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When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?
Darryl Cooper, host of the widely acclaimed Martyr Made podcast, recently did a 2+ hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Darryl Cooper is known for two things. One: being meticulously empathetic with regards to the plight of the disaffected groups that are the subject of his 30-hour long history podcasts, bringing out the vivid details that form the background milieu for poorly-understood events like Jonestown. And two: his unhinged Twitter takes.
As one can imagine, jimmies were rustled. The most common line of attack was “Tucker Carlson platforms Nazi apologetics.” In a literal sense this is true. Cooper gives the German perspective on Winston Churchill. One might make the obvious point that Germany started the war by invading Poland, but the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. Yet the Western allies did not declare war on Stalin. This AskHistorians thread (no haven for Nazi apologetics!) is enlightening. What masqueraded as a mutual defense treaty was actually an anti-German treaty. Britain really was out to get them.
Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I. Post-hoc rationalizations are just that, post-hoc. It certainly isn’t irrelevant when studying World War II that the holocaust happened, but that isn’t part of the causal chain of events the way many seem to believe.
I want to emphasize that I personally like Anglo-American hegemony. Churchill’s aggressive stance towards Germany is good for me and for the vast majority of the people reading this, but in order to understand history (or current events for that matter) one has to understand the people who do not like Anglo-American hegemony. I do not know where on the doll Anglo imperialism touched him, but I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.
Sorry, but what Anglo hegemony existed in continental Europe before WW1? To my knowledge, there were few if any British or US troops stationed on the continent at that time. Neither the US nor the Brits were in a position to push France or Spain or Germany or Austria or Italy or Switzerland around by threat of overwhelming violence.
As any player of Paradox games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis knows, if you allow your regional rival to absorb smaller countries until they control a large empire, this will be very detrimental to your future security interests. The British generally have a strategic interest against an Europe which is militarily united from Lisbon to St. Petersburg (at least unless they are part of that military union).
The regional power most likely to achieve conquering huge parts of Europe was Germany. So it makes sense that they opposed anything which would see Germany getting stronger, such as allowing them to defeat France and extending their territory.
Especially in WW2, their security interests and international law happened to align, as Hitler was not uniting Europe by charming the Polish into voting for him, but by outright conquest and annexation.
By contrast, the USSR was a lesser threat to British security interests in 1939. Sure, if it conquered all of Europe to Calais, that would be a problem for them, but the USSR was not in a position to just steam roll over Germany, and the ideological differences between Stalin and Hitler (with the Nazis considering the Slavs Untermenschen, and the Soviets considering the Nazis evil capitalists) made a long term joint military effort unlikely.
Of course, once Germany was soundly defeated, the geostrategic landscape changed, and the two blocks emerged. This is the point where I would assert an Anglo hegemony over Western Europe.
It should also be noted that Germany was not especially threatened in 1939. Of the regional powers, neither the Brits nor the French nor the Polish had any plans to jointly attack Germany and annex parts of it -- they had gotten their territorial claims in 1918. The USSR was perhaps a different story. A risk-adverse German leader might have co-founded NATO in 1935 to secure their future security interests against potential USSR expansions.
But Hitler was not content with Germany not being the strongest player, so he opted to conquer Europe instead.
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Nuanced opinions like Martyrmade are always appropriate. Conversely people slandering him should be subject to pressure against their speech, or outright restricting their rule violating behavior based on the setting it happens and people disagreeing him without trying to label it nazi apologia, or being angry, but happy for him to have his views, are welcome.
In general these idiotic taboos must be made themselves taboos. It must be taboo for people to be intolerant of deviations from Hitler maximally evil, Churchil, FDR, Stalin, did nothing wrong, and that WW2 was unavoidable. People enforcing them by trying to cancel others must face cancel culture and are greatly harmful to our culture.
I am in favor of just people in moderated discussions at least temporarilly banned from "fuck you", "nazi, or more sneaky ways to attack his character in that light. And in general there should be a norm in media and in society against this kind of reaction towards people exploring such issues.
We need to enforce a minimum level of respect towards people deviating from immoral demands for black and white maximalism. Rather than them being subject to excessive rhetorical reaction, or cancel culture.
Obviously Martyrmade is right that WW2 is used to promote warmongering todays, far left agenda, and an anti right wing and anti european prejudice.
In general, the maximalist narrative for black american slavery, WW2 narratives, is part of a general black vs white, erroneous maximalist narrative. The very idea that it is sacred for people to have only one excessive view, is ridiculous, and part of weaponized history. It is directly related to the cultural far left excesses of today.
The antifa fanatics are damaging our societies while people like Martyrmade are trying to fix those problems and counter their damage, even with his own culpability of errors.
A synthesis of views from debate between people like Martyrmade and people who share his preference against both nazism and antifa types, who have some disagreements on areas he might get wrong, would be a way for a productive way this issue to be handled, that includes an opposite side.
The "fuck you nazi apologist" types (both saying it overly or sufficiently pushing in that direction with more polite language) have nothing of value to say and we would be better off if they stayed silent. And the people who talk about how they love the german deaths in dresden, and in general all the suffering of Germans, support Palestinian, Iranian, Russians today to die, supported Hiroshima bombings, supported the death of southerners in USA and for more of them to have died in the 19th century, support the destruction of right wingers, support authoritarian imprisonment of both them and of non self hating Europeans, support the extinction of Europeans, have a very monstrous ideology, and these kind of people we genuinely shouldn't allow them to use WW2, slavery, holocaust, colonialism, as weapons. They represent an evil, which actually shares part of what has been pathological among nazis in the way nazis are presented. In my own view there is a propaganda and fog of war but the nazis did do sufficient atrocities, and acted in a sufficiently murderous imperialist manner against other nations to deserve a negative reputation.
Even though other bad guys factions have used them in their propaganda overly, as a means of justifying their own immoral agenda. Still, as far as Europeans are concerned, the antifa faction is more hostile and destructive to it than the Nazis were. And more justifiable to suppress it than neonazis a million times over, considering the damage it is doing and its destructive nature and ideology.
Of course, I don't think our culture would be great if instead of one set of immoral reaction that is today too pervasive, the dominant narrative was a different one, and it was of Hitler fanboys. The antifa types genuinely have always been bad guys, including in the time the nazis were active, both the antifa far leftists and nazis held immoral ideologies. There is a better alternative to both and Martyrmade is part of that better alternative.
Kudos to Martyrmade/Darryl Cooper for his courage. Although I disagree with him on some aspects. I think it is true that Churchil wanted the war, and pushed for it, I am not sure I buy the willingness of Hitler to take back conquests for peace after the invasion of Poland if I got my timing right. x So on some of his points he might have overreached while promoting valid points that people don't want to hear elsewhere. But in any case, I don't really care about such details, the WW2 taboo and the antifa narrative is the problem. In general Martyrmade is pushing in the right direction and doing so while knowing he will get slander thrown at him. His courage and willingness to do this is praiseworthy. The world needs more courageous and sensible people like Darryl. He is a good man.
As for the antifa ideology, this is an ideology which justifies by distorting and enforcing an one sided narrative of history a lot of evil and unreasonable stuff, including the persecution of dissenters from that. One of the most notorious, well in addition the current program of destroying and persecuting the native people of Europe, includes what this movement did in previous decades. Putting German children in the homes of pedophiles while claiming that not doing so would lead to a new holocaust.
This applies to slavery of blacks as well. In the past like in WW2 until more recently, there was more debate. But the people claiming slavery of American blacks was the worst type of slavery ever succeeded in cancelling people with more nuanced views. Helen Andrews argued that this was an erroneous narrative, but in general it is in service of the woke progressive stack agenda. And part and parcel of various frauds that it is less taboo to question, that are now encouraged, that Andrews did expose such as the lies on the Congo, or the Indian mass graves hoax in Canada. For if maximalist narratives are unquestionable, it will encourage as it has other blood libel accusations that must be unquestionable.
In conclusion, respecting dissenters and even favoring nuanced peoples while disrespecting maximalist fanatics is a good thing. We genuinely actually need to gatekeep against the personalities whose reaction is to be more hateful towards southern people today over 19th century grievances, or Germans, or whoever, than many people that lived the events nearer that times had more timid reaction. The idea that maximalism serves stop a genuine neoconfederate, neonazi threat, is preposterous. It serves an evil antifa faction agenda and a foreign nationalist agenda, and of hatred against groups I mentioned and of a supremacist agenda that weaponizes a black and white narrative to promote a caste system.
People need to be deradicalized and to get over their immoral grievances. I wonder if in another 80 years, people will be weaponizing WW2, slavery, colonialism, the holocaust the same. Hopefully we manage to put an end to it and move on. There were never an ideal level of discourse, with antifa type organizations like ADL active and influential but discussion was actually more open on several of these issues in the past and it is in near decades that the maximalist antifa types have managed to become more dominant and to pass their hate speech laws and enforce their cancel culture, to the world's detriment. And especially to the detriment of the people under such regimes. Culture can change to a healthier level again by removing hate speech laws, promoting the right voices, instead of cancelling them, while disrespecting the antifa ideologues.
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Maybe not right before an election, when your preferred VP candidate publicly follows you.
Given that the upshot of his WWII reading seems to be an anti-Zionist political argument in the current day, I'm not sure he has a real preferred candidate.
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They way the discussion went was that Tucker asked Darryl what he is working on, Darryl responded that he is working on WW2 and the rest is history. To me it is insane to just lie about basic facts of your life just because it is an election year. But it is a good form of projection of how other people think.
Yeah I get more Kantian by the day if only because it takes too many freakin clock cycles to manage all the noble lies
What does this mean?
Kant opposed lying under any circumstances.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_Supposed_Right_to_Tell_Lies_from_Benevolent_Motives
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Immanuel Kant was a philosopher that argued that lying was impermissible in any situation, even one where the lie produced a morally good outcome.
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From Astral Codex Ten:
I'm not sure if you're wrong, but I'm leery of the idea that famous people restrict your actions (and/or reduce your rights) just by looking at you.
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(I'm responding in general to this whole subthread.)
Right wing X.com, where I personally think all of the action is in this arena, isn't really a huge fan of MartyrMade, and him being featured on Tucker's show post-FOX isn't really surprising considering the guests he's had on in the past. A while ago there was a dust-up between MartyrMade and influential anons over the issue of immigration. IIRC, MM is against the pursuit of mass deportation because it's unlikely to work or, reading between the lines, because he doesn't want it to happen, or is morally opposed to it. This didn't go over well at all and no one really talks about him in a good way, but not many people talk about him at all. I don't think his podcast has a lot of purchase in the sphere, and his buddy Jocko "GOOD" Willink is a meme in himself too. All this to say: I don't think anyone with any real influence in the dissident sphere is friends with or even appreciates this guy in any way.
I mention Tucker being post-FOX because, for a while, Tucker was viewed with some respect in the dissident sphere. He was seen as "one of us." Since his departure it's become clear that he is mostly just a talking head, and it was more likely one or more of his producers were closely monitoring dissident Twitter and echoing their themes on the show. So, this is to say: MM's appearance on Tucker at this point in his career isn't indicative of some sort of acceptance of MM by RW dissidents, and it wouldn't have happened on FOX.
“Influential anons.”
How does that work?
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Speaking of mainstream right producers/writers having their ear to the disident right online, I have to admit the absolute Zenith of keks for me was when Trump gave the Inauguration speech with the Bane posting right in there.
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I don't think people are commenting on mainstream media's acceptance of heterodox history so much as what topics it is materially possible to discuss on the public square and expose the public to.
It wouldn't have happened on Fox, but that's not where the gravity center of American right wing discourse is anymore.
Or at least it doesn't seem to be. I'd like a second opinion on that. My impression is that Tucker is still very popular among right wing normies and who he talks to is notable. But I may be wrong.
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I have an effortpost somewhere in my notebook brewing, ever since I finished Tooze's Wages of Destruction on the topic of all the different frames that one can use to examine WWII in Europe. There are at least seven framings I can think of that I can make a full argument out of, and completely justify the beginning of the war. WWII was, in some ways, vastly overdetermined.
