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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Lütjens was about as anti-Nazi as you could be and still reach flag rank in Nazi Germany. He ignored directives to kick Jewish officers out of the Kriegsmarine when he was the head of the personnel office, wrote a formal complaint about the Nuremberg laws to his superior, and refused to perform the Nazi salute even in front of Hitler. I mean, not that I'm at all shocked that a movie portrayal of a historical figure didn't turn out to be accurate, but man if this is the case then 'Sink the Bismark' really does the opposite job of portraying what kind of a man he was. Lütjens was shown as nothing short of fanatical, and kind of goes insane and loses it towards the end of the movie believing that Hitler is going to come and pull their butts out of the fire. Edit: Is there any material you can recommend about Lutjens/The Bismark, etc.?
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May 18, 2017 16:28
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Cyrano4747 posted:We really need to get past this notion that the only reason Jim Crow happened and that things were lovely for blacks was the failure of reconstruction. It goes way, way deeper than that. You never have de jure segregation in the north, for example, but you sure as poo poo had de facto segregation caused by the every day racist BS that white people in the north were doing. The second you see the Great Migration kick off you have serious racial tensions in the north and a lot of the same ugly bullshit that made the south so unpleasant. This is something that MLK noticed and talked about frequently, especially as it related to housing. It is always complicated but you can't understate the significance of a southern population that would basically without fail vote for racism and how that enables things.
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May 18, 2017 16:44
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Fangz posted:I think the equivalent of the Nuremburg trials and denazification for the confederates would have been a vast improvement on how things turned out. Denazification didn't even work in Germany. And it was an utter disaster in Iraq. Fangz posted:It is always complicated but you can't understate the significance of a southern population that would basically without fail vote for racism and how that enables things. Do you think those voters would be less likely to vote for racism after you've executed all of them who wore a CSA uniform? Or are you just saying we shouldn't let them vote anymore?
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May 18, 2017 16:46
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Yes, let's use hyperbole.
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May 18, 2017 16:58
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Am I not taking a 'noose, a stout elm, and an unmarked grave' in the spirit it was intended?
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May 18, 2017 17:12
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I know it's not out yet, but what does the thread think of the Dunkirk movie based on the trailers so far?
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May 18, 2017 17:14
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Could be good, I just hope the French soldiers aren't forgotten.
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May 18, 2017 17:18
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Phanatic posted:Am I not taking a 'noose, a stout elm, and an unmarked grave' in the spirit it was intended? Did the Nuremburg trials execute *every* Nazi?
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May 18, 2017 17:22
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Fangz posted:It is always complicated but you can't understate the significance of a southern population that would basically without fail vote for racism and how that enables things. Sure, but the planter elite that everyone laments didn't get neutered enough by reconstruction wasn't the be all and end all of it. You could magic away every plantation owner and member of the political class in 1865 and you would STILL have some really horrible problems with ingrained racism. It's a much deeper cultural issue (and one that was common across all of the US, albeit more acute in the south). Phanatic posted:Denazification didn't even work in Germany. And it was an utter disaster in Iraq. Whether or not denazification was a success depends on how you define success. If you mean "no nazis are ever involved in public life ever again" then no, it wasn't a success. However if you look at it as a process for removing nazis from prominent positions of power then it's a qualified success, with some aspects of German government being better denazified than others (political leadership, pretty well denazified while the judiciary had some serious issues). If you define it as restructuring the political landscape in the country to ensure that it is able to move on and reconstruct society in a broadly non-nazi mold then it was quite successful. Everyone points to the stale old farts who had jobs in the 60s as the failure of denaizfication. The problem is that you can't run a society in 1946 if everyone who had even the slightest connection to the NDSDAP is a forever-pariah who can't participate in public life. This is further complicated by the fact that how you even define a nazi gets really hard. The party very consciously coopted every professional organization it could, for example, to ensure that it was in everyone's best interests if the party succeed. If you wanted to be a teacher in 1938, for example, you HAD to be a member of the National Socialist Teacher's League (NSLB). Similar gateways existed if you wanted pretty much any job that required a professional certification. Drawing a delineation between the person who joined the NSDAP in 1932 because they were a true believer and the person who joins in 1940 because they want to keep their job is something that had to be done. More importantly, what denazification was excellent at was clearing the field in the short term so people who disagreed with nazism could set the agenda moving forward. Denazification was extreme in the late 40s, to the point where there were chronic teacher shortages (teaching was categorized as one of the most politically