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InspectorBloor posted:I saw it once in a german documentary, but then never again. He was sitting in his seat at the games and had the upper body tilted slightly forward, circling around with his torso back and forward, left and right. Reminded me of the tics that people with shell shock displayed. Hats off to you if you manage to find it. I didn't. e: the source didn't mention the Olympics, though, just "original footage from a German propaganda film (that was censored at the time) with Hitler's left hand tremor." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D25a-jkBHk0
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Oct 1, 2013 01:37
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InspectorBloor posted:I've read that it's most likely that H. had Parkinson's disease. I'm not trying to offend you or anything, but what's up with calling him "H"? Is it a German thing to not even recite his name out of disgust or something? Also, is it true that if you do the nazi salute in Germany and a policeman sees you, they'll straight up arrest you? When I was a kid, my dad took Holocaust Memorial Day very seriously. What parts of his side of the family that didn't get out of Lithuania got wiped out, and he had photos of them and everything. Between that and learning all about the Holocaust in Hebrew School (which is pretty much a story of how many Jews were killed at X place in Y year), its really interesting learning about how Germans deal with it today. I was actually all over Germany a couple years ago for Oktoberfest, but I couldn't bring myself to go to a concentration camp. Hebrew School was awful enough, so I'd like to think I can relate to having Holocaust-related material drilled into your head since childhood. EDIT: My dad was also old enough to serve in WWII. We had a falling out and he's got Alzheimer's now, but I asked him what he did during the war once as a kid and he absolutely refused to tell me about it, except that it had something to do with POWs. Now I kind of regret asking him when I grew up. His hands still hurt him a lot when he got frostbite during the war. That's all he'd tell me between that and the PoW thing. Business Gorillas fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 03:48
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Business Gorillas posted:
Yes. They might let you off with a warning if they think you're just being an idiot, especially if you are a foreigner, but it is illegal. Its the same if you wear a swastika...anywhere.
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Oct 1, 2013 04:18
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InspectorBloor posted:I'm not exactly sure, but I think around mid 1942 H. starts to take over more and more competences in warfare, putting enormous workload on him. He wanted to micromanage alot of things at the front, so it's likely that the stress and the pressure of the failures that started then excacerbated his symptoms. Yah, it's not as if being an evil fucker necessarily makes you immune to stress and his job must certainly have been one of the more stressful ones around.
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Oct 1, 2013 05:28
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Groke posted:Yah, it's not as if being an evil fucker necessarily makes you immune to stress and his job must certainly have been one of the more stressful ones around. He led an almost charmed life. Except for the failed beer hall putsch his early rise to power seems to have gone so amazingly well. Every daring move he made through either skill or dumb luck came up as a win. Then when he started playing politics he always seemed to get what he wanted. Occupy the Rhineland: The French could have moved in and he would have been removed from power within a month. Nothing happened. Seize Austria: The Italians, British, and French let him have it. Seize Czechoslovakia: The British and French sell out their ally and give Germany continental superiority. Seize Poland: The west intervenes but can do nothing to save Poland. Invasion of France: Through a number of lucky factors it is a relatively easy campaign. Then after the invasion of the Soviet Union things began to fall apart and you watch Hitler planning his grand gestures of defiance and seeming to be baffled that they no longer work. A tragic figure, though obviously not a sympathetic one.
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Oct 1, 2013 06:15
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Business Gorillas posted:Also, is it true that if you do the nazi salute in Germany and a policeman sees you, they'll straight up arrest you? Pretty much. We also have some fun laws that actually curtail freedom of speech when it comes to holocaust-denial. The name of the paragraph itself is a bit of a misnomer and I don't believe there's an apt translation for it outside of a literal one, which is "incitement of the people". Up until the 90s, holocaust denial was already punishable as defamation (albeit, I believe, only when targeted at people of jewish belief or descent, both in public and non-public settings), but our supreme court decided to turn up the heat some and ruled that denying the holocaust isn't an opinion protected under the freedom-of-speech-paragraph of our constitution. So even some faux-innocent moronic statements like "I don't believe anyone was gassed at Auschwitz, but that's just me, what do I know, I'm just asking questions.", delivered in the most  -esque of manners, is already illegal. One distinctive characteristic of this paragraph is that being in violation of it will get you tried and convicted even when committing the violation outside german soil. If I were to go on some american talk-show and say "Jay, to be quite honest, that whole story about jews being gassed is a bunch of horsepucky if you're asking me." or hand out pamphlets "educating" about the holocaust in Canada, I would, with near-certainty, be