Part 1 (of 2) of an in-depth investigation into the shenanigans that led to many of the developments of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the re-emergence of Neo-Nazis seemingly everywhere
You do spoil your readers. Being outspoken was to be the burden and duty of the humanities and the social sciences, and look at us now. Rather than doing what you do here, we have instead become the clergy of not only the politically correct, second for second, but the politically expedient career-wise.
Will read more thorough but I'll drop a question here if it's alright:
When studying history in school in Germany and Austria, does the time-line jump from the French Revolution, touching lightly on Napoleon and Marxism, and then mention the wars before settling in and becoming detailed again in the early seventies?
Because swedish history, in school books for the past fifty years basically skips everything but the world wars, during the period 1850 to 1965. Rather than going into detail about recent history, a period where we have lots of material, more time is spent on the neolithic era for comparison.
I ask, and if similar in Austria and Germany wonder if there's a conscious thought behind this, or accident?
If you consider the amount of history taught at school as a distribution over time, what is the ideal? Something coming close to a uniform distribution? Definitively, this is not how I remember my school years (in Germany, 30 years ago). In my mind, the distribution seems three-modal:
- quite a lot about Greeks and Romans (mostly Romans); maybe I remember it that way because this was how history lessons started (around 6th grade)
- quite a lot about the French revolution
- and, of course, an enormous amount about Nazi Germany (more about politics and the holocaust, less about the war); maybe here my memory is twisted because these topics, of course, were not confined to lessons in history (but also Deutsch, Religion, Sozialkunde, ...)
Not that much about the periods in between, almost nothing about the time period after WWII. For my oral examination, I had to choose a history topic, and I chose the history of Israel after WWII, because I was interested in it and had read about it in private.
I don't know, honestly, because not everyone is interested in history, even though knowledge thereof certainly 'helps'.
The above distribution also applies, by and large, to Austria. The problem, I think, isn't the weighted (biased) emphases on one over another period or topic; the main problem--and this isn't a feature of History as such, mind you--is the ever-increasing specialisation. We're training what amounts to the second generation now of what I think as 'Nintendo [specialists]', i.e., really good at looking at parts and/or representations of parts, but without first-hand experience with 'the real thing' (not that I'm advocating more war, but this kind of training (think, e.g., microeconomics instead of macro) leads to increasing myopia.
Well, I take that as a compliment, my good sir, thanks a lot, and I'm very much looking forward to more thoughts.
As to your question, which requires a rather long-ish answer for either country, I suppose (which will have to wait for another day, though), the short answer is: there's a lot to discuss here, incl.:
* the discussions in the 1920s until the Depression and the advent of fascism, which differ from the stories related by the Austrofascists and the Nazis;
* the 'new dawn' after 1945, which again differed between Austria and Germany (whereby the latter must also be subdivided into W and E Germany, ven if that division proved temporary);
* the supersession of some issues emphasised after WW2 by the 'Historians Quarrel' of the 1980s and the re-direction of much of the social sciences and humanities after 1989/92;
* the increasing role of supranational institutions (and their funding streams) which gathered momentum since the Maastricht Treaty (1992) 'produced' the EU
Leaving these issues aside for the moment, school curricula in both Austria and Germany (which are very different, as they are a federal concern in the former and something devolved to the states in the latter) emphasise the US-inspired narrative of WW1 leading to WW2, Hitler, and Auschwitz, all of which means special emphases on these issues in school while much context is omitted. In practice, little of the economic issues of industrial economies and societies is discussed, the Russian Revolution is mischaracterised as a boogyman ('Bolshevism bad!'), and the Soviet role in the defeat of Nazi fascism is merely grudgingly admitted. It has gotten much worse since the advent of the 'greatest generation' grap washing ashore in Europe since the 1990s (esp. 'Schindler's List' and 'Saving Pvt. Ryan'), which has greatly reduced the connection of society to objective reality.
I'm unsure about the consciousness of all of it, which would require a certain amount of thinking and writing about these issues. In short--I'd go for this: both Austria and Germany desperately wish to provide 'proof' that they 'learned the lessons of history', thus their elites in academia and politics seek to please the Swamp Masters of DC by being, well, the proverbial-stereotypically over-engaged (former) miscreants.