sensitive professions and therefore is a good case study for denazification - it's also what I wrote my dissertation on so I know a bit more about the specifics of how it worked than, say, the electricians). The general pattern was to remove everyone in 1945 and put everything under a total-occupation hiatus and then identify professionals who were ardent anti-nazis. These were usually the people who opposed the regime to the point of self destruction. The guy who headed up the Thuringian school system after the war, for example, literally walked out of Buchenwald to take up his position. He could actually see his old KZ from his office as Minister of Education. Much more common were people who simply dropped out of the profession in the late 30s because of the bullshit. (note that denazification in this era is more or less the same in the US/British zones as it is in the Soviet Zone) Once that layer of people with impeccable anti-nazi credentials was in place they were then used to fill out the lower levels of the bureaucracy. Partially this was done with more anti-nazi true believers, and partially it was done with skilled professionals who just avoided Nazi poo poo as much as possible. At the level of school inspectors you could have had a professional membership in the NSLB, for example, but actual Party Membership was a big no-no. Once you get down to the level of teachers party membership wasn't an instant disqualifier after 1947 or so, but it was very contingent on the circumstances. You had to go before a tribunal and basically show that it was done under pressure later on. They were very careful to draw a distinction between the guy who joins in 1940 and the one who joined in 1932. The Alte Kameraden were pushed to the side in a very big way. Once that's done you have in place a system where the people in charge are impeccably anti-nazi and are overseeing people who, while they may be tainted, are in the fellow traveler category rather than the die hard ideologue category. This is how you keep society functioning until you can educate a new cadre of people who are untainted by the previous regime. You have to age them out. This is very important because it creates the conditions where those younger people can call bullshit on their elders later on. The major cultural moment in Germany in the 60s when questions about the past got asked in a major way is the ultimate success of denazification. Interestingly denazification really falls on its face in the east much worse than it does in the west. Both went for radical denazification early on and both had to relax it to simply make society function. THe problem is that in the east they clung to the myth that all the old nazis were in the west, so you never have that moment of cultural reckoning. There's some excellent work done on schools in Brandenburg, for example, that show that they had just as many old Nazis teaching in classrooms in 1950 as you find in West Berlin. If you really want to find the flaws in De-Baathification they lie in a facile understanding of denazification that only understood the initial steps taken in 1945. It lacked that crucial phase where you rehabilitate enough people with good-enough records. It's this step that allows you to have a stable, functioning government that is recognized as both legitimate and native (as opposed to just an occupation), and it's this stability that lets you do all the other things that enable an eventual reconciliation with the past.
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May 18, 2017 17:23
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Fangz posted:It is always complicated but you can't understate the significance of a southern population that would basically without fail vote for racism and how that enables things. Pretty much everywhere in America was pro-racism, either codified or de facto, for 80-90 years after the Civil War ended. Hanging a bunch of Confederates wasn't going to change that, nor did not hanging them enable it. All it would have done is sown the seeds for a massive insurgency and probably a far more severe backlash against southern blacks.
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May 18, 2017 17:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Great post, thanks.
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May 18, 2017 17:39
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bewbies posted:Pretty much everywhere in America was pro-racism, either codified or de facto, for 80-90 years after the Civil War ended. Hanging a bunch of Confederates wasn't going to change that, nor did not hanging them enable it. All it would have done is sown the seeds for a massive insurgency and probably a far more severe backlash against southern blacks. This isn't strictly milhist but during the ACW era, did abolitionists tend to believe that black people and white people were equal in all respects, and that they deserved total equality under the law? Did most people think that while slaves deserved freedom, they were inferior or other wise less-than white people?
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May 18, 2017 17:47
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zoux posted:This isn't strictly milhist but during the ACW era, did abolitionists tend to believe that black people and white people were equal in all respects, and that they deserved total equality under the law? Did most people think that while slaves deserved freedom, they were inferior or other wise less-than white people? It's a spectrum. You have parts of the abolitionist movement that thought the races were entirely equal. There was frequently a strong religious component to that wing. You also had people who were in favor of abolition because they saw it as a toxic, degrading institution that debased whites just as much as blacks or simply for political reasons. A number of those people would probably be considered racist by any post-1960 understanding. edit: it also changes over time, like most things in history do. An abolitionist in 1840 and an abolitionist in 1860 can be two very different things.
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May 18, 2017 17:50
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SeanBeansShako posted:I think these days this is the only Churchill I can tolerate now. I don't even get why they wouldn't show Churchill warts and all when it came to his personality.
