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JaucheCharly posted:I don't exactly recall why Hitler goes to Munich in 1913 (apart from finally receiving money from his father's inheritance), but I think he wanted to avoid to get drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. I believe what really happened was, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and was told to report to Salzburg for his physical, which he failed. He then joined the Bavarians afterward.
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May 10, 2014 00:31
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:We make too much of this racist angle. And the ones who make the racist angle the most well known are plenty racist themselves (Jews/Israelis). Jesus Christ. I can't tell if your actually anti-semetic or just so far up your own rear end you don't realize what you are saying, and it doesn't really matter. If you ever find yourself saying poo poo like this you really need to reevaluate the thought process that led you to say "What about how racist the Jews are?" during a conversation about the Holocaust.
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May 10, 2014 00:50
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Patrick Spens posted:Jesus Christ. I can't tell if your actually anti-semetic or just so far up your own rear end you don't realize what you are saying, and it doesn't really matter. If you ever find yourself saying poo poo like this you really need to reevaluate the thought process that led you to say "What about how racist the Jews are?" during a conversation about the Holocaust. Why's that? It seems like a fair question. They're the Chosen People, it must factor in somewhere. Slim Jim Pickens posted:You've lost everybody. You don't actually think 10 million people died in extermination camps, do you? No one does, actually. The figures are so various it's crazy actually. No one actually even thinks it was 6 million Jews anymore. Raul Hillberg said 5 million. But then Auschwitz revised their individual figure down to 1 million but the overall number didn't change. I could go on about all that, but I'm just pointing out that there's a very slapdash use of emotional language to talk about the Holocaust, as in no one is interested in being accurate, just browbeating with a kind of guilt tripping and so on. Also please don't link Wikipedia as if it's helpful, it's the most useless trash there is when it comes to WW2. Sensationalist crap all over the place. And I never said Napoleon commmitted genocide, I said he engaged in a war of conquest on all of Europe. I can't respond to the rest of emotional diatribe that you guys responded with, maybe eventually you'll all come to your senses on how you've been told to think and feel. ThePriceJustWentUp fucked around with this message at 00:59 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 00:51
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meat sweats posted:Who are these people constantly talking about how awesome Napoleon is? The "non-Hitler sympathizing" guy who wants to tell us how Jews are congenital liars is railing against a person who doesn't exist to make his point. Germany may have had negative stereotypes paired with it prior to World War II - militarism being a common association - but they were still largely regarded as a civilized and "proper" nation. Germany produced many great thinkers and works of art historically, and was certainly a modern nation in the sense that they were technologically capable. As a result, you end up with a country that many individuals may have admired or at least thought a respectable member of the world community, committing genocide and murder on an unprecedented scale. It's shocking, in a sense, and that makes it appalling. Of course, this argument is weaker or non-applicable if you do not really care about Germany or how it relates to your own individual country. Another part is the mechanization of genocide. Many people see the Holocaust as a process as efficient as the Nazi war machine, which is to say, brutally efficient. Now, we're aware that neither of the above were very orderly processes, but to many people, even the mere idea that there were locations dedicated to wringing every last bit of labor out of an individual before murdering them is uniquely appalling. Most massacres, when one thinks of them, are what happened early on the Eastern Front - people are rounded up, brutalized, and shot. Mechanized death, in the form of some of the concentration camps, is radically different and more difficult to file away. Another set of factors are scale and intent. Even if people do not care that Germany committed the Holocaust (all people have the capability for evil, and all nations commit evil acts) or that it was planned by Nazi officials and administrators, gradually evolving from shootings to working prisoners to death (such systems have existed in other places throughout the world) the sheer number of people murdered by the Nazis is appalling. These murders were deliberate and obvious in their intent, as well - there is no disguising why people were murdered, and people were slaughtered simply because they were judged undesirable by a regime. Once again, a cynic may attempt draw parallels to other events or actions by nations, but it is very hard to do that on the scale of millions of people intentionally murdered. Only a few other events may be put forward to compare, and of those, some can be explained away as accidental or producing less deaths. This ties into what I feel are the final two factors, mitigation and sources. As noted above, there is no way around what the Nazis did. They murdered people the state judged undesirable. Period. Some historical traumas and atrocities can be argued about - the Soviet Union, with the Great Purge and the Holodomor, is a perfect example - as people quibble over intent, whether or not it was an atrocity, and how many people died. That cannot be done with the crimes of Nazi Germany. Sources bind this all together. If an atrocity or genocide does not have survivors that are visible in media or literature, or if documentation is hard to find, it is easy to overlook it, relatively speaking. There are plenty of photographs of the Nazis, their tools, and their actions, and plenty of survivors that made their way into popular society and left a mark on culture and media, leaving the crimes of the Nazis fresh in the mind. In short, the Nazis are seen as the ultimate evil because what they did was visible, indefensible, uniquely appalling to many, and had survivors that could express clearly what they had experienced. (This is based off of discussions with people ranging from High School students to History Professors. For some, reading Night and being introduced to babies being bayoneted is enough. For yet more, seeing the results of the camps - liberated survivors starved to bones - hammers home the evil. For others, they rationalize it out, weighing it carefully with other events.)
