This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's a meme, "Then for no reason at all everyone voted for Hitler."
Doesn't how it came about, lead often to '30's culture wars and anti-semitism?
There's a lot of roots there, something bad happening in Germany/Central Europe was very much overdetermined and I'm just going to mention them and you can look deeper yourself if you're interested. I don't really see "Culture Wars" as a valid comparison, the anti-semitism is largely an incidental superstition in my view of history, a random occurrence as a result of the ideas that were "lying around" circa 1920s Germany.
-- Western support for Fascism as a counterweight to the Red Menace of Communism, which was real and did exist. Visible most clearly in Spain, where the intention of the Republican forces was by late in the war very much to form a Stalinist satellite of Moscow, which they seemed to prioritize even over winning the war. British and American diplomats very much did think it was "Mussolini and Fascism or Stalin and Communism" in Italy, and chose Mussolini as the horse to back. You really can't overemphasize just how real a threat Soviet Russia was to everything in Capitalism countries, the number of socialists in the proletariat and in the educated classes. Very real cultural, political, and violent efforts were made to marginalize communist forces in the west after 1945, it wouldn't be until the 1960s that the threat of violent revolution could be safely put on the backburner. If Soviet Russia didn't exist, or were not an enemy of the West, it is highly likely that Hitler would have been prevented from ever reaching power. Hitler was accommodated in his violations of treaty obligations, in large part because his government had to be propped up to prevent a Communist revolution in Germany, which would have threatened the West. As it is, Hitler was in many ways a gamble by the West that didn't pay off.
-- Soviet support for Germany to obtain needed industrial goods to allow the Soviets to fend off the west. Read this
-- Deeper history of the German speaking peoples, including particularly the history of Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire and its Hapsburg successor states, and their spread further abroad a commercial minority into Russian and Slavic lands. Millions of Germans in 1919 found themselves living, for the first time in thousands of years, under a non-German speaking sovereignty. The Sudetenland wasn't a made up crisis, it really was a German community with roots stretching back centuries. This tends to get ignored in Whig history tellings in England and the USA, where you learn that Charlemagne founded the HRE and then it went into decline, check in at Charles, and we get back to it at Napoleon or all the way at WWI. The Germans living outside the boundaries of Germany and Austria got a raw deal after WWI, going from respected local minority as part of a broader majority in their state, to despised foreign minority within nation-states trying to build themselves anew as Czech/Polish/etc. It should be noted that there were actually relatively few places in Europe in 1900 between the Dnieper and the Danube where the historical gentry, the peasantry, a supermajority of the proletariat, the urban commercial classes, and the government all spoke the same language. The world post 1945 where Polish People live in Poland and speak Polish is the result of multiple physical, cultural, and spiritual efforts of ethnic cleansing. Where this didn't happen in 1945 (Yugoslavia) it had to happen later, and the brutality was often paid out with interest. {Grievance Identity-Based Nationalism is a disease}
-- The financial results of WWI, read Tooze on this one. The balance of payments crises created by the massive loans made by American banks to British and French govenrments which could not hope to pay them back without German indemnity payments influence policy during this period significantly.
-- The destruction or discrediting of so much of the prior German leadership by the results of WWI. The aristocracy collectively abdicated with the Kaiser, the loss of huge numbers of promising young men from the upper classes left a big hole in leadership. The British, French and Americans experienced this as well; but their governments came out the other end of the war intact. Germany had to cope with creating a whole new system of government, the loss of prior commercial contacts that were once within German speaking polities or colonies thereof but were now foreign, simultaneously with having much of its natural leadership destroyed.
So yeah, throw all that in a pot and stir.
Thanks for the book recommendations. Thriftbooks has both, I've managed to nearly eliminate Amazon from my home.
Applause for that, my friend. When I buy new books rather than downloading e-books of classics, I nearly always try to call my local bookshop and if they don't have it they can order me a copy. I'd rather spend the extra money in this time in my life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link