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May 18, 2017 17:51
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Hunt11 posted:I don't even get why they wouldn't show Churchill warts and all when it came to his personality. I feel like the warts are almost part of his charm
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May 18, 2017 17:53
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I do not think inviting Lee in to the white house as he was going on speaking tours against giving black people the vote helped the situation. Yes, hanging the ringleaders of the confederacy would not have instantly cured racism, but being prepared to do nasty things to nice white racists is a necessary step in a general process of purging racism from the nation, that the country and the world still suffers from. You might say that the deeper problem is the lack of will in the North, but that's turning it into a chicken and egg problem.
Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:56 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 17:53
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Fangz posted:I do not think inviting Lee in to the white house as he was going on speaking tours against giving black people the vote helped the situation. Yes, hanging the ringleaders of the confederacy would not have instantly cured racism, but being prepared to do nasty things to nice white racists is a necessary step in a general process of purging racism from the nation, that the country and the world still suffers from. I think the problem here is that we're getting into Free Black Grant territory here, because a North that would do anything that harsh is a North that is very different, and that difference would make as much or more of a difference to the outcome than the action itself.
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May 18, 2017 17:57
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Hunt11 posted:I don't even get why they wouldn't show Churchill warts and all when it came to his personality. Like most political figures what, exactly, you decide his personality was like is really contentious. gently caress, it's this way with any random rear end in a top hat off the street you choose to name. You could easily present me as a thoughtful, kind, family man or you could also present me as a arrogant, know-it-all, ivory tower gun nut. Then you have the needs of the art itself. No 2 hour movie is going to be able to show a perfect, fully rounded picture of the man (assuming that can be done at all) so they have to decide on some portrayal. THEN you have the raw politics of it. Thatcher's another good one for this. Is she a fire breathing hell beast who cared only for devouring coal jobs, or is she a strong, female executive who believed free enterprise was at the core of British politics and society? You could easily make a movie about a sympathetic Maggie succeeding through hard work and determination, and you could also make one about an evil Iron Lady destroying 60 years of progressive politics in a go. It's almost like the world is nuanced and most people aren't easily summarized by a handful of personality characteristics.
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May 18, 2017 17:57
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xthetenth posted:I think the problem here is that we're getting into Free Black Grant territory here, because a North that would do anything that harsh is a North that is very different, and that difference would make as much or more of a difference to the outcome than the action itself. Sure. But that's a decidedly different argument from those that claim even more generally that denazification was bad and the likes of Herman Goring should have walked free and had monuments built to him. Also Grant was a poo poo president.
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May 18, 2017 17:58
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I think another of the popular idea of the abolitionists was simply sending the newly freed Black Americans back to Africa because they could not co-exist with the white races.
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May 18, 2017 17:59
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zoux posted:This isn't strictly milhist but during the ACW era, did abolitionists tend to believe that black people and white people were equal in all respects, and that they deserved total equality under the law? Did most people think that while slaves deserved freedom, they were inferior or other wise less-than white people? Practically everyone in that era was a white supremacist, even the staunchest abolitionists operated under the presumption that blacks were inferior to whites. You only had a few people preaching true equality and they were generally regarded as radical freaks (Thad Stevens), even by their friends. It is very hard to find anyone who actually espoused the idea that blacks were just as smart/capable/whatever as whites. The Boston-type abolitionists in particular really had a "white man's burden" philosophy - they wanted to educate the negro and make him self sufficient, but very few if any thought that they were the intellectual/cultural equals of whites. The Pennsylvania/mennonite type abolitionists were more about....treating all god's creatures gently or some such.
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May 18, 2017 18:03
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Fangz posted:Sure. But that's a decidedly different argument from those that claim even more generally that denazification was bad and the likes of Herman Goring should have walked free and had monuments built to him. Comparing reconstruction to denazification really isn't a fair comparison. The situations are just so profoundly different. There is a lot of political will to do things to a defeated foreign enemy that you will never see in a civil war, and ultimately you can GTFO of your occupation - everyone realizes that you need to deal with those defeated assholes moving forward into perpetuity in a civil war. There are also major problems of how you restructure things. Restructuring the south post-ACW required amending our constitution. Ultimately we were trying to un-gently caress fundamental problems in our own government, which is going to limit exactly how far we are wiling to go. Should we have had a constitutional convention in 1866 to draft an entirely new government? Maybe, maybe not, but that would have been a MAJOR move. In the case of Germany, however, they got a new constitution at gunpoint. Take the first amendment for example: there are a lot of things you could do in the south to shut down the political moves of the planter class, but a lot of them would have fallen afoul of freedom of speech. In Germany it was a lot easier to just spell out in the law that freedom of speech applies to everyone but nazis, because the laws were being written, not amended. Restructuring a nation in the wake of a civil war is a much more delicate balance than establishing a new order in the wake of total defeat by a foreign power.
