Yes, and it was also self-corrected by the USA, acting from within. No invading force from outside ended slavery. The USA invaded itself, at great cost in blood.
If I was a descendant of a Union soldier, I would be mightily pissed at how little credit they get.
I don’t think there is a country in the history of the world that self-corrected in that manner, and to that extreme. It truly is extraordinary among nations.
Or at least that is what I was taught about the USA in public school.
(In Israel, mind you. I think your schools crap on you.)
Only mildly related, but I will tell you a story about going to a beer hall in Munich when I was a uniformed Israeli solider and we were doing a training thing (I was in the engineering corp) with NATO.
For some reason, probably related to ingestion of alcohol, we Israeli soldiers decided to go to a beer hall where Hitler was known to have made a rather stirring speech and started a riot.
We walk in, again in uniform, obviously Jewish. Sit down, get beer.
Got more than a handful of stares.
An older man (clearly of the age to have been a soldier in WWII) came to the table, with what appeared to be his daughter trying to stop him.
He stopped at the end of the table and stood at attention. He saluted. And held it. He was crying. No, he was openly weeping. The entire bar – no, beer hall – became dead silent.
Not knowing what to do, we stood at attention, and saluted until he released.
And the crowd went wild with screaming and clapping.
His daughter led him away, and we drank beers the manager had brought over.
I have heard it said that Nazi Germany was 10% hard core supporters watching everyone else. They had a very sophisticated propaganda ministry that styled movies that people saw and the radio programs they listened too, and Hitler influenced the art that they saw. Every type of person had something programmed just for their demographic.
Hitler had a preorganized totalitarian police apparatus loyal to him step into place when he seized temporary emergency powers; If someone questioned how long he had those powers and wouldn’t shut up they were disappeared. (He made up the excuse for emergency powers by having his henchmen secretly set fire to the Reichstag, sort of like a Parliament building, and declared the German state was being attacked). Yes, there were people who were not of the same idea, they weren’t very noticeable.
As to how people really did let him take power, 10 years before he won a minority government he was convicted of attempting an armed Putsch against the federal government. He had connections and instead of hanging he did 6 months in jail, time he used to write Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which was sort of the Bible of Nazism.
Although comforting, I’m afraid that’s inaccurate - historian Niall Ferguson analyzed data on 1932 and 1933 elections in Germany and showed that Nazis had a 40% support across all regional and social strata of the German society, thus shattering the myth that a specific social/political group was responsible for the rise of Nazism.
What’s more disconcerting, the NSDAP beat Socialists and Communists combined among the urban working classes, allegedly the main voting base of the latter.
Actually, no. The building of the totalitarian apparatus began in 1933 after Nazis seized power - Goering was named interior minister of Prussia (an archaic title, denoting a historical region of Germany) and from Prussian rank-and-file policemen he created the much-feared Gestapo.
Yes, that is true, but that shouldn’t distract from the breadth of support the Nazis enjoyed in German society.
A comparison with Austria is also warranted - despite the Austrians being massively over represented in the Gestapo, SS and among concentration camp guards in particular compared to their share of the population in the so-called German Reich, by claiming that they’re the “first victim of Nazism” they’ve avoided a kind of catharsis tha happened in Germany and a major acknowledgment of historical guilt.
Especially in the Austrian countryside there’s a lot of dog whistling.
the part about 10% hardcore support I heard on a spoken word program on a campus station. Might I still be correct if we consider some voters to be fickle and realizing that they got stuck without future elections and wouldn’t have voted the same if they could step in a time machine?
I am left curious as to how when people wondered when an alternate venue than the burnt out Reichstag would be used to debate Hitler’s temporary emergency powers that nothing was really done to stop it.
I haven’t taken a look at William L. Shirer’s book, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ in a while.
Oh, I just imagined some sort of antisemitic rant and his daughter trying to prevent that. Sadly, it’s what seemed most likely when looking at the small handful of people I know who were teenagers or older during the Nazi reign. It’s always good to hear that there are different experiences as well.
