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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   708 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 20, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Who said this?

I did not exactly hear about it in context of Germany, but it was an official policy towards Austria since 1943 that started from Anschluss and beyond. As far as I understand, this is to large degree a myth as Austrians supported Nazis in equal numbers to that of pre-anschluss Germans. Heck, Austrians had fair share of high-profile Nazi leaders including Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann, who was raised in Linz since age of 8 and who Austrian Nazi since 1932 and many other war criminals leading concentration camps and so forth.

Austrians embraced it especially immediately after WW2 with and they used this myth to refuse any reparations toward holocaust survivors up until 1995.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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