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feedmegin posted:Plus it was fought on Russian soil and nearly extinguished Russia as a state. The US hasnt seen that since Independence. Apart from the Civil War, you mean.
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Jun 6, 2015 09:37
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Apart from the Civil War, you mean. OK true the South knew the deal. And its still a big deal there today, just like the Great Patriotic War.
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Jun 6, 2015 12:33
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Tim Stone of the Rock Paper Shotgun PC Gaming blog who does the Milhist, Milsim and general other simulators posted this history of the real life flight simulator I thought you'd all be interested in reading.
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Jun 6, 2015 14:07
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SeanBeansShako posted:Tim Stone of the Rock Paper Shotgun PC Gaming blog who does the Milhist, Milsim and general other simulators posted this history of the real life flight simulator I thought you'd all be interested in reading. It makes me really, really, reallly want to try one out.
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Jun 6, 2015 14:29
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Neeber posted:Nothing scholarly here, but I was talking with one of my Russian colleagues over lunch today about her family and wanted to share. She was casually telling me how her father-in-law joined the Soviet army in the winter of '41, killed 30 men, became a squad leader, and was discharged after losing a hand and an eye... all before he turned 18. He would say that the first person he killed gave him nightmares, but the rest was just white noise. Guy lived into his 80s. Her grandfather went off to fight the Germans in '42 but never came back. It's crazy how nearly every Russian I've met was so profoundly touched by the Second World War. Flipping through Hero of the Soviet Union award orders, you see 18 and 19 year old kids doing some pretty hardcore poo poo. I don't think I've seen a Hero younger than that, but if you ended up as a "son of the regiment" you could very well have a chest full of medals in your teens.
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Jun 6, 2015 17:11
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Neeber posted:It's crazy how nearly every Russian I've met was so profoundly touched by the Second World War. They also got to live in the shambles afterwards.
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Jun 6, 2015 18:08
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JaucheCharly posted:They also got to live in the shambles afterwards. Jesus, 100% this. Most people don't realize just how long the parts of the USSR that saw heavy combat were hosed. I've seen pictures of Stalingrad in the late 50s where it still looks like a moonscape. As bad as places like Germany and Poland got it they also got rebuilt significantly quicker. edit: not that there weren't major german cities with tons of gutted buildings in the 50s, but just not on the scale that I've seen in some pictures of the USSR from that period.
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Jun 6, 2015 18:30
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Also public monuments and ceremonies to commemorate it. Have you seen the loving victory parades and monuments? 
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Jun 6, 2015 18:42
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Posted this in the Russia.jpg thread: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/opinion/mikhail-shishkin-how-russians-lost-the-war.html?_r=0
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Jun 6, 2015 18:43
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Disinterested posted:Also public monuments and ceremonies to commemorate it. Have you seen the loving victory parades and monuments? The sheer number of monuments is staggering. The backwater town that my grandparents' dacha is near has a ZiS-3 on a pedestal. Even the shithole village across the forest from ours had a granite slab with the names of its residents that perished in the war.
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Jun 6, 2015 18:55
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Quite a few pages back during a discussion about the Tuskegee Airmen, someone asked about African-American Navy fliers during WWII and mentioned that the Navy wasn't segregated. I'd be interested to hear about any black naval combat fliers too, but I'm not holding my breath - I'd be very surprised if there were any. The Navy wasn't exactly segregated, but it definitely wasn't integrated. Blacks served on the same ships, but the only jobs open to them were cooks or stewards (which means that they were de facto restricted to enlisted ranks). This didn't prevent some of them from performing extremely valorous combat action*, but did tend to keep them cooking, serving food, and doing laundry. The most I'd expect might be some stateside aircraft shuttle work like some of the WAVES did. The first African-American officers (the "Golden Thirteen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Thirteen) weren't commissioned until 1944 and were excluded from combat roles, staying in the US. The indoc building where all enlisted recruits first arrive at boot camp at Great Lakes RTC is named for them. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Miller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Walter_David_Jr.
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Jun 6, 2015 22:07
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100 Years Ago Same diet as yesterday, Third Krithia and Second Artois. There's house-to-house fighting in Neuville; over on the Lorette, Captain Hudelle refuses a direct order. On Gallipoli the MEF's line bends, wobbles and jars, but doesn't break, and they do maintain most of the 4th's exceptionally modest gains. Meanwhile, Kenneth Best has heard a disturbing rumour about an officer who allegedly stemmed a rout by shooting down four of his own men with his revolver; since the officer in question was later awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions today, this gets a little more investigation, and is worth breaking my "medals are boring" rule for.
