Like all bullies, Nazis felt THEY were the ones who had been wronged. All the violence they inflicted on the Jews and on Europe generally was not proactive aggression in their eyes, but reactive retribution. They believed that THEY had been wronged by the Jews, that the Jews were secret oppressors of Das Deutsches Volk, and that far from simply attacking them at random and for no reason, that they were simply righting a wrong, rectifying an injustice, just giving them what they deserved.
Critical Race Theory is no different in this respect. What its proponents WANT to do is punish innocent people because of crimes they did not commit.
I say again: CRT is Nazism by another name. Same mobs in the streets, same irrational and mouth frothing violence, same demonization and radical polarization, same inability to see their chosen enemies as the ordinary, fallible, and mostly but not invariably reasonable people they are.
I will append the comment that even when Hitler was speaking of Lebensraum, the latent assumption, and certainly feeling, was that the rest of Europe had encroached on them, was crowding their space, confining and constricting them, and that it was both their natural right and even DUTY to stop this aggressive bullying by the rest of the world.
Here is the thing: if you do not do your emotional work, you are a fucking imbecile. And if you happen to be a highly intelligent imbecile, then you are dangerous to everything good. Such was the case with everyone of whom I am aware in the Frankfurt School, and such is the case with anyone CAPABLE of taking their BS seriously today.
I will not say everything they wrote was stupid. Some of their critiques of modernity were on point. Some specifically Marxist critiques have some validity. But to diagnose a problem is very different than proposing an intelligent and likely effective solution.
As I have said often, such “thinkers” are what I call Thought Aesthetes: they love painting in their minds, and really don’t give a shit if any of it does any good in the actually existing world. The process of painting–which involves a lot of discussing, and not infrequently being idolized, as Theodore Adorno, as one example, seemingly was in California (I am not widely read here, but this is my superficial impression)–is the whole aim. The aim is the words.
And for anyone who criticizes such a solipsistic and at best useless enterprise, more words, OBVIOUSLY, are the answer. Not effectiveness: dear God, not that.
Never forget that Sartre hated engineers more than nearly anyone. I think he hated them more than the bourgeoisie as a class. That is what I recall reading. What could be worse than a practical outlook, and the capacity to create things that work in the real world? How could that but remind the useless of their uselessness? Add vanity to the useless thinker, and “make something work” is fighting words