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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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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.

I didn’t mean to ‘akshually’ you, it was more that I wanted to say that the cause of Franco’s disastrous early agricultural policy (mainly price controls in a poorly-imagined attempt to achieve autarky) wasn’t the war, but ideology. It’s not clear that the war would have made it impossible for Spain to import food, particularly from the Americas.

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.

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