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Jun 6, 2015 22:54
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I'm going to write another fascism post soon, I've been researching and brewing. I think it'll be either A) Another post talking about different types of fascism - and how they apply to different countries. So addressing Nazism vs Italian fascism, whether we can call nationalist Spain 'fascist', and then move from there to other movements that have been called fascist (possibly a future post): 'islamofascism', South America, former Yugoslavia, today's Russia. B) A post on the intellectual underpinnings of fascism, starting with the German Romantic tradition: Herder, Fichte. etc. C) Something more specific, starting with the role of race in fascism - starting with anti-semitism. Can't decide, but if I'm being methodical it should be A! All three will likely come soonish. If anyone has any questions about fascism or anything I've posted before let me know and I'll fold that in too.
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Jun 6, 2015 23:24
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Taiping Tianguo Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Cat and Mouse Part of the imperialist problem was that governance of of Guangxi province was paralyzed by the unexpected deaths of general Chang Pilu and givernor Lin Zexu, who were both appointed to new posts but died before arriving. Lin was the official whose opium confiscation campaign had prompted the first opium war, and he had been disgraced and demoted as a result. His subsequent skilled administration had worked him back into the court's good graces, and he likely would have been a good choice for the post. The man on the spot who would end up having to deal with the rebels became general Xiang Rong (向榮). Depsite the setback at Jintian, Xiang seemed to be in a strong position to attack the rebels at Jiangkou. His Guangxi troops joined Zhou Fengqi's Guizhou army as well as Li Nengchen's reinforcements from Yunnan. Despite attacking from both sides, the government troops are chewed up by minefields and repulsed at Taiping fortifications, losing nearly a thousand men in exchange for a few hundred rebels. At this point, Xiang decides on a strategy of encirclement en lieu of pitched battle. Boxed in on three sides, and the river controlled by pirates who at this point had sided with the imperialists, the Taiping slip out of the town to the west under cover of darkness. the more colorful version of the story is that they impressed village women to beat drums all night and conceal the noise of the Taiping retreat. The imperial troops pursue, but aren't able to accomplish much more than burning Jiangkou to the ground. The Taiping move west past Jintian to the Wuxuan area. They are encircled again, but the disorganization of the imperial forces limits their effectiveness. The men are poorly trained and difficult to manage, in contrast to the disciplined and organized Taiping. The leaders are worse. Comissioner Li Xingyuan, Xiang Rong, and new governor Zhou Tianjue quarrel constantly. The one imperial success in this period is to prevent the Taiping attempt to join with Ling Shiba. Ling has led a force of 10,000 God Worshippers from Guangdong, who have come too late to join the movement when it was at Jintian. The main Taiping army moves to meet them, but they are seperated by the river which is firmly controlled by the imperialist-allied pirates, led by a half-European from Macao known as Da Tou Yang, or "Bighead Ram." Ling's group will have to turn back to Guangdong in disappointment. They will fight their own private war for over a year before finally being destroyed in 1852. Manchu general Wulantai (烏蘭泰) arrives with reinforcements for the imperialists, but he also brings another ego to the already fractured command structure. The Mongol Saishanga has also been dispatched to replace Li Xingyuan, but before he arrives, Li dies, amplifying the imperial confusion. It is little wonder then, that the Taiping are able to break the imperial lines, heading back east to Xiangchou. They sit securely there for a month until, short on supplies, they break yet another imperial encirclement, bringing them right back to Jintian, where they started. They are stronger than before however, as they have gathered recruits and supplies everywhere they traveled. Their breakout to the northwest has failed, but they are set to try again to the northeast.  I've seen a few different maps try to trace the route of the rebels over these six months. This is a pretty close representation. Breakout The imperial armies have gathered more men as well, and the Taipings beat back several fierce assaults. With Wulantai to the south and Xiang Rong to the north, it seems this encirclement may finally succeed. Xiang finds a path through the mountains and is set to attack the rebel base as soon as Wulantai is in position to the south. It's a long wait, as from either incompetence or personal spite, Wulantai never shows up. The Taiping escape yet again to the north. They set up blockades and ambushes in the mountain paths to frustrate the pursuing imperialists. Xiang's spirit and body are broken by this point, and he will take a medical leave of absence. Xiao and Shi take the vanguard. Feng and Wei guard the rear, and Yang commands from the center. Hong is in the middle of the column, along with those civilians too young or old to fight. The column is commanded not to let a single member of this group come to harm. Former pirate Luo Dagang commands the naval forces as the Taiping column advances next to the Meng river. The pursuing forces eventually lose contact with the Taiping column and the army comes to the city of Yongan. The city is walled, but the garrison is far too small to adequately defend it. The Taiping having limited