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White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, but not for the war itself. The usual intervention after a major war was for a few hundred years t

White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, but not for the war itself. The usual intervention after a major war was for a few hundred years to carve up the major belligerent into smaller states. This happened fairly regularly throughout the early modern period but curiously stopped being a thing after the Napoleonic wars. I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted. These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.

0815test 7y ago
> White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Sure. But to say the Nazis weren't white supremacists because their ideology differs from today's white supremacists isn't really saying anything at all. It's still racism, just differently defined.
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    I'm breaking with my usual rule of not commenting on downvotes, this only seems to happen with historical topics, to say that trying to make a distinction between the Aryan supremacy of the Nazis, as weird as the details would sound to a 21st century mind, and the racists of our day, is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments. If today's white supremacists found power, they'd look exactly like Nazis. The enemy might be different, but the mindset of fighting that enemy would be exactly the same, and the white supremacist suddenly finding power would find no other example to take heed of than the Nazis, so we can pretty much almost assume that that's what would happen.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      > ...is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments. Sure, but it's important to realize that this is true about any supremacist ideology. There's nothing exclusive about either Nazism or white supremacism. ISIL's Islamofascism is the same old crap for example, and it too has a line of historical descent from, e.g. early-20th-c. anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a raging anti-Semite who met Adolf Hitler and ardently supported his most heinous atrocities.
vkou 7y ago
> but not for the war itself. Have you never heard of Lebensraum? Generalplan Ost?
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  I'm not disputing that racism was at the heart of the Nazi Party, what I'm disputing is that the Nazi Party singlehandedly brought about the war. The war would have happened anyway. It would have been somewhat different without Hitler at the helm, but that Germany would give it another go was inevitable once the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles. There were many many more war hawks in Germany than the Nazis.
- luckylion 7y ago
  Those were völkisch (as in "Germans are the best, we need that space for us"), not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well). Hi. If you downvote factual statements, please leave a comment. It's annoying if you're using downvotes and flags as "I don't like that somebody says this". Write an argument, don't abuse moderation tools.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well). Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not. The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not. Meh, removing any value from descriptive terms doesn't help. > The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave. Or it's just not white supremacy, which it never was with the Nazis.

0815test 7y ago

> White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust, Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.

vinceguidry 7y ago
Sure. But to say the Nazis weren't white supremacists because their ideology differs from today's white supremacists isn't really saying anything at all. It's still racism, just differently defined.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  I'm breaking with my usual rule of not commenting on downvotes, this only seems to happen with historical topics, to say that trying to make a distinction between the Aryan supremacy of the Nazis, as weird as the details would sound to a 21st century mind, and the racists of our day, is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments. If today's white supremacists found power, they'd look exactly like Nazis. The enemy might be different, but the mindset of fighting that enemy would be exactly the same, and the white supremacist suddenly finding power would find no other example to take heed of than the Nazis, so we can pretty much almost assume that that's what would happen.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    > ...is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments. Sure, but it's important to realize that this is true about any supremacist ideology. There's nothing exclusive about either Nazism or white supremacism. ISIL's Islamofascism is the same old crap for example, and it too has a line of historical descent from, e.g. early-20th-c. anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a raging anti-Semite who met Adolf Hitler and ardently supported his most heinous atrocities.

vkou 7y ago

> but not for the war itself. Have you never heard of Lebensraum? Generalplan Ost?

vinceguidry 7y ago
I'm not disputing that racism was at the heart of the Nazi Party, what I'm disputing is that the Nazi Party singlehandedly brought about the war. The war would have happened anyway. It would have been somewhat different without Hitler at the helm, but that Germany would give it another go was inevitable once the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles. There were many many more war hawks in Germany than the Nazis.
luckylion 7y ago
Those were völkisch (as in "Germans are the best, we need that space for us"), not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well). Hi. If you downvote factual statements, please leave a comment. It's annoying if you're using downvotes and flags as "I don't like that somebody says this". Write an argument, don't abuse moderation tools.
- vkou 7y ago
  > not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well). Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not. The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not. Meh, removing any value from descriptive terms doesn't help. > The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave. Or it's just not white supremacy, which it never was with the Nazis.