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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28273 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Does Germany abolish itself? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/does-germany-abolish-itself

Schafft Deutschland sich ab? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/schafft-deutschland-sich-ab

I analyze the latest PISA results to figure out why Germany's performance has declined so much in recent years. My focus is on figuring out the extend to which changes in migration patterns can explain the decline. I won't post the entire post here because it has a lot of figures and will be disjointed to read. Remember to subscribe!

Introduction

In 2010, the book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany Abolishes Itself) was created by Thilo Sarrazin. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Sarrazin's core thesis on the topic of education can be roughly summarized as follows:

  1. The German birth rate is low, with less than 1.4 children per woman. This is contrasted by a large number of migrants, especially from Muslim countries, who have higher birth rates.

  2. Many migrants have educational deficits compared to the German population.

  3. Even after several generations, these migrants do not catch up with German society. This is due to genetic and cultural inheritance as well as little pressure to integrate.

  4. In the long run, Germany’s educational achievements will deteriorate due to this demographic change.

Sarrazin's critics argued that he was right about some things, but that he painted too bleak a picture and mixed truths with falsehoods. They pointed out, for example, that there had been progress in the area of education among Turks, a large Muslim immigrant group. Against the background of the recently published PISA study, in which Germany performed miserably, it seems appropriate to re-examine Sarrazin's thesis. In particular, I will use the latest PISA study to answer the question of whether, and to what extent, migration aspects play a role in the continuous decline of German education...

It did not abolish itself, it is occupied and the occupiers will ensure that Germany is kept in line with their ideology. The Germans knew full well what would happen if the Americans and Soviets would take over the world and there is a reason why they fought tooth and nail to stop it. The foresight of German thinkers in the 20s and 30s was astonishing and they understood the direction the anglosphere was taking.

Nonsense. The Soviets never demanded high immigration from their puppets. Likewise, the Americans (at least those from the 1950s) didn't demand high immigration either. The "import third worlders en-masse" agenda is from the woke bug that bit all Western societies in the 2010s. There are no treaties or diktats you can point to where immigration is "forced" on Germany by the US. Maybe there's some bit in there about the EU pushing it, but Germany under Merkel was at the forefront of accepting refugees with the "we can do this" mantra.

The Soviets never demanded high immigration from their puppets.

No, they just forcibly relocated people within their puppet states.

just another random drive-by

True, but it's also true that the Soviets were hardly trying to flood East Germany with Third World immigrants, which was his point.

Nonsense. The Soviets never demanded high immigration from their puppets. Likewise, the Americans (at least those from the 1950s) didn't demand high immigration either. The "import third worlders en-masse" agenda is from the woke bug that bit all Western societies in the 2010s.

Most of the non-Western immigration to Europe is not due to any of that, but rather the need of labor hitting all Western societies after decades of low fertility.

The "import third worlders en-masse" agenda is from the woke bug that bit all Western societies in the 2010s.

It was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965

Mass non-Western immigration in Western Europe begins before 1965. The Empire Windrush docked in London in 1948. The first large wave of non-Western immigration to post-war France is Vietnamese who collaborated with French imperialism moving to France after Vietnamese independence in 1954, with another wave following after Algerian independence in 1962. As discussed below, the largest batch of Turkish Gastarbeiters arrived in Germany in the early 1960's.

Although there is a story about the need for cheap labour, in the British and French cases it looks like an accident rather than a well thought-out policy. The official policy of the 1945 Labour government was to discourage Caribbean immigration, but there was no way of prohibiting what was at the time domestic migration within the British Empire without causing a row that would blow up the whole Empire. The French situation is similar, with most of the early immigrants being what the French government considered to be loyal Frenchmen regardless of their skin colour.

Unlike the US, the 1960's is when the British start to restrict immigration with the 1962 and 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Acts. The UK reopens for mass immigration under Blair in 1997. Something similar happens in France 10 years later, with immigration laws being tightened in 1974 and loosened by Sarkozy.

In other words, the timings don't match up for mass immigration in Western Europe to be an extension of American policy. The wave of immigration permitted by the Hart-Cellar Act coincides with the pause in immigration in Britain and France. If you believe in the cheap labour theory of immigration politics, the explanation for this is easy - the role of cheap migrant labour in the US was filled by blacks moving north to escape Jim Crow.

The UK reopens for mass immigration under Blair in 1997.

Immigration began rising earlier in the 1990s under Major, didn’t it? The nadir was in the early ‘80s, but there was still substantial immigration from the third world throughout the 1975-1997 period.