artillery, they will need to find another way of getting past the walls. They buy a huge stockpile of fireworks from a local shopkeeper. These are launched over the walls, creating so much noise and confusion that the panicked defenders are unable to prevent the rebels from scaling the walls and opening the gates. Several hundred defenders and their Manchu devil officers are killed. The Taiping have taken their first city, the first of over 600 in the decade and a half to come. The Armies of the Empire So who were the imperialist armies who are being repeatedly chumped here? Professional soldiers should, you might think, make short work of peasants and charcoal burners. The Imperial armies are not a unified, structured whole. There is not a pyramidal command structure stretching from the lowliest private to the emperor. Instead, a variey of officials at the national and local levels have responsibility for several types of forces.  The Banner armies are, at least on paper, the elite hereditary warrior caste. They started prior to the conquest of the Ming with 4 Manchu banner armies , later expanded to 8. Conquered Mongols were incorporated into their own 8 banners, and another 8 would be formed of Han Chinese during the Ming conquest. The 24 banner armies had their glory days in the expansion of the 18th century, but by the 19th were a shadow of their former selves. The tremendous state expenditure for their upkeep went less and less towards training and maintenance and more towards maintaining a luxurious lifestyle for the garrisons. Those martial skills that were maintained included things like horseback archery, whose usefulness was diminishing with each passing year. About 150,000 bannermen were in service at the start of the rebellion, mostly in the Manchu/Mongol north and in a few southern garrison cities. None of these garrisons were in Guangxi.  The bulk of imperial forces were the Han Chinese of the Green Standard (綠營)army. The Qing of the 18th century preferred to employ the green standard in domestic strife while the banners were busy in their external conquests. The decline of the 19th century military hit the Green Standard as hard or worse than the bannerman. The army was chronically underfunded, and it was not unheard of for guns to be over a century old. Even new weapons would be matchlocks, hopelessly obsolete if they should be needed against Western opponents. In the absence of western style quartermasters and barracks, troops were expected to take care of their own equipment maintenance. The underpaid soldiers usually found better uses for their money, like opium. Beyond the individual soldiers, the command system was deliberately fragmented as a measure to prevent possible rebellion among the army. So while functional as a national police force, trying to organize them for conventional warfare against an organized foe was a task well beyond the capabilities of the feuding Qing commanders. The Green Standard numbered at least 400,000, though it's hard to say exactly, as many non existent soldiers were reported so their commanders could pocket the additional pay.  In addition to the regulars, there are a variety of local militia groups, or tuan lian. Known as yong (勇 literally "braves") as opposed to the bing (兵) of the regular army, these soldiers were organized and funded by local government or civilian groups. Their effectiveness would vary widely depending on the resources committed to them, and at this early stage of the war they would remain small and restrict themselves to the defense of their home area. As time went on, though, this system would prove to be the framework by which effective modern armies would be constructed for the defense of the dynasty. The utter dysfunction of the regular army could not be fixed, but it could be bypassed. All of the problems of the declining Qing armies would be exacerbated by the first opium war. The imperial army was defeated, demoralized, and disorganized. There was no money left to rebuild to where it was, let alone start reforming it for the future, even though the need for change was apparent. Discharged troops, with no other means of support, gave birth to the bandit gangs that would set the Guangxi on fire and set the stage for the rebellion. To give an idea of the state of the troops opposing the rebels, here is the list of Taiping Rules of the March Obey the ten commandments and religious regulations Separation of the sexes- do not wet it up. Do not speak falsely of regulations, or pass on rumors of orders or military secrets. Every officer and soldier is to carry his own military gear, provisions, utensils, and salt. Weapons are to be maintained and ready for use. No one is to usurp rank and ride on horseback or in sedan, or impress people as servants. Except the Heavenly King, stay out of the way of his sedan chair. No one is to enter villages to seize food, ransack shops, burn houses, etc. No one is to coerce civilians to act as porters. Do not poo poo or piss on the road or in peoples homes. Don't kill the old and weak who can't carry things for you. This poo poo needed to be spelled out, it seems. The imperial troops have long been known for skipping some of these, especially the parts about impressing civilians as porters. Part of the reason the Taiping can escape the trap at Jintian is that poorly disciplined imperial troops stop to loot and burn local villages, slowing their pursuit and increasing local sympathies for the rebels. Later in the war, both sides will commit atrocities by the truckload, but in the early going the comparative discipline of the Taiping will benefit them both militarily and politically. Hopefully we'll get from Yongan to Nanjing in a few more updates. Let me know if anyone has questions, special requests, etc. In particular, I can adjust the level of excruciating detail as desired.