WWII was primarily a replay of WWI with a little shuffling around the edges. The core conflict was once again Germany-Austria-Hungary vs England/France/Russia/USA, with Italy going from a liability for Britain to a liability for Germany and Japan getting involved. This was known even before the war started, Ferdinand Foch famously called the treaty of Versailles a twenty year ceasefire as it was signed. The flow of conflict runs directly through Versailles, much of Germany's chaos and depression resulted from the aftermath of WWI, and the conflicts with the western Allies began with conflicts over reparations and the removal of formerly German territory into creations of Versailles like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
WWII was primarily a result of the early Cold War, a symptom of the struggle between Communism and Capitalism, which began before WWII and continued after; Hitler is best understood as a Golem figure, built by both Communists and Capitalists to protect against the Other, only to turn on each in their turn. The Cold War didn't start in 1945 Berlin, it started in 1917 at the latest. The first Red Scares in the US and the rest of the West happened long before Hitler rose to power. Hitler could not have achieved what he achieved, could not have been half as destructive as he was, without the support he garnered from both sides of the Cold War. Without Stalin's material support in the years between Molotov-Ribbentrop and Barbarossa, Hitler never could have achieved the Blitzkrieg victories in the West. Stalin and his crew were ideological Leninists, and believed in the science of history, that Capitalist imperialist powers must go to war, they can't help it, the competition over economic markets is too powerful a motive. Threatened by the capitalist western powers, Stalin supported And the western Allies significantly aided the rise of fascism diplomatically, seeing it as a counter to Communist revolutionary fervor in Germany, Spain, and Italy; believing that Hitler would naturally fight the Communists because, you know, he kept saying he was going to fight Bolshevism and invade Russia.
WWII was primarily an economic conflict. Germany could not sustain its economy without the resources it did not have access to within its own territory, and England and France were constantly threatening to cut Germany off. Germany had to go to war to secure economic resources to support its economy, and England had to go to war to defend its economic predominance. Balance of payments tells us more about the leadup to the war than any amount of studying battlefield choices.
WWII was a "don't be racist" contest with golf scoring, and Germany and Japan lost. It's very difficult to look at many of the decisions that were made by conquering German and Japanese armies in the first phases of WWII, and not think to oneself that if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit, maybe they could have gotten some of their conquered peoples to buy into the project a little bit, and then they would have won the war quite easily. Japan stormed into Southeast Asia after Pearl Harbor, and they threw out the hated white colonial governments, and then instantly proceeded to behave so much worse that many of the freedom fighters who had been fighting against the European colonial overlords flipped to working with the European colonial overlords. The Japanese could have been recruiting Vietnamese auxilaries to fight against the British and Americans, instead they were unable to exploit Indochina to its greatest extent because of local resistance. If the Nazis had aligned with the Banderites at the start of the war, instead of imprisoning Bandera for most of the war before springing him near the end of the war in a last desperate shot; if the Nazis had aligned with Poland to invade Russia together instead of destroying Poland; if the Nazis had at least made vaguely credible motions in the direction of a future Free Russian state rather than making their exterminationist intent obvious; if the Nazis had utilized their Jewish population properly instead of destroying them in a tremendous waste of human capital. The British Empire and the United States were racist governments at the time, but they were less racist than their enemies and that was enough. Stalin killed millions of Jews, too, but he didn't make explicit his intent to exterminate the populations his armies sought to subdue, putting their backs to the wall. The only way to square the circle is to assume that Hitler actually did believe all that racial superiority stuff, otherwise his actions are inexplicably illogical.
And so on and so forth.
It is possible to draw so many different framings for WWII, that are all perfectly cohesive, and are perfectly adequate explanations for why the war took place. And part of the upshot of this is that the guilt for the war is overdetermined. It's possible to say everyone is at fault. The British are at fault and Stalin is at fault and the Germans are at fault. It was the inevitable result of the avarice of Clemanceau at Versailles, and it was the contingent result of decisions made regarding Czechoslovakia and Poland. There's a ton of different ways to slice it up, but the nature of guilt for the deaths of millions is that they can all slice up a share of guilt that is more than enough for one lifetime.
That all being said, while I love some of Daryl's, he's long been pushing credibility with increasingly edgy contrarian takes, and when you play the oh my aren't I an edgy boy game, it's dangerous to dance this close to power. Tucker Carlson was reported to have significant influence, it is a reasonable attack surface to look at who he has on his show. Daryl himself has been retweeted by JD Vance. These aren't random folks engaging in a touch of edgy trolling on the motte or 4chan, of course this bullshit is going to stir up a kerfuffle. Kulak has not, yet, been a Twitter Main Character for his pas-de-deux with Hitler apologism, because he hasn't yet presented a valid attack surface against mainstream right wing politicians.
I mean, AFAICS you need all of:
On the Japanese side... again, the land stuff is kind of a sideshow. Indeed, the Japanese actually were doing pretty well on land the whole time, at least until the last few days when the Soviets invaded Manchuria. And none of the places they conquered really had the industry to contribute to the sea/air fight out in the Pacific - at best, they could have reallocated manufacturing toward the sea theatre from a calmer land theatre.
Bear in mind that 1940s fission bombs were not all that powerful. They were devastating to Hiroshima because that was a densely packed city of thin wood and paper. The brick/cement buildings of Germany were actually pretty resistant to bombing, which was part of why the strategic bombing campaign never worked as well as the allies hoped. So it's plausible we could have gotten a 1984 style world where they are regularly getting hit by nuclear bombs, but people survive and life goes on.
The most plausible scenario i've seen is where Germany simply avoids declaring war on the USSR, and coordinates better with Japan to avoid provoking the US. Instead they focus on the Mediterranean and taking apart the British Empire. If they could take Malta, Gibralter, and the Suez, that would pretty much lock up the entire med, protecting their southern flank and forcing the British to reroute shipping around Africa. Then they offer to come "liberate" Iraq, Iran, and India, which were all sympathetic to the Axis. At that point it's no longer a "world" war, it's simply a war against the British being fought in the middle east, so there's no particular need for the US or USSR to get involved, and the logistics for the Uk become nightmarish. No need to invade Britain, you can just ignore them, or build up a huge fleet of next-gen type XXI submarines to strangle them.
The problem there is the Japanese oil crunch. With Britain, the Netherlands and the USA all embargoing Japan and guaranteeing each other's colonies, there weren't really a lot of good options for the Japanese. Also, Roosevelt wanted a war and was already giving substantial aid to the British; while Pearl Harbour certainly made things much easier for him, it's not certain that Roosevelt couldn't have dragged the USA in anyway.
(As it actually happened, of course, Hitler was high on meth and wanted to declare war on the USA, so what we're positing here is a saner Hitler as well as the Japanese listening to him.)
Avoiding invading Russia, yeah, that could be done.
If. Historians are split on whether the logistics could be stretched far enough to let Rommel reach the Suez, even with ~unlimited troops due to no Barbarossa.
Not as powerful, no (although hollow pits were considered at Manhattan, just not deployed by war's end). They're not "city off the map" unless the city is made of paper. But they're a hell of a lot more effective than TNT and once the production line had spun up the losses would become unacceptable.
Well, the oil they wanted was in the Dutch east indies, not the American Phillippines. So they could have just gone for that without attacking the USA. I do agree that the US would have likely gotten involved eventually, but just delaying that a bit could have made a difference. Notably, it was Germany that declared war on the US, not the other way around- Hitler wanted to show support for his new ally.
Well, there's no way to know for sure of course. But Malta is a small island. In 1940 it was defended by a grand total of 3 biplanes. So if the Italians had gone for it they probably could have taken it. Or Germany could have taken it in 1942 with greater numbers. Then with Malta gone, Axis shipping in the Meditteranean becomes much safer. Plus with no Barbarossa they'd have the entire air force at their disposal for support, and could focus more resources on building ships, so logistics overall would be better. There's also the option to go after Turkey and/or Spain, opening another land route.
I'm not trying to see this would be easy or guaranteed. But I do think it was possible.
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I have some problems with that statement.
In the subtext, one of the defining features of the Golem is that it is a Jewish creation. If you want to imply that Hitler's rise was the result of him being backed by Jewish interests, please state so outright. Otherwise, a better metaphor might be 'a demon summoned' than 'a golem built'.
Before his rise to power, Hitler was definitely backed by German industrialists. They could see the specter of communism looming, and were seeing Hitler as the strong man who could defeat communism. Industrialists (at least the ones considered proper Germans by the Nazis) mostly fared much better under the Nazis than they would have under communist rule, especially once the anti-capitalist SA was out of the picture. (I guess they had more influence in the Weimar Republic, where they could not be arrested on a whim, but mostly they got to keep their riches as long as they were willing to build tanks when ordered.)
I am unsure how much international backing there was for Hitler in the Weimar time, outside of German expats. I mean, on the one hand he was likely seen as necessary against the commie threat, on the other hand the Western allies had fought a long and bloody war against an expansionist Germany.
Before Hitler became chancellor, communists were strictly anti-Nazi. While united in their disgust at parliamentary democracy, they both had very different and incompatible revolutions in mind for Germany, and both knew that the other side winning would result in their side getting purged and losing.
By contrast, in 1939, Stalin knew that a commie revolution in Germany was not in the cards. It is true that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he gave a ton of resource aid to Germany which enabled the Blitzkrieg. I am unsure how militarily sound that was as a strategy, in hindsight. I have a hard time imagining Western Allies to decide to enter a land war with Russia to rid the world of communism, so Hitlers defeat of France likely bought the USSR no security.
I am not sure if Nazi Germany ever got significant aid from the Western allies between 33 and 39. At the most, I think that the obligations under the Versailles treaty were not imposed, and he was allowed to amass troops about that treaties limitations.
Of course, both Western allies and the USSR were not in a position to fight a war against Germany in 1933, so Appeasement might have been the best strategy. As the old adage goes, diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice dog' while looking for a bigger stick.
This is true, but Marxists overstate its importance for obvious reasons, and this rubs off on normies who read textbooks written by people who read academic papers by Marxist historians. Germany was not a bourgeoisie-ruled society before WW1 - the Kaiserreich had a functional warrior-aristocracy of men who had von in their names, lived off inherited landed wealth, spent their youths as army officers, and if successful would move into the General Staff, politics or both. The pro-regime middle-class was what we would now call the PMC of civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, Lutheran priests* etc. This PMC group plus rural voters were the base of the DNVP, which was the main right-wing party in the early Weimar Republic.
Hitler's key useful idiots were mostly aristocrats. von Papen had a classic aristocratic career of army followed by politics. von Schleicher and von Hindenberg were career generals. The others were PMC - Ludwig Kass (the Centre Party leader who convinced his party to vote for the Enabling Act) was a Catholic priest. You can argue about whether Hugenberg was PMC or an industrialist, but his background looks more PMC on balance - his father was a civil servant, he did a PhD in economics, worked as a civil servant for 17 years, worked as a salaried manager at Krupp's for 10 years (being made de facto CEO based on a personal intervention by the Kaiser), spent the money he made at Krupp's buying newspapers, and was a press baron by the time he became DNVP leader.
This is false. By 1928 the KPD reliably followed orders from Moscow, and whether Moscow wanted them to actually oppose the Nazis or not depended on the twists and turns of Stalin's foreign policy. During the critical period in 1932-3, Stalin was more worried about the democratic parties restoring a functional western-oriented Germany than he was about a Nazi takeover, so the KPD focussed on trying to take left-wing votes off the SPD and weakening the Weimar government by direct action (occasionally co-operating with Nazi SA or DNVP-aligned Stahlhelm to do so).
The KPD leadership had plans to flee to Moscow if it looked like they were losing. Most of them successfully got out, although party leader Ernst Thalmanm didn't.
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It wasn't a wise strategy, but Stalin did not expect France to fall as quickly as it did -- nobody did.
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While this is true, the biggest reason for Japanese lack of benefit from conquered territories was that it lost the naval war and so the merchant fleet wound up on the bottom of the sea, instead of moving war material(Japan, unlike Germany, didn’t really have a personnel shortage).
