Tom > Recent Status Updates

I feel like I've grown up with two competing narrative on WW1.
1) The Germans were just as much victims as the Entente nations. This mostly applies to the individual soldiers, but sometimes transcends to the nation as well.
2) The Germans were morally more abhorrent than the Entente and the consequences for their defeat was completely deserved.

Does anyone have an explanation as to why the humanities used to be full of chuds (much more than the hard sciences) and now it's completely the opposite? To be fair, Evans examples of historians are still pretty based and not as chud as, gulp, sociology profs.

So...I thought that Catholics resisted, to an extent, the Nazis. My ass was completely wrong.

Literally nobody (not even the Communists) completely resisted the Nazis, but the Catholic resistance is straight up Christian propaganda and revisionism.

It's easy to say you would have done something in retrospect or that it was so obvious. At the moment? I honestly don't know.

Was Hitler democratically elected? Not really. - Now that I've gotten an understanding of more than the basics I feel like I know truly nothing.
It seems like just factions of the far-right wanting to be the ones responsible for creating *their* special gov't out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic.

The average voter has always been incredibly dumb and evil: "I was okay with Nazi violence and assassinations but when they supported a worker strike, that was *too* far!"

Having almost finished the pre 1933 part of this trilogy, I can say that I have a lot of respect for the KPD and close to zero for the SPD.
Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds holy shit they were so incompetent.

I think it's really interesting, and under-discussed, how the working-class (labourers and even a sizable percentage of office workers) did not fall for the Nazis (in 1930). And of course, to nobody's surprise, the small business owners and self-employed had the highest amount of Hitler particles.

"Much of the Nazi's appeal lay in their promise to end the political divisions that had plagued Germany..."
"'Destroy the parties! Do away with classes! True national community'"
pp. 224

I am definitely not an expert, but I don't think that any Western country that is experienced a resurgence of the far-right is experiencing a copy of what happened in Weimar Germany.
Are there rhymes? Yes especially with certain demographics like petit landowners, but it is simply not the same.
But I don't know what that will exactly turn out into, as I didn't choose political science LMAO!

The Bavarian Revolution is just absolutely crazy!

At least the Weimer Republic had an excuse for being full of institutional rot, what excuse do governments of today have?

The idea of the university being a "bastion of Marxism" is such a laughing stock. It wasn't true back then and it isn't true today.

Have I become radicalized in the past 3 months? Because I have no sympathy for the Social Democrats. Yet, it’s painfully clear that this lack of faith in the SDP and the institutions is what brought about the Nazis.

It’s telling how the far-right in Germany is shown to be responsible for assassinations and murders, even to the point that the social democrats become complicit. Yet for the far-left, Evans’ most extreme example is armed robbery. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to explicitly equivocate the two, but these levels of criminality are just not the same.

I think it’s boils down to nationalism being a disease.

“The Bright Ages” seems to be a provocative title, because Gabriele and Perry seem to ditch the idea of brightness, and opt for nuance - which they retrofit as brightness.

> goes to do colonialism and has sex with indigenous women.
> wants to bad "miscegenation"

bro

I feel like society has rejected eugenics so hard that even the *idea* is killing a baby based on "inferiority" would sicken 99.99% of people. I think religion does actually help with this, but even atheists find this idea repulsive.

It’s really interesting, but also not surprising, that (a) antisemitism founder originated in misogyny and (b) Engels and many other influential intellectual figure openly fought back against antisemitism. It shows that bigotry isn’t something concrete and that being on the left always revolved around pushing back social conservatism just as much as economic conservatism.

Do Liberals manufacture Nationalism under the guise of "Liberal Values" in order to push and continue bourgeois/aristocratic interests at the cost of individual rights and freedoms?

I think this book will radicalize me to a full-on communist. Not *Communist* - just communist.

I feel like being born between 1996-2002 was probably the age where WW2/Holocaust education was everywhere. I think I'm a *bit* too young to have experienced the peak, but it really was a educational cultural force that I don't think was equally as present before the 1990s (in North America).

I find this book too vague, but I suppose that's the purpose of a survey course. It also is too "everything is hopeful and beautiful and woe to thou suffering".

I am excited to get into this, especially the chapters of the late 19th and the entire 20th century. McGill francais is the one that sounds the most interesting as the most contemporary one, but Nerbas' one on McGill student culture will also be good.