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Jun 7, 2015 02:06
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Using a poo poo tonne of fireworks to bypass a siege is hella ballsy. I'm really digging the Rebels, I'm going to be upset when we start learning when things turned for them. Keep it up P-Mack.
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Jun 7, 2015 02:37
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P-Mack posted:
Quick question what kind of weapons were they using? Did any of them still use swords, bows, crossbows enmasse, or was everyone at least up to gunpowder? using the various ignition systems.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:29
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SeanBeansShako posted:Tim Stone of the Rock Paper Shotgun PC Gaming blog who does the Milhist, Milsim and general other simulators posted this history of the real life flight simulator I thought you'd all be interested in reading. Cool article, but the idea that there was no way to train for flying in the 1920s is largely bullshit. You flew model aircraft. They had all kinds, mostly balsa wood construction, many gliders, some with motors that would run on a timer (say, 7 seconds and then the motor would cut out and a cable would be pulled to lower the elevator for an easy landing), and some that ran until they run out of gas, but were tied to a pole, so you only had 1 axis of control (i.e. up and down, no sideways, steering via a string). Then of course there were the glider clubs. I'm impressed at the idea that people flew IFR in 1920. Thats some ballsy poo poo. I've been in fog where all I could see was grey, and the GPS was the only thing that reassured me I was going the right way. I guess you *could* do it if you just flew a heading and used your artificial horizon to keep yourself steady, but even then, what about drift? They must have had good maps and lots of last-minute corrections.
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Jun 7, 2015 07:45
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Keldoclock posted:Cool article, but the idea that there was no way to train for flying in the 1920s is largely bullshit. You flew model aircraft. They had all kinds, mostly balsa wood construction, many gliders, some with motors that would run on a timer (say, 7 seconds and then the motor would cut out and a cable would be pulled to lower the elevator for an easy landing), and some that ran until they run out of gas, but were tied to a pole, so you only had 1 axis of control (i.e. up and down, no sideways, steering via a string). Then of course there were the glider clubs. Jimmy Doolittle accomplished a blind flight in 1929. He was testing the first directional indicator (a gyroscope) and artificial horizon, which are the two minimum pieces of gear you'll want for blind flying. The gyroscope lets you know if you're pointed in the wrong direction.
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Jun 7, 2015 08:08
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Disinterested posted:I'm going to write another fascism post soon, I've been researching and brewing.
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Jun 7, 2015 12:48
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tonberrytoby posted:I would be like to read some info about how much the Japanese were influenced by Fascism. They are usually called Fascist, but I don't know how much overlap there actually was. Yeah, I forgot the Japanese when I was writing that post. I'll bring them in but it's complicated. I think the two books that probably make the links most explicit are Buruma's Inventing Japan and The Wages of Guilt. It's definitely the case that Japan bought in to a lot of German practices and ideology in the late 19th century which was a contributory factor. But it's also the case that Imperial Japan was emulating more traditional forms of European Imperialism, and doing something very culturally specific to Japan. Some Nazis definitely expressed envy that the Imperial Japanese had happened upon a form and idea of government they wished they had - that of an organic community, headed by a divine ruler who holds the special race of his people as his extended family - a family which will sacrifice anything for its father.
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Jun 7, 2015 12:52
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Chillyrabbit posted:Quick question what kind of weapons were they using? It's kind of an early pike and shot technology level where there's a mix of polearms, matchlocks, and light artillery. Some western observers estimated that only one man in ten had a gun, but this will vary tremendously with the specific unit and which stage in the war we're dealing with. The village militias would likely have only bows and spears. The Taiping at this point have guns, but they're running short on powder. Supposedly the rebels were more effective in melee combat, which is why Xiang tried to rely on surrounding them with fortifications instead of open battle. I'll work a section on equipment into one of the next few posts.
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Jun 7, 2015 13:24
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When you are done with fascism Disinterested, I don't suppose you can break down European Nationalism in the 19th century if that is also your thing? If not that is cool, but it is something to look into when that discussion comes to the end  .Also, I'm down for reading a breakdown of the Taiping and Qing armour and weaponry too!
