And 1945. Double whammy. Germany never made a comeback.
The anti-science culture revolution of the 1970s cemented this. It's cool to be bad in science in schools since then, every celebrity boasts about how bad they were in mathematics etc.
German here. It's actually true that you see a lot of "public intellectuals" that publicly tell how bad they were at math.
I only realized that when Merkel as chancellor back in Covid times, after numerous meetings with other politicians and non-scientists, found herself explaining exponential growth on a press conference with her fingers.
I think Germany has been quite good in practical research (see world leading companies, especially smaller ones in niche markets you never heard of),
not so in science (think Nobel Prize winners).
One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and dismissed as psuedoscience, as pathological science: "Jüdische Physik". There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa).
The disease is independent of context. It's about taking a political club and using it to hit anybody you don't like. And we're far from being immune to it even now.
The correct reaction is to identify people using this particular pattern and penalize them regardless of political or cultural affiliation. Especially if they're in your own tribe - you're the one in the best position to censure them.
Not the same thing. Twice the unique zero of cos in [0, 2] is provably equal to the circumference of a circle of diameter 1. It's not equal to 3.2 or whatever the Indiana Pi Bill was trying to legislate.
The depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time.
I wonder if it's similar to how we look down on e.g. string theory, except I don't know if that's an apples to apples comparison given that we haven't seen any string theory apples yet :-)
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect.
EG - a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it.
But that's probably nothing compared to the narrow band of tolerable science when it comes to questions of race or ethnicity. Anything that could be construed as people of some descent being "inferior" in any aspect is pretty risky to publish.
I've just watched a documentary on Netflix, "Three Identical Strangers" (SPOILER ALERT), about a 1960's to 1980's study about identical twins/triplets separated at birth and who grew up in intentionally distinct conditions (of the triplets, one grew up in a blue collar family, one in middle class, and one in a upper class family, all with an older sibling in the family as a sort of "control").
Apparently, the study ran for decades, but the results were never published... it's unclear why but it seems plausible to me that, aside from the ethical concerns, the study came to uncomfortable conclusions about the polemic "nature VS nurture" debate. Initially, they show how all siblings in the study, despite the intentionally very different environments, all came to like and do the exact same things... but later in the documentary, it also shows there were differences enough that the similarities were only superficial (in what I can't see as anything other than trying to appease the "nurture" crowd - as there seems to be no justification for that, as much as I tried to find it in what was shown).
The documentary also mentions the study may even actually have been about the influence of different parenting styles on the children, or even about mental illness, given many of the participants in the study had biological parents who may have been mentally ill (who the hell would give up their children if they didn't have some serious mental issues?!), which again seems to point at trying to divert from the study findings in my opinion.
The documentary is a little sensationalistic as it tries to outrage the viewers instead of trying to understand the actual circumstances of the study (siblings were always separated at birth at the time in most adoption agencies, apparently, that was not the fault of the study), which is a pity but understandable as that makes for better entertainment which is what Netflix really needs for its viewers to be happy, but still it's well worth a watch.
These articles talk a little bit about the controversies:
There's a dirty fashion in climate science to include political activism or call to action in their papers. Especially if they've found something that shows good news about climate change. They qualify it with "... but we must all make an effort to reduce fossil fuel use".
I used to teach science and would tell students not to give life advice to the reader, because that's what we were supposed to teach them. But then all these climate change papers started doing just that. It's equivalent of ancient mathematicians saying "glory to the king" in their work and reveals that the authors are bound by a conflict of interest and can't be expected to do honest work.
I recently read one about childhood safety, and they said that following the government's safety rules was important, while also defining their own idea of what kinds of safety are valuable or harmful. If the government already knows better than you, why are you even researching this? It's obviously just some effort to pressure people into not making their own dangerous decisions. But again, that's not science, that's activism and non-objective.
You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones.
There's the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The authors found a politically incorrect result and tried to cover it up by inventing a new hypothesis (which they hadn't tested) after they'd collected their data.