Would that make sense to you in lieu of a more detailed answer?
It sadly makes perfect sense, given Sweden's actions during the war and the lead up to it.
Most swedes live in the happy illusion that we were neutral and stayed out of the war due to skillful political maneuvering by the socialist democrats and their opposing national socialism.
This fairy-tale (or rather: Grosse lüge) has been repeated from 1945 to today, and is such a strong collective truth that publicly opposing it means career suicide no matter who you are. That we aided Finland against the soviet Union is a-okay to acknowledge, that's seen as an item of pride.
But try telling a swede that the J-passports was an idea and a demand made from Sweden to Germany before the war, so that swedish customs officials could ientity jws and send them back? Despite it being a proven fact it gets fobbed off as "right-wing propaganda" of all things.
Try to bring up the 14 swedish concentration camps (not murder camps, just internment without suspicion of crime or trial or even a paper trail), and that the chief for those was the socialist democrat Erlander, more commonly known as "Landsfader"? Fervent denial, downplaying of it, and rationalisation.
Sweden's direct aid to Germany regarding the transport of troops and equipment to and from Norway gets played down as "transit of a few wounded soldiers". In reality, it was more than 2 000 000 men being transported through Sweden, including SS divisions or kampfgruppe headed for northern Norway and the front in Finland.
And any mention of SS Wiking and Nordland gets waved away as "but that was mostly insane people and danes" - and the fact that all swedish volunteers for these units were given complete amnesty and new identities upon returning isn't even acknowledged by most historians.
In my the areas where my roots are, they aided and hid norwegian resistance fighters, not from german forces since they didn't cross into Sweden, but from spies for 'Bureau S' (sicherheitsdienst) and the police, since if discovered the norwegians would ahve been handed over to Germany.
So I'm afraid that we must conclude that we live in a shared delusion, history for the majority of our countrymen being what the state has chosen to see fit for schooling and what Hollywood deems fit for consumption.
Oh, and the fact that Sweden together with Britain and the US was /the/ major source of inspiration for the German eugenics program, or that the writings of such once esteemed scholars such as the Myrdals clearly shows that the only distinction between swedish socialist democracy and german national socialism is the severity of methods regarding race and war... is called neo-nazi propaganda today. Irony is so dead it's become oil.
99 out of a hundred swedes have no knowledge, or does not acknowledge it, that the socialist democrats - the same party mrs Andersson heads and who is our current regierungspartei - forcibly sterilised and aborted more than 63 000 people between 1922 and 1976 (!) as part of the eugenics programme.
All these facts are, if they are brought up at all, rationalised as "right wing extremist propaganda and lies" - despite numerous works from public sources.
And the swedish co-operation with Stasi.... swedes are banned by agreement between Sweden and Germany from having access to those parts of the records which can be used to identify what swedish politicians and other prominent people were agents, collaborators or "kombinatoren" with GDR and Stasi.
Lots of text, so difficult to focus on just one item. But the most enraging part is the lack of morality of anyone in power from 1850 onwards. It is appalling.
The 'might makes right' issue is certainly something to point, but I'd argue that 'this has always been the case', historically speaking.
To me, the most infuriating aspect is--the utter betrayal of 'we the people' by the SPD leadership. I mean, I'm not a fan of the Communist/Bolshevik ideological predisposition, but as I shall explore in part 2, the revolutionary upheaval led by 'we the people' was real, and it was taken over by the Bolshevik-inspired left-wing extremists (who, truth be told, like Mr. Liebknecht used to be a quite mainstream SPD party hack until autumn 1914) before the government--which included the same mainstream SPD hacks--asked the military and the proto-fascistic Freikorps to open fire.
Thanks for the very detailed history, which again, I knew very little about. In U.S. we are taught that Germany turned to the National Socialist party because of the heavy reparations they had to pay after WW1 and the subsequent depression, massive inflation that crushed their economy. In other words, WW2 happened because of the the Treaty of Versailles . The level of detail about the German political scene immediately after WW1 is not mentioned.