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The concept behind Operation Barbarossa hinged on the assumption that the Red Army can be decisively defeated before the autumn rainy season - that is, in a matter of weeks. In that context, it doesn't matter much if the average Ukrainian, Cossack, Chechen, Kalmyk etc. can be won over for the National Socialist cause or not. In the Pacific, the situation was the same i.e. that the US Navy was to be defeated decisively in short order according to Japanese planning (such as it was) so that the Americans have no other option but to sue for peace, because the US population won't want to fight another big war. The sentiments of the average Vietnamese, Filipino, Malay etc. don't matter one iota in that context. (Was there even any meaningful combat in WW2 in Indochina anyway? Between the Japanese and the Allies, that is?)
And that didn't work out, so in the second phase of the war not making the decision to throw away the military and productive value of Poland, the Ukraine, etc would have been really valuable, might have made all the difference. Germany perpetually faced piss-poor productivity from its foreign nationals in armaments factories, largely because they were treated so poorly. Slave labor is less productive than free labor, especially when the slaves are pretty sure they're to-be-executed. Much of Tooze's work covers how the "armaments miracle" was the result of easing (in certain cases) the racist brutality of the Nazi slave labor system. Improve German armaments manufacturing earlier, and it could be the difference.
My understanding is that the plan was to deal a blow to the US Navy that would leave it reeling, seize as much territory as possible to push the defensive ring far from the Japanese homeland as possible, then bleed the Americans for every mile on the way back to Japan, while utilizing the resources controlled as a result of the earlier conquests to fuel the Japanese war machine.
I'll admit my argument is more shaky here, as it is quite likely that once the US got into bombing range of Japan, and certainly once the atom bomb arrived, there was no likelihood of Japanese victory. The possibility of inflicting damage on Japan itself without penetrating the entire defensive front obviates some of the value of the extended defensive ring.
Nevertheless, I'd still argue that significant Japanese resources were wasted on efforts that would not have needed to be made if they had chosen differently.
This raises some questions: when was the most recent time a conqueror seriously benefited from free labor?
My first thought was Alsace-Lorraine. But apparently the economic richness is hindsight bias; Germany originally took it on nationalist and military planning grounds. France took it back for similar reasons. I assume Hitler was eager to tap its manpower and natural resources, but I couldn’t confirm what was actually extracted. Does Wages break down how many rifles, airframes, etc. were sourced from which territories?
Anyway, I think we have to go back further. Plenty of colonization had economic motives, but I’m reluctant to count cases where the free labor was all imported. Not sure about the later colonial banana republics, either. Maybe administrations like the Raj are a better fit.
My point is that free labor is hard to get. Back when the only income was feudal dues, maybe you could reasonably expect a ceded province to improve cash flow. But that was based on the unfree nature of serfdom and the limits of human capital. Add mobility, and your free labor becomes no labor. Raise complexity, and serf labor won’t get you a new airplane.
The states which won WWII benefited from free labor because they weren’t relying on conquered territory. As soon as you start conquering, I think all the good options are off the table.
Depends how we define "Conquest."
If we count the takeover and integration of territory regardless of violence, we'd be talking about Hong Kong going back to China, right?
Before that, we have South Vietnam conquered by North Vietnam, though they would have labeled that as liberation rather than conquest, and they did not benefit solely or immediately.
The USSR did not conquer most of the Eastern Bloc in the sense of integrating them into their territory, but they had effective control over their labor and benefitted from it, though you could also quibble with "free" under Communism.
This is why I think the idea of prc violently taking Taiwan is unlikely. They can't take TSMC, within a few years tsmc would be irrelevant, if it even survived the war. They must non violently absorb Taiwan to benefit.
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At the oldest possible candidate, the Japanese conquest of Korea. There’s almost certainly Soviet examples in the late forties or early fifties, as well, I just don’t know them.
As a borderline example in the 21st century, the junta in Myanmar had been making use of forced labor in territories conquered from the rebels to produce cash resources which financed the war machine.
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Does this not apply to both theatres of the war? The "if they had just relaxed their racial hierarchy stuff a liiiiiitle bit" hypothetical doesn't bring Einstein and his "Jewish physics" back to Germany.
I wonder what the modern left attitude would have been about the atomic bombing of Bremerhaven or whereever. On the one hand, if you see everything on an oppressor-oppressed axis then it's hard to get more oppressed than "lethally irradiated". On the other hand, literal non-metaphorical Nazis.
Who are white, and therefore not going to have that hint of "Well, the USA was only willing to be that callous out of racism". Which, mind, is a take I think is stupid, but I've seen it more often than you'd think.
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Large numbers of Soviet citizens, mostly Ukrainians, served in the German army as Hiwis. More fought in the SS. The official plan was to move the Russian people off the good land in Western Russia and resettle it with Germans, that necessitated a Free Russian State albeit with much less territory.
Assuming Germany won the war, they'd inevitably find that there just weren't enough Germans to populate the enormous swathes of land they conquered, even including their optimistic reclassifications of the Danes, Dutch and so on as German. This would probably necessitate moderation. The Allies moderated their post-war plans (to render a diminished Germany a deindustrialized wasteland), it's reasonable to assume that a post-war Germany would also moderate.
The Galician SS division wasn't formed until 1943, and the Ukrainian National Committee wasn't recognized as the government of Ukraine until two months before V-E Day. These were desperation moves made by a government already realizing they were on the ropes, compromises with ideology in the face of defeat. Stalingrad was a close fought battle, where a few extra divisions arriving at the right time would have made a difference.
This is to say nothing of the complete destruction of the Polish state.
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My take from Wages of Destruction was that the problem was more short-term. Between war production, the blockade, the bombings, and the linger effects of WW1 and the great depression (plus them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with), they were really struggling even to feed their own people. Conquering a bunch of farmland was one of those "yeah, in the long run this will help, but in the long run we're all dead" kind of things. There was so little food to go around, they had to make some hard decisions, and there was a certain cold logic to it. Full rations for the soldiers and key factory workers, half-rations for the civilians and prisoners from the people they liked, slim-to-nil rations for the people they didn't like. But OK, maybe they would have moderated in a hypothetical future where the war was over, the blockade was lifted, and there was plenty of food to go around.
Huh?
More horses than tractors
Do you actually think that counted as backwards and low-tech back then in the European continent?
Welll, what's the point of comparison? Compared to the UK and USA they were decidedly backwards. Compared to Russia and Eastern Europe they were more advanced. Compared to the rest of the continent... I don't know, that's a tough question. Probably not a huge difference, but France and the low countries might have been a bit more advanced since they weren't suffering from WW1 reparations. I know the Germans seized a lot of material from the occupation of those countries, which was absolutely critical for them to keep their war economy going.
At any rate, its important to keep in mind just how pre-modern this country was. It was not, for most average people, a country of cars driving through cities the way Nazi propaganda films made it look. It was a country of people living in rural farms, where they didn't have electricity or radios, and had to take a train to the nearest city if they wanted to watch a news reel.
If someone is basing their view of the German tech-level on propaganda and WWII Hollywood action films, I can see why you might want to correct that. But if you fight propaganda with propaganda, you're not going to end up with a more accurate picture of the world, you're going to snap right back around to something just as inaccurate, but from the other side. Like, yeah, people don't understand how pre-modern Germany was, but that's not because of anything specific to Germany, it's because they don't realize how pre-modern the world was at the time.
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Compared to Italy, Spain, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary? Very certainly not.
Not even Nazi propaganda films portray it as a country of average people in cars.
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Relatively speaking? Yes.
But Europe includes the Mediterranean region, Poland, the Balkans etc. as well.
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Exactly what it says on the tin.
Things like the tiger tank and various "wunderwaffe" get most of the attention but the Wehrmacht and the wider German economy was still very much a horse and mule drawn affair going into WWII and this significantly contributed to thier food shortages.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...
Sure, I can buy the Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector, to the detriment of civilians, but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense. Forget about the Wunderwaffen, tell me how the horses and mules produce, in terms of raw numbers, enough tanks, fighters, bombers, and their respective munitions, to conquer France, challenge Britain, and drive deep into the Soviet Union at the same time!
...and yet it was so. In 1938 there were an estimated 2.5 million operational motor vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors, locomotives, etc...) in Germany servicing a population of approximately 68 million. IOW a per capita rate of 0.036
Compare that to an estimated 30 million vehicles servicing a population of 130 million people (a per capita rate of 0.230) in the US.
"Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector" doesn't quite capture how heavily skewed it was, or just how hard it ended up screwing them.
Whats that old Napoleon quote? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
One of several reasons the Germans lost is that they put lots of time and energy into developing fancy toys and a comparatively little energy into developing the ability to produce them and keep them in the fight.
Then please step me through how these horses and mules built something to the tune of 100K aircraft - roughly the same number that the Brits did. Did the Germans use some Aryan über-mules, or were the Brits fake-industrialized as well?
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Yeah, the consensus(?) in this chain of comments appears to be bizarre.
It's true that the British and American land armies were fully mechanized in WW2, mainly because they were relatively small. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, wasn't. And yes, the peasantry was something like a quarter of the whole German population. But to conclude from that it was a backwards low-tech economy to begin with is really far-fetched.
The Toozian argument is that, before WWII, a large portion of the German economy remained focused on 'conventional' production, matters like textiles, farm labor, mining, etc, while more advanced or complicated technologies were either unavailable or made up smaller portions of the full sector. The Nazis were very much able to exploit this; despite often tragicomedic levels of incompetence, there were so many low-hanging fruit in a country with a lot of industrial technology but not anywhere near as much industrial economy that they could pick winners.
Tooze focuses a lot on textiles as one particular example: in 1933, the German textile industry was a vast part of both German labor force and total import balance sheet, but it was also not especially advanced or unusually automated by the standards of its time. Nazi policy squeezed the entire sector hard (Tooze has a chart showing nearly a 15% drop in total employment in the sector), and at the same time pushed the remainder toward more emphasis on synthetic fibers and final productions, mostly a side effect of their autarky policies.
Similarly, while agriculture was a massive portion of the German economy in 1933, with just over a quarter of the working populace, much of these people were just barely above sustenance farming on tiny parcels of land, while agricultural automation and electrification had stalled badly post-WWI. Germany had pioneered artificial nitric acid and ammonium nitrate during WWI (and the Haber process was a good part of how Germany had been able to fight as long as it did), but there was no German 'green revolution'; these technologies were focused almost entirely into the military, industrial, and transportation sectors.
((To its credit, this lack of focus on agricultural automation and efficient use of labor is probably why some local populaces in conquered territories were supposed to be useful after invasion... as, uh... 'not-quite-voluntary labor'. So not much credit.))
By 1938, the urban areas and military matters had been heavily revamped, but large sectors were basket cases, both urban and otherwise -- Tooze highlights the extent that rural agriculture was often overlooked in the buildup with a lengthy segue about Nazi ponderings to encourage farm labor that, after politics hit, turned into a counterproductive tax on the dairy farms somehow. And while Tooze doesn't focus on it, a lot of the Nazi policies emphasizing centralized control of the electricity infrastructure pushed toward urbanization and against agricultural automation.
((That said, I do think Tooze's argument overlooks the extent this was a choice. Tooze says:
But, to borrow from Hellsing Abridged, if you call heads, it matters what face the coin falls. The liberal fallacy about utilization of national resources not only ended up working in Mexico, it ended up working in no small part thanks to pre-Nazi German technology!))
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That's the thing, they didn't. They frequently outran their logistics, had an impossible time recovering damaged tanks, and almost never had enough of them in the first place.
The conquest of Poland resulted in a lot more casualties than normally acknowledged, and the invasion of France was a nearer-run thing than you'd expect. For the first few years of the war they managed to do wonders, but behind the propaganda reels of blitzkrieging tanks those early fights cost them a lot of their best infantry
This is all with the caveat that I barely even have a passing interest in history... but it's just not adding up.
You can tell me all about how they outran their logistics, and couldn't recover their tanks, but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case. Either all of them are, and the fight went the way it did, for as long as it did, because they were more or less evenly matched, or this portrayal is itself propaganda.
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so this is actually one of the really interesting parts of Wages of Destruction. It drives home the incredible degree to which Nazi Germany was this backwards economy pulling off a Potemkin village of industrialization. I'm recalling from memory but if i recall correctly
and finally not enough steel for everything. there's just not enough steel for construction, fortifications, tanks, airplanes, ships, & ammunition. Let alone the domestic economy. And so one of the central ideas in Wages of Destruction is that the Nazi state uses this scarcity of steel and turns it into a means of political control. Dolling out steel here and there to favour one industry/military faction over another.