The difference is that it doesn’t show on the now all important ‘net migration’ figures primarily because there was substantial emigration of 200,000+ a year through much of this period, often to Australia and elsewhere, most of which was natives.

There is a long period of negligible net foreign migration in the 70's and early 80's. There appears to be a glacial slow uptrend in both gross immigration and net foreign immigration between about 1985 and 1997, but the data is too noisy to say when it begins. See figures 1.1 and 1.2 (which should, but don't, match) in this old ONS report. The ONS have since stopped publishing immigration statistics from before 2010 because it became clear that the numbers were such poor quality - in particular they are not stock-flow consistent when cross-checked against the census. But you don't need high-quality data to see the increase after 1997, which was deliberate government policy.

I remember that non-refugee immigration was not a political issue during the Major administration - there was a tabloid panic about the number of people claiming refugee status in the immediate post-Cold War period, but the numbers peaked at about 50,000 refugee arrivals per year and about 20,000 asylum grants.

You write well, thanks for this

Mass migration started happening in the USA earlier, to be sure, but it was generally seen as a problem. It wasn't until the 2010s that people started pushing for open borders in practice if not in name, and this got transplanted to Europe to cause the chaotic migrations of 2014-2016.

Yeah okay, I'll buy that, open-faced 'the great replacement is a good thing' was about when you're saying

I don't know, Wikipedia at least says that the US pressured Germany to accept gastarbeiters from Turkey:

The first guest workers were recruited from European nations. However, Turkey pressured West Germany to admit its citizens as guest workers. Theodor Blank, Secretary of State for Employment, opposed such agreements. He held the opinion that the cultural gap between Germany and Turkey would be too large and also held the opinion that Germany didn't need any more laborers because there were enough unemployed people living in the poorer regions of Germany who could fill these vacancies. The United States, however, put some political pressure on Germany, wanting to stabilize and create goodwill from a potential ally. West Germany and Turkey reached an agreement in 1961.

The source is in German so I can't follow it up, though I do remember seeing this asserted in other places over the years.

Technically that was in 1961 and not the 1950s and the Turks aren't "third world" but if true it would support the core claim that the US intentionally tried to push diversity on its puppet states via the mass importation of non-western people.

intentionally tried to push diversity on its puppet states via the mass importation of non-western people.

wasn't really about diversity, and more about internal issues in turkey.

if true it would support the core claim that the US intentionally tried to push diversity on its puppet states via the mass importation of non-western people.

It wouldn't, because the intention of the US, according to the text you quoted, was "wanting to stabilize and create goodwill from a potential ally." That Turks were so different from the Germans was an inconvenience from a US point of view, not a goal.

There's a massive gulf between a one sentence line in Wikipedia saying the US put "some" quid pro quo political pressure on Germany to accept some Turks in the 1960s, and the claims of European right-wingers who imply all nonwhite migration to Europe is a diktat enforced top-down by a brutal US occupation of the continent.

I can't find the source from that wikipedia article but if you tag it here I will (attempt to) translate for us

Also Germany was the bad guy in WWI because they teamed up with the Ottomans (Turks). After a thousand years of enmity they teamed up with team bad guys. Big no no

The Anglos and French did that first in the Crimean war, though.

Austro-Hungarians also did it sometimes, still not great. In a game of 5 better to be on the team of three without the muslims

I'll also chime in by utilizing the Akshually... meme unironically, by pointing out that Japan was also under de facto, and is under practical US occupation, and yet mass acceptance of immigrants and refugees never became the norm there. More or less the same applies to South Korea and Taiwan.

I happened to be out to lunch with a client yesterday, as fate would have it, who was a Japanese fella who had just visited his uncle, a hiroshima survivor, who was on his death bed in gratitude the yankees occupied them instead of the soviets

Very good point! Yes, Korea and Japan arguably make the point even more clearly and succinctly than my examples.

I don't think this is a good comment. It just gestures at a bunch of vague right-wing ideas without providing any detail, evidence, or new information. An equivalent left-wing comment would be "America is occupied by the entrenched forces of conservatism and racism. They know what they are doing, they see our pain, yet they refuse to even let us speak. They hold all the levers of power and are not afraid to use them against us."

It probably violates the "speak plainly" rule too. Who are the occupiers? How are they keeping Germany in line with the new ideology? What would happen? Which german thinkers? Which direction? Yeah, obviously it's the nazis, but I'd be happy to read an open and evidenced defense of Nazi ideology or historical actions, but this isn't that.

