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I'd agree here and I think there's a big flaw in how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers. Generally a high-school level of hi
by Guid_NewGuid 4y ago
I'd agree here and I think there's a big flaw in how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers.
Generally a high-school level of history (assuming you're paying the normal level of attention) leaves you with the impression that Germans got sad and mad and poor because of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the 'German martial spirit' or something and then Hitler appeared out of nowhere to do bad stuff.
Reading "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans was eye-opening in this regard. The Nazis did nothing more than tie together several existing culturally accepted themes more successfully than other fringe groups in Weimar politics. The swastika as a far-right symbol wasn't even 'invented' by them.
The Nazis to some extent were incidental, or didn't represent a step-change from the thoughts, politics and speech that were already circulating broadly in pre-Nazi society. This is what free-speech primacists seem to neglect. The Nazi ideology didn't arise from nowhere, death camps weren't the start, they were the end of 30 plus years of increasing acceptability and propagation of far-right ideas (stab in the back myths, casual and scientific anti-Semitism, anti-communist and anti-left propaganda, mainstream scientific eugenics, etc).
- kashunstva 4y ago> how this period of history is taught to people in the 'victorious' powers. By placing the word _victorious_ in quotes, you clearly have some alternative viewpoint about military victory in mind. Given that Germany tendered its unconditional surrender to the Allied forces in Europe, I don’t see how that’s in question; but maybe I’m missing your point.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoI think he means to include places like Denmark, France, Norway and other nations that weren't militarily victorious but for whom post-ww2 regime change was a reversion of what had been implemented by Nazi Germany and who generally teach that period of history the same way Britain and the US do.