TV Producer. Florida transplant. Foodie. 🥖

I don’t understand why we give a symbol so much power over us

Kanye is not a nazi

He is interested in why it makes everyone so angry

Why is Kanye releasing music praising hitler and producing clothing with hate symbols?

His art is about reactionary culture. He’s saying “look at how angry these people get at a symbol they have no real world experience with, look at how easily they call a black American racist for pointing at it”

Look at how mad we are, people who have never met a real nazi

Where is the line where he crosses over into being a reckless provocateur?

There's a lot of trauma around this matter, and poking a finger in it and calling it art feels deeply insensitive

IMO, art is a tool for emotional catharsis. I think his recent "art" is net bad because it doesn't promote healing

friendly neighborhood shitcaster // working on @pinetree

There is no line for a man who feels like society hates him

Rationalizing a man's insecurities as justification for poor behavior is bad logic

By that logic, you justify both Kanye and Hitler lol

Kanye and Hitler are both reflections of the societies they emerged from, and one of my biggest criticisms here is that we vilify a man instead of understanding how he came to his points.

In Nazism, the empathy should not lead to loving Nazis, but truly hating the whole imperialist mindset of the 1900s that would justify rightfully taking someone else’s home (liebenstraube) and thinking an entire race of people is inferior / superior.

In Kanye’s case, the culture turned him into a villain long before the Nazi arc. People got mad at him at first for questioning the 14th ammendment which outlawed slavery but made prison labor legal, leading to the mass imprisonment of blacks in America.

His point was missed, it was just “Kanye hated abolition”.

And from there it was “ye is mentally ill, ye is an edgelord” and his right to influence the culture with his art is revoked.

Thats why he got into Nazism— he was pushed out by people who didn’t understand his message.

I appreciate your thoughtful response

It reminds me of that proverb: "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth"

Kanye is that child, but I don't think the message here is to embrace his propagating his hurt forward -- it's to help him heal and bring him back into the fold

I take your point that he's lashing out, but that doesn't mean we need to normalize symbols of hate

Separately -- I made a post dunking on you, but after seeing your response, I deleted it. I gave in to my instincts to shame rather than going back-and-forth with you here, so you do have a point that the culture is too quick to villainize (often for something as useless as internet points)

I don’t think people are hurt by a swastika, no, I think that is cultural conditioning. We’ve been taught to be mad. And so we aren’t allowed to talk about it, look into it, see how Germany not only got there but felt justified in their imperialist ambitions. Even historians speaking plainly get squelched.

I think about the Congolese hand trade. I think about the Armenian genocide. I think about what our own government and military did to suppose the united fruit company. I see endless horror and suffering throughout history. I read a lot of Wikipedia.

And there are many hitters. They didn’t have television and radio or a goebbels PR wiz, but everything else was the same. The vilifying of another group, the entitlement, the superiority myth.

So why is everyone so mad? Systemically, it *is* conditioning. It is not truth, because the truth is far darker and more mundane, that humans are very capable of evil.

But even saying “your society told you to say that” pisses people off, even if true.

I think you’re missing everyone’s point as well, which is that you’re rationalizing away hurt by saying a misunderstood man can appropriate symbols as he wishes

Yes my point is that he is autistic and feels like a rejected outsider

His line in his heil Hitler song is literally “they don’t know how I’m feeling so I say I’m a Nazi so they can make me the villain”

I’m not defending Nazism, everyone here is proving my point to a T