I disagree. It doesn't gesture, it directly says what it says.

You are trying to censor an opinion you disagree with. He is saying that the Nazi Germans had foresight about the consequences of a world dominated by USA and Soviets . What is there that isn't plain? I am not saying that view is correct, but it isn't violating any speak plainly rule.

You should simply directly argue your opposite opinion including your disagreement with that poster's apparent sympathies for mid century Germany.

I'd be happy to read an open and evidenced defense of Nazi ideology or historical actions, but this isn't that.

And? It doesn't have to be.

No! I'm happy that we allow Holocaust deniers or the (iirc) nazi pedophile from a while ago to post if they follow the rules. But that's the kind of comment I'd expect to see as a reply to iamyesyouareno on twitter, not one I want to see here.

nazi pedophile

That's a whole new kind of "mixed race and belongs in neither camp" lol

Chomos are the lowest of the low and I think the pedos think the same of 'nazis'

The Nazi paedophile was komm-nach-unteralterbach. And I'm not badmouthing him by saying that; this is his literal flair-text:

transhumanist libertAryan monarcho-pedo(anti-agecuck)fascist/natsoc + androsupremacist (unironic)

Unfortunately, he disabled search-by-poster.

Jesus wept. Just in case you happen to read this buddy, drop me a line, let's talk

Are you asking for a PM conversation with me, or KNU?

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If you don't like their opinion, you should argue about it and not try to censor it by trying to manipulate the rules. Personally, I am much more outraged about people's views excusing warcrimes that happen now than any of the view about 80 years ago.

On the specific issue, I have both a negative view of historical nazis, and the nazi derangement syndrome types who have excused all sort of extremism on the basis of antinazism and try to take the opposite extreme view. There really has been a problem with destructive extremism of American liberals and communists in general, including in their cooperation in the 1940s, but also how they behaved separately while the nazis are also a group that should be seen as a warcriminal group, and not as Europe's defenders.

If under someone's analysis Europeans on the long term would be even worse off with the liberals than if the nazis won WW2, that is an indictment of liberals, and doesn't wash out the crimes of the Nazis against european ethnic groups. However, I also don't think trying to ascertain that is illegitimate, or extreme. This isn't what the person you are replying with were about, since they had an one sided pro mid century german view, but censoring the discussion, also helps excuse the extremism of liberals.

If the rule by so caled liberals, leads to the destruction of Europeans, then that is something insanely negative about liberals, and how the post WW2 order evolved. That matters when talking about how valid the good vs evil narrative is, and how good USA, one of the victor of WW2 has been.

One way to understand how I'm not trying to censor is that I invited OP to make a more detailed and direct defense of whatever the nazis were doing.

Are you trying to defend Nazi Germany here?

The tricky thing about WW2 is that, from a reactionary perspective, all three sides of the showdown were bad — communism, fascism, and new deal democracy all represented a flavor of progressive managerialism attempting to mobilize and rationalize their citizenry in a grand unconstrained-vision project. Of the three, democracies may well be the least bad. However, from a narrowly American or British perspective, our corners of the globe might perhaps be nicer had we not gotten involved, and the fascists won a grueling victory in Eastern Europe that completely exhausted them. (Keep in mind I don't countenance the possibility the Axis could have conquered the world afterward; if you do, this perspective may seem alien.)

The Greater American Empire created in the wake of the Allied victory destroyed the sovereignty of its member states, then birthed a technocratic antiracist transnational ideology that is, as we goof around on the motte, desperately trying to flatten the world and reshape all nations in its image. I think this was inevitable in the same way that, once complex multicellular organisms formed, it was inevitable that individual cells would lose autonomy and act according to a nervous system's command. This is the version of "bad" reactionaries live with.

Naïve moderns with a reactionary bent perceive that the winners of WW2 created the regime they live under. Thus, there is a natural tendency to contort oneself into seeing the other side of that conflict as a great lost cause, and to project one's values onto it.

Not OP, but I'll defend 'Nazi Germany' every day and twice on Sunday if you like

They were fighting for a homogenous high trust society that was self-sufficient and built to last. They fought against communists and liberals who wanted a centralized global order with bland global materialism. They defended Europe from Stalin and their loss is turning western Europe into North Africa/middle east. Germany would not be in severe demographic decline with large scale third world immigration if they had won. They wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism and bland American consumerism.

They wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism

Cultural decay? Stalinism was well known for pushing classical art, music, literature, theatre and ballet to the masses, whether the masses appreciated it or not.

and bland American consumerism.