I also read a fairly comprehensive secondary research paper trying to support the no-biological-differences theory and when it came to Ashkenazi Jews, they admitted the only plausible explanation was genetic superiority.
This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction. People don't look at the research. Probably because they don't want to understand, they just want to spread their political ideology. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever shown that no races are inferior.
Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death.
Also, while everyone has the right to argue anything, no one has the right to have the merits of their effort evaluated. When you go on and tell everyone here that ROT13 is as secure as RSA-2048, everyone will rightly laugh at you without considering your reasoning.
Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers.
It's a technical subject that does not immediately affect most of us on a day to day basis. It is not surprising that people would have poorly informed opinions on a topic they don’t really care about very much.
For what it’s worth, the average college educated liberal has a comparably abysmal understanding of climate change but their ideological judgement happens to be closer to reality on this one.
I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that.
The sad part is any scientific topic that becomes politicized, becomes abyssal in terms of science. It is true of climate change, feminism before that, all the way back to 1500 and planets.
I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020?
OTOH climate science as a field did already suffer from siege mentality before, whether justified or not, that did suppress rather than engage disallinged views.
(Fwiw my own not too informed view on the subject is we are heading for real disaster, we will and have postponed any real action until too late, but it will be the geo-engeneering grifters that will put the final nail in the coffin)
> a scientist can easily get smacked down for being "a climate change denialist" or an "antivaxer" or a similar unpalatable label way before the merits of their effort are evaluated.
Interestingly, I have more examples of the opposite: scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming) or totalitarian control freaks (or some enlightened nonsense about being mindless followers of prominent Jewish people, very subtle that one) for saying that vaccines save lives.
Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with people getting actually killed or deported for their work, even though some loud mouths have a persecution complex.
>scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming)
the attacks come from different directions - climate alarmists attack comes from without the scientific community (political, corporate)
climate denialist or antivaxer attacks generally come from within the scientific community, generally from experts in the field from which results are being denied.
The people who then want to support climate denialism can then say the scientists are non-scientific because they are taking sides, providing another useful tool of attack.
There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore.
I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.
Anyway, I don’t think you really have a point with what you’re saying here. You can’t put anti-vaccinate “science” up for a discussion with real science because it’s utter nonsense. Similarly you can’t be a climate change denier, you’re free to argue about what causes the heat up, but you can’t deny that it’s been happening at a rapid pace since the Industrial Revolution, at least not with any pretence of doing science.
It depends what you mean by "antivaxer", what is the subclinical myocarditis rate for ACAM1000 again? (Not ACAM2000, I'm very specifically talking about ACAM1000)
>There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though.
Read pages 4,5,6 of this vaccine insert[1]. It seemingly says a large percent of infants have adverse reactions to vaccines (up to 85% for some vaccines and symptoms). An anti-vaxxer can say "I won't give my kid a shot that has a chance of causing an adverse reaction."
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.
It's simple. They don't trust authorities on the subject. They don't trust authorities in general. They feel lied to and manipulated. In many ways, that's the fault of the authorities. They are prone to simplifying things in order to get their consent.
During the pandemic I witnessed government officials proclaiming that there were no risks associated with the vaccines. That's just false.
Everything is a risk/benefit calculation. There is no 0% and no 100%. Things are vastly more complex than they seem to be. Yet these authorities insist on simplifying things for the layman in order to manufacture consent for their public policies.
These people aren't stupid. They will find out. When they do, they will never listen to you again. They will actively resist you.
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing. With a lot of these things like climate change, there are clear economic forces which will pour “tobacco is healthy” amounts of money into pushing whatever makes them money. But then you have something like antivaxing which quite literally benefits nobody, because even the people who don’t want to put themselves at risk by getting vaccinated still sort of do so by collectively bringing back terrible diseases through their destruction of the herd immunity… but who could possibly gain anything from spreading this nonsense? “Yay, polio and the measles are back!!!”. Then you have the more harmless stuff like flat-earthers which also don’t really have any obvious driving force. But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.
