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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Here is where I suppose the American public at large has not yet noticed the extent to which things have come full circle.

WW1 (yes) and WW2 propaganda clarified that resistance to and the ultimate defeat of the Nazis was a moral imperative. Post-war Germany adopted this, at the Allies' command, and went full hog - youths were indeed taught that nazism was the ultimate evil, and that even the most minute form of it was a germ from which the Third Reich could rise again. And with no narrative to actually counter this, since any opinions to the contrary were banned either in law or in practice, this view grew ever more extreme over the generations, and ever more wide-spread, and could take uncontested hold of many public institutions. You may have heard of the Frankfurt School and the philosophical underpinnings of modern American leftism coming from Germany. But please understand - the practice of modern leftism, its modes of operation and expression, its lines of thinking and of everyday argumentation, its symbols and axioms, have also been grown here, in our youth clubs and universities and cultural centers. And then, though I know not how exactly, they made their way back across to America. It's no coincidence that you now have "Antifa".

What you have now is a synthesis of all this; American propaganda filtered through generations of German self-hatred and nationally enforced anti-nazism, and all the weight of WW2 and the Holocaust behind it. And the spearpoint of it is this - that it is better to burn down the entire country and everyone in it than to permit even the smallest expression of nazism, than to risk a repeat of the greatest atrocity that ever was.

You don't need any more strong evidence to prove that violence is justified to stop nazis, because there's the 20th century to prove it. Are you ignorant of history to deny it? Do you secretly hate the jews to downplay the unique horror of the holocaust? Are you just unworried because you aren't a minority? Are you uneducated, or unintelligent, not to see what all good people agree is the case? Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now.

Post-war Germany adopted this, at the Allies' command, and went full hog

Yes, but. Initially, the former Nazis were hard suppressed. Then, they were softly and quietly let back into the normal life. Of course, no openly proclaiming their views allowed ever, but you could be, e.g., ex-Nazi - especially if it's low level position - and hold a government job. Even be a lawyer or a judge. I assume most of them are dead by now, but how ironic would it be if an ex-Nazi judge would imprison a Jew under the censorship laws meant to prevent the recurrence of Nazi atrocities?

There was a former Nazi official serving as the Bundeskanzler at one point.

This is true, but it makes no difference. The suppression of their views was thorough enought hat whatever secret views they might have held in the back of their minds could not compete with the decidedly un-suppressed leftist tendencies of German society.

But they don't compete. They blend. Her grandpa hated the Jews and she hates the Jews. His grandpa knew the country can be only saved if certain troublesome groups are eliminated and the political debate is curtailed - and he knows the same. It's not a competition, it's an evolution.

Maybe in some hypothetical world, but not in the real one. The secret true-believing nazi who clandestinely influences procedural outcomes from a position he obtained by hiding his power level might have been an observable phenomenon in the early days of the Federal Republic, but not one that secretly handed on his antisemitism to the current generation of woke anti-zionists. I don't believe that this ideological lineage can actually be traced.

They are not direct ancestors maybe, but close relatives. Cousins or something like that. The totalitarian mindset is the same, the world model is the same - there's a group of people which is the reason of every evil and must be suppressed by all means necessary. It's true that for the modern Left the inclusion of the Jews into this group is consequential to them being so close to foundations of the Western civilization (which is the real target) that it's impossible to not include them, while for Nazis the Jews were pretty much the sole focus. But looking beyond those surface differences, the ideological skeleton behind it is surprisingly similar. And I don't think this is a coincidence.

But please understand - the practice of modern leftism, its modes of operation and expression, its lines of thinking and of everyday argumentation, its symbols and axioms, have also been grown here, in our youth clubs and universities and cultural centers. And then, though I know not how exactly, they made their way back across to America.

Do you have any sources I can read on this boomerang effect of American propaganda? What were the "modes of operation and expression" and whatnot that American propaganda imposed on postwar Germany?

Do you have any sources I can read on this boomerang effect of American propaganda?

Nope. Just half a lifetime of first-hand experience and German general education. Just trust me Bruder.

What were the "modes of operation and expression" and whatnot that American propaganda imposed on postwar Germany?