The Nazi's take this total control and use it to focus everything into one area or another the result is visible, legible, & shocking. But it's going all out for short term sugar highs over and over again. And the underlying health of the economy is nowhere near that of the US, UK, or France. And it doesn't have the comparative scale of the capacity of the USSR.
I kinda have a problem with this. How do you do 6 years of basketcase "Potemkin industrialization", and proceed to whoop the ass of half of Europe?
That's a very reasonable question! The mainstream account focuses on the dangerous potential and near victory of the Nazi's. It also tends of overlook economics in favour of operational accounts of the war. With a further focus on the sexy attention getting offensives of 1939-41 (42 for some).
For reading I would combine Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction alongside Robert Citino's "Death of the Wehrmacht". The two compliment each other quite well. Death of the Wehrmacht deals with the military from the start up to 1942. His subsequent books The Wehrmacht Retreats for 1943 and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand are also engaging and accessible for average war nerd.
If you'd prefer the cliffnotes version here are some youtube video's for each.
Citino
Tooze
Tooze economics highlight the constraints the domestic economy puts on the war effort. How resource & industrial capacity constraints affected decision making. Citino's account emphasizes continuity with the old Prussia tradition and the concept of Bewegungskrieg (Maneuver Warfare) over the incoherent concept of Blitzkrieg (a journalistic invention). Citino's account also explains why Prussia developed such a tradition, namely on account of the comparative poverty of Prussia and the awful geographic situation it was placed in. To quote from the first source online i could find that summarizes it neater than I can
I'd ask you to consider it this way: Germany starts off by fighting a bunch of small doomed states. Victory over Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, & the Netherlands are not prestigious victories. They are assumptions. However the real impressive victory is over France and while this is an accomplishment it comes from a mix of French failure and German operational art. And it's an incredible upset that shocks the world!
But it does not come from a well calibrated economic engine developed by the Nazi's which overpowers the French in an attritional warfare contrasting each countries total industrial capacity. And the moment it becomes a match up between the other real players on the world stage, the UK, US, & USSR, the Nazi war economy simply isn't capable of handling the challenge.
also here's another great video by John Parshall of Shattered Sword fame comparing the Nazi tank production economics to that of the Soviet Union.
Parshall
flipping back through it there is a great slide that really highlights things. From 43 minutes in:
I would suggest that having one of your major tank facilities only able to crank out 2 tanks a day while fighting the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US might not be a sign that they had the best possible economic/industrial set up before the war.
I've been pointing to this link throughout this thread, that I lifted from Wikipedia for a quick sanity check. They seem, at first glance, roughly on par with Britain. Those are not basket-case numbers no matter which way you slice it, though obviously not enough to withstand the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US, and I still don't see how WWII even gets started on Potemkin industrialization, let alone gets as far as it did.
This whole thing feels like playing zoom/pan/crop with facts to paint a very specific picture.
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I'm aware of at least one thing on the his list that is 100% wrong. One reason the invasion of France was so successful was thst they DID do a great job inventing small high quality radios.
They were used extensivly by the military and by the civilians. I believe that right before the war there were more Volksempfänger radios in Germany than total radios in the rest of europe. France had almost none. There wasnt even a radio at French military headquarters! They needed to relay messages via motorcycle messengers because the first thing germans did was shoot out the phone lines with air power...
German radios were never particularly good, but unlike the Poles they actually had some, and unlike the French they trained thier regular troops in thier use.
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Yeah, I think I'm starting to see what's going on here. That point said "international market" so "ho hum, while it may be true that Germany had more radios than the rest of Europe put together, but other countries weren't buying German radios, so we weren't lying".
This is starting to get all the smell of "it's literally impossible to tame zebras" that Jared Diamond spawned.
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1, 2, and 3 are not all that different given the economics and politics of the.
Basically every wealthy country followed the same idea, of not just free-market capitalism, but imperalistic capitalism. The way to get rich was to conquer some 3rd countries, take their resources, and then sell them back manufactured goods at an inflated price. Then you use your high-tech manufacturing to dominate the world, forever.
Britain especially, but also France, Dutch, Belgium, and some others had all emerged as "winners" of the great imperialism game of the 19th century. They had nice little empires for themselves, and were raking in the cash. Germany, eastern Europe, Italy, and Japan were "losers"- potentially strong nations which had lost their chance to grab an empire and were now falling behind. Russia was sort of a weird case where it had a ton of land and resources but was still undeveloped and uncolonized, so it had the chance to either emerge as a great power in its own right or get colonized by someone else.
Once you're in that kind of system, there's an obvious dividing line for how the alliances would shake out. Britain et. al. wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism. Germany and the others still wanted to do capitlism, but rearrange the map a bit to grab some colonies for themselves. Russia wanted a whole different system where they could develop and be left alone. Nobody was thinking "let's just develop our service sector and leave the 3rd world alone in peace" because that just wasn't how people at the time thought, at all.
It's weird to say this about a country that very aggressively tried to invade almost everybody around itself.
The Soviet idea of empire wasn't a perfect analogue to English or French or Dutch imperialism... but it wasn't that far off either!
Fair point. It's easy to think of "the USSR" as being a singular country, but it really wasn't. It was the Russian Empire. So you could slide them into that side of "winners of the global imperialism game" alongside the English, French, Dutch, etc. But they were kind of different in that they didn't have any wealthy, 1st-world "core" to the country the way those other countries did.
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It probably won’t come as any surprise to those of you that know me, but this is where my sympathies for the new American right evaporate. I disagree with the object-level historical take, not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2, and Hitler’s cavalier takeover of numerous small neutral countries (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands) massively violated that important international norm.
More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
As a poster here (actually back on reddit, but same diff) once trenchantly observed, bigots can't help themselves. The reason people from the New Right keep getting caught out doing Nazi apologia is that the New Right is shot through with Nazi sympathizers. Maybe they're not champing at the bit for an expansionist totalitarian dictatorship, but they often think Mr. Hitler had some interesting ideas about the use of state violence to enforce racial/cultural purity and fight degeneracy.
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My question here is more: howcome an edgy journalist interviewing an edgier historian is enough to tar an entire political / intellectual movement, but academia gets to argue for pedophilia and family abolition, and high-ranking officials use their position to abolish the age limits on sex change procedures without anyone feeling like they have to answer for them?
Because the mainstream media is, by and large, willing to run interference for academia. It is equally willing to use its position to tar the right with one massive brush. You can argue right and wrong until you're blue in the face but the facts on the ground are that the American political left gets to push its whackjobs off to the side and the American political right doesn't.
So if you are a leading figure on the American political right, you really need to avoid giving the softest of fucking softball pitches to the mainstream media, because it will be used to discredit your entire movement. Professor Marx over at the political science department of Harvard doesn't have to make the same calculus.
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Tucker Carlson is probably the most prominent journalist on the entire American right. In terms of impact on the public imagination, this is broadly equivalent to Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper giving a softball interview to someone who says that Mao and Stalin were misunderstood heroes.
Looks at current, and several decades of, university protests, and the underlaying foundations thereof
And that would be surprising how? Stalin, Mao, the infamous Che tshirts- they are treated as, if not heroes per se, then respectable among a certain crowd in which Churchill is not. This has long been a source of disgust and confusion for me. I would fully expect either of them to behave much the same way as Tucker has here in that parallel situation.
This gives me a hilarious mental image of center-right college students ironically donning Che-style shirts featuring Churchill, FDR, or Eisenhower. Maybe even Patton as an edgy choice.
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I still don't understand why anyone has to answer for Tucker, but no one has to answer for these weird academics / officials. More people watch him? Ok, but academics are taken more seriously. Position tends to trump numbers from my experience.
Also, I seem to remember some politician defending Mao on British TV, and only irrelevant internet Chuds getting upset over it.
Strategically, it is a good outcome to have academics who are taken seriously on your side. Serious academics are influential, they have a job where they get to espouse weird and unpopular ideas to students and other academics, and many people won't bat an eye. A decade or two later their ideas may be an established academic tradition with a peer-reviewed journal. Media personality who starts espousing weird and unpopular ideas might become weird and unpopular, and taken less seriously. It is unfair. Winning often is, from loser's point of view.
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Haven't basic bitch normie-friendly Republicans been trying to do exactly this at least since the appearance of the Tea Party, over and over, appealing to supposedly present normie sentiments of civic nationalism and economic liberty?
Yes, but progressivism is able to pivot constantly between "that's not happening" and "that's good, actually" and get away with it, thanks to their control of "normie" institutions. If they do overreach, they just cool it down for a while and everyone forgets.
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It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness, in the sense of the nascent leviathan of the media-academic-activist IDpol-complex. I remember already by 2014 there was a growing unease among classically liberal academics at the massive and comparatively new cultural revolution that was being impressed on young people, but very few people on the American right recognised the threat until comparatively recently; and of course, even when they did, it was usually pretty cringey (think Jordan Peterson/Elon Musk interview).
I love how over the course of this forum's lifetime we went from criticizing conservatives for freaking out over "just a couple crazy kids on college campuses" to "being late to discover wokeness".
???
Peterson was screaming about this since 2017 or so, and was pretty wildly hip with young people to the point the entire mainstream media complex was having waking nightmares about him?
I think it's fairer to say that it took them this long to come up with any theory of the case or solution besides pointing and yelling about campuses being woke.
Everyone knew but conservative activists today like Rufo tend to take a very different tack than just complaining and hoping to win the cultural battle the way they perceived the wokes to have won it . Or appealing to "classical liberal" values and expecting the dam to hold.
That's now being done by left-wingers closer to the center like Haidt and Yascha Mounk. With a similar rate of success.
Haidt was on it pretty early on too, from what I remember, but yeah the classical liberalism thing is a bit of dead end, so I don't think he'll get anywhere.
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So what would a non-cringey but anti-woke moderate Republican narrative look like in your estimation?
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They weren't "late to discover wokeness" - they've been complaining about it - or its forebearers - since before I was born. They just were completely incapable of stopping it, for a variety of reasons that would probably take several large books to adequately address and provide supporting sources for. The TL;DR is that the circumstances of post-War America - chiefly, increasing technological and organization scale, along the mass suburbanization of America - meant that the Right largely couldn't articulate a real, workable answer to the rise of IdPol, because they believed in the conditions that would inevitably lead to its rise, and they didn't even know it. To paraphrase The Last Psychiatrist, the Right wanted to debate the conclusions ("schools should teach family values! the government should support traditional marriage!" etc.) but accepted all the premises, and the entire form of the argument (that we should have mass society that encourages hyperindividualism, that accepts it as given that kids are supposed to go to college far away and then have their own lives, etc.)
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The allegations that the Republican party is anti-intellectual are essentially correct, and one of the consequences of this is that they have a very limited perspective of expert institutions. Namely, an exterior view which tends to write off the whole edifice as a wretched hive of degenerate commies. The result is that the right is virtually always late to the party intellectually and their efforts to participate in the discourse are often pretty unimpressive (in this case, their constant efforts to equate the post-liberal bent of 'wokeness' with any sort of social liberalism mostly just delegitimized center-left left critics of the far left).
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The diplomatic history doesn't really bear this out, at least for WWII, given how many small nations were thrown into Stalin's lap before he even had to ask. A more accurate take, I think, would be that moral feelings, such as the "rights of small nations", end up being outraged when and only when a violation of such moral feelings is also a violation of the prevailing international order. Moral feelings towards small nations act as a defense of geopolitical order, and are stirred up more by threat than by empathy. Hitler was violating the international order more gravely than Stalin in the run-up to war, by taking more critical states in a more flagrant manner, and by 1945 there was no international order at all save for what the Allies were constructing. This theory also has the benefit of continuity to the present day.
The revisionist take errs in a more simple way, by ascribing to malice what was actually incompetence.
"Rights of small nations" overlaps strongly with "Don't bitchslap the British Empire and expect no response" in practice.