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May 10, 2014 00:57
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Why's that? It seems like a fair question. They're the Chosen People, it must factor in somewhere.
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May 10, 2014 01:05
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Von Humboldt posted:Could you elaborate on the Chosen People remark? And you're just saying that the numbers for the Holocaust are maybe a little off, due to poor records, and that does not mitigate the tragedy or number of people murdered, right? He's opening the ducts of his own metaphorical gas chamber
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May 10, 2014 01:14
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Von Humboldt posted:Could you elaborate on the Chosen People remark? And you're just saying that the numbers for the Holocaust are maybe a little off, due to poor records, and that does not mitigate the tragedy or number of people murdered, right? I am saying that the Jews think they are apart from the goyim, non Jews, and that informs behavior and how they treat outsiders. They're racist as a group basically. Look at how Israel has turned into an apartheid state. And that's fine I guess, but that also means they don't get to call other groups racist. And I am saying there's probably significant discrepancies in the numbers due to Soviet obfuscation, Israeli obfuscation, and poor records, and that does not at all mitigate the tragedy of those who did die, but it does raise questions about why this has happened and why people perpetuate it unthinkly, in my opinion.
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May 10, 2014 01:22
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Disappointing troll effort, 1.5/4 stars. You slow-played it well at the start but if you'd been more patient you probably could have played "not actually a Nazi, just asking questions" for a couple more posts.
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May 10, 2014 01:23
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I was going to post a long, measured reply but after the Holocaust revisionism came up ... gently caress it. I'd just say that his main mistake is thinking of Nazi Germany as just another colonial, imperialist state. When it was a very modern revolutionary state that had totalitarian ambitions to transform the lives of ordinary Germans and build a entirely new and different kind of society. Embedded at the core of this process, to make a long story short, was the systematic and "hygienic" cleansing of un-Aryan elements. The Nazis didn't think they were exterminating people. They thought Jews, Roma, the handicapped, etc. were like invasive parasites swimming around inside the guts of a larger organism. Only be flushing these parasites out could the organism -- the German Reich -- survive AND grow healthier. It was very much embedded in and fundamental to the Nazi worldview.
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May 10, 2014 01:27
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:I am saying that the Jews think they are apart from the goyim, non Jews, and that informs behavior and how they treat outsiders. They're racist as a group basically. Look at how Israel has turned into an apartheid state. And that's fine I guess, but that also means they don't get to call other groups racist. And after I just told meat sweats that he loved Hitler for saying there were Neo-Nazis around. I take it back, meat sweats. I'm sure you don't love Hitler.
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May 10, 2014 01:30
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Why's that? It seems like a fair question. They're the Chosen People, it must factor in somewhere. Go to bed, David Irving.
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May 10, 2014 01:40
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I actually don't know if I am trolling or serious about this topic..it has almost no day to day relevance for me although members of my extended family were affected by the Nazi regime. I'm gonna try to drop it. I gain nothing by arguing about it as far as I know. A black hole of sanity. The 20th century religion of death. Members of my family have a victim mentality due to the Holocaust mythology they grew up with and due to family members that were part of it. I learned about it in school and at home too. I don't want that victim mentality and I see how insidious it is. And I don't have it. I see the roots of it though and that's what I am trying to convey. Sorry for any unnecessary offense. (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) ThePriceJustWentUp fucked around with this message at 02:50 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 02:43
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Von Humboldt posted:And after I just told meat sweats that he loved Hitler for saying there were Neo-Nazis around. Apology accepted. I wish the spergouts who were getting upset about someone challenging their devotion to the awesome uniform designs of the Germany army would also acknowledge that I was right and that Holocaust deniers and other Neo-Nazis ALWAYS try to colonize these sorts of discussions. Now that the guy has turned over all his cards, go back and look at the sort of code words and warning signs in his posts from when he first showed up and know what they mean when someone else tries it in the future.
