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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28898 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.

German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.

For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.

So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.

Before the sailors' mutinies and revolutions of November 1918, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, made the proposal, or so I've heard, for the emperor to abdicate in favor of his son, to negotiate a ceasefire, and to reach out to the US government to sue for a separate peace, as a first step of terminating the war and salvaging a defeated nation. This was probably the only conceivable path to preventing the ensuing national catastrophe, but the emperor decided against it. And from then on, the republic that came into existence only had enemies in the country, save for small-r republican Social Democrats, who were always a political minority. And this republic was never going to be a European bulwark against American and Soviet hegemonic tendencies. This story was always going to end in disaster, I think.

I think the Weimar republic would have survived if Gustav Stresemann had been able to turn the DVP into an effective centre-right party. Crucial to the fall of Weimar is that all the right-wing forces except the DVP (which never moved beyond a niche party for eccentric rich people) and the Bavarian regionalist BVP (which didn't organise outside Bavaria) wanted to destroy it.

Building an effective centre-right party after the Versailles dictate is implemented is sort of difficult.

I appreciate that you have to feel this way because you are German-German, but because I have the luxury of being German-a-few-generations-removed, allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'

Was JFK an 'unhinged gangster' because his family were literal mobsters and he was constantly high on painkillers?

I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.

As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.

I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.

Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.

And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

Edit: This wasn't meant to seem curt - sometime though brevity is the soul of wit. Yes, perhaps if the Junkers or some other more traditional conservative faction had risen to power rather than such a reactionary party, Germany may have done X, Y, and Z. But it seems crass to me, almost prideful, to look at the 'unhinged gangsters' who 'volunteered' to beat the Spanish communists and then got the band back together in the Rhineland, Osterreich, the Sudetenland, Danzig, etc to give the Bolsheviks a genuinely good go and say 'if only!'

Yes, they lost, but they fought! By Jesu they fought. And it's just as easy to say 'it would've been better if they hadn't' as 'it would've been worse.' Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero). But he chose to go! He chose to fight! That he happened to drown when someone else might've not and (swamped the saracens) instead doesn't make him an 'unhinged gangster'

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

It would be pretty hard for Churchill to declare war in 1939. You might not know as much about WWII as you think.

Hitler declared war on Poland, in the face of explicit threats by Britain and France to join such a war on Poland's side. He could have just, y'know, not done that, and if he had he'd be remembered as the second Bismarck for the Anschluss and Munich.

Calls to mind the old joke about how if your aunt had balls she'd be your uncle. Today we're used to the idea of a tiny shriveled ball sack-in-cold-weather Germany without a Baltic presence, but at the time, saying "just forget about the Germans in Poland" (which had just reappeared as a political presence for the first time in like 400 years) was a non-starter

was a non-starter

That doesn't stop it from being Hitler's choice. "I want to do X" is difference from "I was forced to do X."

"I want the communists to win the War in Russia and China" is difference from " I was forced xyz"

I am not being cute or trolling and don't know how to say otherwise. Our entire discourse is poisoned but please try to consider that sincerely. Or don't. Trying too hard to care is more cringe than it's ever been so not appearing to try too hard is a sign of legitimacy

I am not being cute or trolling and don't know how to say otherwise.

Stop engaging in rhetoric and deflection, as opposed to defending your substantive claims or acknowledging your mistakes. This will remove the appearance of trying to be a cute troll.

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Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

That's certainly a take, and a depressingly common one around here it seems.

Setting aside the fact that Churchill didn't even become prime minister until May of 1940, I'm just going to reiterate what I said the last time this topic came up a month ago.

Hitler's diplomatic position in August of 1939 was essentially that of a belligerent drunk at the bar who keeps getting in people's faces and asking "Oh Yah? Watch'ou goanna do about bro?" and then acts surprised when someone decides to "do something about it".

The Nazis were already on thin-ice for continuing their territorial expansion post Munich, rebuking the Anglo German Naval Agreement, and harassing neutral shipping in the North Sea wich the British regarded as their back yard. If they didn't want a war with the British, they could have easily avoided it by not doing any of those things and more critically by not aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks against a country that both the British and French had a security agreement with.

Edit to add: That last bit in particular also demonstrates that all that talk from current year nazis about "racial brotherhood" and "opposing communism" is a crock of shit.

For all the talk condemning "brother wars" Prussians seem particularly prone to engaging in them and as much as I want to make a joke about Martin Luther being to blame I'm worried about someone falling into the same trap I almost did with @Southkraut's comment down thread where I almost chewed them a new one before I realized they were being facetious.

We can, obviously, have it both ways and more than one thing can be true at the same time. Ethnic germans really were getting persecuted in newly-Polish territories. Maybe their diplomatic position was that of a belligerent drunk too.

We can, obviously, have it both ways

No, no you can't.

Agree to disagree?

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero).

Are you even a German? You talk like an American with some far off German ancestors, who has no real connection to the country or it's culture. You also idealize Germany, and attack the Anglo world, like someone who knows the faults of the Anglo world first hand, but has no real understanding of what Germany was like then.