If it's any consolation, this isn't taught over here either. I shall have something to say about the above-related narrative, too, at least about its early parts, but the German political development in Weimar Germany is detailed in the quite excellent book by Dirk Schumann, Political Violence in Wemar Germany (New York: Berghahn), if you're interested.
It's not the same kind of accounting as, say, the late Howard Zinn's People's History of the US, but it's a step into the right direction, I'd say.
How does Mark Jones, writing things like "Violence is a physical action: it causes injury and death and it reminds all who encounter it of the fragility of their own physical existence.", duck the shitstorms? I am writing this after having just read William Briggs' piece here:
Ha, thanks for the link to the conference. I'm very much in awe of the stupidity of wokery, which I consider something like a shake-down, in particular because so many of my (contemporary history) colleagues are beholden to this kind of (crap).
None of them are actually able to express themselves (or their topics) coherently and without contradictions, but that's o.k., it's about feelings, I suppose, instead of, you know, reality. None of these pesky things, such as fact, consideration, or logic appear to matter to them.
Case in point: I clicked on the link and even looked at the abstract booklet--and 'learned' that 'silence kills' now, which is beyond, esp. given what, say, Pastor Niemöller's experience in Nazi Germany says about the preverbial equivalence of 'silence' and 'consent' as opposed to the in- and perverted notion of 'silence' in the face of 'micro-aggressions' being a, well, 'killer'.
I have read several books detailing the events of 1918-19 (I don’t have them in front of me and therefore cannot cite them...one of them was “The Kings Depart”).
Soviet Russia was attempting to provoke a communist revolution in Germany at the time, opening an embassy in Berlin and pouring money and agitators into the country to foment revolution. The Army and police were almost nonexistent, and the new government couldn’t defend itself from the communists. Chancellor Ebert was presented with the first Freikorps units (placed under his control) which were used to support his government.
Historians tend to downplay the threat that the Russian Communists actually posed to Ebert’s (social Democratic) government.
I’m not defending the Freikorps or their subsequent actions....I’m just saying that they were needed at the time in order to prevent the spread of Bolshevik (Russian) Communism into Germany.
You do spoil your readers. Being outspoken was to be the burden and duty of the humanities and the social sciences, and look at us now. Rather than doing what you do here, we have instead become the clergy of not only the politically correct, second for second, but the politically expedient career-wise.
Will read more thorough but I'll drop a question here if it's alright:
When studying history in school in Germany and Austria, does the time-line jump from the French Revolution, touching lightly on Napoleon and Marxism, and then mention the wars before settling in and becoming detailed again in the early seventies?
Because swedish history, in school books for the past fifty years basically skips everything but the world wars, during the period 1850 to 1965. Rather than going into detail about recent history, a period where we have lots of material, more time is spent on the neolithic era for comparison.
I ask, and if similar in Austria and Germany wonder if there's a conscious thought behind this, or accident?
If you consider the amount of history taught at school as a distribution over time, what is the ideal? Something coming close to a uniform distribution? Definitively, this is not how I remember my school years (in Germany, 30 years ago). In my mind, the distribution seems three-modal:
- quite a lot about Greeks and Romans (mostly Romans); maybe I remember it that way because this was how history lessons started (around 6th grade)
- quite a lot about the French revolution
- and, of course, an enormous amount about Nazi Germany (more about politics and the holocaust, less about the war); maybe here my memory is twisted because these topics, of course, were not confined to lessons in history (but also Deutsch, Religion, Sozialkunde, ...)
Not that much about the periods in between, almost nothing about the time period after WWII. For my oral examination, I had to choose a history topic, and I chose the history of Israel after WWII, because I was interested in it and had read about it in private.
I don't know, honestly, because not everyone is interested in history, even though knowledge thereof certainly 'helps'.
The above distribution also applies, by and large, to Austria. The problem, I think, isn't the weighted (biased) emphases on one over another period or topic; the main problem--and this isn't a feature of History as such, mind you--is the ever-increasing specialisation. We're training what amounts to the second generation now of what I think as 'Nintendo [specialists]', i.e., really good at looking at parts and/or representations of parts, but without first-hand experience with 'the real thing' (not that I'm advocating more war, but this kind of training (think, e.g., microeconomics instead of macro) leads to increasing myopia.