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Jun 7, 2015 16:21
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SeanBeansShako posted:When you are done with fascism Disinterested, I don't suppose you can break down European Nationalism in the 19th century if that is also your thing? If not that is cool, but it is something to look into when that discussion comes to the end I'm going to touch on it imminently because intellectually nationalism obviously in itself feeds in to fascism, and is also related to romanticism, even though 19th century German nationalism was often a liberal concept: students insisting that the ancien regime had no right to cleave the self-determining German people apart from one-another to live in a free community. But they contain in them what we generally consider conservative precepts today. So with Germany I would begin by looking at some of the same figures who influence fascism later: Herder, Fichte Schelling - and dealing with Hegel last, as well as more orthodox German history. To explain the history of that in the German context is an extremely long process that goes back in to the medieval period, and how people thought about a land, and concepts like heimatliebe and whether or not these things are the rustling of what is to come, but then also talking about what the French revolution signified and how the reactionary post-war settlement and the Revolutionary/Napoleonic eras set the scene, as well as the onset of capitalism and the de-localisation it causes through regional integration etc. Then you have to look deep in to the question of what nationalism really is which is
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Jun 7, 2015 16:37
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Thanks, keep it up your posts are awesome.
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Jun 7, 2015 16:39
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I recall looking up fascism in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. It was a fairly lengthy entry, and I think a good three quarters of the article was dedicated to espousing the glory of socialism.
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Jun 7, 2015 17:35
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Ensign Expendable posted:I recall looking up fascism in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. It was a fairly lengthy entry, and I think a good three quarters of the article was dedicated to espousing the glory of socialism. That doesn't surprise me. One of the really important things for understanding post-war German politics is that the Soviets and the Western Powers had two completely divergent theories of fascism. The western one can basically be understood as the early stages of the explanations Disinterested is laying out. The Soviet model was based entirely on a Marxist interpretation of history, and basically just tl;dr'd fascism down to the final, most decadent and destructive end stage of capitalism. There is a bit more nuance to it than that, but that's the core thesis. It was really useful for them in the Cold War era as it gave them an intellectual framework to hang claims that everyone west of the Oder were fascists of one flavor or another. I think that interpretation is really flawed, but it hangs together if you're 100% intellectually committed to a traditional (as in ca-the late 19th century / early 20th ) Marxist view of history.
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Jun 7, 2015 18:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:That doesn't surprise me. One of the really important things for understanding post-war German politics is that the Soviets and the Western Powers had two completely divergent theories of fascism. The western one can basically be understood as the early stages of the explanations Disinterested is laying out. The Soviet model was based entirely on a Marxist interpretation of history, and basically just tl;dr'd fascism down to the final, most decadent and destructive end stage of capitalism. There is a bit more nuance to it than that, but that's the core thesis. It was really useful for them in the Cold War era as it gave them an intellectual framework to hang claims that everyone west of the Oder were fascists of one flavor or another. I don't think it hangs together that well but it sure is a convenient and effective propaganda tool. And thinks like the war in Vietnam and the violent retributions against the civil rights movement made it very easy for the Soviets.
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Jun 7, 2015 18:43
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Thanks to both P-Mack and Disinterested for the continual effort-posts - they're all fascinating stuff. (And Trin Tragula too, but I thought that was a given.)
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Jun 7, 2015 19:09
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P-Mack posted:Do not poo poo or piss on the road Ah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Jun 7, 2015 19:15
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Disinterested posted:I don't think it hangs together that well but it sure is a convenient and effective propaganda tool. And thinks like the war in Vietnam and the violent retributions against the civil rights movement made it very easy for the Soviets. Well, it hangs together if you accept a lot of very basic presumptions in old school Marxist history. Even dedicated Marxist historians have moved on from what was current in Stalin's day. If you fully subscribe to a teleological view of history and look at everything through a lens that demands root economic causes for everything the idea of fascism as failed capitalism leading to an inevitable progression first to socialism and then communism it's a coherent and internally consistent world view. Of course if you don't hold those base presumptions it falls apart, which is why I said it hangs together if you're 100% invested in that philosophical framework. It's similar to trying to understand the internal logic of the German strain of fascism. I don't believe that different races or peoples are engaged in a zero-sum struggle for survival, but if you do then eliminating foreign or undesirable elements from your nation makes a whole lot more sense. That doesn't mean it's right, moral, or even correct (it is, after all, based on a questionable core belief) but the end result does logically follow from the initial beliefs.