greeted by the authorities upon my return and look forward to a 3-5 year sentence.One of the more recent and infamous cases where this relevant part of §130 was invoked was when Horst Mahler, notorious for being a founding member of the RAF and later turning to far right extremist politics (and being a general shitbag), was scheduled to be interviewed for a piece in vanity fair by Michel Friedman. Friedman (also a bit of a dickbag himself, albeit for being a self-proclaimed smug/confrontational rear end in a top hat to promote his talkshow-host persona and a scandal involving cocaine and polish prostitutes) was born into a polish-jewish family and is an actual decendant of the Schindlerjuden, so he didn't exactly take too kindly to Mahler greeting him with "Heil Hitler, Herr Friedman!" and going on to deny the holocaust during their interview. For this instance alone, he was convicted and sentenced to (I believe) 11 months of prison without parole, but I'm not entirely certain, because this colossal moron managed to deny the holocaust so often and consistently that he's had the book thrown at him more often than I can make sense of and is currently serving a grand total of 12 years without possibility of parole and was even barred from posting bail before trial. Mahler's wife, also a lawyer, incidentally was sentenced to three and a half years prison without parole for calling the holocaust "the world's biggest lie" during her defence of Ernst Zündel (yet another shitbag; on trial for publishing holocaust-denying literature in Canada) and claiming that jewish foreign powers were in control of the german government and forced it impose "allied victor's justice" upon its people. tl;dr: The holocaust happened and if you think otherwise, you'd do well to keep it to yourself in Germany. /edit: I'm extremely cool with all of this, by the way, mostly because I've had the joy and privilege of pressing charges based around §130 and §86a against a bunch of neonazis myself. Fun story on the side: being in a fight with someone that is likely to be tried and convicted under either of the relevant anti-nazi paragraphs basically gives you carte-blanche to, let's say "liberally interpret the legal limits of self-defense" and you'll very likely be off the hook on the legal grounds of "yeah, well the other dude had it coming." Duzzy Funlop fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 07:59
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Business Gorillas posted:I'm not trying to offend you or anything, but what's up with calling him "H"? Is it a German thing to not even recite his name out of disgust or something? Ah no, although I just could ctrl&v the Führer. It's tiring to write and read Hitler over and over, and everybody knows what is meant anyway (hopefully). I picked it up from Ian Kershaw I think. There are laws in Germany and Austria that prohibit the use of nazi symbols like the swastika or Hitlergruß. Wearing a swastika will get you arrested, or depending on the policeman, you're told to remove it or you'll get arrested. I have the impression that the nazi salute isn't prosecuted so strictly, but maybe that's just my impression. http://derstandard.at/1379291805845/Graz-Hitlergruss-bei-FPOe-Wahlkampftour Politicians of right parties sometimes substitute them with other gestures or symbols that resonate with the recipients. I can't tell you about how Germans deal with it today, because I'm not a German and never lived there. Here in Austria you will have contact with the thematics in school, but it's by no means omnipresent in history classes. I can't exactly recall the curriculum, but I think we've been to a concentration camp at 12 or 13 or so, and then had some more in history class at 16 or 17. It's nothing that is too present in everyday life. I think I mentioned it in connection with the dying out of the last people that were grown ups at that time, but it feels very much like it's gone most of the way, to transcending to history. Regarding the latest elections here, the FPÖ is certainly a radical right party, but the hard core of radical nationalists is a comparatively small number of voters. That doesn't mean that the messages don't resonate with a potentially substantive part of our society, looking at the fact that the political discourse drifted so far to the right in the last 30 years or so. It's almost impossible to talk about something natural like immigration without suddenly having the conversation revolving around asylum/social security abuse. that's certainly not a local phenomenon, but it carries more weight with our history. e: I managed to forget about holocaust denial. There's certain parlamentarians of said party that sport comments like that every now and then or have known neonazis in their staff. While they're protected by their immunity as delegates, this immunity will get revoked for stuff like denying the holocaust. By the way, what is it like to go to a jewish school? For obvious reasons it's hard to have many jewish friends here without trying hard. How present is the holocaust in your life? NihilCredo posted:A quick googling says it appears in an episode from the NatGeo documentary "Nazi Underworld", called Patient Hitler. It should be somewhere in these 45 minutes: I can't watch it atm, too much work at work. The sequence that is mentioned here will most likely refer to the last appearance of H. on film, he awards a bunch of medals to kids that shot up tanks. There is also another one where he is shown visiting his injured staff after the bomb of the 20th july. The documenation that I mean was produced by the ARD or ZDF, but maybe my memory fails me. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 08:06
