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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   22681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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We remember it that way because of how it ended up, but the Weimar was absolutely lousy with serious, revolutionary communists and honeycombed with the most stomach churning levels of sexual and cultural degeneracy ever witnessed in the west at that time. It very easily could have gone the other way.

My general feeling on this matter is that a healthy society capable of self government with aligned values and incentives would have never produced the Nazis in the first place, so if you’re frightened of a reappearance of them the moral imperative is not to produce the same levels of abject moral depravity that produced them in the first place.

Up until very recently, I felt that we were obviously failing that. I feel much more hopeful now.

Weimar was absolutely lousy with serious, revolutionary communists

I recommend reading The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. He battled these leftist revolutionaries and wrote about his experiences.

He was too young to be a WW1 vet and Freikorp member. He was a young regular soldier in post-WW1 Germany. So he fought against all sorts leftist revolutionaries circa 1919. But there was a strange issue in which his squad is killing socialists, but a few squad members were secretly socialists and he himself was very socialism-curious.

We exchanged shots with snipers. We tore around corners, hugging the walls, looking for openings; we crouched behind hastily piled-up barricades; we lay behind advertising columns and lamp standards; we forced doors and stormed up dark staircases; we shot anyone carrying arms who did not belong to our company; and every now and then men would fall who had not been carrying arms; and sometimes women and even children; and the bullets whistled over their bodies.

Behind our line prostitutes were strolling about. They sauntered up and down the Friedrichstrasse while shooting went on in the Unter den Linden. They approached anyone who stood to rest for a moment, giving us, who were still in the grip of this confused battle, who were still sighting the enemy over our rifles, a curious feeling of nausea. It was not the whispered solicitation that seemed so intolerable, it was the calm matter of fact way in which they snatched at our bodies - those bodies which a moment before had been exposed to rivers of bullets pouring from the machine-guns. We forced our way through the disorder in the streets, all our nerves strung up to their highest pitch. We pushed past hordes of beggars, of wounded soldiers, of blind men, and from time to time people spoke to us one offering cocaine, another a diamond ring, a third Kiesewetter's latest political verses.

It is so crazed. The casual acceptance of both mass desertion and slaughter of communist uprising. The wild chaos of that time could have led to the Soviet Union consuming Germany. Instead it led elsewhere in the desperate struggle against communist revolutionaries.

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