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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6208 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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I wonder to what extent does the following fall into the category of "right-wing wrongthink" in Germany?

  1. Right-wing interpretations of the various Communist uprisings in Germany between 1918-1921

  2. A similar examination of the policy of the Communist Party of Germany in the Weimar Republic

I'm asking because I think there is a possibility in the future that Die Linke will have to be invited to the governing coalition after a federal election in Germany.

I can’t speak for German schoolbooks, but the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power is an optional topic in the British GCSE history syllabus. The 1918-1921 period is taught from an “Ebert good” perspective and is fairly both-sidesist about the Kapp and Spartakist putsches. There isn’t enough time to cover the Weimar era political parties in any detail, so the only thing that comes up about the KPD is that they wouldn’t support an anti-NSDAP coalition government when it would have made a difference.

Based on the reading around the course I did, this is consistent with the consensus of English-language historians who are not writing explicitly pro-communist history.

That's actually pleasantly surprising.

I'm not clear on what you mean by right-wing interpretations or examinations. Please clarify.

I'll give it a shot.

As far as I can tell, the rightist view was that Communists are the enemies of the German nation, which they explicitly wanted to dissolve together with all others, agents of chaos and degeneracy, with Jews overrepresented, and had to be fought by the means the German state still had on hand, which were the Freikorps (officers' detachments) and nothing else i.e. the struggle of the Freikorps was legitimate.

With respect to the KPD, the predominant criticism against them is, as far as I can tell, that their actions were a necessary (but not solely sufficient) prerequisite of the Nazi seizure of power. Also, their "anti-fascist action" was 1. a farce (as they considered Social Democrats and all right-wing parties to be fascists) 2. counterproductive (as it played into the hands of Nazis).

Honestly, that's largely too academic for it to feature at all in public discourse. The vast majority of Germans will discuss these topics exactly once - in school - and never think about them again. And in school during my time the narrative was one of good versus evil, i.e., SPD and associates against NSDAP and nazi collaborators. Jewish representation wasn't a topic at all, Jews were simply the sacred cows of victimhood. Nitty-gritty details like actual uprisings, socialist republics, street fighting, Freikorps were ignored altogether.

Modern retellings of the entire era in Germany really, really don't manage to be anything other than extremely moralizing condemnations of anything associated with the nazis - anything from conservatives to nationhood to the military to Germany as a whole. Documentaries, public speeches, museum exhibits, doesn't matter. The Weimar Republic - all of it - is in most contexts nothing more than story about how the nazis came to power, and everyone likes to not think about it.

So I guess strictly speaking what you wrote is wrongthink, but it's also a non-topic in general.

Not much to add (maybe later, or if there is a question I can actually speak to), but I just wanted to confirm what Southkraut said here. It matches my own experience in German schools to a t.

I'll have to say I'm somewhat surprised. (Not regarding the part about Jewish sacred cows though, that's for sure.) One a scale of 1-10, my surprise is maybe level 3 or 4. After all, the 1918-21 period was crucial for the entire German nation, no matter how we slice it. Nationhood itself was at stake. But again, I'm not that surprised that awareness of this is basically suppressed.

(For example, I once came across descriptions about the Ruhr Uprising of 1920, which I actually never heard anything about before, and later found that only rather scant information is available about this even in German, even though this event had clear long-term political ramifications; also, the numerous leftist victims of the uprising's suppression by the Freikorps only actually have one obscure monument dedicated to them in Hagen, which I guess even local antifa never visit. And the monument dedicated to the suppressors actually still stands in Essen!)

But anyway, portraying the SPD as the gread force of good against the Nazis? Really? That's almost comical, consider just how useless that party actually was (and have always been), on balance, when it came to actually ever reaching its stated aims. Zentrum was arguably a much more serious opponent of the Nazis.

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