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InspectorBloor posted:By the way, what is it like to go to a jewish school? For obvious reasons it's hard to have many jewish friends here without trying hard. How present is the holocaust in your life? I didn't go to a Jewish school, per se. For me, Hebrew school was tied in with synagogue, which I'm told is a lot like catechism for Catholics. There's a pretty big Jewish population where I grew up, so I've had friends who went to an actual Jewish school, so they'd have a better grasp on the actual school than I would. I don't know how much you know about Judaism, but its basically broken up into three major groups: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. The names are pretty self explanatory  , with the Orthodox Jews being those with the hats and the big sideburns, Reform Jews that do the big events (holding a seder for Passover, going to temple for Yom Kippur/Rosh Hashanah, doing the whole 8 nights of Hanukkah, etc), and Conservative being in the middle. I went to a Reform hebrew school.For reform kids where I'm at in the states, we only went up to our Bar (for boys) or Bat (for girls) Mitzvah, so we stopped going at 13. Out of the two days a week we went, one day was learning how to read hebrew and the other day was going to service, observing the different holidays, and about a hour or so of Jewish History. You read out of the Torah (Old Testament) in hebrew during your Bar Mitzvah, so that was the whole point of the one day, to get you trained for that. You could take speaking courses if you wanted to, but they weren't mandatory. We did Jewish history after service, which was mostly about the massacres and flights of jewish populations throughout the Middle East and Europe over history. We also went into the different holidays as they came up. For example you have Passover, obviously, and another big one was Purim, which comes from the story of the Jewish exodus from Babylon. They did a lot of positive stuff about Jewish history, like King David and the founding of Israel, but there isn't a lot of it, so it was mostly stuff like Masada, the Spanish Inquisition, etc. When Holocaust Remembrance Day was around the corner, they spent a lot of time on the Holocaust. The big thing about Jewish History in temple was that we understood why Jews were targeted throughout history, the Holocaust especially. We spent as much time about the buildup to the Holocaust such as Kristallnacht and the anti-jewish laws Hitler put in place as much as we spent on the actual Holocaust itself. I've had gentile friends take Jewish History courses and say that they were the most depressing classes they ever had taken, and I don't blame them. There's a really big push in the Jewish community to make sure that the Holocaust never fades completely into history. They made sure that we knew all of the details and could relate to it, so we could do our best to make sure something like it never happens again. There's also a serious hatred of the Nazis and anything approaching fascism, which I don't think will ever go away. My dad was a WWII vet like I said before. He tried to push me really, really hard into hating the Germans for what they did, but it never really stuck. He showed me those pictures of everyone who didn't make out of Lithuania with his parents, who he said left due to antisemitism right after WWI. Reading up on it, the Jewish population in Lithuania was pretty much destroyed during WWII, so I lost almost my entire family on my dad's parents' side of the family. I'm 24 now and my dad is approaching 90. His parents died before I was born, so I never got to talk to them about their experiences. As for me personally, I don't think it affects me on a day to day basis or anything. Whenever I see something like a movie or something set in the Holocaust, I get a pretty visceral reaction from it. If someone ever denied the Holocaust to my face, I'd probably start throwing punches, even though I'm not that kind of person in the slightest. I also think I'm pretty defensive about my roots even though I haven't associated myself with the Jewish faith for a while now, and I think that's sort of a side product of all of the history lessons I had and my dad drilling it into me for most of my formative years. Business Gorillas fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 11:34
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I hope this is not too far removed from the scope of the thread but today is the 70th anniversary of the rescue of the Danish Jews. Many of you probably know about the rescue already but let me just quote the relevant Wikipedia article for those who don't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews quote:On October 1, 1943 Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ordered Danish Jews to be arrested and deported. Despite great personal risk, the Danish resistance movement with the assistance of many ordinary Danish citizens took part in a collective effort to evacuate about 7,800 Jews of Denmark by sea to nearby neutral Sweden. This incident has usually been, rightfully, hailed as an extraordinary nationwide act of humanity that stands out from the dark and disturbing history of the Holocaust. During the past decade however, new research and testimonials here in Denmark have revealed harsher and previously little known aspects of the Jewish rescue as the last generation of survivors have revealed their wartime experiences, many for the first time. This article from the Jewish daily Forward gives a good summary of these aspects: http://forward.com/articles/184216/denmark-forced-by-history-to-revisit-heroic-tale-o/?p=all
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Oct 1, 2013 12:07
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Thank you for sharing. Did your father join the partisans or was he in the regular troops of the Red Army? I'm currently reading Hannah Arendt "The Origins of Totalitarism" on the side, but I'm not much further than her take on how jews were closely associated with the state in the 18th century - but she gives a short introduction of a later chapter where she does look into the jewish discourse on why jews were often targeted. So I'm naturally curious when you said you learned why jews were targeted.