LOL. Whatever pure Aryan kulchur would victorious Reich produce, it would be as helpless in face of American art and music as Soviet culture was.

As long as you have the will to send to concentration camp anyone caught with unauthorized radio or bootleg negro music records, you can stop the tide with brute force. As long.

Counter-point, in order to establish a high trust society one must establish trust, a resource that Hitler and friends seemed to be particularly bent on squandering.

turning western Europe into North Africa/middle east

The whole western world. In 1950, Europe was twice the population of Africa. Today it's half. I have a friend in a fairly high position who told me how they're worried about what happens when the gigantic populations of sub-Saharan Africa start migrating to more temperate climates. Racism, climate change and replacement migration - the blankslatist-economic/progressive-moralist logic is clear. They've basically made up their minds about what's supposed to happen. They see it as their role to manage migration, ensure things don't get out of control - there's no concept of saying 'no' - that's too far-right, it would be too hard to oppose all the civil society NGOs, there'd be judicial review if you want to send them back...

You can see it in Biden's crowing about how the European descended white population of the US fell below 50% back in 2017 (US defines white more expansively), how this was the source of their strength. No more white European civilization and that's a good thing. Same in Eastern Europe. You've got the US embassy in Estonia pushing multiculturalism. Poland's fertility is well below replacement and they're in the EU - they're not going to be spared.

Allied victory in WW2 cemented the blankslatist-progressive ideology as the official doctrine of the Western world. Even China and Russia give it lip-service. It's ironic, there's an entire book of letters from British servicemen, (Unknown Warriors) most of whom bitterly regret how things turned out. They resent how the nation they fought for was replaced, how Britain's full of ungrateful foreigners and violent selfish yobs, how the politicians betray them with constant doubledealing and corruption. Reaping the spoils of victory!

Even China and Russia give it lip-service.

you seem to miss that for decades, communists in those countires were pushing blankslatism, it is very recent that USA went further than them

This sort of romantic neo-nazi image is ridiculous. The Nazis were not high trust. In fact they were the total opposite, a heap of the most venal, odious, dishonourable bandits to ever come out of Germany (which is saying something). They had no concerns for honour or trust or mercy, no respect for the traditional religion of Europe, no respect for the ancient peoples of Europe. They started vast wars over money and land, lied habitually, ran a horribly corrupt state built on exploitation and outright slavery, and slaughtered millions.

Nor was their state really ever intended to be self sufficient. From the start, the intention was to loot, conquer and subjugate their neighbours. Indeed, the German nationalist project was mostly complete by 1938 with the annexations of Austria and the Germanized regions of Czechoslovakia, and scarcely a peep from the Allies. But the Nazis dreamed of imperial domination and glory, not self sufficiency. Instead of rallying the nations of Europe against Bolshevism ( an easy task), Hitler squandered his credibility. By the end of WWII even anti communists like Churchill were drinking with Stalin, and it was left to the US to establish an anti communist front in Europe - well, the half of it that was left.

It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.

It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.

It's darkly funny that the first thing Franco did after (according to Franco) preventing a communist revolution in Iberia was implement a disastrous, ideologically motivated economic policy, causing a massive famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people and miring Spain in dire poverty for two decades. It's like that Spongebob meme where they're celebrating while the city burns in the background, "we did it, Hitler, we saved Spain from bolshevism!"

I don't know about famine. I knew the autarky years were very rough for Spain, especially coming after years of civil war.

Franco didn't have that much of a choice after 1945.

The policy discussed was implemented from the late 1930s, not 1945.

Well, yeah, thank you very much, you’re indeed correct that Franco’s austere policy of economic self-reliance and self-reinforcement was akshually implemented from the beginning. I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure that a liberal economic policy of free trade, foreign investment, wide-ranging reforms and growing interconnectedness isn’t feasible when a) the entire continent is engulfed in all-out war b) you are an isolated and detested pariah in international politics because Hitler and Mussolini militarily assisted in your seizure of power. I didn’t state this in detailed terms because I assumed most visitors here understand this, and I didn’t want to post a verbose reply. Again, excuse the snark please.

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The difference is that Franco learned from his mistake and Spain converged with western standards of living over the latter half of his reign.

So did the Red Chinese but I wouldn't give them props for that.

I would, actually, give deng credit for economic growth, although less than Franco because he never caught up with his neighbors. The gulf between the PRC and Japan/South Korea/Taiwan is much bigger than the pretty small Spain/italy gap.

bland global materialism

[...]

bland American consumerism

Evidence for Benjamin's claim that fascism is the "aestheticization of politics"?