/u/johnfabian /u/netstack I may be a few generations removed from the old country but I sure as shit aint Chinese

Also Heil Hitler, we must have a bratwurst and save the Fatherland

it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"

Eh, whether or not the OP has any credibility, I’d like to avoid this brand of mockery.

Germany could have not invaded Poland.

Because I live up on a hill in a big house with a nice moat of acreage in a very safe place, this is both true and hilariously similar to the conditions of Putin and Eastern Ukraine in contemporary times.

Had the Polish not been feeling their oats from their victories over the Soviets and actively persecuting Germans in their recently acquired territories shrug

this is both true and hilariously similar to the conditions of Putin and Eastern Ukraine in contemporary times

And Putin's invasion of Ukraine was also a strategic mistake.

I think that this is not obvious, at least not yet. If there's a Taiwan blowup ending in nukes, and Putin stays out of it, he takes Ukraine. Yes, he could have done that with less casualties by waiting longer, but on the other hand a lot of those casualties work in his personal favour due to selectively conscripting the least-loyal elements of the Russian populace (and also to some degree the Ukraine mess has made a Taiwan blowup more likely).

selectively conscripting the least-loyal elements of the Russian populace

why do you think that? Right now, Moscow and St Petersburg are way less conscripted and they are also less loayal to Putin

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This would suggest that Hitler and Co's priority was not combating Bolshevism but expansionist German nationalism. Glorifying Hitler for fighting against the Bolsheviks ignores the series of anti-Boshevik states that he destroyed on the way to Russia. Poland, as you note, had just come off fighting a war against the Soviets.

Hitler was never really very anti-Bolshevik, never moreso than he was anti-Slav. Had Hitler aligned with Poland and the Czechs against Russia, things might have gone differently, n'est pas?

Of course there is no readily available source, because of course there isn't, and I apologize but I'm just not gonna fight upstream to find the link, but there was a proposed German-Polish non-aggression pact renewal

I'm fairly certain from Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which I listened through recently that there were current treaties obligating Germany to respect and protect Poland's borders, and certainly there were treaties promising to hold to current Czech borders at the time that Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Hitler was rather known for failing to respect treaties.

What would be more interesting, though still less dispositive than his actual real actions, would be if you could find a movement within Naziism (meaning Hitler) to rally an anti Bolshevik coalition in eastern Europe that predated Nazi plans to invade Poland. I don't think you can because Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Baltics were more or less part of the plan from Mein Kampf onward as I understand it.

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  1. Rightful German Clay, had to protect the German minorities.
  2. They attacked us first! Remember the radio station!
  3. Had to be done to push the starting positions of the inevitable anti-bolshevik war further East.
  4. Lebensraum. We needed space to live.
  5. It was just an anglo puppet and we had to call them on their bluff.

Alright, alright, I'm just fooling around here.

Yes they fought, but their having fought no matter how much and how well doesn't save the Germany of today. We can trace our unmaking right back to them. Barbarossa, for all of his ineffectual campaigns and fruitless labors, left the Germanies roughly in the state he found them in. The Nazis took a struggling Germany and, for all the little glories they won, burned it right down to the ground and left the withered remains to the mercy of the victors. Certainly perfidious Albion had its schemes and probably quite a laugh at our fate, perhaps on can believe that Hitler himself would have preferred peace with them, but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

Unless you subscribe to some school of thought that completely denies the significance of consequence, I find no way to absolve the people who had complete authority over the country from complete responsibility for its destruction. Whatever our enemies might have done, however justified any given aspect of German military campaigning was, given that kind of authority those kinds of results speak for themselves.

And so as to not neglect the Unhinged Gangsters bit - I stand by that. Something like the Night of the Long Knives is decidedly ungerman.

but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

No! That's the point! England is a rotten mess of God only knows what and they're the one's who won!

That's true enough, but it wasn't so in 1945.

Thank you God for granting us the wisdom of our ancestors and the gift of distance from their mistake to properly evaluate them

Churchill was not prime minister when England and France declared war on Germany.

It doesn't take a Churchillian titanic view of history to understand the trends and forces of the war were beyond the scope of who happened to hold office at the time. Churchill and his ultra-conservative faction had feared the rise of German naval power for half a century - unabated after the Great War - before their promise to Poland gave them the necessary excuse to smack Germany back down. And what happened to Poland after the war?

Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

You think if the Republicans had won in Spain this would somehow have led to the Red Army conquering all of Europe Command and Conquer style?

No, but I love the throwback, you or anyone else want to fire that back up sometime for nostalgias sake?

I think the Bolsheviks very openly and actively wanted to unite the workers of the world which would have certainly included going to the Atlantic if someone hadn't stopped them

In real life, the Soviets only reached even as far as Berlin because of copious American and British assistance. Without that, they might have at best fought the Germans back to Barbarossa start-lines. On their own, they barely beat Finland. The Red Army marching all the way to the Atlantic is ridiculous. "If it wasn't for us, the communists would have taken over!" was a useful bugbear for everybody from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco but Bolshevik conquest of Europe was always a fantasy.

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allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'

I'd suggest that at least one was.

I like Hitler and think he was genuinely kind of a nice fella

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