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Oct 1, 2013 12:40
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InspectorBloor posted:Thank you for sharing. Did your father join the partisans or was he in the regular troops of the Red Army? My dad was born a couple years after his parents came to the US from Lithuania. He got drafted and fought for the states. All I know is that he fought in the Army in Italy and Germany and he also got frostbite, which still hurts him in the winter to this day. He never really talked about the war and he never showed me any medals or war memorabilia, but he obviously saw some poo poo over there. Up until he got diagnosed with Alzheimer's he never really trusted Germans. EDIT: From what I remember, what I learned in hebrew school as to why Jews were targeted mostly lines up with stuff I've read in gentile perspectives. Jews were outcasts of society and were easily otherized and scapegoated. They also covered the whole bit about how Jews tended to only be able to be moneylenders in medieval times, and people would get pissed that they owed money and just kill their creditors. There was also the ideas that people simply killed Jews for their stuff. We learned all about how people with gold fillings would have their teeth ripped out in the concentration camps. Business Gorillas fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 13:06
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I think we're leaving the boundaries of this thread, but there is surprising depth to the history of european jews and the genesis of the modern nation state. Which is interesting, because the roots of modern antisemitism take a new twist with these developments. As you might have read, Germany was a patchwork of lots of different principalities ruled by dukes and princes. So shortly after the French Revolution we have alot of German philosophers that are favourable towards the ideal of it. That changes with the Napoleonic Wars and the occupation of large parts of Germany, yet the napoleonic code of laws will leave a large footprint. What changes is, that because of the occupation and what they experienced as foreign tyranny, those german philosphers will abandon the ideals of the revolution and put the ideas about nationhood and what makes a nation on a different base. So instead of the voluntarism of the french, the german philosophers turn to the idea of blood. That means, you can only be a member of the german nation if you have german heritage. So it's a good question what makes a german? That's where the jews come into play. The jews were the only notable group that were noticably different in terms of their religion and the way they were segregated. It was also noticed that since the 1500s certain jews that lent large sums of money to the emperor gained substantial wealth and influence (although at the cost of denying the rest of the jews access to both). By the time of Napoleon the exemplaric name Rothschild was practically known everywhere all over Europe. These influential families of bankers played a large part in financing wars and simple state projects in absence of a modern code of taxation, yet they seldom got engaged with manufacture, as their proximity to the state guaranteed them security that they would not have gotten in absence of a modern code of laws. To make it short, the jews were a convenient target, because one could ascribe alot of traits to their otherness and the unknown and thereby also build up a counter-image of yourself. You understand it when I give examples like "Jews don't farm, but most of the germans are farmers". If you look at influential thinkers like Fichte, that's what he's going on all about - and it's also the part from where german concepts of nationhood take off. So instead of the idea that you can be a member of this nation if you adhere to certain principles and feel attached to them, you can only be a true member of this nation if you have it's blood. Whatever that might mean. It's also a point where you suddenly have mentions of jews here, jews there, everywhere all over the arts. Everyone starts being obsessed with what the jews are supposed to be, but it's mostly for the reason to tell yourself what you think you want to be. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 13:45
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Business Gorillas posted:EDIT: From what I remember, what I learned in hebrew school as to why Jews were targeted mostly lines up with stuff I've read in gentile perspectives. Jews were outcasts of society and were easily otherized and scapegoated. Interestingly, Denmark's Jewish population had long been almost completely integrated into Danish society by the beginning of World War II. This is not to say that Denmark was free of antisemitism, but when the Nazis' started the arrests and deportations of Denmark's Jews in 1943 it was not seen as an attack on "Jews" as such but as an attack on fellow Danes. This is regarded as one* of the main reasons behind the great success of the rescue as ordinary non-Jewish Danes rallied to protect their fellow citizens. *The other reasons being the close proximity of neutral Sweden to Denmark, and the fact that the German authorities were actually not that interested in catching the Danish Jews.
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Oct 1, 2013 15:03
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Still, the rescue of the danish jews is something worth remembering that we need to hear more about.
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Oct 1, 2013 15:34
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There was Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-consul to Lithuania during WW2. He helped thousands of Jews leave Nazi Germany by just blanket-stamping visas essentially. Because he was Japanese and a rather high foreign functionary the Germans didn't really know what to do with him. I'll just quote the second part from wikipedia;quote:Sugihara continued to hand write visas, reportedly spending 18–20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day, until 4 September, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. On the night before their scheduled departure, Sugihara and his wife stayed awake writing out visa approvals. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at the Kaunas Railway Station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train's window even as the train pulled out. He's now considered a saint by some Orthodox Christian people. It is really weird to see a guy in suit and tie with a halo. 
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Oct 1, 2013 16:32