British grand strategy between the end of the Anglo-Dutch wars in 1668 and the Brexit referendum in 2016* was built around preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power in Continental Europe. Putting a neutral Belgium slap bang in the middle of the most convenient invasion route between France and Germany was part of that - it prevents either side converting a temporary force advantage into a Sedan-tier victory by successful maneuver warfare. So from a British perspective the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality wasn't just a "scrap of paper" - it was core to British policy in the same way that the current "rules-based" international order is to US policy. Accordingly, violating Belgian neutrality without asking the British nicely suggests that the Germans don't take Britain seriously as a Great Power able and willing to defend its interests, and was therefore perceived by the part of the British establishment that didn't already favour a full defensive alliance with France as a bitchslap, and produced (largely without thought on the British side) an appropriately robust response.
The bitchslap in WW2 is even more blatant. At Munich, Hitler tells Chamberlain that Nazi grand strategy is about reversing Versailles, and that the Sudetenland is the last major territorial adjustment needed to complete this project**. Germany signs a treaty explicitly guaranteeing the borders of rump Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain sells Munich to the British people on the basis that it is "Peace in Our Time". When Hitler invades the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later, he is basically saying to Chamberlain and the British voter "I have altered our agreement. Pray that I do not alter it further." This goes down differently when it is said by the Empire vs when it is said to the Empire by a short Austrian corporal with one ball. Both AJP Taylor and Orwell (in The Lion and the Unicorn) agree that the resulting British policy was a largely unthinking response to being bitchslapped.
* This is one of the reasons why I agree with this blog post suggesting that the core supporters of Brexit were assuming the EU would collapse following the withdrawal of the British net budgetary contribution - I'm pretty certain that not even the Brexiteers saw the UK facing a united, hostile Europe as a good outcome.
** This is more plausible than the modern schoolboy version of history says it is - AJP Taylor in the serious-but-moderately-heterodox Origins of the Second World War points out that Hitler had plans for a second Munich-style deal to avoid an attack on Poland, and had it worked he was not expecting to grab any Polish territory - just to annex Danzig (which was a majority-German city under League of Nations administration, where the local Nazis dominated local elections) and get better transit terms for German rail freight crossing Polish territory between contiguous Germany and East Prussia.
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Were these any more objectionable than the Allies’ invasion and occupation of the small neutral countries of Iceland, Iraq, and Iran?
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Signalling incentives exist on the right as well as the left - being the edgiest and most daring in your online bubble is more immediately appealing than going for any kind of mass appeal. Better to be captain of a small boat than a junior technician in a flotilla.
I don't really have a strong take on Darryl Cooper, whom I'd never heard of prior to this post, but certainly I think Tucker Carlson makes more sense if you interpret him as basically uninterested in winning elections or in getting public policy done. Being king of his own small mountain is more lucrative, and probably more emotionally satisfying as well.
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I guess I'm finally no longer able to see both of the"two movies on one screen." That doesn't seem unhinged to me at all. Slighty provocative (only slightly because "nazi" has been abused so much that it stings about as much as "commie") but to me fairly obviously true. Jew-hunting was likely transitory and once the exigencies of war vanished would very likely have disappeared*, while the near complete destruction of the family and basic relations the sexes is something that it's not clear a society can ever come from. So Jesse's outraged pearl clutching to me reads as "it's okay for a a country's native culture to be completely corrupted as long as no Jews die." I'm no white nationalist or jew hater, but come on.
*I guess this can be argued, but I just can't see a sustained long term appetite for murder of Jews after the war. I'd guess they'd reach some sort of emancipation agreement with the governments of the German puppet states and probably would have been encouraged to move to Israel. Not very nice I guess, but that still seems less terrible than the complete degradation of a nation and its identity to me. I wonder if Jesse would have preferred Israel to adopt strong Laicité and import tons of Arabs rather than fight to keep its national character by hook or by crook
I think Jew-hunting would disappear because the Jews disappeared. Pre-war Nazi policy was to encourage Jews to emigrate, and it was mostly successful - per Wikipedia there were 523k Jews living within the 1933 borders of Germany, and only 163k were left to be Holocausted. If the policy had continued for another decade there would have been sufficiently few Jews left in Germany that Hitler could have had the last few murdered discretely, or paid the British to let them into Palestine. The industrial-scale genocide machinery of the Holocaust was "needed" because:
The Holocaust makes most sense as a last-ditch move by someone who thinks he can achieve some of his long-term geopolitical goals by killing Jews even as he goes down to an ignominious defeat on the battlefield. If you think that Hitler's basic view on the JQ was the same as modern right-wing anti-Semites (I don't, but the argument is too long for this post), then he was not wrong.
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I gotta disagree with that. The way things were going, Jews would've died by war's end, and the insistence Germans had in trying to get their allies to give up their Jews was notable.
Here's a pretty funny quote about the Italian attitude to German demands for Jews.
It's quite possible persecution of Slavs would have lessened to making sure they speak good German or language suppression. But not certain at all.
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Compared to what? He was on the level of Stalin and at least in the same league as Franco or Mussolini who actually invented blackshirts as a precursor to Hitler's brownshirts, and we do not even go to atrocities committed by Italians in Ethiopia. Even "milder" leaders like Austrofascist leader Engelbert Dollfuss committed political violence in three figure range. We can go on, especially early post-WW1 period was full of atrocities such as during Polish-Soviet War or under Hungarian Soviet Republic and related red and white terror.
I think your sense of "normal" is highly curated by modern sensibilities and information available to you, which is vastly different to what people in Europe lived as "normal" for decade of their lives or more prior to WW2.
I guess my gripe is with the definition of "normal". Let's think of today - I think Putin is a "normal" leader. Not dissimilar to Xi Jinping or range of various leaders in Africa or Middle East etc. Hitler espoused especially virulent version of fascism, but then Germany was also facing unique challenges. If let's say Germany won WW1 and carved out Lotharingia/Burgundy out of France/Benelux as a new puppet state populated by Dutch and German and French and Flemish people, I would not expect rump France to have your cookie-cutter milquetoast leaders just accepting that.
I would not say that let's say kaiser Franz Joseph or tzar Nicholas II or kaiser Wilhelm II or president Raymond Poincaré or prime minister David Lloyd George were "abnormal" leaders for their times and yet they are all co-responsible for WW1, which should put them into 0.01% of abnormal leaders according to your criteria - right?
Also I was assessing Hitler pre-war, of course once you have total World War, then all comparisons are off. In fact related to the topic of Darryl Cooper vs Churchill - and we can throw Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman into the bunch - grounding to dust millions of houses full of civilians during air raids on cities in Germany and Japan, including dropping atomic bombs is up there on the scale of atrocities committed on civilian population by any leader in the history of the world. Vietnam war caused around 2 million civilian deaths in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos - which makes JFK and Johnson and Nixon also pretty high on the abnormal list. What percentile of abnormality are those figures in your eyes?
And I see why you do not want to discuss these things, because exactly as Cooper points out, the WW2 is prime example of hyperreality event, it has high place as a national myth in very many countries, which makes any assessment immediately mired in controversy. The thing is that as the time goes this pressure is lessened - not many people are riled up if one assesses pros and cons of Napolen or Emperor Ferdinand II or if they talk about how Gengis Khan can be praised for bringing hundred years long Pax Mongolica, which enabled Europe to reach to orient with explorers like Marco Polo and spurred them toward modernity in its own way. We already see WW1 in rearview mirror and you can finally have reasonable discussions about the events leading to the war as well as if the treaty o Versailles. It is inevitable that the same will happen with WW2 some time, Cooper is just one of the early birds in this sense.
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It doesn't affect the argument, but this is a common trope which gets my goat, so I am going to stick an oar in. The Holocaust was mostly not Hitler murdering his own people - most of the German and Austrian Jews escaped. The Holocaust was mostly a genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied territory - with the numbers being dominated by Polish and Ukrainian Jews because Poland and Ukraine had the largest Jewish populations. Hitler was in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of militarily unnecessary massacres of conquered populations but probably not the top 0.01%. (Genghis Khan says "Hi!") Whether you consider "his own people" to be Germans, Austrians, or both, he wasn't even in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of murdering them.
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I can't provide you any evidence about an alternate historical scenario that never took place. I'm openminded, what do you predict would have happened had Germany won? Jew-hatred appears to me to have been an expression of German paranoia and and inferiority complex, once geopolitical rivals have been vanquished and the German people felt strong and unchallenged, would it have continued at such a fever pitch? It seems like it would have become politically unnecessary in peacetime and probably a diplomatic liability.
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.. I'm not sure how unprecedented that was. Absolute monarchs were common in Europe until mid 19th century. Hitler was essentially that, no?
Entire Europe had a wave of revolutionary violence in the 19th century. There was a surely a number of coups. At the very least Serbia had a pretty nasty coup in which the monarch was killed, his wife too and the killers kept her severed breast, later dried, as a souvenir. Those nice guys who did the coup later were a proximate cause to WW1..
Napoleon was an absolute ruler and also almost united Europe.
Greeks believed it's natural for democracies to decay into dictatorships, and when considering the fate of western liberal democracies - none are actually much democratic anymore insofar as voting doesn't help. (no one voted for immigration, no one voted for more war, Macron lost elections yet he gave the premiership to a party that got 39 seats, down 22 from their last result. Not to the victors - the left coalition, not to his party or to nationalist. The guys who came in fourth, somehow. How's that supposed to even work ? I guess they must have parliament unable to declare no confidence in the cabinet.
Considering the trend of the last hundred years, I'd call it 'normal'.
Democracy means less and less, people can vote on things but not on the things that matter.
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I think honestly all wars are like this. Nobody giving a neutral account thinks any of the allies were specifically going to war for human rights in any strip. Russia notoriously did not like Jews all that much. Our empire is fairly civilized as empires go, and I’m not at all disappointed that a genocide was stopped or that France was liberated.
And I think any fair analysis of history has to take into account the perspectives of everyone involved if it’s to avoid being simply propaganda for whichever side happens to be telling the story. The Germans had an opinion of the allies, talking about what that perspective was isn’t apologetic, it’s simply telling the truth — they didn’t like us because we were bombing the crap out of them. And while I think most of the deaths in the camps were absolutely deliberate, I think it’s reasonable to suggest a small role for logistical failures simply because again, we are bombing their supply lines and factories and so on, and yes, they undoubtedly prioritize their own people over prisoners they consider less than human. All of this can be absolutely true, the holocaust still happened, we might have made it worse.
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When you're a Galician Waffen-SS veteran living in Canada, for example?
I think that this was when you got standing ovation. Or we are talking some other case?
They are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal
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Yes it was.
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The initial post-war assessment that Germany shared 100% of the war blame for WWI was supplanted by historical revisionism relatively quickly (as well as propaganda-claims that the Germans operated Corpse Factories where they made soap and fertilizer out of corpses, a claim which also becomes prominent in the WWII Holocaust). It makes sense- tensions cool and you are able to have a more sober-minded view of hindsight. WWII is long overdue for the same treatment, and Cooper and Tucker are indeed telltale signs that we are going to see it happen.
As a Holocaust Denier, I actually agree with the assessment that Cooper was engaging implicitly in Holocaust denial by relating the large death toll in the camps to logistical failures, mostly in the final days of the war as Germany was being destroyed on all sides. This is what Revisionists say, and I don't think Cooper mentioned the story of homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms at all in the discussion. Talking about WWII without paying alms to the Holocaust mythos is indeed a soft form of Denial, which people are correct to pick up on.
Cooper can appeal to plausible deniability- his point is that the Holocaust is a post-hoc justification for the war, but you can't just talk about war guilt for WWII and not make the gas chambers central to a moral outrage towards the Nazis.
The fact is, WWII revisionism hasn't yet happened, and people are now so scandalized by its emergence, precisely because of the gas chamber mythos. Like any other religious mythos, it has a deep psychological impact on intended audiences. The Gas Chamber story is the only thing that has held the post-hoc rationalization for WWII and its outcomes together. Without it, the entire Nuremberg-established moral order collapses. And Cooper does directly criticize Nuremberg in the discussion, which is another argument Revisionists make.
Cooper criticizes Nuremberg and doesn't fall over himself denouncing the Nazi's alleged gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. It is implicit denial, because the denial argument is correct.