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Jun 7, 2015 19:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, it hangs together if you accept a lot of very basic presumptions in old school Marxist history. Even dedicated Marxist historians have moved on from what was current in Stalin's day. If you fully subscribe to a teleological view of history and look at everything through a lens that demands root economic causes for everything the idea of fascism as failed capitalism leading to an inevitable progression first to socialism and then communism it's a coherent and internally consistent world view. I don't think you can apply the standards of Marxist thought to the west from the 70's onwards and really get fascism as your end computation if you're being fully intellectually honest, or if you are working with vaguely correct information. If someone makes such a claim, I think that's the moment you need to go hunting for why such an extraordinary claim is being made without just reference to the internal logic of the ideology (which even so, I think is shaky).
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Jun 7, 2015 19:19
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Disinterested posted:I don't think you can apply the standards of Marxist thought to the west from the 70's onwards and really get fascism as your end computation if you're being fully intellectually honest, or if you are working with vaguely correct information. It would of course be massively anachronistic to apply classical marxist-leninist dogma to the 1970s West 
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Jun 7, 2015 19:31
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Koesj posted:It would of course be massively anachronistic to apply classical marxist-leninist dogma to the 1970s West I'm not talking about using that dogma anachronistically - although one does have to ask oneself how reasonable it is to alter one's view from a previous set of beliefs. Are we saying that the belief that the United States was a fascist state in the 1970's was a rational one?
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Jun 7, 2015 19:35
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Disinterested posted:I don't think you can apply the standards of Marxist thought to the west from the 70's onwards and really get fascism as your end computation if you're being fully intellectually honest, or if you are working with vaguely correct information. No where in there am I talking about applying marxist thought to the west from the 70s onwards. Note that I was originally talking about post-war Germany. These are how Soviet thinkers justified painting the Western Allies + W. Germany as the heirs to fascism. I've already explained how it's predicated on some basic beliefs that are very, very easy to disagree with. Once you get into the Brezhnev era I doubt that anyone other than the most ivory-tower party political theorists in the USSR fully believed that Carter's America was the equal of Hitler's Germany. I could be wrong on that, I'm much, much more conversant in the first half of the USSR's history, especially as it dealt with Germany in the later 40s and 50s. You seem to think that I am arguing that this is some kind of undeniable truth. I'm not. I'm saying that this was the rationale in the Soviet sphere of influence in the decade after WW2. If your philosophical worldview is rooted in the explanations and theories that were current with Russian Marxists between 1900 and 1945 then seeing Hitler as the death throes of a collapsing capitalist system makes sense. I'm not saying that this is a correct interpretation of history, but I am saying that it is an internally coherent argument predicated upon what I personally see as flawed assumptions. Hence my example of how even National Socialist philosophies and goals make sense if you have a particularly race-based, Darwinistic view of how cultures interact. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 19:45
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Disinterested posted:Are we saying that the belief that the United States was a fascist state in the 1970's was a rational one? No, no one is saying this.
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Jun 7, 2015 19:45
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Looking back perhaps I was unclear about the time frame I was talking about. When I say "post-war" I'm talking about the decade following WW2, not the entire span of time between 1945 and today. When I said that the post-war understandings of fascism in the West and the USSR were based on radically divergent understandings of fascism, I was talking about the initial understanding as it existed in the late 40s - not the historical narratives that were being constructed in the late cold war. As an example, this is why it isn't purely cynical horseshit for the E. Germans to call the Berlin Wall the "anti-fascist protective wall" in the mid 60s. Yes, it was patently obvious that the purpose of it was to keep people in E. Germany. The "protective wall" part of it is questionable. However, from the perspective of people who accepted an analysis of German fascism based on a teleological view of history firmly rooted in the primacy of economic factors the "anti-fascist" bit wasn't just a complete flight of fancy. I'm not making a grand proclamation of How Things Were and what the Correct Explanation for Fascism was, I'm simply gesturing towards the intellectual framework that politicians and thinkers in the USSR and its satellites were using to explain the rise of fascism and the development of the Cold War immediately after.
