:3, Insightful)
See point #2. Hitler enjoyed widespread and overwhelming support. If you'd been reading an Internet forum discussion at the time it would have been full of people talking about reasons why you should help vote Hitler in.
Re:Godwin says... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what about darfur? (Score:2, Insightful)
And it seems like most European countries have acted the same way, so it's hardly an issue with solely America. You're right about the oil, but at least something got the US to move at all.
Remember how much the EU did about the genocide in Rwanda?
Re:wha? (Score:2, Insightful)
Its far more likely, Hitler would seek to control the Internet in every country he controlled. It would be a dream come true, for the Nazis to monitor all communications. Hilter did after all, try to create a Totalitarian level of control, even without the Internet!. The Internet (for all its early utopian dreams) is (as the news is showing) turning into a means to monitor and datamine large numbers of people, in an automated way, while providing an automated means to censor anything they wish to suppress from within their own country.
Its extreme idealism to believe the Internet would therefore stop Hitler and fails to take into account Hitler's nearly Psychopathic behaviour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy [wikipedia.org]
"The psychopath is defined by a psychological gratification in criminal, sexual, or aggressive impulses and the inability to learn from past mistakes. Individuals with this disorder gain satisfaction through their antisocial behavior and also lack a conscience. Psychopathy is frequently co-morbid with other psychological disorders (particularly narcissistic personality disorder). The psychopath differs slightly from the sociopath, and may differ even more so from an individual with an antisocial personality disorder diagnosis. Nevertheless, the three terms are frequently used interchangeably."
I think Hitler qualified for aggressive impulses! (to say the least!), plus an extreme lack a conscience, combined with extremely narcissistic perception of his own importance!.... give that kind of person a means to automate the control and suppression of anyone who attempted to speak out and the Internet would allow the creation of hell on earth!.
By the way, while Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio is a Nobel prize winner, he is a Nobel literature prize winner!. Getting him to quote on technology and psychology, makes about as much sense as asking a Nobel Peace Prize winner to carry out Brain Neurosurgery!.
bush (Score:2, Insightful)
didn't stop bush....
Re:The Importance of the Minds of a General Popula (Score:3, Insightful)
See point #2. Hitler enjoyed widespread and overwhelming support. If you'd been reading an Internet forum discussion at the time it would have been full of people talking about reasons why you should help vote Hitler in.
I agree he still would have been elected.
However his support might have evaporated when news and photos and video of what he was actually doing in a lot of places after things got rolling were communicated to those people. He might not have gotten nearly as far as he did.
There are lots that say it could never happen in america because the military would never follow those orders. But the reality is, you could separate the military into the groups that would and the groups that wouldn't, and then deploy the groups that wouldn't of communication with home (helped by controlling the media), and then set the group that would to doing the atrocities you could get away with it. Hitler did just this.
The internet would have made it impossible for the portions of the military that wouldn't have gone along with it from being so completely out of the loop for so long. Even if you control the media, the truth still moves around on the internet.
Hitler would have had to censor / filter / and discredit it. It would have been an additional challenge at least; at best it might even have stopped him. But China is the obvious counter example.
Wow... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what about darfur? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just curious, but why would you want bigger countries coming into smaller countries and telling them who they can and can't kill?
"I wish America would stop trying to police the world" is not compatible with "I wish America would do something about African genocide."
Re:Bullshit. (Score:2, Insightful)
really? (Score:2, Insightful)
if Hitler had the technology we have today, maybe he would've conquered the whole world.
Re:what about darfur? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have always been able to isolate themselves with like-minded kin, in the forms of cults/religions, and in the education/brainwashing of their own children to raise people with similar ideology. If anything, a vulnerable individual participating in an online community is much less isolated than one participating in an actual cult, allowing them access to a wide range of information sources which will inevitably conflict with any ideology too far removed from common social norms. As a group tries to expand itself through online recruitment, they must ultimately advertise their ideology on more general interest sites, where they will have to compete with arguments from people with more socially acceptable views.
In any online forum where individuals interact, there is always a pressure to conform to social norms (in the sense of avoiding sociopathic tendencies that negatively impact other individuals, not necessarily any kind of moral judgment on socially acceptable behavior, the latter of which is widely open for discussion). On Slashdot, for example, any antisocial commentary is immediately moderated down to invisible comment purgatory (for those with default viewing prefs). The same holds true in most other forums as well, even in the case of those forums without peer moderation, as antisocial behavior is repudiated and/or ignored (if they don't get themselves banned). The pressure to avoid sociopathic ideology is very real, and almost completely ubiquitous on the web.
The way information spreads on the internet today is that individuals are determining which information appeals to them, and either passing it on directly to their social connections, or flagging it of interest on social news sites. Inevitably, information that is socially positive will spread much more readily than sociopathic information, which simply dies a quiet death of irrelevance. Most people outside of an ideologically homogenous group will simply not spread antisocial information, making it quickly fade away with counterarguments and resistance once one tries to spread it beyond that group. The fact that information fed to people on the internet must go through a populist filter to be widespread means that sociopathic ideology hardly stands a chance at mass-appeal. Increasingly, only a secular humanist agenda has any chance of making it to the mainstream through internet information distribution. There will always be small groups of gullible or brainwashed outliers, but they will always be just that, and popular sentiment will inevitably be against them. In the context of the article, in reference to an entire society adopting a sociopathic ideology, I would argue that the decentralized nature of information distribution on the internet, dependent on populist appeal, is absolutely a very strong check against widespread antisocial ideology.
Re:wha? (Score:3, Insightful)
I strongly agree with your post, other than to say that it's still possible to be isolated on the internet. Closed groups and forums with selective membership can still be a breeding ground for antisocial tendencies. They can slowly absorb people with like minds, while simultaneously rejecting those people who may offer counter arguments to their ideals.
I do agree that the internet does make this harder to achieve than, say, compared to the environment of early 20th century Germany.
WWIII (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ubiquitous encryption and darknets are gonna make this effect even more pronounced. Insular groups will be able to get more insular, requiring closed circuits of credentials and so on.
But likewise, their grip on their own members must weaken; In 1939, a German youth who doubted what he was being taught, would know better than to ask the important questions or search for validation for his misgivings. But if he were able to talk anonymously and securely on /b/ with some proxies Yer durn tootin' the opposition would have new and powerful ways to associate.
I guess I'm saying you got the nail on the head.
Re:what about darfur? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just curious, but why would you want bigger countries coming into smaller countries and telling them who they can and can't kill?
Throwing my best wild guess out there: concern for innocent people getting killed?