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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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You can avoid another set of world spanning genocides by not putting genocidal madmen in charge of three major continental powers all at once, and that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.

I hope that's the case, but I'm not convinced that Tooze's Wages of Destruction is wrong.

It describes a lot of the worst atrocities by Nazi Germany in economic and logistic terms, and while that doesn't make the people who did it any less genocidally mad or evil -- the actions are just as vile whether done because of bad moral philosophy or to simplify food logistics -- it does give an alternative reason why three (or, uh, many more than that) genocidal madmen popped up and received widespread support all at once, despite their often wildly conflicting positions and backgrounds. And one can at least imagine the same frameworks applying to those other genocidal madmen, and to other less-successful ones who still nonetheless punched far above their grade.

Which still leaves revisionism as pretty unexciting, but does leave past genocides and especially the bigger and more deadly past genocides as worth studying.