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May 10, 2014 02:54
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If you have something nice to say about Hitler, don't say anything at all 
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May 10, 2014 02:56
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meat sweats posted:Apology accepted. I wish the spergouts who were getting upset about someone challenging their devotion to the awesome uniform designs of the Germany army would also acknowledge that I was right and that Holocaust deniers and other Neo-Nazis ALWAYS try to colonize these sorts of discussions. Now that the guy has turned over all his cards, go back and look at the sort of code words and warning signs in his posts from when he first showed up and know what they mean when someone else tries it in the future. I'm not and will never be a Neo-Nazi and I think you are still susceptible to your own brand of foolish thinking. Insinuating the whole German Army is directly complicit in war crimes for example. What about rearward support units? Do you know how modern militaries are structured?
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May 10, 2014 03:04
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Considering that most of the occupied Soviet Union and other countries was a war zone with active guerilla wars it's not exactly improbable that units that are ostensibly support units would still engage in combat, not to mention that as the war went on the Germans scraped the barrel as much as they could for warm bodies to put in the front lines, and this would obviously include reassigning men from rear area units or repurposing units wholesale.
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May 10, 2014 03:17
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Pornographic Memory posted:Considering that most of the occupied Soviet Union and other countries was a war zone with active guerilla wars it's not exactly improbable that units that are ostensibly support units would still engage in combat, not to mention that as the war went on the Germans scraped the barrel as much as they could for warm bodies to put in the front lines, and this would obviously include reassigning men from rear area units or repurposing units wholesale. Yes, anything is possible, doesn't mean it's likely, and even if it were likely, that doesn't mean it DID happen. And you have to know that it DID happen to implicate those units as well. And even if you know some did, do you know all units did? Anyway, implicating the entire German Army is the claim I am railing against. Do you have certainty? No? Then don't make the claim. WW2 history doesn't need any more insinuations. Or maybe it does and truth and objectivity aren't that important, I can't even tell anymore.
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May 10, 2014 03:21
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:I'm not and will never be a Neo-Nazi and I think you are still susceptible to your own brand of foolish thinking. Insinuating the whole German Army is directly complicit in war crimes for example. What about rearward support units? Do you know how modern militaries are structured? It's funny, because this is exactly the coping mechanism German soldiers developed. "No, no, we didn't do any of the bad stuff. We were a rear area unit. The atrocities happened near the front." "No, no, we didn't do any of the bad stuff. We were a frontline unit, we didn't have the time to commit all these atrocities. Those were committed by the guys in the rear." Also, the idea that truth and objectivity exist (or should be goals to aspire to) in historical discourse is hilarious to anyone who actually works in the field.
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May 10, 2014 03:22
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And towards the end of the war as Germany scraped the bottom of the barrel, they were on the defensive by the way, it wasn't fertile ground for wanton war crimes when entire divisions were fighting for their lives against the Soviet onslaught. The massacres were on the way over (and by the Soviets on the way to Berlin).ArchangeI posted:
Objectivity might not exist, but historians are surely looking for the truth. I would say they create the truth and the narrative where there was none before oftentimes, but that's a separate issue. ThePriceJustWentUp fucked around with this message at 03:27 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 03:23
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:I don't want that victim mentality and I see how insidious it is. Not a particularly harmful mentality compared to others, and it can be overcome. I would hardly call it insidious. ThePriceJustWentUp posted:It's not hilarious, it's what history strives to do, find the truth. You're saying truth is not what historians strive for? Then what are they aiming at? And what basis do they have to disagree on if they're not? Why do you all so fervently disagree with each other in this thread if you don't each think you have the crucial truth about a certain fact? The "truth" is consensus and your ideas are so far from consensus, based on evidence and discussion... if you have something that is actual evidence, toss it out and I'm sure people will debate it. You've just made assertions without evidence and rejections of consensus.