If there is inevitably going to be a pop culture it would be better if it were cultivated with a purpose by some kind of class with a proper education and righteous intention to direct the people in a particular, intentional way.

The reality that this 'eureka moment' of great truth inevitability leads us all to getting thrown in gulags instead of creating a utopia driving the culture in 'purposeful' directions is why we're all here talking about exactly this.

While some of what you say may be correct, I feel the need to temper your enthusiasm.

German society had numerous problems in the 1920s. It was shaken up by the effects of industrialization, urbanization, unification and democracy, and even more badly so the first world war and the following economic crises. The country was very troubled and not at all self-sufficient. What the national socialists turned the country into in the 30s and 40s wasn't much better. Some problems were solved, yes, and maybe it even was the nazis' doing, but what they made of Germany wasn't a lasting high-trust society but a totalitarian shithole that steadily degraded its social capital - by replacing Germany's formerly durable culture with the artificial crackpot pseudo-culture invented by party ideologues, by pouring ever-more resources and manpower into military endeavors (one can make the case that this was justified, given the Bolschewist threat, but frankly I think a large degree of doubt is merited here), and finally by ruining what was left of the country's international standing and plunging it into the war that almost destroyed it at the time by the after-effects of which are slowly destroying it now.

For all that I know many at the time may have fought for the country proper, or against bolshevism, but on the whole the fight was corrupted in means and in goals and led to the worst possible outcome short of an actual Nazi victory, because let us recall for a moment that the people in power at the time weren't sagacious guardians of Germany's heritage and future but a bunch of unhinged gangsters high on their own supplies of ideology and drugs and intent on transforming Germany from a real country with a real society populated by real human beings into some nightmare caricature. They might have coasted for some time on the industry of the people and the military heritage of Prussia, but Nazi administrative competence was, frankly, not much to boast of. I have no doubts that whatever social and economic capital Germany had at the time, the political leadership would not have failed to destroy it in due time.

So, yes, I guess they wouldn't have suffered the cultural decay that comes with Stalinism or Capitalism...but instead we would've seen a third flavor of cultural self-destruction.

Before the sailors' mutinies and revolutions of November 1918, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, made the proposal, or so I've heard, for the emperor to abdicate in favor of his son, to negotiate a ceasefire, and to reach out to the US government to sue for a separate peace, as a first step of terminating the war and salvaging a defeated nation. This was probably the only conceivable path to preventing the ensuing national catastrophe, but the emperor decided against it. And from then on, the republic that came into existence only had enemies in the country, save for small-r republican Social Democrats, who were always a political minority. And this republic was never going to be a European bulwark against American and Soviet hegemonic tendencies. This story was always going to end in disaster, I think.

I think the Weimar republic would have survived if Gustav Stresemann had been able to turn the DVP into an effective centre-right party. Crucial to the fall of Weimar is that all the right-wing forces except the DVP (which never moved beyond a niche party for eccentric rich people) and the Bavarian regionalist BVP (which didn't organise outside Bavaria) wanted to destroy it.

Building an effective centre-right party after the Versailles dictate is implemented is sort of difficult.

I appreciate that you have to feel this way because you are German-German, but because I have the luxury of being German-a-few-generations-removed, allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'

Was JFK an 'unhinged gangster' because his family were literal mobsters and he was constantly high on painkillers?

I "have" to feel that the great sin of Germany was what it did to the Jews, Cripples and Gypsies. I do feel that the greatest sin of Germany back then was what it did to Germany and the Germans.

As for those WWI vets, you can validly suggest that they weren't all unhinged gangsters, but I will insist that more than enough of them in positions of great power were, and this includes big names like Himmler, Göring, the non-veteran Göbbles and Hitler himself, and a thousand lesser party barons who managed to escape post-war condemnation only because they lorded it over the Germans instead of bullying foreigners or minorities. Some more unhinged, some more gangster, some perhaps neither but alas the the party was top-heavy with unhinged gangsters and the top had the last word on acceptable behavior.

I'm fine with denouncing the common depiction of the Nazis as fundamentally evil, fine with admitting that they did some good, fine with any claim of there being worse things in the world than Nazis, fine with theories that posit that Fascism may have good points, but not fine with attempts to whitewash those particular Nazis as saviors of the Germany they destroyed in their mania and incompetence.

