Fremdbestimmt: 120 Jahre Lügen und Täuschung

by Thorsten Schulte

1

Genres: Politics

Hardcover

Published October 28, 2019

Reviews

[Tobias Wolfram · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting thoughts about the causes of the first and second world war which were new to me. Besides that an utter waste of time: The author's prose is rather close to being unbearable and the sheer amount of quotations that together are (as often mentioned) supposed to change our view on the history of the last 150 years starts to get incredibly annoying after some time, especially the more far-fetched the implied inferences become. If this is the best case for revisionism one can make while aiming at a non-academic audience I am disappointed.

One more thing: The audiobook (read by the author) is a trainwreck which I would only recommend to my worst enemies.

[Flutlicht · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wer sein Wissen über die deutsche Geschichte auf den neusten wissenschaftlichen Stand bringen will, dem sei dieses geniale Buch von Thorsten Schulte empfohlen.

Im Nachhinein muss man leider sagen:
Was man in Deutschland an den Schulen über die deutsche Geschichte lernt, ist zu großen Teilen Propaganda. Schulte schafft den Spagat, die deutsche Geschichte zu Gunsten der Deutschen kritisch aufzubereiten ohne die Taten des Nationalsozialismus zu verherrlichen, zu verharmlosen oder zu rechtfertigen.

[Marina Koerber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dieses Buch bringt mich zum Nachdenken.

[Lion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply eye-opening. He made an impressive research effort. The book became extremely fascinating. He corrects the winners history without falling into typical traps from "that camp", which he specifically disputes, unlike other revisionist books. He's does the reasonable split that avoids the problems of both deceptive court historians and revisionist neo-Nazis. This should be required reading, especially for people in allied countries. Although someone should rewrite it to make it more coherent.
I wanted to read this for a while. It is somewhat imperfectly styled, and at first I was quite unimpressed. The people who say the writing is good just like the content. He veers from one issue to another, repeats himself, keeps writing what he will write about later, and there is way too much intro material. The book is an insufficiently continuous collection of quotes with commentary. He often doesn't fully spell out the implication he had in mind, so you kind of have to read between the lines. And he constantly has to do this conspiratorial prodding, in effect saying "hmmm, isn't that suspicious??!?", which is kind of what makes him sound like a conspiracy theorist. If he had just said what his interpretation was, it would have made a more clear impression. In a way his flaw is being honest enough to admitting when he's being speculative. But at times I was unsure what he did want me to understand with his insinuations. I think he's trying to be objective and anticipate detractors by only having verifiable facts, since these authors get attacked so much. But it's your book, you can tell us what your interpretation is. If you want to stay objective, make it clear when the quotes end and your interpretation starts. He really would have needed an editor to connect it all into a flowing prose. The markup feels unprofessional, because he puts random sentences in bold for effect, like less reputable self-published revisionist books do, and there are too many paragraph breaks. He keeps doing these kind of sloppy topic changes: "let's skip to this topic again", "we will get to that, but first we have to talk about this thing". The narrative mentions his writing experience too personally. He is often too focused on irrelevant details, like the time of day some event happened in 1914. It took a few chapters before the book became gripping. Then it was one of the more fascinating read in years.
I suppose the less polished presentation is what we get with his kind of counter-establishment stuff, where the authors get censored by the foreign-owned publishers and have to set up their own to be heard. This was probably just the first work saying this that made it through the information blockade. So what's special about him is that he managed to jump over the censorship barrier, not that his style was pretty. That wasn't his skill.
Note that I still gave the book 5 stars. I congratulate his daringness for putting himself out there with an unpopular message that advances our understanding. Just leaving a book review will probably get you on a watchlist with the German thought police, [CENSORED]. The author got into all sort of legal trouble for his not-quite-so-free speech, and I can understand pretty much everyone is intimidated to tow the establishment line and attack the dissenters to show their own alignment to the system, [CENSORED].
He seems autistic; he is unconcerned with social approval, incredibly focused on details, interested with systematizing what reality is, disregarding social approval, but bad at presentation. He digs incredibly deeply into one topic (I presume he read all those books he mentions), and aggregates a huge amount of data into a fresh interpretation. Normative minds work differently, they mostly just adopt packages of pre-made thoughts based on the social dominance of who says it.
It was interesting how the author made the connection between the world war subjugation of the big surroundable continental European country and the same effects by the Euro, which had not occurred to me. I can understand this content is attacked, it gives people ideas.
(I skipped some in the end because it just make me angry.)

The following is just my own thoughts that came up when reading the book, not things he said directly. Finding out what really happened in history, after 80 years of winners history deliberately obscuring a proper interpretation, and this narrative having been massaged deeply into every presentation by fear of begin contrarian, feels a bit like archaeology: You dig out a clue here and there and try to piece together what the object in the past really looked like. It is an interesting case study of how humans self-deceive based on social incentives.
Everyone wants a simple narrative. The winners, including the "anti-american" left, want a winners history where they are the good guys. And the neo-nazis want the other side to be the good guys, with denied atrocities on their side. What people like Schulte or Suvorov are saying is closer to: there were no good guys in this story. Sorry, no heroes, both sides were bad. But nobody can handle a nuanced reality. They need some flag to wave, some side to "be for". But reality is not that one side of psychotic 20th century baddies was good. One group of baddies won and wrote the history that you read, so your perspective is an artifact of that. That doesn't make the other baddies good. They were still baddies, just real-world ones, with human motivations, instead of cartoon caricatures.
I'm piecing together what happened back then (this is mostly not something the author says): [CENSORED DUE TO SPEECH CRIMINALIZATION]

[Alexcanislupus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Inhalt und Umsetzung ungenügend. Das Hörbuch ist dazu auch noch katastrophal schlecht gelesen.

[Georg Sagittarius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wahres zu unserem Weg als Demagogen-gesteuerte dumme Schafe in den 3.Wk: mE 2026: j-lorber.de! Gerd Gutemann! Jens Wernicke Daniele Ganser!