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May 10, 2014 03:48
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ashgromnies posted:Not a particularly harmful mentality compared to others, and it can be overcome. I would hardly call it insidious. You wouldn't call it insidious, but I would and am. It is more difficult to identify and to address than for example a mentality of hatred for some person or group. That's what insidious means, "stealthily treacherous", not "a bad thing". And I have been less interested in debating actual pieces of evidence than I am assuming evidence that's commonly understood to be true and indisputed and portraying it in a different light. Of course everything Nazi Germany has to come back to the Holocaust for most people so I suppose that isn't possible but it should be. The Holocaust as it stands absolutely refuses to be portrayed in a different light and that's a shame and also the product of religious thinking. You don't seem to understand what's going on, and this thread doesn't need a referee. I'm interested in ending my hijack at this point honestly, it's become tiresome.
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May 10, 2014 03:59
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:And towards the end of the war as Germany scraped the bottom of the barrel, they were on the defensive by the way, it wasn't fertile ground for wanton war crimes when entire divisions were fighting for their lives against the Soviet onslaught. The massacres were on the way over (and by the Soviets on the way to Berlin).
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May 10, 2014 04:13
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:
No. Not even in the slightest. You are conflating the past with history. Historians do not strive to find some perfect truth, we interpret a more or less fragmentary record to construct arguments that explain past events and (sometimes) their relationship to the world we inhabit today. In some cases we can speak with extreme confidence because of a preponderance of evidence, in others less so, but at the end of the day it is an interpretive discipline. If you want capital T Truth go talk to a mathematician or a priest. Phone posting so I hope this link works: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/htd_history/historians/historians_hats_01.shtml Read that. It is a good article by the bbc that does a serviceable job of explaining what history is and the different roles that academic historians play. Edit: also Wikipedia is deeply flawed in many regards but most of the basic history poo poo is OK-ish for first pass research or informing oneself about the broad strokes of a topic. I have a love hate relationship with it but blanket condemning it is a lazy way to attempt to gain credibility for your own beliefs Edit x2: edited some needless snarky poo poo Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 04:24
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Spare me the irony of sending this thread to the gas chamber. Each of you strive to make the thread less lovely by coming up with useful and interesting and well supported historical research. Or conscientiously objecting to posting at all. Do not attempt to style on one another about who hates Hitler the exact right amount.
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May 10, 2014 04:46
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I'm going to agree with the recommendation of Downfall. It's interesting to see a society compress like Nazi Germany did. All the major players were still active just in a continually smaller space until it broke. It gets incredibly claustrophobic as it goes on.
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May 10, 2014 05:44
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I finally put some work into actually writing my candidate's thesis about bishop Clemens von Galen and the whole catholic resistance to the nazis thing. The T4 program is a fairly interesting case study into how the Nazi administration worked and how the Nazis were concerned with public perception. Its very clear that there wasn't widespread violent anti-semitism in Germany at the time, since stuff like Kristallnacht was seen as terrible and embarrassing by the Nazis themeselves. Even the T4 program to kill off patients in hospitals and asylums had to be clandestine because the general population would not approve. Heck, even the Minister of Justice, Franz Gürtner wasn't convinced that the program had sanction before he saw a letter from Hitler which approved the program. And despite various efforts to do so, the Catholic Church had enough public support to remain a political actor which protected people like Galen from reprisals at times. As soon as my master's thesis is finished I'll switch away from writing about Nazis because this is some depressing poo poo.
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May 10, 2014 09:17
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Kemper Boyd posted:
any idea about what time period you're moing to?
