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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Can we stipulate Wikipedia is not a Nazi-aligned source? And then put aside everything else, to look at this list of leaders from Wikipedia of the German Revolution that introduced the "Weimar degeneracy" -

Rosa Luxemburg

Karl Liebknecht

Kurt Eisner

Clara Zetkin

Paul Levi

Franz Mehring

Leo Jogiches

Wilhelm Pieck

Ernst Toller

Erich Mühsam

Richard Müller

Emil Barth

Gustav Landauer

Eugen Leviné

Max Levien

Rudolf Egelhofer

Karl Radek

Johann Knief

Emil Eichhorn

It did not have "at least as many" ethnic Germans involved. In reality only 1/3rd were gentiles.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht died a few months after the German revolution when they led the weak and quickly crushed Spartacist uprising, so I'm not sure why anyone would think they contributed much to so-called Weimar "degeneracy".

I also find the notion of "Weimar degeneracy" to be pretty silly because people who use that term generally ignore the much worse degeneracy of the Kaiser's government, which allowed Germany to get pulled into the worst war in human history up to that point and then failed to win it, and many of the supporters of which then blamed others besides Germany's political-military ruling class for the catastrophe. Note that I am not blaming Germany for starting the war or claiming that the communists would have been better had they taken power in Germany, but I am claiming that the Kaiser's government were a bunch of incompetents who caused much worse things to happen to Germany than anything that Jews or leftists did to it during the Weimar periiod.

The specific notion of "Weimar degeneracy" already implies that the person who uses the term only cares about what certain groups of people did to Germany, but does not care about others. So, for example, to them all the leftist attempts to take power are automatically branded as bad things, but they will go and excuse the Kapp Putsch and Hitler's later takeover as being good things even though there is no good reason to believe so given that Kapp probably would have returned some version of an incompetent monarchist autocracy into power and we know that Hitler in fact made even stupider geopolitical decisions than the Kaiser's government had, and got Germany even more destroyed than the Kaiser's government had.

The German revolution didn’t “introduce Weimar degeneracy”; the ‘German revolution’ (actually several) that you’re referring to were a series of failed communist revolutionary attempts, all of which were quashed. The Weimar Republic stood in opposition to them, and was considered by the radical left to be the enemy since it largely preserved the economic system and structure of government (at lower levels) that had existed in Germany before the war, was more continuity than change. It certainly didn’t have very much to do with any cultural change, since its main problem was its utter sclerosis.

The cultural changes that happened in Weimar Germany happened across the West at the same time, and outside of a tiny subculture in Berlin (which even the Nazis didn’t really bother eradicating, since in many ways their attitude to gender wasn’t trad at all) the vast majority of Germany in the Weimar era largely retained its traditional cultural character.

This list has 9 Jews and 10 non-Jews. Going by Wikipedia descriptions, Luxemburg, Eisner, Levi, Jogiches, Toller, Mühsam, Landauer, Leviné and Radek are Jewish.

Since I am not that good with european jewish names - how did you figure that out? Aside from the Levi and Levines that are somewhat high profile.

Max Levien doesn't seem to have been Jewish. "Research has established that Levien was descended from Huguenot immigrants into Russia by the name of Lavigne."

Of course, several debates with online antisemites have demonstrated, to me, that he criteria for Jewishness among their objects of hatred are stretchy indeed - you can be Jewish by religion, Jewish by ethnicity, half Jewish, quarter Jewish, have any demonstrable Jewish heritage, just know how to speak Yiddish, have advocated against anti-Semitism, have a Jewish spouse, "look Jewish", have a "Jewish" last name (ie. often just a normal German or East European last name - that's why people frequently seem to assume Karl Liebknecht was Jewish, for example) etc. etc. to get in the Jew count.

It’s funny. I’m not Jewish by Jewish standards (father was Jewish but not mother). I’m married to a Jew. My kids are Jewish. So presumably the antisemites view me as Jewish while the Jews do not!

In a way that makes you Jewish. The true essence of being a jew is that whichever way the world turn you are always the one in the least favorable position. Sources - let's start with the old testament and then move to history books.

Orthodox Judaism wouldn’t, Reform Judaism would.