Bit by bit, the brightly lit dining hall of a countryside hotel near Potsdam fills with people. There are about two dozen of them, a mix of AfD members, followers of the Identitarian movement and members of nationalist student fraternities (Burschenschaft). People from the middle classes – doctors, lawyers, politicians and entrepreneurs – are also […]
To be fair to Germany, Hitler was the clash of two trains of thought. Should you punish a country for the crimes of its ruling class through fines and territory claims?
In medieval eras the country was property of the kings and the peasants were their rightful “tools”, so punishing them was seen as fair, which is where the Versailles peace agreement came from.
In modern eras, the country belongs to no one and the ruling class is just that, the ruling class. Punishing people or taking land is seen poorly in international courts, regardless of what the country did in the war.
Hitler came to power because of how the allies treated the Germans after WW1. Had the allies implemented a restructuring plan, like it happened with Japan and Germany post WW2, instead of implementing border gore and impossible to pay fines, Hitler would have never been able to do anything, seeing as he was significantly unpopular. But if you trap a population between an impossible choice, this is what you get.
So you see, Germany couldn’t have produced anything. The right wing might see a substantial representation increase in the parliament because current parties have been incompetent in handling migration over the last 10 years and refuse to listen, but the conditions that caused Hitler’s rise to power are not currently met. Not even close.
Which is why i think you are not right in this matter.
Banning AfD would be incredibly stupid. Votes are a representation of concerns in a population. Ignoring the issues causing the votes and banning a party does not remove the concerns, just our visibility of them.
Europe in general needs to either drastically improve the integration mechanisms for migrants or reduce migrant throughput to levels which the current existing mechanisms are capable of handling. The current methods of just ignoring the problem and not giving a crap is clearly not being effective and thinking this is just a problem of ideology is exactly what’s wrong here.
Banning parties is irrelevant, banning nazi symbolism is irrelevsnt, cordon sanitaire is irrelevant, declaring fascism illegal is irrelevant. Those are symptoms and if we only treat symptoms the problem just changes faces.
Tl;dr: nazi propaganda. Ww2 happened because the allies went too easy on Germany, any history book will tell you so.
That is true, if all the history you’ve ever learned was the history that came in your highschool books. It’s a very simplistic take of a complex situation meant to be easily digestible by teenagers. I mean no offense.
Which is fine i suppose. If you think it’s fine for you, then it is and i am happy that you are satisfied. I understand not everyone shares my curiosity for ww2 political history, however, I am very much not a nazi. I’m not even right wing. It would be nonsensical to defend right wing extremist ideology.
Criticism of the treaty of Versailles has been thoroughly written by many non nazi historians from allied countries. It just doesn’t add much to the conversation to just write “nazi propaganda”. It’s not really an argument at all. No premises whatsoever. You could have just dropped your dislike because you feel you disagree and moved on.
Although i am very willing to read your thoughts if you could develop them a little more than that. I’m always willing to listen to a strong argument in favor of the treaty of Versailles and if you have a take i find insightful, perhaps even change my mind.
Are those high-school books you mentioned from the USSR? Because all my teachers ever told me was that the French were mean to the Germans. Oh and the biggest economic crisis to ever happen occurred around the same time, but that’s completely unrelated.
Truth is, it’s not fair to call that nazi propaganda anymore, for the simple reason that the west started singing the same song. US would have struggled to expand its influence if it were linked directly linked to the origin of the problem, which may have pushed Europe to communism, France would have had to execute so many ranked military, etc.
I’m probably a lot less educated on the matter than you (as you condescendingly pointed out), but if letting a country invade everyone around is somehow being too hard on them, idk what to tell you. The right thing would have been to enforce the treaty of Versailles properly, the harsh thing would have been to let the French soldier do to the Germans after ww1, what the Russians wanted to do after ww2. No Dolchstoßlegende after that.