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InspectorBloor posted:So instead of the idea that you can be a member of this nation if you adhere to certain principles and feel attached to them, you can only be a true member of this nation if you have it's blood. Whatever that might mean. This sort of idea permeates cultures and you can still see that idea in the birther nonsense about President Obama and his citizenship/nationality. A significant number of people in the US believe that who you are is a function of who your parents are and where you were born. That's why so many people ask the question "where are you from?" in order to pigeonhole you into some category of "us" versus "not one of us" and from that determine how polite they should be to you. In previous generations, the phrase "one drop" was well understood and was used to define the legal status of people. It is embarassing how recently Loving v Virginia happened. There are 2 types of citizenship in the world: jus soli and jus sanguinis. Under the doctrine of jus soli, if you were born there, you're a citizen (America is this way). Under the doctrine of jus sanguinis, if you are of the proper ancestry, you're a citizen. Ireland and Japan operate under jus sanguinis: if any one of your grandparents were Irish citizens, you're an Irish citizen (if you want to be). In Japan, if your father is a Japanese citizen, then you're a Japanese citizen (this leads to some interesting cases where people born in Japan, grow up there, only speak Japanese can be deported for being illegal immigrants because citizenship is transmitted via sperm, not the womb). Germany used to be a jus sanguinis nation but for people born after 2000, they've adopted jus soli rules. Many Turkish immigrants were prevented from gaining German citizenship even though they had lived legally in Germany for several generations. Jus sanguinis was the standard throughout the world until recent times. I consider a culture to be a bunch of people with shared stories about "who we are" and "who we are not." Those stories don't have to be logical, nor consistent and sometimes the stories are contradictory. Many times the values of different cultures are close to incomprehensible to people of other cultures. A pair of essays that show some of these different value systems when comparing "liberals" with "conservatives" are these two essays. quote:With all that in mind, Haidt identified five foundational moral impulses. As succinctly defined by Northwestern University’s McAdams, they are: As for "why Jews", I think the book and TV series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews covers a lot of the discrimination, marginalization and abuse throughout European history. Series on YouTube. Amazon link for book. I agree with Ebba Abban's remark that the history of Western civilization is also the history of the Jews. In the book, the first documented case of "kill all the jews" in Europe happened in 1084. The hatred isn't new, I think it is baked into the DNA of European culture. By dialing that hatred up to 11 and institutionalizing it, the Nazis made it unacceptable to continue. I thought that the laws against Holocaust denial would do a good job of stamping it out, but the spasms of the collapse of Yugoslavia show that sort of institutionalized murder won't die out. edit: fixed "Jus sanguinis was the standard throughout the world until recent times." Huttan fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 20:59
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Business Gorillas posted:EDIT: From what I remember, what I learned in hebrew school as to why Jews were targeted mostly lines up with stuff I've read in gentile perspectives. Jews were outcasts of society and were easily otherized and scapegoated. They also covered the whole bit about how Jews tended to only be able to be moneylenders in medieval times, and people would get pissed that they owed money and just kill their creditors. There was also the ideas that people simply killed Jews for their stuff. We learned all about how people with gold fillings would have their teeth ripped out in the concentration camps. I've went around some execution sites around Vilnius with a Jewish historian and he told our group that a significant factor why Jews were really hated by the locals and enthusiastically given away to the Germans was the ties the Jews had to communist groups. When the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania happened in 1940, Jews from communist youth groups would work with the NKVD and give them information on where the rich, the intelligentsia, and other purported counter-revolutionary elements lived. As a result, tens of thousands of people, mostly educated Lithuanians, were sent off to freeze in the rear end in a top hat-of-nowhere in Siberia. The local population got its revenge in blood when the Germans invaded a month later, which is why they were greeted as liberators from the red menace. It is absolutely tragic what happened in this country, the same guy took us on a walk around the city centre and talked for hours about various Jewish synagogues, streets, a huge library that got burned down, now it's all mostly gone and the city is bland and provincial.
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Oct 1, 2013 21:45
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Huttan posted:As for "why Jews", I think the book and TV series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews covers a lot of the discrimination, marginalization and abuse throughout European history. Series on YouTube. Amazon link for book. I agree with Ebba Abban's remark that the history of Western civilization is also the history of the Jews. In the book, the first documented case of "kill all the jews" in Europe happened in 1084. The hatred isn't new, I think it is baked into the DNA of European culture. By dialing that hatred up to 11 and institutionalizing it, the Nazis made it unacceptable to continue. I thought that the laws against Holocaust denial would do a good job of stamping it out, but the spasms of the collapse of Yugoslavia show that sort of institutionalized murder won't die out. Good to see somebody studying Inclusion/Exclusion. I'd be wary though to see antisemitism as something inevitable to our culture that rules out everything else or likewise concentrate overly on the role of jews as victims or scapegoats, when western culture is inseparable from jewish culture. Think of intellectual life - it's just impossible to think of. There's just more depth than this. About birthers and the teaparty, let me just tell you that only the fringe of the fringe right comes close to this here in Europe. It's just inconceivable that people like that wield any political power. I think I understand what you mean with Yugoslavia. It's important to remember that eastern countries might have had laws that made holocaust denial punishable, but by and large, there was no broad examination of the own role in making the holocaust possible. Maybe that's going to happen some time in the future, but looking to Hungary (wtf?) doesn't exactly make you optimistic for the moment. I don't know if it already came up in this thread, but going to countries of the former eastern block, you will encounter pretty mindboggling casual antisemitism that is unthinkable in Austria or Germany. Even more Germany. That's not on the main part because of laws, but because of a public discourse that modified the image. I know it's a bit more complicated. Antisemitism is definitely "in the DNA" of the right, and since the 70s also of the left, but for other reasons. It's a topos - whenever you are commenting on this, you are refering to said image in memory and the discourses around it. Whenever you have unfavorable event X featuring jews, it might come up from under the carpet. See Waldheim So, to wrap it up and join what you posted, the right picked new groups of people as their main enemies and scapegoats here, but in the eastern countries the old images remain largely untouched. Whatever the mechanic or psychology behind this is, it's similar. What Haidt states seems valid. And I tend to see "rightness" as a psychological rather than a political flaw. e: I think we're touching alot of very interesting things here. I have a really hard time staying cohesive and deleted the parts about the thoughts of unfinished and inhibited nationalism in eastern countries that kind of seems to pick up where it stopped 1945. Or at least it's not something that these countries were able to "exorcize". And then we're at the point where economic difficulties contribute to the spread of old ideas in new and old clothes, etc. etc. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 2, 2013 09:17