Well, I take that as a compliment, my good sir, thanks a lot, and I'm very much looking forward to more thoughts.
As to your question, which requires a rather long-ish answer for either country, I suppose (which will have to wait for another day, though), the short answer is: there's a lot to discuss here, incl.:
* the discussions in the 1920s until the Depression and the advent of fascism, which differ from the stories related by the Austrofascists and the Nazis;
* the 'new dawn' after 1945, which again differed between Austria and Germany (whereby the latter must also be subdivided into W and E Germany, ven if that division proved temporary);
* the supersession of some issues emphasised after WW2 by the 'Historians Quarrel' of the 1980s and the re-direction of much of the social sciences and humanities after 1989/92;
* the increasing role of supranational institutions (and their funding streams) which gathered momentum since the Maastricht Treaty (1992) 'produced' the EU
Leaving these issues aside for the moment, school curricula in both Austria and Germany (which are very different, as they are a federal concern in the former and something devolved to the states in the latter) emphasise the US-inspired narrative of WW1 leading to WW2, Hitler, and Auschwitz, all of which means special emphases on these issues in school while much context is omitted. In practice, little of the economic issues of industrial economies and societies is discussed, the Russian Revolution is mischaracterised as a boogyman ('Bolshevism bad!'), and the Soviet role in the defeat of Nazi fascism is merely grudgingly admitted. It has gotten much worse since the advent of the 'greatest generation' grap washing ashore in Europe since the 1990s (esp. 'Schindler's List' and 'Saving Pvt. Ryan'), which has greatly reduced the connection of society to objective reality.
I'm unsure about the consciousness of all of it, which would require a certain amount of thinking and writing about these issues. In short--I'd go for this: both Austria and Germany desperately wish to provide 'proof' that they 'learned the lessons of history', thus their elites in academia and politics seek to please the Swamp Masters of DC by being, well, the proverbial-stereotypically over-engaged (former) miscreants.
Would that make sense to you in lieu of a more detailed answer?
It sadly makes perfect sense, given Sweden's actions during the war and the lead up to it.
Most swedes live in the happy illusion that we were neutral and stayed out of the war due to skillful political maneuvering by the socialist democrats and their opposing national socialism.
This fairy-tale (or rather: Grosse lüge) has been repeated from 1945 to today, and is such a strong collective truth that publicly opposing it means career suicide no matter who you are. That we aided Finland against the soviet Union is a-okay to acknowledge, that's seen as an item of pride.
But try telling a swede that the J-passports was an idea and a demand made from Sweden to Germany before the war, so that swedish customs officials could ientity jws and send them back? Despite it being a proven fact it gets fobbed off as "right-wing propaganda" of all things.
Try to bring up the 14 swedish concentration camps (not murder camps, just internment without suspicion of crime or trial or even a paper trail), and that the chief for those was the socialist democrat Erlander, more commonly known as "Landsfader"? Fervent denial, downplaying of it, and rationalisation.
Sweden's direct aid to Germany regarding the transport of troops and equipment to and from Norway gets played down as "transit of a few wounded soldiers". In reality, it was more than 2 000 000 men being transported through Sweden, including SS divisions or kampfgruppe headed for northern Norway and the front in Finland.
And any mention of SS Wiking and Nordland gets waved away as "but that was mostly insane people and danes" - and the fact that all swedish volunteers for these units were given complete amnesty and new identities upon returning isn't even acknowledged by most historians.
In my the areas where my roots are, they aided and hid norwegian resistance fighters, not from german forces since they didn't cross into Sweden, but from spies for 'Bureau S' (sicherheitsdienst) and the police, since if discovered the norwegians would ahve been handed over to Germany.
So I'm afraid that we must conclude that we live in a shared delusion, history for the majority of our countrymen being what the state has chosen to see fit for schooling and what Hollywood deems fit for consumption.
Oh, and the fact that Sweden together with Britain and the US was /the/ major source of inspiration for the German eugenics program, or that the writings of such once esteemed scholars such as the Myrdals clearly shows that the only distinction between swedish socialist democracy and german national socialism is the severity of methods regarding race and war... is called neo-nazi propaganda today. Irony is so dead it's become oil.