Honestly, even as someone who believes what you’re calling the mythos (with some rather minor caveats) I still find “The Mythos” rather annoying mostly from the point of what it’s actually done to conversations around fascism and authoritarian regimes of various forms. Which is to say that Nazi Germany has become a stand in for Satan in political form. And because everything about it is Pure Evil and the regime is imagined as constant parades, angry speeches, and crowd yelling “Sig Heil” all the time. This is honestly a cartoon version of history that creates a lot of false senses of security about whether fascism or other forms of authoritarian government could arise elsewhere. When your idea of fascism is Hitler yelling into a microphone, goose stepping soldiers, new flags, and Hugo Boss uniforms, anything short of that seems to be something else.
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I wish there were more shades of difference between the binary of "Holocaust Denier" and "Holocaust Believer(?)". I don't think I'm a "Denier," I believe that some holocausting surely did happen, I don't know/care what the exact numbers are, because 6,000,000 or 300,000 is still an incredible tragedy either way. But I've come to care much less about it because AFAICT Holocaust remembrance is almost exclusively used as a heavy rhetorical cudgel for character assassination and silencing dissent, and it really seems to lend credence to the idea that a lot of Jews are Jewish first and second. I don't even necessarily think that's a terrible thing, I'd say I'm Catholic first and American second (sorry pre-JFK Catholics). But more people realizing/admitting that would prevent Jews from having their political cake and eating it too.
I guess I'm "Holocaust Indifferent" in the same way that I'm indifferent to the Armenian Genocide. I weakly hope a second Armenian Genocide never happens again, because genociding people is bad. But I'm not Armenian, so I don't think I'd be willing to spend much of my country's blood and treasure to prevent it (sorry). And if someone tried to tar an author or political opponent as an "Armenian Genocide Denier" or "Anti-Armenian" I would probably find that mildly interesting but it wouldn't stop me from voting for that person or buying their books. I wonder how manynother millennials feel this way. It really seems like it's mostly the boomers who are completely steeped in the Holocaust mythos.
Like I said in another comment, I'm not a mind killed Jew hater so I'm open to hearing other perspectives.
Simply put after years of a certain sort "just asking questions" people are quite correctly suspicious.
This may be unfortunate for the occasional sincere autist only interested in truth-seeking that gets caught in the crossfire but it is healthier for society at large.
How? I just don’t see why putting barbed wire and guard dogs around a certain fact makes people better off.
First of all, it tends to elevate one event and one set of victims above all others. There are lots of genocides in history. I’ll recommend reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Our policy in the USA denied native Americans rights, forced them onto reservations and underfed them. Armenian genocide was a very deliberate decision. The Cathars were slaughtered with the explicit approval of the Pope. Even African slavery in the new world was pretty bad. But there’s only one genocide that we must not question and must never belittle. Which puts that people above in some sense. I can call the Trail of Tears an exaggeration all day long. I can say slavery wasn’t that bad. But touch the Grand Mythos and I’m a bad person.
Second, I believe, as I said earlier, that such a cartoon version of history with a cartoon villain making comically evil angry sounding speeches, crowd shouting slogans, Hugo Boss uniforms and red and black flags give people a very skewed idea of what authoritarian regimes look like. It’s become a visual shortcut for evil and if you want to make a bad guy regime for your movies, tapping into the aesthetic of Nazi Germany is the way to do it. But if someone else comes along and wants to use the state to silence and arrest enemies, as long as they can avoid looking like those people and don’t talk like the Nazis talked, and don’t want to go after that one ethnic group, it’s fine.
Third, I think it undercut any sober analysis of whether or not our own democratic system works. Neoliberalism has faults as well, but it’s hard to get people to think about it because of the free world propaganda which the Grand Mythos and the idea the human rights are the best way to secure human flourishing. It’s actually been used quite effectively to justify going to war with our political enemies. All that needs to be said is that a country is violating human rights and we are ready to bomb those countries, destroy their infrastructure, kill people, or maybe if they’re lucky we’ll just kill their economy with sanctions.
Its not about "facts" its about topics and certain topics are just massive red-flags.
Maybe this is uncharitable of me but if it were up to me I would not allow anyone with strong opinions on how age of consent laws are unjust anywhere near children unattended. It's the same principal.
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I think that's totally fair and reasonable, since for some reason Jew-haters seem uniquely dedicated and patient in carefully drawing people into "JQ" discussions and barraging them with an endless supply of factoids. I can't prove I'm not a troll, but FWIW I don't believe in any kind of global conspiracy to control non-Jews or suppress The Truth or anything. Jews just seem to me like an exceptionally powerful ethnic group who are very effective at leveraging their economic and political success, like Indians or Chinese. If Chinese could get American children to learn about and feel bad for the Century of Humiliation, I'm sure they would.
If the Chinese acquired the representation across institutions of cultural influence that Jews currently have in media, politics, and academia, and made the Century of Humiliation equivalent to what is now the Holocaust in public consciousness, then wouldn't the "Chinese Question (CQ)" be justified as well?
The JQ doesn't claim that the behavior of Jews, or the Chinese in this counterfactual, is hard to understand. But that it's a hostile foreign influence. That same criticism would apply if the Chinese forced the elevation of their identity so prominently in the cultural consciousness.
And wouldn't it be weird to call someone a "Chinese-hater" for correctly pointing out that influence and identifying it as hostile, in this counterfactual?
Especially if many of those lobbing the accusation of "Chinese-hater" in this counterfactual were Chinese themselves, you would be correct to view that epithet, and its cultural weight, as being yet another validation of the initial critique.
I guess this hinges on whether the Chinese got to those positions through merit by being legitimately better at them, or through corruption (there is a lot of gray area in between of course, but my point should be obvious).
If it turns out that the world’s greatest physicists, philosophers, writers, comedians, investors, and entrepreneurs were languishing in poverty for a century as a result of imperial subjugation, that would in fact be one of the pivotal events in world history!
It would be especially weird if the people most upset about this had some weird historical hangup like, “the Opium Wars were actually about tea, no one was trying to smuggle drugs into China.”
This is completely wrong. If the Chinese acquired and used that level of influence in academia, Hollywood, and news media to perpetuate systematic hostility towards White American identity, and used that same influence to elevate Chinese identity above all others, it would not matter whether they acquired those positions by merit or by crook.
If I were to say, "hey the Chinese are being very ethnocentric and hostile" then the merit of that accusation has no bearing whatsoever on how the Chinese acquired that influence which is the subject of my accusation.
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Exactly. Few people are denying that there was Holocausting present, but in a historical period in which random historical revisionism runs rampant it seems insane that there is only one singular line in the sand allowed for by the culture that is untouchable. Aztec apologia flies, but not this case.
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I am reminded of the early days of SSC and LessWrong specifically the admonishment that indifference and/or stupidity can destroy just as readily as hate.
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Two questions are being conflated here:
Is Cooper clearly a /pol/ adjacent dissident right shitposter who transparently has white nationalist sympathies?
Does he deserve to be ‘cancelled’ / does this ‘tarnish’ his work as a popular YouTube historian / does this make everything he does a not-so-secret propaganda effort for the far right?
The answer to the first is obviously yes. You can’t follow him long term on Twitter without seeing this. That he sometimes deletes ‘mask off’ implicit or explicit tweets about blacks, leftists, Jews and so on isn’t evidence against this. Obviously being a moderately respected successful YouTuber is a comfortable enough life that he has the time preference not to constantly try to blow up, but enough slips through to be clear, as @Gillitrut notes. This isn’t like the “Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi” /pol/ collage posting (regardless of the veracity of that claim), the man clearly has strong personal political opinions that align broadly with DR X/Twitter, a community that various shitposts clearly suggest he is part of and which is never more than semi-ironic. Cooper is 0.1 steps away from retweeting colorized videos of Rhodesia in the 1960s set to chill synth with the caption ‘there was once a country…’, if he hasn’t already.
The answer to the second is entirely a matter of opinion. Many if not most historians are strongly opinionated and it’s clear that this always has an effect on their work. But you can’t divorce Hobsbawm’s writing, great as much of it is, from the fact that he was lifelong communist and viewed everything through that lens. Cooper has his biases, his worldview, and one might fairly consider them when consuming his content.
I also question his intellect. For example, at the end of the Tucker video, Cooper says that no historic European monarch would have imagined that they could allow mass immigration without getting “their head cut off”. I don’t think this makes sense (there wasn’t a mass immigration button they refused to push; mass immigration is in large part a consequence of technological modernity), and even if you take it as truth, I don’t think it serves his argument at all (it implies, if anything, that the people are largely fine with what’s happening, which would contradict what Carlson was just saying, and which is incongruent with his previous statements). He then says that the politicians who implemented mass immigration did so even though they knew it was a terrible idea and would irreparably harm their own people. He offers no real reasoning for this, and again I consider it unlikely; for the most part, the politicians who allowed mass immigration into the US didn’t think it would change much at all, and in many cases significantly underestimated the demographic transformation that would follow. The whole interview is full of this kind of bullshitting.
Partially this is Carlson’s fault. Carlson throws out opinions like facts and then almost dares the interviewee (who is usually ideologically sympathetic to him) to disagree. He asks matter-of-factly why “there isn’t a Nuremberg trial” for those who enabled mass immigration into Europe, which is bizarre question to pose your historian guest and which doesn’t make sense even if you strongly oppose mass immigration (which invading force would administer such a trial?). Cooper just kind of agrees and moves on.
Exactly. Whole thing looked good on a spreadsheet when you assume absolute fungibility of human stock but any consideration of second order effects or where more recent immigrants are coming from...
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Ok, admittedly I listed to this podcast in the background while crunching for work. So I may have missed something...
But, I never heard holocaust denial? Everyone is saying he denied the holocaust, or acted like the mass slaughter of jews was a logistical error. When I listen to the podcast, I thought he was only referring to slavic POW's captured during Operation Barbarossa? And this was consistent with everything I ever read about it. Analysis about how the German's themselves went in under provisioned, and found themselves freezing and starving when the offensive didn't take only 6 months. I believe the designer notes for A Victory Denied or No Retreat cover the topic similarly in what those game designers learned when researching the invasion of Soviet Russia. It was a shit show, and a lot of POWs died of starvation and exposure, right along with their German captors. Obviously the POWs got the worse end of it, obviously there was a level of "these aren't our people" fueled neglect or cruelty. And to a degree Darryl Cooper didn't linger on the same litany of horrors popularized in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that we are so used to, instead playing the contrarian. Maybe this can be viewed as downplaying, or minimizing, but then again that flips back to his thesis that WW2 history is quasi-religious. The over reaction to his contrarian claims or attitude was profound. And the people just repeating "Holocaust denier!" was amazing.
[I'll caveat that this is just from a quick browse: I absolutely don't find Cooper interesting enough to read at length.]
If you trust this transcript:
I don't think it's a SecureSignals level thing -- he does recognize the whole 'and then the Germans started 'humanely killing' them' -- but it's definitely not limited to prisoners of war, and it's pretty heavily in contradiction with the Standard History Generalplan Ost where Einsatzgruppen were already a policy in Poland back when the USSR and Nazis were allies, and simply brought East.
It's amazing to me that the Jewish/Pro-Israel public hasn't begun to cotton on to how dangerous a game Israel is playing in Gaza right now, in terms of burning decades of carefully built up Holocaust credibility for the Jewish people. What we're seeing online is the anti-semitic right, the bogeyman that the ADL has been fearing for decades, successfully gaining rhetorical clout and likely converts by denouncing the obvious atrocities in Gaza. I find myself agreeing with a lot more posts by JQ posters than I would have before 10/7. And while I doubt I'll convert, a lot of people will. Burning that decades long project is a material cost of the war in Gaza that isn't being calculated.
Can you list a few of these?
This is not a "shOw mE yeR fActs!" post. I am quite simply looking for basic data here.
Main stream outlets call someone having a bad hair day in Gaza an "atrocity', so I am hopeful the Motte can deliver actual data.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/GAZA-HUNGER/myvmakwxrvr/
Cooper's argument is that Israel has taken on the responsibility to feed these people by removing any infrastructure to feed them and actively murdering those trying to deliver food supplies.
One hell of a bad hair day, if you ask me.