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As for "why Jews" I'd recommend a couple of essays by the philosopher Moishe Postone. I'll link to one that is really good but it tends to get bogged down in a lot of Marxist terminology: http://web.archive.org/web/20130521002102/http://contested-terrain.net/postoneasns/ His point is that Nazi anti-Semitism went beyond simple scapegoating, and the Jews were not exterminated for military reasons or a consequence of some other tangible goal, like driving American Indians off their land. It was "not only to have been total, but was its own goal - extermination for the sake extermination - a goal that acquired absolute priority." Nazi propaganda late in the war often referred to World War II as "The Jewish War." And they put priority on exterminating the Jews even up until the end of the war at the expense of other "rational" military priorities. Postone argues that Nazism viewed itself as a revolt against the modern world, and that Jews in Nazi ideology represented an "immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy" that was "undermining the social 'health' of the nation." He also argues that central to the Nazi "revolt" was to be against the "abstract" domination of capital which became identified with the Jews, versus the productive "concrete" (or specific) social/political/economic activity of the Nazi Volk. I suppose you could frame this difference as the difference between a concrete Volkish farm community with this organic unity tying race and soil and the fruits of its labor together; versus the intangible, chaotic, alienating abstract life of the cosmopolitan (i.e. Jewish) city. Think of "abstract" in these terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_labour_and_concrete_labour So again, why the Jews? He writes: quote:The long history of anti-Semitism in Europe and the related association of Jews with money are well known. The period of the rapid expansion of industrial capital in the last third of the nineteenth century coincided with the political and civil emancipation of the Jews in central Europe. There was a veritable explosion of Jews in the universities, the liberal professions, journalism, the arts, retail. The Jews rapidly became visible in civil society, particularly in spheres and professions that were expanding and which were associated with the newer form society was taking. One could mention many other factors, but there is one that I wish to emphasize.
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Oct 2, 2013 10:15
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Omi-Polari posted:Postone argues that Nazism viewed itself as a revolt against the modern world, and that Jews in Nazi ideology represented an "immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy" that was "undermining the social 'health' of the nation." He also argues that central to the Nazi "revolt" was to be against the "abstract" domination of capital which became identified with the Jews, versus the productive "concrete" (or specific) social/political/economic activity of the Nazi Volk. I suppose you could frame this difference as the difference between a concrete Volkish farm community with this organic unity tying race and soil and the fruits of its labor together; versus the intangible, chaotic, alienating abstract life of the cosmopolitan (i.e. Jewish) city. Bit of a derail, but Ryan Gosling's character in The Believer personifies this mentality to some degree.
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Oct 2, 2013 15:45
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It's definitely a revolt against modernity, though I doubt that one could explain it sufficiently with it being a revolt against capital or the consequences of industrialization. The sources from where H. drew his worldview, which he just took over for the most part from Deutsch-Nationale fringe movements of the fin de siècle in Vienna, follow the red line of being a revolt against the ideals of the french revolution and the ideas of enlightenment. They instead posit something that sounds like bad fiction to the modern reader (and for the most part to the people back then). We touched that with the talk about occultism. All that talk about germanic tribes and a white superrace in the north that was supposed to be the *real* craddle of civilization, a huge pool of made up poo poo about germanic religion and meaning of runes and sites. It's really a panopticum that makes the tea party look like a science congress. What made these parties especially virulent and radical was the fact that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a multienthnic state that barred these german nationals from joining up with the German Reich. It was also a state with serious political problems, where the parliament was visited by citizens to have a laugh, because the delegates of all the different nations would hold speeches in their mother tongue, obstruct each other, filibuster, brawl or make so much noise as to make normal operation impossible. These parties drew their lessons from this, they were strictly antidemocratic and led by more or less charismatic men. They also had a tendency to split up and evaporate once these charismatic leaders were gone. The consequences of rejecting enlightenment are obvious, you will also reject rationality and collective decision making, but that leaves you with the problem of legitimacy. From where would you draw that if you also reject the dynastic principle or the clerus? A logical step that most other national ideologists used was to refer to a distant and therefore vague past, but the problem that these german nationalists had, was that there was no substantive history known about the people that formerly inhabited this part of the world. Roman sources that paint a too positive or negative picture, a few excavations, but no written primary sources that could be used to construct anything useful politically. I can't think of anything that H. personally added, aside from just concentrating on the jews as a singular enemy, but that was mostly for political raison. He literally concentrated all the other points into "the jews". Power Khan fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 2, 2013 16:49
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So I'm a German Studies grad student working on an MA thesis with the focus of Afro-Germans in Nazi cinema, and the way Nazi cinema/media/entertainment viewed Afro-Germans (positively or negatively). Do you guys have any particular films, memoirs, or academic works to suggest on this topic? I've watched many Nazi films meant for "entertainment" (as opposed to blatant propaganda such as, say, Hitlerjunge Quex, or Triumph Des Willens), and now I need German films which feature blacks/Afro-Germans, whether it be newsreels, propaganda films, or relaxing entertainment films from the Nazi era. Incredible thread, by the way. It's been a super fun read  .