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May 10, 2014 15:10
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Members of my family have a victim mentality due to the Holocaust mythology they grew up with and due to family members that were part of it. I learned about it in school and at home too. I don't want that victim mentality and I see how insidious it is. And I don't have it. I see the roots of it though and that's what I am trying to convey. Sorry for any unnecessary offense. I take it that you are at least partially Jewish, given what you write here? Yes, Israel brings up the Holocaust all the time to deflect criticism. This does not mean that the Holocaust itself is an Israeli invention. The fact that the Nazis committed other crimes against other people does not mean that the Holocaust isn't their greatest crime. Let's look at the actual facts here. Antisemitism was one of, if not the core principle of National Socialism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler brings up the Jews again and again, describing them as destructive parasites that will, if left unchecked, bring about the end of all human civilization. He also details the idea that Germany must acquire living space by conquering land in the east and expel or eradicate the native populations (except for a fraction kept as slaves). Nazi propaganda, speeches and newspaper articles both from before and after the seizure of power use "the Jew" as a scapegoat for virtually all of Germany's ills. Public and private documents of individual Nazis that have been preserved speaks openly of the need to eliminate all Jews and Jewish influence from Germany. The Nazis started operating concentration camps almost immediately after seizing power. At first they housed mostly political opponents. However, the Nazis quickly started enacting laws aimed at Jews, stipulating what jobs they could hold, what they were allowed to study, who they were allowed to marry, what property they were allowed to own etc. This caused to Jews to be further and further marginalized within German society. At the outbreak of war, Jews were routinely having their property seized and sent to concentration camps. After the war started, the Nazis started "evacuating" the Jews east, to camps in Poland. We know this, because the Nazi regime was pretty open about that, and we still have the train schedules and cargo manifests for it. Prior to the war, the Nazis had ran a "trial" euthanasia program called T4, where they executed handicapped, mentally ill and other "antisocial" people, sometimes using gas. It was clandestine, but its existence eventually leaked out and caused quite a stir among the German public at the time. It was also know internationally, as letters from Catholic scholars to the pope concerning the T4 program has been preserved. T4 was shut down after less than a year, but many of those involved eventually got involved in Aktion Reinhard. We know this from testimonies of the men themselves, of their colleagues or superiors, or of their surviving victims. The Nazis were rounding up Jews in all countries they occupied, and pressured their allies to do the same. Some, like the French and the Baltics, cooperated with gusto. Others, like the Italians or the Finns, were more restrained or outright uncooperative. German forces were rounding up and executing Jews in Eastern Europe on an ad-hoc basis from the moment Operation Barbarossa started. It helped that the Nazi regime was equating Judaism and Bolshevism. The Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, Dachau and Theresienstadt are more well known, but Aktion Reinhard, the actual extermination program, only involved three camps - Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, all specially constructed for the extermination and torn down once it was concluded. The camps operated between spring 1942 and autumn 1943. Most "inmates" were executed within 48 hours of arriving to the camps. A few were kept as workers. We know of these camps from contemporary German documents, from testimonies of administrators, guards and surviving victims, and from excavation of the camp sites. It is estimated that between 700.000 and 1.500.000 people died at Treblinka alone. These figures have never been challenged by anyone involved. Reinhard Heidrich estimated at the Wansee conference that there were about 11 million Jews in Europe. It was at Wansee that Aktion Reinhard was formalized. The minutes of that meeting survived the war, and it is from here that we have the term "the Final Solution". The American Jewish Yearbook estimated in 1933 the Jewish population of Europe to 9,5 million. In 1950, the same estimation was 3,5 million. Jews were specifically targeted by the Nazi regime from its very inception. No other group of Nazi victims, apart from maybe communists, was so openly and constantly vilified. Jews were murdered by the Nazis trough ad-hoc executions in the east, through sickness, starvation, exhaustion and random violence in the labour camps, and through gassing in the extermination camps. In conclusion: We have a regime which is extremely antisemitic, and very open with its desire to rid the world of Jews. Between 1933 and 1939, the Jews in Germany are marginalized, deprived of legal rights, and eventually rounded up in concentration camps. When the war starts, they are shipped east. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence, kept by the Nazi regime itself, that they initiated a program aimed at ridding Europe of Jews. Guards, administrators and surviving victims are all largely in agreement on how the concentration and extermination camps operated, and that a truly mind-boggling amount of people died. Between 1933 and 1950, at least 6 million European Jews simply go missing. Tell me, what do you think happened? Mr. Sunshine fucked around with this message at 16:10 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 16:08