Look at their mismanagement, the purges, the wealth accumulated by party functionaries, and the ground-level stories of German peasants and tradespeople being bossed around and told to shut up and get with the program or else, and look at the total and utter catastrophe that was WW2. It takes a lot of revisionism to clear them of the blame for that. You can, if you like, completely ignore the horror stories of concentration camps and death squads or any principled objection to authoritarianism - there's still more than enough left to condemn the Nazis in general both for what they attempted and for what they ended up achieving.

And I honestly don't know enough about JFK to answer your question.

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

Edit: This wasn't meant to seem curt - sometime though brevity is the soul of wit. Yes, perhaps if the Junkers or some other more traditional conservative faction had risen to power rather than such a reactionary party, Germany may have done X, Y, and Z. But it seems crass to me, almost prideful, to look at the 'unhinged gangsters' who 'volunteered' to beat the Spanish communists and then got the band back together in the Rhineland, Osterreich, the Sudetenland, Danzig, etc to give the Bolsheviks a genuinely good go and say 'if only!'

Yes, they lost, but they fought! By Jesu they fought. And it's just as easy to say 'it would've been better if they hadn't' as 'it would've been worse.' Maybe the Bolsheviks would've won in Spain and then later pushed through all of Europe to the Atlantic.

It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero). But he chose to go! He chose to fight! That he happened to drown when someone else might've not and (swamped the saracens) instead doesn't make him an 'unhinged gangster'

Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

It would be pretty hard for Churchill to declare war in 1939. You might not know as much about WWII as you think.

Hitler declared war on Poland, in the face of explicit threats by Britain and France to join such a war on Poland's side. He could have just, y'know, not done that, and if he had he'd be remembered as the second Bismarck for the Anschluss and Munich.

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Churchill was the one who declared war. It was his choice.

That's certainly a take, and a depressingly common one around here it seems.

Setting aside the fact that Churchill didn't even become prime minister until May of 1940, I'm just going to reiterate what I said the last time this topic came up a month ago.

Hitler's diplomatic position in August of 1939 was essentially that of a belligerent drunk at the bar who keeps getting in people's faces and asking "Oh Yah? Watch'ou goanna do about bro?" and then acts surprised when someone decides to "do something about it".

The Nazis were already on thin-ice for continuing their territorial expansion post Munich, rebuking the Anglo German Naval Agreement, and harassing neutral shipping in the North Sea wich the British regarded as their back yard. If they didn't want a war with the British, they could have easily avoided it by not doing any of those things and more critically by not aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks against a country that both the British and French had a security agreement with.

Edit to add: That last bit in particular also demonstrates that all that talk from current year nazis about "racial brotherhood" and "opposing communism" is a crock of shit.

For all the talk condemning "brother wars" Prussians seem particularly prone to engaging in them and as much as I want to make a joke about Martin Luther being to blame I'm worried about someone falling into the same trap I almost did with @Southkraut's comment down thread where I almost chewed them a new one before I realized they were being facetious.

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It's not unlike when Barbarossa drowned on the way to the Third Crusade. Yes, it's a bit pathetic, and we can poke fun at him for drowning (because he is our ancestral hero).

Are you even a German? You talk like an American with some far off German ancestors, who has no real connection to the country or it's culture. You also idealize Germany, and attack the Anglo world, like someone who knows the faults of the Anglo world first hand, but has no real understanding of what Germany was like then.

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Germany could have not invaded Poland.

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Yes they fought, but their having fought no matter how much and how well doesn't save the Germany of today. We can trace our unmaking right back to them. Barbarossa, for all of his ineffectual campaigns and fruitless labors, left the Germanies roughly in the state he found them in. The Nazis took a struggling Germany and, for all the little glories they won, burned it right down to the ground and left the withered remains to the mercy of the victors. Certainly perfidious Albion had its schemes and probably quite a laugh at our fate, perhaps on can believe that Hitler himself would have preferred peace with them, but in the end they played Realpolitik and they did a hell of a lot better a job of not bringing their own countries to bloody ruin.

Unless you subscribe to some school of thought that completely denies the significance of consequence, I find no way to absolve the people who had complete authority over the country from complete responsibility for its destruction. Whatever our enemies might have done, however justified any given aspect of German military campaigning was, given that kind of authority those kinds of results speak for themselves.

And so as to not neglect the Unhinged Gangsters bit - I stand by that. Something like the Night of the Long Knives is decidedly ungerman.

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Churchill was not prime minister when England and France declared war on Germany.

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allow me to suggest that none of the WWI vets who happened to get control of the government afterward were 'unhinged gangsters'

I'd suggest that at least one was.

I like Hitler and think he was genuinely kind of a nice fella

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