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Oct 7, 2013 02:41
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edit: never mind that wasn't what you asked at all.
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Oct 7, 2013 02:55
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I will look in the database of my uni. There is surely something. I recall reading about something similar in a magazine a few years ago. Something about black jazz musicians. e: I found these ad hoc in my uni's library, but it's more general literature: Bilé, Serge (2006): Das schwarze Blut meiner Brüder [Original title.: Noirs dans les camps nazis] Campt, Tina (1990): Other Germans This looks better: Czinki, Gertrud (2004): Repräsentation der Schwarzen im NS-Spielfilm 1934-1944 im Kontext der Geschichte Google did a better job, each of these links also offers sources on blacks in nazi germany: http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/migration/afrikanische-diaspora/59423/nationalsozialismus?p=all http://www.museenkoeln.de/ausstellungen/nsd_0211_schwarze/aus_10.asp http://media.de.indymedia.org/media/2007/11//199954.pdf http://www.exil-club.de/dyn/9.asp?Aid=98&Avalidate=390789210&cache=39081&url=56369.asp I don't know. The whole thing seems to be difficult regarding access to the sources (if you want to do a really solid job) - if you're not in Germany for recherche. It looks like a task where you need money to succeed. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 07:27
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Anyone that wants more insight/information on the Holocaust, as well as Sweden's smaller role in the war, should really read A Death in Jerusalem by Kati Marton. Now this book mainly revolves around the rising Arab-Israeli conflict and the rise of an Israeli Extremist Group, Lehi, but more importantly it focuses around Folke Bernadotte, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folke_Bernadotte, who was asked by the UN to mediate in this rising Middle East Conflict. I recommend this book because he had an extraordinary clandestine role in the war effort as well. He was a Swedish Nobleman who had Royalty in his blood, served on the Swedish Red Cross, and was just a family man as he was anything else. He met with Himmler a number of times trying to negotiate agreements regarding future terms of surrender, prisoner exchanges ext. Someone brought his name up in this thread but I feel he is often overlooked for someone who saved thousands of people as well. Here are some of the key meetings he had with Himmler. The book goes into greater detail, especially regarding Folke when he met Himmler for the first time, being in disbelief that someone so small and dorky looking could posses so much evil ext... quote:18 Feb 1945 You want to talk about bravery during the war, this man willingly threw himself right into the lions den on so many occasions it is insane. It is a good read especially if your interested in the way people physically and emotionally handled the Holocaust before and after the war. Less Claypool fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 21:10
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InspectorBloor posted:I will look in the database of my uni. There is surely something. I recall reading about something similar in a magazine a few years ago. Something about black jazz musicians. This is ABSOLUTELY incredible. Danke sehr!  Honestly I'm looking into funding to do some formal research through the DAAD Stipendium. This project has led me on an amazing academic journey, that's for sure. Afro-Germans have an incredible history! Ballin Stalin fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 22:52
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If you have time, I think a fair number of us would be interested in an effort post about them.
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Oct 7, 2013 23:17
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Duzzy Funlop posted:One distinctive characteristic of this paragraph is that being in violation of it will get you tried and convicted even when committing the violation outside german soil. If I were to go on some american talk-show and say "Jay, to be quite honest, that whole story about jews being gassed is a bunch of horsepucky if you're asking me." or hand out pamphlets "educating" about the holocaust in Canada, I would, with near-certainty, be greeted by the authorities upon my return and look forward to a 3-5 year sentence. Actually, that's not true. Section 130 of the German Criminal Code does not have a special distinction with regards to the application of German criminal law. Committing incitement to hatred by handing out pampleths in Canada is only prosecutable in Germany when those pampleths find their way to the Federal Republic. Which only follows from the general rule of German criminal law that an offence occurs in every place where the offender acted or, in the case of an omission, should have acted, or in which the result if it is an element of the offence occurs or should have occurred according to the intention of the offender. (§ 9 I StGB) Which, by the way, is the reason why Bishop Williamson was so keen to proclaim that the interview where he denied the holocaust was not supposed to be aired outside of Sweden. Randler fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 23:40
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To Battle posted:
Not to diminish his efforts, but the amount of bravery it takes to meet Himmler when you have diplomatic immunity isn't quite so high.
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Oct 8, 2013 06:37
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ArchangeI posted:Not to diminish his efforts, but the amount of bravery it takes to meet Himmler when you have diplomatic immunity isn't quite so high. How safe were diplomats in Nazi Germany? Can't really argue either way without knowing that. Were they safe?
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Oct 8, 2013 07:03
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Grand Prize Winner posted:How safe were diplomats in Nazi Germany? Can't really argue either way without knowing that. Were they safe? Besides a spat about safe passage for the American ambassadors after war was declared, I haven't read anything about the Nazis disrespecting diplomats. I mean, obviously an allied fighter bomber strafing vehicles on a road isn't gonna look and see if it might be a diplomatic convoy, and if your embassy gets bombed because it is in Berlin you are still better off in an air raid shelter, but still...