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Jun 7, 2015 19:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:Looking back perhaps I was unclear about the time frame I was talking about. When I say "post-war" I'm talking about the decade following WW2, not the entire span of time between 1945 and today. When I said that the post-war understandings of fascism in the West and the USSR were based on radically divergent understandings of fascism, I was talking about the initial understanding as it existed in the late 40s - not the historical narratives that were being constructed in the late cold war. This particularity helps me a lot, since 'post-War' and 'West of the Oder' are pretty broad terms that could mean 'all time since 1945' and 'literally everything west of the Oder', which is how I took it. I never thought you were proclaiming what the correct explanation for fascism was, I was just trying to point out that in my view in most contexts the argument that the west was fascist was not a rational one, even within the coordinates of the USSR. Germany is an interesting and different case though, as you point out, especially in the immediate post-war era. But I think that is not as much to do with philosophy as it is to do with the degree to which the two states de-Nazified historically - though, naturally, one informs the other. I also think I want to disagree with this: Cyrano4747 posted:I'm not saying that this is a correct interpretation of history, but I am saying that it is an internally coherent argument predicated upon what I personally see as flawed assumptions. Hence my example of how even National Socialist philosophies and goals make sense if you have a particularly race-based, Darwinistic view of how cultures interact. I don't think, in truth, fascism is ever really a rational belief system to have even in its context - and not just because it is an inherently obscurantist and anti-rationalist belief system. Many of its claims are easily empirically disprovable, as well as being inconsistent. When analysing it one really does need to look for causes external to philosophy to explain why people adopt it. In the case of Germany, you have the two major emotional breaks of 1918 and 1929, and then the fear of Communism, that really give a wide body of people the capacity for cognitive dissonance necessary. By standards of proof and argumentation contemporary to it, it was a stupid ideology, especially in its German manifestation. I don't think explaining it in this way makes it rational, but that is perhaps more of a semantic problem. Though I would want to differentiate between practical rationality and intellectual rationality. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 20:02
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Following up on my WW1 trench photos, this is the display at the USAHEC that was across the field from it: a reproduction WW1 German pillbox. The pillbox itself is separate from the entrance, connected by an underground tunnel.       
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Jun 7, 2015 20:14
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Disinterested posted:This particularity helps me a lot, since 'post-War' and 'West of the Oder' are pretty broad terms that could mean 'all time since 1945' and 'literally everything west of the Oder', which is how I took it. I never thought you were proclaiming what the correct explanation for fascism was, I was just trying to point out that in my view in most contexts the argument that the west was fascist was not a rational one, even within the coordinates of the USSR. My personal view of denazification is that it was more or less evenly conducted across both the American/British/French zones and the Soviet zone, although both were imperfect and both were predicated on very different understandings of its goals. It should be noted that in both instances old Nazis (especially those in mid-level positions) were re-employed in large numbers by the early 50s. This goes against the previous wisdom that E. Germany made a clean sweep, but there has been a lot of research on Soviet denazification in the last two decades that shows that people were re-employed at the same rates as they were in the west. If you want literature I can point you to them, although most of the cases that I'm specifically aware of look at the firing and re-hiring of teachers and educational administrators after the war. It should be pointed out that (despite my particular research predilections) the educational system works as a good general case study since it was one of the most intensively denazified and both sides had a very deep appreciation for the vital importance of cleaning up the schools for the long-term rehabilitation of German society. I would argue that the philosophical underpinnings are important, because it is these divergent understandings of the root causes of fascism (specifically Nazism) that directly informed the political and policy decisions that they made. In the west this ultimately led to an understanding of just how incomplete* their denazification process was and the subsequent scandals and political angst in the late 60s. In the east the basic understanding was that the west was the unreformed remnants of the Nazi state, which allowed them to heap the crimes of the past over the boarder and be a lot less self-reflective. When you define your nation specifically as an "anti-fascist state" it's pretty easy to draw a line under an unfortunate past. This wasn't completely cynical blame-shifting either. In both the West and the East the new generation of top-level political leadership was drawn from people who had opposed the Nazis, but in the East they had the added luxury of selecting people who had opposed them from the 20s on. Among people who were extremely politically conscious (or at least had strong feelings about Marxist socialism) there was a post-war process of self-sorting that put more ardent opponents in the West and the majority of the old KPD and more radical SPD members in the east. Because of this you end up with a very high proportion of people in E. German leadership circles who had been fighting the NSDAP tooth and nail since they emerged on the political scene. Walter Wolf, one of the guys that I concentrated a lot of research on quite literally walked out of Buchenwald after a long period of incarceration (I think 8 years? I would have to double check) and straight into a job as the Minister of Education in Thuringia. When you have this kind of pedigree it really isn't all that disingenuous to say that your government is an anti-fascist government; most of the key members had utterly impeccable anti-fascist credentials. * In my opinion, based on way too many years immersing myself in the literature - both academic and archival - on the post-war denazification process, the entire