Speaker: How to Look Good as a Nazi
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Not unlike other states one could name, however.
Indeed, but this is one thread we've managed to keep the Candyman out of, so lets not push it....
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It was a very happy chance that someone like Churchill was leading Britain in 1940, especially when one considers the shitty standard of the other politicians that filled the front benches of Westminster at the time. The Nazis did not choose to go to war against the man, it was a lucky chance that when war came, Churchill was there.
It wasn't chance that Churchill was Prime Minister; it was the result of a series of conscious decisions made by British politicians.
The argument is that Nazi-ism was a series of ideas about reality, and that those ideas about reality were so screwy that Nazi-ism was functionally incapable of existing as a stable state in that particularly place and time. I don't think that's true of Francoism or Fascism & I don't think it's an argument for complacency or anything, but rather an argument that admiring the Nazis as being like the Australian cricket team is just wrong, because the Nazis were losers. It's the `say what you like about Mussolini, he made the trains run on time' thing, and it is just wrong.
For instance, the Nazi inability to decide between butter and guns was a Nazi failure; organising your economy is one of the most important things about winning an industrial war, and Nazi-ism wasn't up to it, and so they got destroyed by nations which did in fact have a sensible industrial policy.
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Keir, according to wikipedia, at the 1936 Summer Olympics, Germany won 33 gold medals.
To win those medals, the sporting ability of those athletes would unquestionably have had to be first-rate.
However, most, if not all, of those athletes would have also been ideologically committed Nazi's.
Do you not think it is possible to separate out an admiration for their athletic ability from the reprehensible ideology they believed in?
If they hadn't been nazis, would they have been better athletes?
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Simon, I presume that you're familiar with Robert Harris's Fatherland. While I don't claim any expertise, the hypothetical sanitised postwar Nazi state he portrayed gave me the impression that he'd been down this particular path in some detail. What do you think?
The question that remains unanswered happily, is how the Nazi state would have existed if it had won and I'm not sure if that bland state was possible for any extended time. It needed continuous conflict.
Well, I've just had a quick flick through my copy of Fatherland and there's a running thread through the book that, as early as 1963, the Reich is on the brink of economic collapse, bogged down in an increasingly unpopular "quagmire" (to coin a phase) to the East, and the universities -- full of people who have no memory of the world before 1933 -- are turning into hotbeds of dissent. Which is why it is essential that the state visit of President Joseph Kennedy -- and an end to the Cold War -- goes off without a hitch...
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If they hadn't been nazis, would they have been better athletes?
I suspect the Nazis probably provided more resources and time for them to become better athletes, than would have happened under a different German government, the Nazis being big on that sort of stuff.
I fail to see how 'admiring' or in some other way thinking that some things that the Nazis did were good, is necessarily wrong. Distaste for them and their activities didn't stop the rest of the world adopting many of their scientific and warfare advances. Should we ignore everything Germany and Germans did for 15 years because it may have been done under a swastika?
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But the argument normally goes `look at Nazi-ism*, it may have been evil, but it worked', and the thing to do is to point out that no, it didn't work.
I shouldn't have a problem with admiring Genghis Khan or Subotai as technically brilliant generals, without any particular feeling for their non-military actions, or admiring the Royal Navy as a thing for maintaining an Empire; but the Nazis were not in fact very successful; indeed, one might even say they were rather inept when one takes it as a whole.
If one wants truly brilliant military ability coupled with immorality, Her Britannic Majesty's Armed Forces are a good example; a regime that fought one war and lost, resulting in the destruction of their nation as a single independent entity for fifty years, is not.
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I fail to see how 'admiring' or in some other way thinking that some things that the Nazis did were good, is necessarily wrong.
Well, up to a point. I just find it rather hard to separate that when the Nazis were expanding the Autobahn system (which created jobs and reduced unemployment during the great Depression -- which was a good thing), within months of coming to power had passed laws to purge the civil service, courts, hospitals and schools and universities of "Jewish activity". Tough shit if they starved...