The motivation for anti-vaccine--and flat-earthers, for what it's worth--is basically the same thing as Q-Anon. It's all primarily based on feeding on peoples' feeling of a conspiracy against them. It's not being pro-measles, it's thinking that the vaccine is a cover for the government trying to collect your DNA or euthanize your children or something, and there are all too many grifters who are willing to ride the wave of such thinking and flog their own products on top of that. Don't use the government's cure for COVID, buy my COVID cure for only $50! And I'm not the government or an evil megacorporation, so you know I'm trustworthy.
> But at least it’s harmless and sort of funny.
It's... not really harmless. There's a path from the flat earth stuff to the January 6 riot.
Imagine someone asks you: "If I flip a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds it comes up tails on the 100th toss?"
Do you say 50%, or do you dismiss their prior? At what point do you dismiss their prior or them, entirely? You don't have to dispute the mathematics, you just have to get bored with the impracticality of the question: it will never happen. Maybe they should flip that allegedly fair coin until it comes up heads (or tails) 99 times in a row and get back to us.
It's reasonable to ask what confounding factors are at play. It's reasonable to have a null hypoothesis.
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.
I think the cause might have been the polar opposite of a conspiracy: isolated, but similar, examples of opportunistic fraud. Soon after COVID-19 vaccines were developed, I saw lots of advertisements for pseudo-scientific remedies for COVID-19 - these were clearly intended to make some profit out of the public's justified concerns about mRNA technology.
However, once mRNA vaccines proved themselves to be not especially different in efficacy or danger from traditional vaccines, it makes sense that the vendors of pseudo-scientific remedies would seek to maintain the anxiety about vaccines somehow. Hundreds of self-serving quacks trying to keep their customers (and compensate for the shrinking size of their market!) would naturally result in self-sustaining movements of anti-vaxers. The persistent conflation of COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with civil liberties campaigners in some parts of the media would have benefited the quacks further, by making anti-vaxing seem more of a legitimate social movement than it actually was.
Ironically, this is how popular beliefs are supported, but I don't think anti-vax is one of them. The news tells people what they want to hear to keep them engaged to make money from advertising to them. That's why news organizations are split into partisan groups, they have to do that to serve their own markets. Anyone being neutral would alienate most of their audience by making them uncomfortable.
Remember when the correct belief about the origin of Covid was naturally occurring in an animal then spreading to people in a market? Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false. But the news kept telling people that because people had already formed political attachment to that belief.
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect.
We find them where they intersect with actual reality, because it's all just nonsense. Electrons and photons are not real. You won't ever get your quantum computer (at least not in that way), because the physics isn't real.
String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED
Quantum physics and relativity were a radical departure from classical mechanics and remain very counter-intuitive for laypeople so it's not hard to see how contemporary persons with ulterior motives and little interest in scientific inquiry would fixate on those.
The Nazis weren't unique in dismissing categories of research on ideological grounds. The USSR label of "bourgeois pseudoscience" [1] was applied to various fields like evolutionary biology.
We aren't immune to it now. In the software world, remember that Ballmer called Linux a cancer, and in general there is a meme amongst capitalist software developers that the GPL is a cancerous or infectious license. In academia, there is always a question of where the funding is coming from, or how some research output can be monetized, and so there is an inherent bias against research which doesn't offer hope of capitalist and military-industrial dividends.
> remember that Ballmer called Linux a cancer, and in general there is a meme amongst capitalist software developers that the GPL is a cancerous or infectious license
And google and apple are spending millions of dollars to reimplement GNU software because they want to escape the GPLv3 license.
There’s a difference in having a subjective opinion on an OS and flat out denying physical phenomenon like the photoelectric effect. What kind of nonsensical analogy is this.