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Oct 8, 2013 07:14
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I'd take the stuff that I said about central european jews and their relation to the state with a grain of salt. It seems to be very complex. Again, the political and social environment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy seems to the be key to understand many many things about national socialism. I'm curious if there's any recent backing to Arendt's thesis that groups who were opposed to the state, were as a consequence, automatically opposed to the jews. Don't get me wrong, she makes a very good case, but it isn't treated with satisfying much depth, as this isn't the subject of the book. Anyway, "The Origins of Totalitarism" is brilliant. It kind of puzzles me as to how radical right movements want to utilize the state. It seems to be a very difficult question to answer. Whenever we pose this question now, at least for you Americans, the answer seems to be very obvious - but that's not the case, as we saw with any fascist movement in the past.
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Oct 8, 2013 15:10
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Yesterday I attended a lecture by a Danish designer named Poul Brandt, who is one of the 470 Danish Jews that were caught by the Germans and subsequently sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. He was 7 years old when he arrived at the camp along with his father. He talked about how he and his father were captured (his mother and sister managed to escape to Sweden though), the 1½ years he and his father spent in Theresienstadt, and the release from the camp in April 1945 when the around 420 surviving Danish Jews were turned over by the Germans to Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross and transported to Sweden in white buses. It was a very emotional lecture. He came close to tears at several occasions and had to take a break to compose himself. While Theresienstadt may have been a much less deadlier camp than the extermination camps further east, it was still a excruciatingly horrible place. Highlights both good and sad included: How the non-Danish children he played with in the camp, would over time disappear never to be seen again, as they were periodically shipped further east... How he and some other children were ordered to strip and go into a mock gas chamber complete with false shower heads, as a sort of training for the camp personnel so that these were prepared for the procedure if the need arose. How he and the other children in Theresienstadt had to dump the ashes of around 22000 cremated people into the nearby Eger river, as part of the clean up of the camp in preparation for the infamous visit by representatives from the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross in 1944. How he one time witnessed German soldiers kicking a baby like a football. How his father punched a Danish Nazi right in the jaw in an attempt to escape from their capture in Denmark How a huge cheering crowd greeted them and the other Danish Jews when the Swedish Red Cross buses crossed the Danish border. How when he said that despite petty harassment from some quarters, the Danes considered them to be fellow citizens, one member of the audience replied "That is because you are!"
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Oct 10, 2013 20:39
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Namarrgon posted:There was Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Vice-consul to Lithuania during WW2. He helped thousands of Jews leave Nazi Germany by just blanket-stamping visas essentially. Because he was Japanese and a rather high foreign functionary the Germans didn't really know what to do with him. I'll just quote the second part from wikipedia; I don't know if they actually consider him a saint per se, but he was definitely an Orthodox Christian himself and that was apparently enough for him to be honored by a couple Orthodox Christians who were interested in him. The person behind the icon discusses the process in the comments of this blog. And also posted this video of a Troparion for Chiune Sugihara. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K9kpv2ZqVY
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Oct 11, 2013 04:03
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How could were the Nazis at dealing with crime? Did the crime rate go down?
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Oct 11, 2013 16:19
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Kurzon posted:How could were the Nazis at dealing with crime? Did the crime rate go down? The Third Reich was a closed society with highly restricted civil liberties, and the police were granted far-reaching authority to pursue offenders of all kinds, political, racial, or criminal. The dramatic expansion of police powers typical of authoritarian states was often effective in combating crime, at least those crimes not associated with the regime itself, as can be seen in many states. It's just hard to operate as a criminal when the police can do whatever they want. The extensive criminality of the Nazi government aside, yes, the crime rate went down. platedlizard posted:I don't know if they actually consider him a saint per se, but he was definitely an Orthodox Christian himself and that was apparently enough for him to be honored by a couple Orthodox Christians who were interested in him. Rates of religious belief generally and church attendance specifically are very very low in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and the Orthodox Church in those areas is aware that it is a marginal and possibly dying tradition. Since veneration of saints and iconography are among their most important traditions, establishing modern saints is one of the ways they've tried to reestablish their relevance. Another example of this would be the canonization of the Romanovs and other Russian aristocrats killed by the Bolsheviks, which is pretty dubious from a theological perspective but might have some cultural utility.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:55
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Did Hitler or his upper goons ever find out about the mass rescues, like Schlinder and the like?
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Oct 11, 2013 23:56
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What do you think of revisionist historians such as Ernst Zundel, David Irving, etc.
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Oct 12, 2013 19:25
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Sobieski posted:What do you think of revisionist historians such as Ernst Zundel, David Irving, etc. I don't know about anyone else, but as a historian I consider them to be utter human filth. They aren't historians, they're goddamned liars.
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Oct 12, 2013 21:49
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 15:30 |
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David Irving was literally proved in a court of law to be a lying piece of poo poo. So yeah.
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Oct 12, 2013 21:51
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