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May 18, 2017 18:04
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Fangz posted:I do not think inviting Lee in to the white house as he was going on speaking tours against giving black people the vote helped the situation. Yes, hanging the ringleaders of the confederacy would not have instantly cured racism, but being prepared to do nasty things to nice white racists is a necessary step in a general process of purging racism from the nation, that the country and the world still suffers from. You might say that the deeper problem is the lack of will in the North, but that's turning it into a chicken and egg problem. Two things of note here. First, Lee's opposition to the black vote always used phrases like "at this time" and "too poorly educated to vote responsibly". We don't know if he would have changed his stance after his proposal for universal black education was put into effect, as he died in 1870, only a few years after the war. Second, you could have hanged every man, woman, and child in the defeated Confederacy without making the country even slightly less racist. It was a racist country - a racist world-, and no amount of force could have changed that. Get rid of the Southern racists and all that happens is that they are replaced by Northern racists, (which might well have been worse for black folk, as however nasty Southern racism was it had been tempered by long familiarity, while Northern racists had generally never even seen a black person before and would probably have been more likely to treat black people as something that belonged in a zoo), and also that anyone you didn't get rid of would hate you with a vicious passion. Most likely, you'd wind up with Bloody Kansas across the entire southern half of the continent.
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May 18, 2017 18:05
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SeanBeansShako posted:Could be good, I just hope the French soldiers aren't forgotten and the plane scenes don't suck rear end.
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May 18, 2017 18:06
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When people say "they should have hanged Lee", they are not imagining, with the power of a time traveller, this is the only change they would make, all else left the same, and things would be awesome. They are really using this as a shorthand to explain that the US should have, at that time, occupied a modern progressive moral framework that would have seen the full monstrosity of the southern cause, at which point justice would have been inevitably demanded and been done.
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May 18, 2017 18:07
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Fangz posted:Like when people say "they should have hanged Lee", they are not imagining, with the power of a time traveller, this is the only change they would make, all else left the same, and things would be awesome. What part of "Practically nobody on the goddamn planet wanted such a framework" are you are not understanding? It was not "Them evil black-hating Confederates vs. the Morally Enlightened Everybody Else", but the "Deeply racist and slaveholding Confederacy vs. The Deeply Racist but not slave-holding everybody else." In 1865, if you tried to propose the sort of equality we see as the standard today, your audience just might die laughing at the absurdity of the idea - certainly none would take it seriously.
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May 18, 2017 18:11
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Fangz posted:They are really using this as a shorthand to explain that the US should have, at that time, occupied a modern progressive moral framework that would have seen the full monstrosity of the southern cause, at which point justice would have been inevitably demanded and been done. The issue here is that you're using the moral framework of 2017, not that of 1865. There were some shall we say subtle differences.
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May 18, 2017 18:13
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Fangz posted:at which point justice would have been inevitably demanded and been done. ...
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May 18, 2017 18:13
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Gnoman posted:What part of "Practically nobody on the goddamn planet wanted such a framework" are you are not understanding? It was not "Them evil black-hating Confederates vs. the Morally Enlightened Everybody Else", but the "Deeply racist and slaveholding Confederacy vs. The Deeply Racist but not slave-holding everybody else." Let me rephrase again. You're treating this as alt history. Others are treating this as a question of modern ethics. bewbies posted:The issue here is that you're using the moral framework of 2017, not that of 1865. There were some shall we say subtle differences. That's not the issue, that's the whole point. It's like people are loudly rebutting "Hitler shouldn't have killed the jews" with "but the Nazis hated the jews!" Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:18 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 18:14
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Applying modern ethics to historical c events is always really problematic. You need to understand the ethical/moral context of the time not what you wish they were based on your own.
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May 18, 2017 18:18
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If what you're saying is we should sit down and properly reevaluate the legacy of the Civil War and how it's memorialized from a modern framework, I'd be right there with you. I'll point out that a good chunk of the nation doesn't agree with the framework and wouldn't agree with the conclusions though.