Every German I have met has been nice polite and friendly. Nearly all the Germans that fought in WW2 are dead and buried. No need to forget about what happened historically but also no need to blame the current Germans for the sins of the ancestors.
Germany has been trying to make up for “The War” ever since, bending over backwards to the point of self destruction taking in hoards of muslim refugees, to the detriment of their society.
If the Allies had lost the war, you can bet a lot of their actions would be judged as war crimes by the victors. The Germans were a real threat at the time(esp if you were Jewish), but don’t forget propaganda exists on both sides.
I was raised at a time that was extremely derisive to Germans and Japanese for their part in WW2.
It was also a very 2 dimensional view goodies vs baddies. Kind of like Hogan’s Heroes, where the Germans are pathetic buffoons, easily outsmarted every time. Reality is much more complicated, but all those things go out the window once war is declared and fighting starts.
I think you have to be very careful with statements like that. Of course you will find instances where the morality of allied actions, be it by governments or individual soldiers, is questionable. But on the whole, you have one side that prepared for and started a world war with the goal of subjugating an entire continent and actively pursued the goal of wiping out an entire people and then you have another side that tried to defend itself and its allies from this tyrannical regime. These are the basic facts, not propaganda. Acting like there’s not really that big of a difference between the two is, I think, highly problematic. And this is coming from a German whose two grandfathers (and at least one great-grandfather) fought in the Wehrmacht.
Sure, but we are not talking about Nazi Germany anymore. Germans are regular folk, now. They are de-nazi-fied, most of them. And I have no problem with them taking pride in their country for what it’s good at now.
And your story @Jewbacca is just a microcosm of what I know of Germans now. They are ashamed of their Nazi past…
I think people should to look at things realistically. Everyone always thinks they are the goodies, that they are right, or have god on their side. Once the fighting starts it really doesn’t matter who was right or wrong. If you want to survive, you do whatever it takes, and its us against them. People will always weasel a way to justify their actions, that’s human nature, whether its morally or ethically right or wrong.
I love all those old movies where the good guy wears a white hat, and the baddy wears a black hat, but life is a lot more complicated than that.
If you look at the First World War, Britain didn’t really have a moral reason to get involved. They were just looking after their own interests regarding their Empire and trying to hurt Germany, when the opportunity arose, because Germany was a rival. They really didn’t have a humanitarian reason to get involved, and could easily have stayed out of it, at least in the early stages. Britain probably would have been drawn into the conflict, like America was when the Lusitania was sunk.
A bit different in WW2 Britain got involved when Poland was invaded. America wasn’t phased by Germany and didn’t get involved until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, and Japan threw in their cards with an axis alliance.
Propaganda is necessary in war on all sides. Freedom of speech is controlled, and the enemy is demonised, and dehumanised(sometimes justly). Without that you can’t make a unified stance against a threat. Propaganda still occurs daily in peace time, between nations, and internally in nations. A sad but true reality. By sticking your head in the sand you can fool yourself that everything is fine, but that doesn’t change what actually happens.
Right and wrong matter even more when the fighting starts. There is no way one can know the depths of depravity that Germany sunk to and not see them as the bad guys. That is not propaganda; that’s historical fact.
You are correct Zecarlo. Still I wonder if a bit of what Beyond Beyond is saying is that the seeds of WW2 in Europe were sown at the end of WW1 with the Versaille treaty. It basically screwed an already economically screwed Germany to the extreme of electing a maniacally extreme leader in Hitler. I mentioned above that he was convicted of an armed insurrection against the state 10 years before he was elected.
WW1 wasn’t clearly about right vs wrong, it was economic competition and a domino effect of alliances. I am Canadian, and the reason we got in on it was because the King of England signed an order, and that was it.
Right, so annexing Austria, attacking Poland and building the world’s first mechanized extermination camps etc… they did that because of the Versaille treaty and their depressed economy?
News flash, the entire world was hit by the depression, really hard. Most countries didn’t try to take over the world and cleanse their minorities as a response.