99 out of a hundred swedes have no knowledge, or does not acknowledge it, that the socialist democrats - the same party mrs Andersson heads and who is our current regierungspartei - forcibly sterilised and aborted more than 63 000 people between 1922 and 1976 (!) as part of the eugenics programme.
All these facts are, if they are brought up at all, rationalised as "right wing extremist propaganda and lies" - despite numerous works from public sources.
And the swedish co-operation with Stasi.... swedes are banned by agreement between Sweden and Germany from having access to those parts of the records which can be used to identify what swedish politicians and other prominent people were agents, collaborators or "kombinatoren" with GDR and Stasi.
*sigh* for this reads quite familiar to my experiences in Austria…(to be continued below cm27874's coment)
Lots of text, so difficult to focus on just one item. But the most enraging part is the lack of morality of anyone in power from 1850 onwards. It is appalling.
"Might makes right" and all that crap I suppose.
I agree that it's appalling.
The 'might makes right' issue is certainly something to point, but I'd argue that 'this has always been the case', historically speaking.
To me, the most infuriating aspect is--the utter betrayal of 'we the people' by the SPD leadership. I mean, I'm not a fan of the Communist/Bolshevik ideological predisposition, but as I shall explore in part 2, the revolutionary upheaval led by 'we the people' was real, and it was taken over by the Bolshevik-inspired left-wing extremists (who, truth be told, like Mr. Liebknecht used to be a quite mainstream SPD party hack until autumn 1914) before the government--which included the same mainstream SPD hacks--asked the military and the proto-fascistic Freikorps to open fire.
Thanks for the very detailed history, which again, I knew very little about. In U.S. we are taught that Germany turned to the National Socialist party because of the heavy reparations they had to pay after WW1 and the subsequent depression, massive inflation that crushed their economy. In other words, WW2 happened because of the the Treaty of Versailles . The level of detail about the German political scene immediately after WW1 is not mentioned.
You're welcome.
If it's any consolation, this isn't taught over here either. I shall have something to say about the above-related narrative, too, at least about its early parts, but the German political development in Weimar Germany is detailed in the quite excellent book by Dirk Schumann, Political Violence in Wemar Germany (New York: Berghahn), if you're interested.
It's not the same kind of accounting as, say, the late Howard Zinn's People's History of the US, but it's a step into the right direction, I'd say.
How does Mark Jones, writing things like "Violence is a physical action: it causes injury and death and it reminds all who encounter it of the fragility of their own physical existence.", duck the shitstorms? I am writing this after having just read William Briggs' piece here:
https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/i-have-the-power-to-slay-with-words
Note also his link (at the bottom of the piece) to a "hilarious academic conference" back in 2018.
Ha, thanks for the link to the conference. I'm very much in awe of the stupidity of wokery, which I consider something like a shake-down, in particular because so many of my (contemporary history) colleagues are beholden to this kind of (crap).
None of them are actually able to express themselves (or their topics) coherently and without contradictions, but that's o.k., it's about feelings, I suppose, instead of, you know, reality. None of these pesky things, such as fact, consideration, or logic appear to matter to them.
Case in point: I clicked on the link and even looked at the abstract booklet--and 'learned' that 'silence kills' now, which is beyond, esp. given what, say, Pastor Niemöller's experience in Nazi Germany says about the preverbial equivalence of 'silence' and 'consent' as opposed to the in- and perverted notion of 'silence' in the face of 'micro-aggressions' being a, well, 'killer'.
I have read several books detailing the events of 1918-19 (I don’t have them in front of me and therefore cannot cite them...one of them was “The Kings Depart”).
Soviet Russia was attempting to provoke a communist revolution in Germany at the time, opening an embassy in Berlin and pouring money and agitators into the country to foment revolution. The Army and police were almost nonexistent, and the new government couldn’t defend itself from the communists. Chancellor Ebert was presented with the first Freikorps units (placed under his control) which were used to support his government.
Historians tend to downplay the threat that the Russian Communists actually posed to Ebert’s (social Democratic) government.
I’m not defending the Freikorps or their subsequent actions....I’m just saying that they were needed at the time in order to prevent the spread of Bolshevik (Russian) Communism into Germany.