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May 18, 2017 18:18
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Cyrano4747 posted:Applying modern ethics to historical c events is always really problematic. You need to understand the ethical/moral context of the time not what you wish they were based on your own. It's also dull and only serves to make a person feel morally superior to other people. That's part of the reason I asked about racial attitudes at the time: there's a tendency to demonize as monstrously evil people who we now view as immoral and lionize those who opposed them. You get people going "Sherman, who was awesome, should've burned all of the South to the ground." Actually, Sherman was a major architect of our other greatest national shame, the active genocide of the Native American people. He was, by our standards, a massive piece of poo poo. By our lights, everyone in the past sucked morally.
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May 18, 2017 18:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:Applying modern ethics to historical c events is always really problematic. You need to understand the ethical/moral context of the time not what you wish they were based on your own. The other extreme is similarly problematic though. Besides this also all adopts a rather blinkered perspective. Our appeal to the "ethical/moral context of the time" sure pays a lot more attention to the opinions of white males than anyone else, no?
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May 18, 2017 18:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Applying modern ethics to historical c events is always really problematic. You need to understand the ethical/moral context of the time not what you wish they were based on your own. Agreed. The ONLY time you should ever try applying modern ethics to historical events is when you are trying to use those events in the context of your own time. Otherwise, it would be far better to pretend those events never happened, as the primary virtue of studying history is that, by analyzing what happened and why you can learn from the mistakes and successes of the past. "What the Union should have done to the Confederacy if they thought the same way we do today" would have been a really useful question if we were dealing with an analogous situation today - but none of the situations we have right now are close enough parallels for it to matter. Using the question as a metric for the evaluation of historical figures is pretty foolish - pretty much no historical figure is going to look that great by modern ethical frameworks, because those frameworks would be as alien to them as the ones they grew up with would be to us. Unless you evaluate personages and events in the context of the times, not only can you learn absolutely nothing whatsoever from them, but you are practically guaranteed to make equally nasty mistakes because you are so "morally superior" to the people of the past that you have no chance of discovering your own blinders.
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May 18, 2017 18:28
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Fangz posted:That's not the issue, that's the whole point. It's like people are loudly rebutting "Hitler shouldn't have killed the jews" with "but the Nazis hated the jews!" So...your ultimate point here is that slavery/racism was bad, and fighting an incredibly destructive war over it was also bad? Alright.
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May 18, 2017 18:29
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I don't think you can evenly say absolutely the North had the moral high ground on the south by modern standards. It was "The deeply racist slavers" against "The deeply racist non slavers who had various reasons, some completely divorced from morality" on the two sides. The fact that abolitionism itself ended slavery, which nobody can deny is a good thing is something we can be glad happened, even if a reason for it was a bad one. Keep in mind this is a world 50 years away from public proscription of political enemies, not just execution on trumped up charges with the pretense of the rule of law, but "you are no longer a person" and you're free to murder them. See revolutionary France. Even supposing something to the extent of Denazification had the will in place, would it even be possible? I don't see how anyone could set up a system that can change people to see who supported slavery, who went along with it and who fought it.
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May 18, 2017 18:29
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Masada continues to repel foreign invaders. Just build a ramp dude!
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May 18, 2017 18:31
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Yes, I'm sure we are discussing this thing because this question and the disagreement on it has no relevance to the modern context.  Come on, this entire discussion literally began with people talking about monuments to confederate military leaders in the present day. What our reactions to them in the current moral framework is, is literally the only relevant thing. If everyone agreed the confederates were poo poo, this would be dull. But terrifyingly, we do not live in that universe. Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:36 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 18, 2017 18:33
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I think this actually started with v956 of "they should have executed the confederates" chat. Which, as it happens, was a bad idea then, and a good example of bad history scholarship now.
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May 18, 2017 18:36
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Disinterested posted:Someone [tell] me about howitzers in the Napoleonic wars. Very unreliable. I remember being told of a shell landing in the middle of a formation of Polish Lancers during the Wars. It injured/killed two horses and nothing else. The issue comes from the fuse. They hadn't figured out percussive (impact) explosives yet, so they had to time the fuse and hope it went off at the right time. My takeaway from them is they're better for burning down cities than killing soldiers, for that you want cannons. It may have been the last thread, but somebody did a big analysis of Congreve Rockets and their main takeaway was "like Howitzers but worse". When a Howitzer works, it's spectacular, when it fails it's useless. And that's assuming you hit. The biggest advantage of roundshot is that a ball ball of iron or stone can't detonate prematurely. There's also quicklime which is like a howitzer, but instead of exploding it creates a burst of flame. Again, good for burning down cities, less useful for people.
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May 18, 2017 18:38
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