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. Distaste for them and their activities didn't stop the rest of the world adopting many of their scientific and warfare advances.
Given Germany's population, and level of industrialisation at the time of Hitler's coming to power, is the technical legacy of the Third Reich really exceptional? As Craig correctly notes, the Nazis expanded the autobahn system. Despite the prevailing myth, they didn't originate it.
I don't see any real evidence that the reputation of Nazi technical achievements owes as much to scientific reality as it does to the efforts of Joseph Goebbels and the likes of Leni Riefenstahl in creating a political myth. While the technical legacy of Germany's WW2 guided missiles may have made the space race possible they did little to alter the course of the war, and the principles on which they were based were already published before the project began.
The postwar success of the Volkswagen - never produced in any quantity during Hitler's lifetime, and essentially a stolen Czech design - wasn't because of any special technical superiority. Credit should go to a rather visionary Briton who was given the task of making viable a chunk of infrastructure that even Citroen refused to take by way of war reparations, and to the later marketing skills of Madison Avenue.
No doubt there were numerous advances and breakthroughs that we enjoy the fruits of today, but are they proportionally greater than those produced by the other participants in WW2? The Arriflex was certainly a better portable cine camera than anything the allies had, and Kodak recognised the superiority of the German-invented Carousel slide projector once they regained their German assets. As for Fanta, the ersatz orange drink developed by Coca-Cpla's nationalised subsidy, there's no need to point out that the reason that it's still around today is a triumph of cynical marketing, rather than technical superiority.
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They were the first government to impose anti-smoking legislation.
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As for Fanta, the ersatz orange drink developed by Coca-Cola's nationalised subsidy
Fanta's a Nazi drink? I stopped smoking because Marlboro were secretly backed by the KKK (that's true, right?) and now this ...
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For instance, the Nazi inability to decide between butter and guns was a Nazi failure; organising your economy is one of the most important things about winning an industrial war, and Nazi-ism wasn't up to it, and so they got destroyed by nations which did in fact have a sensible industrial policy.
Not true As pointed out above, the Germans were able to do both and still had slack. Their military was if anything oversupplied with many things in 1944-45. It was not industrial failure that bought down Germany but a raft of other events.
It wasn't chance that Churchill was Prime Minister; it was the result of a series of conscious decisions made by British politicians.
Nazi Germany would have arisen whether or not Churchill existed. His existing was not a pre-requisite of WW2. A quick squizz through British politicians of the day pretty quickly demolishes the idea that there was any other alternative to Churchill if Britain was going to hang in there. it was a very fortunate chance that there was a man such as him waiting to fill the Prime Ministerial role in 1940. Otherwise..who knows. Once again, he was the perfect man to get Britain through that year, but was continually a disaster waiting to happen in the years that followed, but fortunately chance gave us a pig headed US leader and some very fine American soldiers who kept the war in the west on track. Plus a vicious Russian leader who refused to roll over (remember Lebensraum as a concept pre-dated Soviet Russia..it did not require communism in Russia to happen..so if 1917 had not occurred Nazi Germany perhaps would've been facing Tsarist Russia in the East).
There are so many what-ifs in the way the SWW played out, the dysfunctionality of parts of the German leadership, was just one and one should never underestimate just how horrendously efficient the Nazi machine could be when it set its mind to it.
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I stopped smoking because Marlboro were secretly backed by the KKK (that's true, right?) and now this ...
Nivea (Beiersdorf) was a company stripped from it's Jewish owners in 1938..they were sent East to resettle, and it was never returned. I repeatedly ask my wife not to use it.
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for all the sneering at DPF that goes on in that quarter
Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery..
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. . . one should never underestimate just how horrendously efficient the Nazi machine could be when it set its mind to it.
True. While the U.S. designed everything from locomotives to prefabricated buildings to be operated and assembled by a semi-skilled workforce in response to wartime conditions, the "Nazi machine" adapted much of their industry to a workforce that was literally worked to death.