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Is anyone on here somewhat knowledgeable of the German re-armament scheme? Would it be possible for a country to undertake a scheme like that today with the way information and intelligence can be obtained? It just seems like something that could only have been done before the war, not after. If the Nazis had in some miraculous way "won" the war, wouldn't the German economy have instantly collapsed from all the money that was due from the MEFO scheme? Was the looting done in conquered territories enough to cover the amount owed? RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 17:16 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 17:08
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Hell, let's have a talk about why Nazism is uniquely evil. Nazism is often compared to Stalinism. On the surface they share many similarities - their brutality, oppression, aims of totalitarian control over all aspects of society, an all-powerful secret police and a "formalized lawlessness" were the representatives of the state apparatus could act with impunity until they caught the ire of someone higher up. They also, fascinatingly, shared many aesthetic similarities in architecture, propaganda, art etc (There's a fascinating discussion to be had here about how totalitarianism shapes art and culture, but that's for later). However, their intellectual backgrounds are wildly different. Socialism ultimately comes out of the same enlightenment thinking that gave rise to liberal democracy, and its values and goals are fundamentally the same. The value of individual liberty and dignity, a society controlled by and for the people, and the ability of each individual to express themselves freely and without fear. Granted, none of this existed under Stalin, but it was part of the regime's "cultural baggage", and values it continued to profess and (claimed to) aspire to. "The First Workers' State" had centuries of socialist thought behind it. The opposite is true of Nazism. Fascism considered itself "the movement of the 20th century", a revolutionary movement that would do away with the contradictions of liberal democracy and socialism, a third way between capitalism and communism. Its goals were almost entirely reactionary. It wanted to roll back democracy and the ideas of individual worth and liberty (the most striking example is, I think, Vichy France, that quite literally aimed to undo the revolution of 1789). "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" as Mussolini said. Individuals were to subordinate themselves to an all-encompassing nation-state, personified in the avatar of the Leader. Dictatorship and oppression of the individual are professed, intrinsic values to fascism, in contrast to the "temporary measures" of Stalinist communism. Fascism is also almost completely void of philosophical thought, guided almost exclusively by conservatism, national romanticism and a disdain for modern society. When the fascists seized power in Italy, they did not have a single ideological work to lean on. "Mein Kampf" remains the only major philosophical foundation of Nazism, and it is an incoherent mess mainly spent railing against Jews and the French, and proclaimed "outdated" by Hitler by 1933. Fascism is openly anti-intellectual, hailing instinct and intuition as the most noble foundations of human actions. To this pre-enlightenment thinking, Nazism added an extreme racism and a glorifying of medieval brutality. The goal of the Nazis was to create a new Europe, where the master race rule through violence and brutality, unfettered by morality or law, and the inferior races are either exterminated or kept as illiterate slaves. We find in the speeches and writing of people like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels an almost fetishistic love of brutality and a aggressive disdain for the weakness of liberalism, modernity and "Jewish Christianity". They wanted to turn society back a thousand years or more, and create an industrialized feudal empire running on slave labour, where the elite ruled through gut feeling and violence. And that is why calling Hitler "just a nationalist", or claiming that the "racist angle" is overblown, is extremely myopic.
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May 10, 2014 17:15
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I don't think there's one right answer to the Hitler v. Stalin question. I will note that the Nazis absolutely could not have arisen without modernity either. As true as it is that they often played up some mythical German farmer ideal, they also loved skyscrapers, films, trains, and other elements of the technological future. It's also interesting to note that throughout Mein Kampf, Hitler takes pains to note that he isn't condemning Judaism as a religion, only Jews as an ethnicity. This seems bizarre to 2014 eyes -- if one is to even make such a distinction, wouldn't it look less bigoted to attack ideas and not genetic heritage? But in Germany in 1923, religion was considered irrelevant to your political identity and the "new scientific racism" was at the cutting edge of thought. As much as Communism was a product of the nineteenth century, Stalin too mixed the praise of mechanical progress with very anti-modern sentiments about democracy and urbanization. There's a reason the term "totalitarian" was coined to discuss the many similarities between the two ideologies. On a related note, this is also why people don't understand that there were Catholics, Protestants, and atheists who were fervent Nazis, and there were Catholics, Protestants, and atheists who were devoted anti-Nazis and died resisting, and Hitler's personal religious beliefs are so mysterious to us precisely because no one thought it relevant to ask him what they were. In America the idea that your religion can be completely unrelated to your politics, even in matters of fundamental political ethics like whether to exterminate a minority group, is so far from our experience that we naturally want to find some answer like "Nazis were all neopagans intent on replacing Christianity." But it's not that simple because we're asking the wrong questions.