Here's the tip of the iceberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

My grandpa's joke about Denazification was that it was like like potato harvest - pull out the big ones and leave the rest.

But denazification was officially and ostensibly only about punishing and removing from positions of power or influence in post-war Germany the most prominent nazi funcitonaries. Things went further than that. I blame the allies for the original impulse, the leftists of back then for taking it and running with it, and the good people of Germany for taking it all at face value, doing as their told, and making denazification-in-all-things the de-facto civil religion of Germany. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the immediate post-war years, Germans were dazed and confused. Teachers didn't know what they were still allowed to teach. Public officials tried to keep a low profile. The only thing that was clear, and which allied propaganda now becoming official policy codified, was that the nazis had been evil, and that good Germans must wholeheartedly reject nazism. Which they did, and then mostly washed their hands of history, and concentrated on the simple work of rebuilding normal life. The federal republic of Germany was created in 1949, as a state without even an army until 1955. For the Allies, an apolitical Germany with an army was what they needed as a bulwark against the rising threat of communism. And at first young Germans seemed to grow up with no higher ideals at that time other than "reject nazism". But that's a negative without a positive, a void that communist propaganda eagerly filled. And so, while the allies barred the way for any expression of right-wing sentiment or nationalism in Germany and would have left it at that, German youths egged on by leftist agitation had an ideological void to fill and picked up what they could. Which was a proto-globalist worldview that experimented with rejecting national culture and identity in favor of something in between https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkerverst%C3%A4ndigung ("Understanding between peoples". German, sorry) and more general cosmopolitanism.

And so we get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement in 1968. And then we get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Autumn in 1977.

And I'm rambling. To cut to a tl;dr: American propaganda during the wars created a general anti-German sentiment among Europeans Edit: American propaganda was part of the general promotion of anti-German sentiments among Westerners, Allied policy de-politicized German society from the top down AND set anti-nazism as the default position and absolute boundary of all political thought, and Germans growing up in the post-war years adopted the anti-Germanism and the anti-nazism and filled the remaining political void with the then-ascendant communism. Following generations synthesized that into modern German leftism.

Where does anti-Nazism in Russia come from? Is it the same flavor and degree at all?

I wouldn't know. Don't we have any Russians here who might answer?

But I reckon that Russian anti-nazism is different. Firstly because their opposition to Nazism is driven by a more explicit ideological difference, and secondly because they had to fight for their lives in an existential conflict against the Nazis that was even more horrible than the War in the West.

I see, thank you for the detailed summary!

To cut to a tl;dr: American propaganda during the wars created a general anti-German sentiment among Europeans,

I can accept a great deal of your premise, but given how much anti-German propaganda in both wars was used to get the Americans into the conflicts, years after the wars had started and many of the greatest battlefield calamities and sovereignty violations had already occurred (on all sides), I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to say it was the American propaganda specifically that shaped the anti-German sentiment among Europeans. Certainly the French and the Russians needed no American inspiration, and the German violent-left had its own interwar ascendance (that was crushed, but still a rising).

If the propaganda claim aperture were widened to the allies in general, fellow Europeans they might be, I'd have no objection. Or even the British in particular, given their anglosphere influence through the language of the Americans, that might work in a stretch. But American propaganda being the decisive influencer of European views of Germany?

Certainly the French and the Russians needed no American inspiration

You might be surprised. As an Easterner I grew up with a fair bit of "Germany bad" injected right into my veins, but then I met actual Germans and it turned out trotting up historical greviences isn't even that fun with them, bcause they've been self-flaggelating to the point that nothing you throw in their face can faze them. Then started hearing about "controversies" like "people are waving the German flag after winning the world football championship".

These were bizarre and unsettling experiences, even with all my historical biases in place. The French / Russian propaganda was a completely different thing from what was being pumped into Germany.

Then started hearing about "controversies" like "people are waving the German flag after winning the world football championship".

I couldn't believe it when I saw Angela Merkel's attitude to the German flag.

Fair criticism. You're right. American proapganda was not the driver of European anti-German sentiments, I conflated things there.

American propaganda did however drive American Anti-German sentiments (duh), which influenced American policy.

I edited the post above accordingly.

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