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a regime that fought one war and lost,
But much of the point of this thread is that it's a huge mistake, and very dangerous, to box Nazism in like that. It was not "a regime", it was the culmination of a century of all sorts of things. It didn't simply rise up, and fight one war. If it hadn't been Hitler it may well have been someone else. In 1918-33 Germany was filled with violent not-so fringe groups, with running battles in the streets and murder being commonplace. Even the centrist Social Democratic Party (today's SPD) had their loosely allied Free Corps who murdered thousands. Many, on the right and increasingly in the centre were espousing very radical policies that differed little from the NSDAP's.
Germany and Central Europe, brutalised by WW1 and a Prussian leadership which legitimised violence as a means to an end were a disaster waiting to happen. None of which excuses Adolf Hitler or anyone else.
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A quick squizz through British politicians of the day pretty quickly demolishes the idea that there was any other alternative to Churchill if Britain was going to hang in there.
But Churchill was there, and that was that. (And in fact of course there were alternatives, this kind of great-man history is a bit simplistic.)
There are so many what-ifs in the way the SWW played out, the dysfunctionality of parts of the German leadership, was just one and one should never underestimate just how horrendously efficient the Nazi machine could be when it set its mind to it.
And a great many what-ifs go the other way; what if the Spanish Republic had been supported by the democracies and had won?
But in the end, the Nazi machine wasn't as good as the Russian and the British and the American machines; in the end, it was a failure. The Australian cricket team wins their games; the Nazis lost their war.
Which is what makes a lot of the Nazi worship a wee bit suspect (not that I'm talking about anyone here); in fact the Nazis were not that impressive compared, like I say, to the Mongols or the British or even Louis XIV's France. Yet they get a lot of (for want of a better word) love, which is generally I think misplaced.
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They had teh cool uniforms, someone said..
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Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery..
So is shameless hypocrisy, it seems. As I've said many times before, both The Standard and Kiwiblog would rise significantly in my estimation if they retracted the index finger of righteous indignation and got serious about their own troll farming.
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troll farming
Ae. That's what I meant.
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So Keir, we seem to be back to a variation on Manifest Destiny as that seems to be the only logic your argument flies under. Britain was destined to have someone like Churchill to fight Hitler because of their qualities as a nation, people and democracy. Mostly I'd argue they were lucky to have someone like that.
And a great many what-ifs go the other way
Agreed, but they would need to be pre-determined if I was to follow your drift so they are no longer what-ifs. Because any number of the countless ones may have changed the outcome of the war and that outcome invalidates your theory absolutely.
I'd be keen to know who exactly the Iron alternatives to Churchill were as I've yet to read a history that comfortably identifies one. Maybe they're not looking for the answer at the correct simplistic level?
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No, it isn't manifest destiny, it's a distrust of free floating counterfactuals.
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Any chance of an answer to the question: who were the alternatives? After all it's you that's redetermined variables as absolutes.
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An early example of the all Hitler's fault trope.
Everything's ducky until the little moustachioed creep pokes his oar in. -
One can't answer a question about the state of British politics were Churchill not to exist by looking at the state of British politics where Churchill does exists, just as a general philosophical point.
Less theoretically, Churchill did not exist in a vacuum; there were other politicians who shared his views and there would have been support for them. I mean, read the Norway Debate and Guilty Men, there's this anger and sense of betrayal that focussed on Churchill more because he was there than anything else. Suppose he isn't there, some other Tory comes out the wilderness and gets the Labour & Liberal & dissident Tory votes to oust Chamberlain.
Hell, even Lloyd George might have done it, were he not suspect himself. But of course, without Churchill, the attraction of being the Man Who Won The War(s) might have been enough. And so-on. Christ, Maxton could have done it if enough else fell out right.
But it's all a bit odd, because if Churchill didn't exist, things would be different, in such a way as to make this kind of discussion pointless.
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Pretty good summary of military history.
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