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May 10, 2014 17:43
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I dunno if you're still replying to me specifically or reiterating the status quo for everybody, but nothing you have said is new to me and my posts are actually a reaction to that worldview and not ignorant of it. I don't see things as "more evil" or less evil, I don't think in terms of evil, in fact that's a way to dehumanize others in order to achieve certain goals for the ones doing the dehumanizing. I am sorry for not being more articulate than this. Events and ideologies are the product of causes and conditions, not freestanding evil impulses in the world. The belief in evil comes from the belief in power and I don't believe in power, only the need to appear to have power. No one has power over anyone else. Only if you let them/want them to. I don't expect you to understand any of this because you haven't understood anything I've said so far and have just repeated the party line back at me again. I'm also not interested in contesting your specific view of events and I find them largely correct. Any disputes I might have are besides the point, and that's what I am trying to get across. To me, it's not whether certain events happened or didn't happen, it's why they are being thrown in our face. Why is it so important that a cohesive Holocaust mythology be constructed? Who does it serve? Jews? People at large? Why do I need to know these people specifically died? People in my family did die, but they also latched onto the larger narrative to add onto their pain. This larger narrative is superfluous. To those who died there is no bringing them back. This is the point I absolutely will not budge on. It's not just propaganda, that word is used too much. It's religious, cultish thinking. I just saw the documentary "Mr. Death", about Fred Leuchter. In it, at one point, a certain historian, Robert Jan Van Pelt, says "he intruded on the holiest of holy grounds [Auschwitz]. Why is it holy? I find it to be profane ground. Not because of what may or may not have happened there, but because the events are being repeated, reinterpreted, and forcefed to the world as something that everyone must know about good and evil and victims and Jews and misery and "what did they ever do wrong" and so on. 10 million Soviets also died. We don't hear about them. Not that we should, but the fact that one event is held above all others is mythmaking at work. It's the need for people to find meaning in the death of millions, and to reinforce and create emotional reactions to those abstract events in order to structure their existences better. It's religious thinking. Whether or not it happened exactly how it was said to have! As in, just as I said in an above post that got ignored with snark by someone who takes the blandest possible view of finding and interpreting historical events, historians create the truth and the narrative as they research. This is exactly what has happened in the so called Holocaust. It even got its own name, a neat way to create a tidy package to remember and attach emotions to a series of tragic events. Why does it need to be remembered in this way? For example, Cambodia went through a horrible genocide (effectively) during the Khmer Rouge, but you travel Cambodia and you'd be hardpressed to find any attempt at creating a myth out of the events. Why not? It wouldn't serve anybody's interests. They are trying to forget. Myths serve interests, always. To pretend that "we are just documenting events" is to pretend that information and knowledge are not power. People and institutions derive power from the appearance of cohesive ideology. Holocaust mythmaking, even if it is partly done by the unwitting, is an attempt at this. Everyone shares in this exercise at creating power where there was none before. I actually don't expect anyone here to understand this because I have barely seen a glimmer of intelligence on these forums, to be honest. But I keep trying to get my points across. Maybe at least one person will understand. So don't think I am trying to appeal to people I think are more knowledgeable and reasonable than me. I see through the thin veneer of your unexamined ideological worldviews, foisted upon you by culture. It doesn't have to be that way.
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May 10, 2014 17:49
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I hate to jump in but is Generation War realistic in the civilian sense?
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May 10, 2014 18:00
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Stuff about how the Holocaust is treated differently than other genocides in popular memory German lurker checking in to say that my personal problem is not that we hear about the Holocaust too much, but that we hear about other genocides too little. We talk about the Holocaust a lot because we know a lot about it, we have the records and witnesses and the exhaustive research into both - and the Allies had the power to translate that into consequences for post-war Germany. Sadly, other genocides and war crimes have not generated this kind of response from the world at large - for an example of how it could be if we didn't lean on the Holocaust as a thing so heavily, check out what Japanese high school students learn about their country's history in WW2. Ignorance has ruled for decades, and the foreign policy in regards to China and Russia is pretty weird for it, all kinds of dumb nationalistic poo poo that pegs my Fremdschämen meter pretty hard. WW2 and the seemingly endless parade of what horrible poo poo we did bored and annoyed me in high school, but with the benefit of no longer being a teenager, I still think it's the right way to go in remembering it.
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May 10, 2014 18:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:any idea about what time period you're moing to? Early Modern, probably.
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May 10, 2014 18:51
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You are not as smart as you think and everyone can patently see how you dodged a very simple question Mr. Sunshine has asked to you: What do you think happened? Unless you can answer that question first, then there is nothing to talk here because history is ultimately a discussion. Your drivels are not an attempt at discussion; they are meandering attempts to bring the subject to what you would actually like to talk about, which happens to be you. That's pretty boring and not the reason people come to this thread, which is about Nazi Germany. The Holocaust is a pretty important thing to discuss when we try to learn about Nazi Germany. I'm sorry if this comes off as "the party line" for your oh-so-contrarian sensibilities, but so far you have not made a single intelligent and relevant argument about why we shouldn't talk about the Holocaust.
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May 10, 2014 18:53
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Was there any ever chance of Spain entering WW2 after Germany helped Franco win his civil war? Surely the Allies must have been a bit wary of it happening, even if Germany seemingly mostly helped out Franco to take focus away from themselves and what they were doing.