Again, wasn't try to be bait or be combative. Just looking for facts - which you have provided. Thank you.
I didn't take your post as bait. I think it's fairly obvious that bad things are happening in Gaza, some of them to good people, or at least to more or less neutral people. One can still argue that Gaza, and Gazans, "deserve" it, or that it is necessary, or at least that it is productive.
(I happen to believe that it isn't necessary, or even productive)
But it is beyond debate that bad things are happening, and that as a result of those bad things happening people are upset with Israel. Israel, and Jews in America, need to grope with that reality when making policies. Because people who are upset with Israel are going to start agreeing with people who have always hated Jews when they make the same points.
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What is the actual number of starvation deaths. We’ve seen large scale famine deaths before, mountains of bloated and distended corpses, and everyone in Gaza has a smartphone - the evidence just isn’t there that large numbers of civilians are starving to death.
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As far as I know it is not the responsibility of a belligerent in wartime to feed enemy civilians not under their direct control.
How are they not under Israel's direct control? There is no other government which exists and exercises any territorial control or monopoly on violence. Nor is it at all clear under what circumstances a new government could be formed that would be allowed to govern Gaza. If any citizen's committee of Gazans formed to try to function as a government in Gaza, it is not clear the Israelis would accept it, or would instead murder the leaders.
Yes, Hamas is not technically a government. This is sophistry.
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The whole "oh the Germans just didn't have any plans for all the prisoners they were going take" is something I might believe from someone who knows literally nothing about WWII, but if you have any sort of passing interest you know about things like the Commissar Order, the Einsatzgruppen, the Barbarossa Decree, Generalplan Ost etc. If you have slightly more interest you would know about army- or unit-specific examples like the Severity Order.
The Germans absolutely had a plan for the millions of captives they were going to take. That plan was death.
"The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan#Starvation_in_other_German-occupied_territories
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Maybe. But like I said, I still don't see any holocaust denial in there.
I agree it’s not explicit. On the other hand, he ends the video (it’s in the last ten minutes, certainly) by mentioning earnestly to Tucker “all the other things [related to what he calls WW2 mythology and the subsequent global order] we can only discuss privately”, the latter sagely nodding, which I think makes it pretty implicitly true, since they discuss pretty much everything else.
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Part of this discourse is equating Churchill criticism with anti-semitism.
But I think it's uncontroversial to say that what happened to the Jews in WWII was one of the worst possible outcomes for them.
Smart diplomacy could have saved almost all of them. Britain could have rescinded the 1939 White Paper that capped Jewish immigration to the Palestinian Mandate at 75,000 per year. The other countries that would later become the Allies could have also accepted more Jewish immigration.
Other European countries like France, Hungary, and Poland were considering their own Jewish deportation schemes in the late 30's. Poland even considered sending them to Madagascar, before the Nazis had their own Madagascar Plan.
A statesman who cared about the fate of the Jewish people, and could see the writing on the wall, could have lead on the issue and at least made it trivial for Jews to emigrate out as their governments became increasingly hostile to their presence. But as far as I can tell, everyone did the opposite. The best we got was the Haavara Agreement, negotiated between the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Nazi government.
At the cost of having to deal with endless wars in the Middl... er, never mind.
TBH a Mega!Israel with most/all of pre-WWII European Jewry transplanted there* would probably have colonized out to the historic borders of the old Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at this point just through population pressure, let alone the Jabotinsky's of the world.
*in 1948 the new nation of Israel had about 650k Jews in it, give or take. If we add in appx. 50% of the 1933 Jewish populations of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania (an estimate attempting to allow for for stay-behinds, pogrom-victims, or emigres to other places like the US), we turbocharge that to 3,700,000. For context, Jordan had appx. 500k people in 1948. Syria had about 3.25 million. Lebanon had about 1.3 million. Arabs would have been absolutely swamped all across the Levant, and if it had come to war as it did historically, God alone knows what would have happened. And if we assume the same rate of population growth as historically, in this alternate Mega!Israel, that would mean 50 million Jews running around the holy land today.
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The real reason was that Arabist / orientalist sympathies were common in the subset of the British upper class that managed a lot of the foreign/imperial office (the diplomatic service pre-WW2 was, interestingly in both Britain and Germany, and plenty of other European nations besides, a kind of final redoubt for the aristocracy in politics) at the time. They were countered by strong pressure from wealthy and influential British Jews and some Christian Zionists, but there were enough of the orientalists to make allowing massive Jewish settlement in Palestine unpalatable.
No, I think the OP is more correct in this case. The spectre of widespread local Arab opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine and the resulting unrest coinciding with the coming new great war in Europe was rather obviously something the British wanted to avoid, orientalist sympathies or not.
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I would be curious to know more. It's hardly a True History, but what I know of T. E. Lawrence is, albeit a decade or two earlier, a story of seeming indifference to Arab priorities and nationalism. Maybe sympathies changed in the interbellum period, but Sykes-Picot wasn't done for the benefit of their Arab WWI allies that fought the Ottomans.
Surely the emergence of significant oil deposits across the Middle East which were largely unexplored during the second World War have to had played a part in how the region was handled.
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What is the value in pretending that the reason people describe Cooper's perspective as "Nazi apologetics" is due to his criticism of Churchill rather than his statements like "Hitler is in heaven" or "Nazi Germany was infinitely preferable in virtually every way to modern France?" Your post is almost entirely about the former but I am very confident the reason people call Cooper a Nazi apologist are the latter!
Cooper didn't say this, he made this joke:
This is pretty ambiguous!
One interpretation is that Hitler can't be found because he's not in Hell, he's in heaven.
Another is that the shooter believes himself to be in heaven along with Hitler, but is mistaken, they're both in Hell.
Another is that the shooter is looking for "Hitler" who is actually Trump, who he mistakenly believes he sent to Hell.
The actual quote here is:
Where the picture on the left is Hitler and his officers with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the one on the right is the drag Last Supper from this year's Olympic opening ceremonies. You can see it here: https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1830983770826047711
This one is harder to defend, but I think there are two possible angles.
One, he's literally talking about the pictures. The aesthetics here do, in my opinion, favor the Nazi picture. The drag last supper is gross, it features an obese man pretending to be a woman in the role of Jesus, the colors are garish, everyone is unattractive. If you were a time traveler who didn't know what the Nazis had done, you'd have no reason to think the Nazi photo to be repellant. A person in our time objects to the Nazi photo because of what the Nazis did, not how they were dressed.
Or, two, he's comparing the totalitarian endpoints of each ideology. Communism verus fascism. I wouldn't want to live in either Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR, but I don't think saying one is worse than the other is all that offensive.
Or an alien.
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The picture on the right, however, is not the endpoint of Communism, but a waypoint. In the endpoint, most of the people in the picture on the right are dead or in prison, because it was never going to turn out the way they thought it would and it's always worst for the non-conformists. Honestly, the endpoints of Fascism and Communism look pretty much the same: A corrupt political hierarchy eating each other for power while stealing from the people and murdering as many witnesses as possible.
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I'd choose Hitler's Germany over Stalin's USSR if those are my only choices.
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Well for one thing, those sorts of edgy outbursts don't really count as apologetics, whereas his long-form work often does feel apologetic in nature.
I also feel a jarring disconnect between the two Darryls. Surely the long thought-out works are more representative of his true beliefs? I would like to know what drives him to Tweet like he does. Impulse control? Whatever Jordan Peterson has?
My intuition would be that the long thought-out works are just that, thought-out, carefully curated and censored, where as the tweets are more reflective of his true feelings and how he talks when the cameras are off.
In vino veritas and all that.
Alternatively, tweets can represent a person's tribal knee-jerk sympathies while their long thought-out works represent having done the hard work to transcend these. In which case there would be a sort of veritas in both, but a different type of veritas in each and arguably a higher quality one in the effort work.
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It's a good reminder that Twitter must be destroyed. This point is so crucial we should repeat it like a prayer, like the kyrie:
Twitter delenda est,
X delenda est,
Twitter delenda est.
No one, literally no one, not even one, comes off well on Twitter. Even people I have profound respect for seem like unhinged lunatics. I barely use it, and have never posted, but every time I open it up and I'm greeted by the firehose of insanity, I realize why our discourse has gone so insane. There's no room for nuance, no room for discussion, no room for tone of voice or personality, it's spicy takes all the way down. There's no value in it.
The only use for it is formal, simple annoucements of objective events, like the posting of an article or video elsewhere. Any other use of microblogging is haram.
I think there are some people who come off well, but there are a lot who don't.
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I’ve been saying it for a while now, but I don’t actually know what we can do about it.
The government banning a nebulous category of Twitterlikes is worse. Social opprobrium is powerless and may or may not rely on Twitter itself. Maybe a data rights law could gut free-to-enroll services, ruining most social media? Apparently it was hard to make money off the site before Musk got involved.
The biggest negative element on most social media platforms (not just twitter) is recommendation algorithms that optimize for engagement by stoking outrage and other negative emotions. I think there's a decent change we see significant regulation of algorithmic content recommendation in the near future, and that the present state of social media is looked back upon in much the same way we view the pre-60s state of affairs with respect to smoking.
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Well said. Ceterum censeo Twitter esse delendam.
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I'm really glad for the presence of Twitter since Musk took it over. I don't know where else I'd so easily be able to access news that the legacy media would prefer to be hidden away.
10 years ago I'd have said Reddit, but that hasn't been true for a long time now.
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It been wanting to write something in reply to the world war one discussion down thread but was having difficulty organizing my thoughts.
That said you cant talk about the causal chain of WWII without looking at WWI. From the british perspective WWI starts with the invasion of Belgium. Germany went full "might makes right" and "no laws but man's" and it devastated a generation. Then instead of learning thier lesson the german people doubled down.
The German government made it clear that they would never respect agreements only might, and thus they rendered thier destruction necessary for the survival of the wider west.
If current year wignats had an ounce of intellectual honesty they would recognize that its not the Anglos who were "race traitors" or starting "brother wars" it was the Germans it was always the Germans.
You cannot talk about causal chain of WW1 from British perspective without looking at the whole Causal Chain. Which is assassination of Franz Ferdinand > Austrian Ultimatum Against Serbia on July 23rd > Russia starts secret "partial" mobilization on July 25th > Austria declares war against Serbia on July 28th > Russian full mobilization on July 30th > July 31st German ultimatum for Russia to demobilize, which was not replied > August 1st German mobilization and declaration of war against Russia > August 1st, Britain mobilizes its Navy > August 2nd, Britain guarantees Belgium > August 2nd, Germany asks Belgium for military access, is refused > August 3rd Germany declares war on France as part of Schlieffen plan > August 4th Germany attacks Belgium > August 4th, Britain declares war on Germany
One thing to understand about WW1 mobilization is that it is equivalent of launching ICBMs. Countries had decades to meticulously prepare so they can get their army ready in matter of days. Soldiers need to be concentrated and equipped, trains have to be rerouted etc. If you stop the mobilization it would be as if one side of the nuclear conflict self-destructed their own rockets while the other side has them still in the air, putting themselves into very dangerous position.
I think that the biggest triggers of the war was behavior of Austria and Russia, each in their own way. By the time Britain made their mind in August, it was too late - Russians were in the middle of mobilization almost for a week and dominoes fell. In fact to me it seems that Germans were too timid, if they were more aggressive, they may have pulled it of - if they had one more week against Russians and and mobilized on July 24th/25th. History remembers them as warmongers anyways.
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Well, it actually started with the Franco-British staff talks, the 1904 Franco-British agreement on naval responsibilities in the Mediterranean and North Sea vis. the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and the fear of the Liberal cabinet in 1914 that failing to take a hard line on Germany would result in the fall of the cabinet (the PM and FM were both implicated in secret back-channel negotiations with the French which, had the UK not supported France against Germany, would have been immensely personally and politically damaging to them and probably required resignation) and the likely installation of the Tories, who would be bellicose anyway and (in the view of the liberals) also likely spark civil war over the Irish question. The Belgium question was just the tripwire.
No, they bungled what should have been a decent and defensible position in support of an ally who had been the subject of an organized assassination plot from a rogue state sponsor of terrorism. Frankly, the Russians and Austrians both bear at least as much guilt for the onset of general war as the Germans, and probably more.
