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Seventy years after Adolf Hitler’s death, how Germans see him is changing
- ntumlin 11y agoA little background on the quote about eggs of Columbus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus
- nqzero 11y agois there a simple workaround for the economist paywall ?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- idlewords 11y agoSubscribe.
- erikb 11y agohehe
- enraged_camel 11y agoGoogle the article's title, the click through there.
- chei0aiV 11y agoSome paywalls let their articles be publicly archived.
- Tenobrus 11y agoSet this as a bookmark: javascript:location.href='https://www.google.com/webhp?%23q='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(location.href)%20+%20'&btnI=I' Gets past most paywalls. The morality of using it is up to you.
- kqr2 11y agoYou can use the web link under the URL.
- singold 11y agoIncognito mode
- executesorder66 11y agoYes, delete your browser cookies for the economist. I just did that and it worked.
- frik 11y agoclick on "web" below the HN headline (on this page, scroll up)
- tmalsburg2 11y agoDecent summary of the contemporary German identity. However, I find it futile to debate the effect of publishing Mein Kampf when everyone who is interested can download it from the internet.
- braythwayt 11y agoI don’t know if it’s futile. Some things exist purely as symbols of what is tolerable and what isn’t. Here in Canada, we have the Internet, and with the click of a mouse I can find lots and lots of web sites explaining that the holocaust is a giant conspiracy and didn’t happen. Nevertheless, it’s against the law for me to print them in a book and sell them in Canada. We know that people can read all that stuff, but there’s a statement being about what is and isn’t legal to publish. It’s not so much the information that we are trying to block, it’s the signal I would be sending if I opened a bookstore and started selling copies of my book in broad daylight. The meta-signal of selling the book in public is telling people that holocaust denial is no different than any other point of view. Canadians believe there is value in blocking the meta-signal, even if the signal itself flows somewhat freely across the country’s borders. Not everyone agrees, of course. I imagine that most Americans regard Canadian hate-crime laws as being a horrible infringement on civil liberties, right up there with gun control and socialized medicine. I’m not trying to convince anyone to abandon their principles and adopt the Canadian approach, I’m just pointing out that there can be a value in banning the publication of a work even if the work itself is available on the Internet. Whether that value outweighs the other considerations in play is, of course, a public policy decision.
- BogusIKnow 11y agoThe book that completely changed my view on Hitler was 'Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning' by Timothy Snyder. It explained a lot of the inner logic of WWII and the Holocaust.
- nyolfen 11y agosnyder is a revisionist
- fiatmoney 11y ago"Revisionist" covers a lot of ground. Which of his claims do you take issue with?
- Throwaway1100 11y agoa.) Where do you think he is wrong? b.) Everyone who deviates from dogma on this topic is called a revisionist I think.
- EliRivers 11y agoThat's basically meaningless. If something is wrong, it needs revising. So don't tell us that he revised something; tell us if he corrected something, or if he's mistaken.
- dergachev 11y agoGopnik published an amazing article summarizing Black Earth, really added to my perspective on the matter. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil
- swang 11y agoOff-topic (but not really): This article/site takes almost ~8 seconds to load, then another 7+ seconds for the page to calm down (tracker loading etc). Then there are nearly 40 trackers trying to figure out what you're doing. Dear Economist, I am closing the window.
- singold 11y agoAnd it also shows "rolex values your time" oh the irony
- jonalmeida 11y agoWith Firefox tracking protection, I counted 21 trackers being blocked. This my new record for most number of trackers on one page.
- xux 11y agoI have Ghostery and UBlock origin turned on. Page loads in less than a second for me.
- gottam 11y agoThe site loads about ~30 scripts in the HEAD tag before it's allowed to render the body, its disgusting.
- gPphX 11y agohttps://noscript.net/ https://noscript.net/
- kbart 11y agoEven worse: "You have reached your article limit"
- bbcbasic 11y agoOr... dear Economist, I would close the window but you crashed by Samsung J2
- brillenfux 11y agoWell, Hitler himself said: "You will not get one true word out of me". I don't think there's much more to see than a useful (for some) narcissist.
- Animats 11y ago"Look Who's Back", mentioned in the article, isn't just a book. It's a movie. The trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtW1Lq5c04E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtW1Lq5c04E The part where a young Goth woman shows Hitler how to use Google is very funny.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoConsiderably worse thing with Russia and Stalin, because of the sorry state of modern Russia people are filled with ressentiment and even more susceptible to that kind of second thoughts. Much more polarising.
- tomp 11y agoThe fact that holocaust denial is banned (in EU, even as an idea!) only sends the signal that the government fears it might be true. I mean, they don't even ban creationism!
- Mithaldu 11y agoVery very weird reasoning. Holocaust denial is banned because it amounts to hate speech. Creationism is dumb, but not hate speech. Also, there is no thoughtcrime.
