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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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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.

Are you trying to defend Nazi Germany here?

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.

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.

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'

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.

it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"

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