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May 10, 2014 19:12
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fspades posted:You are not as smart as you think and everyone can patently see how you dodged a very simple question Mr. Sunshine has asked to you: What do you think happened? Unless you can answer that question first, then there is nothing to talk here because history is ultimately a discussion. Your drivels are not an attempt at discussion; they are meandering attempts to bring the subject to what you would actually like to talk about, which happens to be you. That's pretty boring and not the reason people come to this thread, which is about Nazi Germany. The Holocaust is a pretty important thing to discuss when we try to learn about Nazi Germany. I'm sorry if this comes off as "the party line" for your oh-so-contrarian sensibilities, but so far you have not made a single intelligent and relevant argument about why we shouldn't talk about the Holocaust. "We"? This is your first post in this thread that I can find. And it's not "a very simple question", it's a bait to go down the rabbit hole into Holocaust upholding or denial, which is the trap. It is irrelevant to my point, one which I just made. It wasn't a dodge, it was a redirect to what I find to be a more pertinent question. Basically, we shouldn't talk about it incessantly because there's nothing to learn from it incessantly. History doesn't repeat itself because it is forgotten, it repeats itself because no new social understanding is created. What is the understanding created this time around, that genocide is bad? Why did the genocide happen at all is the question that would create understanding. And the answer isn't racism. What was racism in that context? Why were they racist? Why was there a problem with Jews at all? This is just like asking why are there problems between blacks and whites today in America? Why is there a gulf between the haves and the have-nots? There are answers to those questions, or attempts at them. But whether that inquiry is possible or not, I don't think this enshrining of the death of millions of people is particularly healthy for Judaism, Israel, and anyone who is caught up in that mythmaking due to the public school system and the media in America. For example, the Facing History classes and the constant harping by CNN whenever the topic comes up of "6 million Jews 6 million Jews". I don't think I am making my point totally clear and that is a failure of articulation. And if you think this is about me? Sounds like you don't have much to add to the discussion if that's what you think. Any personal anecdotes I gave were in order to give part of the background to why I am saying these things, for the easily confused. History is about all of us anyway. Personal stories have a lot to do with history. It's your stake in the narrative, in a way.
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May 10, 2014 19:17
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Hitler didn't even bother asking him until after the Battle of Britain was decided and at their meeting Franco demanded some of Vichy France bordering Spain and some French colonial possessions. If Franco overplayed his hand or deliberately sunk the talks is still up for debate but Hitler refused his demands. The allies also took a stick and carrot approach to Franco wherein they kept trading with him and promised no repercussions after the war while threatening him whenever he looked too chummy with hitler. Hitler on the other hand just made vague threats about invading Spain, causing Franco to put most of his army on the French Spanish border, though he did send the blue division to fight in Russia. E: oh also German military intelligence had a decently large presence in Spain. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 19:27 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 19:23
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Hey let's keep engaging with the admitted Holocaust denier who has lots of theories re: Jews suppressing the truth about how great Hitler was, that seems like a productive way to learn historical facts in this thread!MrBling posted:Was there any ever chance of Spain entering WW2 after Germany helped Franco win his civil war? Surely the Allies must have been a bit wary of it happening, even if Germany seemingly mostly helped out Franco to take focus away from themselves and what they were doing. I think the bottom line here was that Franco and Hitler were very different, even though both fall under the general umbrella of "fascism," and it is indicative of the old/new outlook divided referred to upthread. Franco was strongly allied with the Catholic Church and with old, agrarian Spain, and came from a long line of Spanish reactionary movements which he absorbed into his own coalition. He was never about ideological purity or forging some new secular vision of the right. Franco's purges were aimed at the left, as Spain had been divided ideologically for a long time. The idea of a Holocaust in a country with, for all practical purposes, no Jews is absurd, but so is the idea of someone coming to power by railing against a type of person most Spaniards had never encountered in their lives. But, equally, there would be no Night of the Long Knives in Spain -- the idea of turning on your allies to forge a pure party vanguard didn't make sense. Nazism is about creating chaos and building a new world along racial lines, Francoism is about imposing order and returning to the past. The image of the schedule-obsessed, rules-lawyering Nazi is much more apt for a Spanish Fascist. Given all that, Franco committing troops to a war whose outcome was uncertain for no apparent benefit to Spain would be contrary to his entire nationalist, hermit kingdom ideology.
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May 10, 2014 19:30
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