- tomp 11y agoNow you're just making stuff up. How is saying "Hitler didn't specifically target Jews" hate speech? I used to think it was just dumb, but now I'm not so sure any more. Obviously it's not thoughtcrime, but it's illegal to even discuss it, not only to publish books about it.
- Mithaldu 11y ago> How is saying "Hitler didn't specifically target Jews" hate speech? Simply put, because it is functionally identical to saying "the victims were liars on a humongous scale", with all effects that will have on an audience. > it's illegal to even discuss it Paragraph?
- tomp 11y agoWhich is exactly exvivalent as saying "those who believe in creationism are liars on a massive scale". Again, how is that hate speech?
- Mithaldu 11y agoIt is not equivalent. Holocaust victims have described things that actually happened to them or their families, they are claiming things as historic fact. It is absolutely possible, and very cruel, to call them liars. Scientists advocating the theory of evolution are 100% aware that it is a theory. The word itself includes an understanding and acknowledgement of it not being fact, but a theory. Unless you try to claim them believing in their theory is a lie, you cannot call them liars, since they are not proposing facts. Further, you ignore the part about the effects it has on the audience. Making other people believe that jews and other holocaust victims have successfully perpetrated a lie about "their race" across decades, makes them more likely to be radicalized and thus more likely to lash out against "others". Do note how in Germany even today fire-bombings against residences of foreigners and particularly refugees occur particularly in the german regions with higher-than-average occurences of neo nazis. Oh, lest i forget: > it's illegal to even discuss it Paragraph?
- zatkin 11y agoIf there is anything good that Adolf Hitler did it was that he made the German people one of the strongest nations ever to exist. From what I have heard and read, they are the hardest working individuals and they are (supposedly) the only country in Europe who are capable of sustaining themselves.
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoActually they work some of the shortest hours in Europe, Greece on the other hand work some of the longest hours.
- anonyfox 11y agowe work smarter, not harder scnr
- macns 11y agoplease define 'work smarter' before saying a whole nation is 'working dumber' UPDATE: I'm sure lots of 'smart' German businessmen or self-employed work long hours just like the rest of the world, not?
- Asbostos 11y agoYou can calculate the GDP per man-hour to compare "smartness". Of course that doesn't mean individual workers are doing something smarter, but that together they've built a system which operates more efficiently. Maybe past generations of Germans spent their work doing something that benefits current generations (figuring out how to make reliable car parts?), while past generations of Greeks worked on less helpful things (tourism?).
- anonyfox 11y agoActually this was a joke. And yes: If you want to achieve something other than just getting a mediocre paycheck, you should put in the usual extra hours. But afaik there also seems to be a slightly different work mentality here in germany, where you go to work and actually work, not chatting gossip or read facebook... at least some blog post from non-germans claim this (since I'm obviously biased I can't confirm this).
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago> But they would never accept such rhetoric in their own politicians, for it would remind them of Hitler’s demagogic charisma. [...] “Because of Hitler, the palette of contemporary German political rhetoric is deliberately narrow, cautious and boring.” That sounds 100% positive to me. Treating politics as public theater has never done anything good in the world.
- marvwhere 11y ago"Hacker News" well well...
- golemotron 11y agoI wonder if anyone else has noticed that this is really another case of the Streisand Effect.
- jensen123 11y agoMuch of what I read about Hitler in the mainstream media seems kinda black and white. This paragraph of the Economist article, for example "Woven into the prose are crude Social Darwinism and anti-Semitism that resonated even beyond Germany, as well as hints of the author’s murderous potential. Having been gassed by the British in the first world war, Hitler writes: if some of the “Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”" It is of course not mentioned that initially the Nazis simply wanted the Jews to leave Germany. Hitler himself said that if some other country would accept them, he would send them on luxury cruise ships. But of course, countries like the UK or US did not want lots of Jews to immigrate to them.
- Throwaway1100 11y ago"It is of course not mentioned that initially the Nazis simply wanted the Jews to leave Germany." This is often quoted wrong, and makes it look like Hitler wanted them to survive, just out of Germany. Hitlers idea in the beginning was to send Jews where they could not survive, to show that they only can survive as a race when they use other races for their benefit. The plan changed several times, where to send them, and ultimatly the plan was to send them beyond Siberia after Germany would have colonized the east. With losing the war and losing the opportunity to let them die in Siberia, and an effective concentration camp system in place the plan was changed to killing all.
- littletimmy 11y agoThis is not true. Wasn't one of the plans to send them all to the United States or the United Kingdom? It was called the Evian conference.
- Throwaway1100 11y agoIt might not be complete, as there were dozens of plans, e.g. the Madagascar Plan[1]. The Evian conference was a conference organized by the United States without Germany[2], so it could not be a argument for a plan of Germany. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Évian_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Évian_Conference
- bawana 11y agoTrump. Hitler reincarnated.