argument of whether denazification was a success or failure is pointless and exists only because of the political points to be scored by defending or criticizing it in the two Germanies at the height of the Cold War. Put simply, it wasn't a complete success anywhere but there was no way that it could be. National Socialism had permeated way too far into German society over the 22 years that it was a significant political force to simply exclude anyone who had participated in it from society. The establishment of Nazi professional organizations and party membership requirements for some of them meant that it couldn't be as simple as blackballing anyone with a membership card. The thing that is usually over looked, however, is that it was a resounding short term success, and that is all that was needed. Taking the specific example of educational reconstruction, the administrative levels were entirely gutted. This was possible mainly because you require far fewer administrators than classroom instructors and there were enough people who had clean political histories to do that. Most of them were near retirement age when they were brought in, and many of them had been kicked out of the profession in the early 30s with the new civil service laws. 10 years later, however? You start to see people with Party histories dating back to when they were in university, or who had been classroom teachers under the Third Reich and who had undoubtedly taught some really unfortunate lessons. The critics of denazification point to this as an abject failure. How successful could it be if you had ex-Nazis around in the mid 60s? The key, however, is that they sidelined the politically tainted for long enough to establish a social and political framework that would help prevent any kind of re-establishment of a Nazi (or re-labled successor) movement. By the time those people were getting their jobs back the political order wasn't the unpredictable, fragile one of the immediate post-war era. They were in post-war successor states that had senior leadership who were dedicated to a post-Nazi future for their section of Germany and a population that had enough time to get over their initial loss of the war, reflect on the tragedy of the conflict, and at the very least not have an appetite for revenge or retribution. This isn't saying that there weren't true believers still in the population, but short of a blood soaked purge that is the sort of problem that a country can only age out of. It was enough for them to know that society wasn't with them any more and that anything more than bar room bitching would land them in serious trouble. Of course this is a thumb nail sketch and there are always nuances and exceptions to general observations. It could easily be argued (and I would agree) that the denazification of the W. German judiciary was more or less a failure and that it should have been pursued much more aggressively. Even in that instance, however, the courts did come around in the 60s and begin to prosecute war criminals in ernest. I would also point out that as loathsome as some of the judicial records of senior judges were, they were also sufficiently cowed that they did not pose a serious judicial challenge to Germany's moving on from Hitler. No one ever ruled the bans on Nazi symbols, language, meetings etc. unconstitutional or tried to throw out the electoral regulations that prevented a Weimar-like proliferation of fringe parties for example. quote:I also think I want to disagree with this: I still think you're missing my general point. I'm not saying that Nazism in particular was a rational belief system (and let's face it, when talking about the specifics you have to specify your strain of fascism), I'm saying that it had its own internal logic and that logic is consistent as long as you understand the basic assumptions. Those assumptions are frequently irrational and based on ideas that have their roots in a certain strain of 19th century romanticism. That said, the same thing can be said of most belief systems. Someone who bases their political worldview on the foundation of American Exceptionalism is going to have a lot of opinions that are empirically false, but make sense if you start from the base presumption that the US is a uniquely superior nation. If you believe that there is a God, that life begins at conception, and that ending human life is a mortal sin then it makes perfect sense to believe that the government should ban all abortion; even a ban on birth control would be a logical conclusion if you believed it to be a subversion of divine will. That doesn't make it correct, that doesn't make it unassailable, but it also means that someone who holds that view isn't stupid or insane, they simply have some basic assumptions and beliefs that help dictate what their other view are. An irrational belief can can underpin subsequent ideas that follow naturally. It's also important to point out that it's difficult to talk of National Socialism as a single intellectual strain, just the same as the broad body of fascisms is really a loose grouping of related political philosophies. Different people had different emphases and it's difficult to draw universal statements about their motives or beliefs. Just look at the upper-level leadership in the NSDAP: Himmler had a lot of quasi-mystical beliefs about history and race that a lot of the other leadership - die hard Nazis each and every one - thought were questionable at best. There are plenty of examples of senior party members criticizing the crude anti-semitism of Julius Streicher and his Sturm Verlag even though many of them disliked it because it was not as "rational" as their own biological/"scientific" racism. edit: I started responding before your edit: Disinterested posted:I don't think explaining it in this way makes it rational, but that is perhaps more of a semantic problem. Though I would want to differentiate between practical rationality and intellectual rationality. Given this I think a lot of our differences on this specific point are indeed semantic. I think you're trying for an objective rationality, although I would argue that there is no such thing as an "objective" or "practical" rationality. Just because I think fundamentalist wahabbism is an flawed worldview doesn't mean that someone who believes it and bases their life on it is irrational. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jun 7, 2015 |
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Jun 7, 2015 21:03
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Note that rational means "based on logic or reason" not "correct." This is how I'm using the word at least. gently caress me, the definition of "quote" is not "to edit one's previous comments"
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Jun 7, 2015 21:07
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