Ironic, because at the time Germany was arguably the leading light of the west, at least in scientific and cultural matters.
If Belgium was a tripwire, it was a pretty substantial one. There was real doubt all the way through the process. Zero reason for England to back Serbia. Almost none to back Russia. More to defend France, but abstaining was seriously on the table. It was only preemptively occupying Belgium that said, hey, one of these pieces of paper has to mean something!
I've heard historians argue that the british government's legal counsel had advised that the 1839 treaty could be worked around. And in any event the UK went in before the invasion of Belgium - Grey's famous speech to parliament is all based upon assumptions and diplomatic insinuations, not any concrete actions by the Germans. Once the Brits were in, there was no incentive for the Germans not to go through Belgium.
The German war plans offered limited flexibility - not NO flexibility as the General Staff pretended - but once the decision was made to go in against France, Belgium was done for regardless. As units on the Belgian frontier were activated they were already moving across the border to secure the way for those coming behind them. The German deployment schedules which were so rigorously developed in the pre-war period required either a conquered Belgium or a pliant one. There were no alternatives.
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Are you trying to argue that the invasion and occupation of Belgium in 1914 was somehow accidental?
Debatable but even so, ironic does not mean untrue.
I'm trying to argue that it shouldn't have come to a general war in the first place.
It probably wouldn't have if Germany hadn't violated Belgium's neutrality.
Germany wanted a general war and they got it.
I disagree; the diplomatic and political maneuvering in the weeks and months leading up to the initial declarations of war - let alone the actual first acts of armed hostility - are much more complex. I recommend Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers and Sean McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War. They reach different conclusions, but are both magisterial overviews of the subject.
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Oh brother.
You mention that the British guarantees to Poland were anti-German, which is correct, but might that have something to do with the fact that Germany had just broken its promises from Munich? There were also the serious deliberations about aiding Finland in the Winter War. The notion of Anglo hegemony over Europe is silly itself as Britain was never much interested in unilaterally dominating the continent. Instead, it consistently wanted a balance of power where no single entity gained a decisive edge, the goal being to get itself a free hand to manage its overseas empire. If anything, France was much more interested in continental influence, and Britain tolerated this since it was clear that France wasn't going to go full Napoleon but rather was trying to contain the revanchist nations.
Oh come on, you can't just contradict yourself one phrase over.
As I mentioned in that WW1 thread, Britain has always had this particular explicit interest in the continent never unifying, for obvious geopolitical reasons. That's not neutral.
Wanting a balance of power is not the same as being a hegemon, but we can't well pretend that Britain wasn't constantly meddling in continental affairs.
Maybe I could have phrased what I meant more explicitly (which I've gone and edited now), but you also cut out the part I had right before that explained the context. "Balance of power" != "Anglo hegemony" if words mean anything. Sure, Britain was willing to make alliances to prevent hegemony of others. I never claimed otherwise.
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At the rate things are going, in 5 to 10 years tops.
Of course people who are interested in history have known that everyone was acting insane in WW2 for a while, but the days of the children story of uncomplicated good vs bad that is the founding myth of the boomer religion are numbered.
Turns out you can't just insist on your beliefs if you want to pass them on, you also have to make them useful to future generations.
Much as I despise Hitlerism, it was bound to be viewed as an unremarkable despotism eventually. It has no unique features except for being the central role of this particular story. Genocides and industrial kill counts are a dishearteningly common occurance.
When Life of Brian, the Monty Python comedy, was released some were offended by the last joke that has the crucified sing "always look on the bright side of life", and one journalist asked whether we'd find it all so funny if it weren't crosses but gas chambers, whether the amount of time that has passed influences us so much. I think the answer is yes. Time dulls the edges of all things. Anything that has once been a life and death matter eventually will end up in the category of that which is so inoffensive it is an acceptable topic of light comedy.
Historically, depiction of the cross is the only artistic Christian universal -- what aniconists of both the Byzantine crisis and the Protestant Reformation had in common was a belief that the cross (and the sacrament) is the only acceptable religious imagery, which is why their churches look like this.
But I've heard historians argue that in early Christian times, when crucifixion was still an active form of punishment in the Roman empire and one to which an insistent Christian might be subjected, there was extreme reluctance to depict it. They assert that this is why the earliest Christian art prefers motifs like the good shepherd, loaves and fishes, St. Mary and the Christchild, etc.
When Christianity became legally protected, and crucifixion faded into the past as a form of torture, this school of historians argues that Christians became more willing to depict the cross as an explicit image of the death of Christ.
There's also a recent Christian sect -- let's call it what it is, it's a cult -- called the Iglesia ni Cristo, which outright rejects the depiction of the cross, and makes fun of mainstream Christians for depicting it with the same sorts of dumb gotchas that edgy 14-year-old atheists use. "If Jesus died in the electric chair, would you wear necklaces with electric chairs?" To which I respond, yes.
I've heard that the LDS church is also reluctant to depict the cross, but when you ask Mormons their reasoning, it's something along the lines of "we don't depict the cross because Jesus isn't dead any more," which is just a folk theology explanation plucked from evangelical Protestantism (like a lot of things in Mormonism), as it's the same argument that lay Protestants invoke against depictions of the cross-with-corpus, i.e. the crucifix.
So, yeah, historical horrors do seem to fade with intensity over time, as living memory of the reality is lost and they become more like distant symbols.
But it's worth noting that the cross maintained significant symbolic importance for Christians (we would not remember it if it did not!), just as the holocaust maintains significant symbolic importance for Jews. The OP contains a link to a Jewish man
Singalularlysingularly distraught over any attempt to mock or trivialize the holocaust, which rather reminds me of my own youthful offense at artistic depictions that seem to mock or trivialize the cross.I'm sure Jewish people will remember the Holocaust long after everyone else has forgotten it. But remembering historical events is kind of their thing, a tendency which they imparted to Christians.
(Intriguingly, there's an overlap of concepts as "holocaust" is sacrificial terminology, and Christianity of course interprets the crucifixion of Jesus as singularly sacrificial -- and D-R literally has "holocausts" as a translation for "burnt offerings" in that passage. I was hoping to make a grand point about the significance of historical events in theological identity, but of course the preferred Hebrew term for the holocaust is "Shoah," which doesn't have anything to do with ritual sacrifice.)
There's an even newer one out of Mexico, La Luz del Mundo, with a similar policy of rejection.
I'm aware of them because of the highly visible (closed) church they built in my neighborhood.
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Very interesting comment, thank you.
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Just a nit, but many Protestants were not always happy to endorse even a plain cross, let alone a crucifix. An article from 1912 illustrates the point:
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As an aside, I have always felt that this entire point of contention between Catholic and Protestant Christians is a huge missing of the point on both sides. At least, the people waging the Christian culture war miss the point - most Christians I've known are content to live and let live. Both the crucifix and the empty cross are good symbols for different reasons. The former reminds us of Jesus' suffering, the latter reminds us that he is alive even after all that. You need both of those things in Christianity! I think there's nothing wrong with a particular sect deciding that they want to emphasize one or the other, as they are both equally worthy of symbols.
I have no problem with live and let live, but they should keep their heresies outside of Catholic church. Catholics acknowledge three pillars of their faith: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and Sacred Magisterium as opposed to protestant sola scriptura. Catholics accept the authority of the church, this free-for-all shit that is happening in constantly fracturing protestant churches so they can just vibe with Jesus on personal level does not fly.
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The theological differences run quite deep. The Catholic Church requires that there be a cross-with-corpus on or near the altar in full view of the congregation for the celebration of mass. This is as a reminder that the sacrifice of the mass is the re-presentation of the sacrifice of the cross, and that the bread and the wine presented on the altar are the real and substantial body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.
The protestant view is to deny the physical presence of Christ in the church, and so the crucifix is disfavored over a symbolic cross.
I think it has more to do with a general tendency towards aniconism in general, rather than a rejection of the substantial presence. Though there still remains a gap where theoretically someone could say the Eucharist should be adored but we shouldn't have icons
-- it's just that it's never happened, depending on how you understand the sacramentology of the Byzantine iconoclasts.nvm, my amateur opinion is this was probably exactly what the Byzantine iconoclasts thought.Lutherans are happy to display images -- and the trad Lutherans are very insistent that crucifixes are a traditional Lutheran custom. They don't assent to Nicea II however, and hold a position (condemned by the council and rejected by the Pope) suspiciously similar to that of no less than Charlemagne that images should be displayed as reminders and teaching aids, but never venerated.
I suspect this view was rocking around in western Europe for a long time, and it was only the Calvinists' iconoclasm that forced the Latin Rite to enforce orthodoxy on that point. Eastern Europe has the Triumph of Orthodoxy, Western Europe has the Baroque period. And both times the attitude was something like, "you don't like us venerating images? Fine, we're going to venerate them even harder."
You find a mixture of crosses and crucifixes in Lutheran churches in the United States, though in my experience it leans towards bare crosses, presumably under Calvinist and credobaptist influence. Though almost always these crosses in Lutheran churches are paired with images and statues of Jesus prominently displayed.
Further, Latin Rite Catholics are perfectly happy coexisting in communion with various rites where the tradition is not generally to display the corpus in a central location, or even to have a prominent cross at all. The difference is those rites* don't object to depictions of the crucifix and use them in other contexts.
Just to say that I believe it's more complicated than you're saying. The mass would still be the mass even if there were a bare cross, though I agree it's an important aid to religious devotion and suits the Latin rite well.
*assuming they find 3d religious artwork acceptable at all
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I think there’s also an iconoclastic aspect to it. Protestants are uncomfortable with using statues of Jesus and saints in a religious ceremonial role. A cross without a corpus is a symbol. A cross with a corpus veers dangerously close to being an idol.
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It's plenty remarkable for a lot of reasons. First, the soap-opera drama of the Nazi rise is just incredible. If it weren't so horrifying, you could make a dozen comic soap operas out of it. Second, the remarkable run of wild success that Hitler's early-career gambles met with is fascinating. There were generals locking themselves in their offices with nervous breakdowns over the Anschluss, the handling of the Sudenten crisis, the invasion of the rump Czechoslovak state, Fall Weiss, and Fall Gelb...and somehow each one worked out fantastically in Hitler's favor. Even the amazing success of the Wehrmacht at the beginning of Barbarossa was down to ridiculously good timing (catching the Soviets forward-deployed for an invasion to the West...but not yet on a war footing) and a shocking case of the normally-wily Stalin suddenly grabbing onto the idiot-ball of world-history with both hands. Third, the speed at which things broke down for the Nazis is just as vertiginous, and makes an equally-interesting story. And of course fourth, the sheer industrial scale of the killing achieved through bureaucracy is itself a modern marvel, and a sobering reminder to western, advanced, industrialized nations that we are not exempt from the blood-lust we might otherwise be tempted to put down to the savagery of less-enlightened souls (the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan Hutu, the Young Turks, etc.)
Napoleon has all of these. It's arguable which one tops the other on either point but they are compared often for a reason.
The scale of the industrical killing is also very comparable to Stalin's.
Napoleon is one of the most noteworthy figures in history.
Yes, the forced resettlement of millions and the complete subjugation and remaking of the USSR under Stalin is also one of the most notable and interesting (though macabre and sinister) phases in modern history.
Hitler was not Franco, or Mussolini, or Vargas, or any of the other tin-pot dictators of the period. He was, no matter how you slice it, one of the Great Horrors. Perhaps, with the passage of enough centuries, he, Stalin, and Mao will be remembered like we remember Tamerlane or Ghengis Khan, the bloodiness of their deeds overshadowed by the alien, bygone nature of their world. But they will be remembered as Great Horrors all the same.
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And when writers and producers deign to visit the era, we end up with some quality fiction!
Don't remind me of Ridley Scott's decline, please. I rewatched Blade Runner recently and it seems impossible that the same man made that dreadful movie that's all about Joséphine.
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Which is conveniently around when the last living memories of the war will be completely gone. At that point I've observed that historians are wont to jump in with revisionist takes. Not that they're always wrong: sometimes the living histories are corrupted by a sense of honor and flawed memories. But it often leads to "maybe the baddies weren't completely bad" takes.
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