When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
The analogy is that regardless of sociopolitical setting, people in power use their non-evidence-based opinions to suppress developments which they consider to be against their ideology.
> When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.
You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of something nearly the entire world has received which was being said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than the thing that actually killed millions of people during the last few years?
It would be pretty weird if there were major political parties denying the science like that, or even picking who they would vote for as a leader based on the person agreeing with their magical thinking flying in the face of empirical evidence on that subject.
"Major political parties" know that votes from idiots are as valuable as votes from people they are unable to fool: no-vax conspiracy theorists are one of many despicable constituencies that they want to be nice to, at the cost of alienating a smaller number of better people.
Protecting people from COVID involves more than preventing them from contracting the illness. It reduced mortality and hospitalizations. Compare the mortality rate in a country like Brazil to the US and tell me again how the vaccines didn't protect people from COVID.
I seriously don't get this antivax nonsense. People get the flu after a flu vaccine sometimes too. The point is to not have a naive immune system if all other defenses fail.
The Nazis have had a strong mystic and esotheric undercurrent which also had to do with the Thule Society. When Hitler came to power German of all walks of life thought they could wield him to reach their own goals. Being correct in the sense of logic isn't what the Nazis were about. Or as my grandfather said paraphrased from Austrian German (who was in the Hitler Youth, like all kids his age — he was 12 when the war ended): "I didn't like the Nazis because in their ranks only simpletons and brutes would get into positions of leadership." So I am not surprised all kind of things have been called "jewish", as this was an easy way to quickly get rid of people you either disliked, envied or who simply did better work than you.
In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.
> There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
People now deny climate change, often because it's 'liberal' - think of the incredible consequences of climate change, far greater than the disregarded physics, and yet it's ignored. It's the same with vaccines - people are causing their kids to become sick and sometimes die. It applies to many more things these days - anything 'liberal' is automatically rejected, regardless of cost.
What I mean is that I regularly see science being denied on the right because it’s labeled “woke.” Mostly social science at the moment, but I see the term attached to medical science as well, vis a vis the pandemic for example. It’s utterly nonsensical, but the point is to imbue the subject with negative feelings by association.
Woke people believe math is racist. They get people banned or fired from universities. I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist?
Could you give us an example? I know about racism issues associated with math education, but I've never heard that 'mathematics is racist'.
> They get people banned or fired from universities.
What does that have to do with denying or rejecting science? Also, sometimes people get fired for legitimate reasons; the fact that they were fired is not a sign of problems.
> I mean there have been N-treads about the latest woke idiocy on campuses across the states here on HN, why are some people always pretending it doesn't exist?
I'm sure you know that there are powerful tides of misinformation and disinformation on the Internet - about climate change and vaccines, for example. Lots of repetition doesn't make something true. In fact, science is founded on the opposite: One person's verifiable facts are believed before the entire world's repetition.
The discussion of Weyl is incoherent: according to the author he was both forced out and decided to leave. The reality is that he decided to leave Germany out of fear for his family, after delaying an alarming interval of time.
One of the very first people to be removed from a faculty position by the Nazis in the purge of Jews is also one of the most important mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century, but goes unmentioned by this author. I discuss her removal and its aftermath, and the phenomenon of her invisibility to both amateur and professional historians, in my forthcoming book: https://lee-phillips.org/noether/
It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host.
If Germany "simply" wanted to win WW2, it should have cultivated its Jewish scientists (and by the way, 100K Jewish soldiers served their country in WW1) instead of eradicating them as per this article. Not to mention, diverting scarce wartime resources towards the program of concentration camps and ethnic extermination is not just pure evil - but strategically stupid.
It seems very clear that Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany. This pattern repeats throughout history including in the modern day.
Ultimately, once you start optimizing for your hatred vs your love (of your own people, for example) you're going to make decisions that doom you.
From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence.
"Hitler and his friends hated the Jews more than they wished for some positive outcome for Germany" really misunderstands the world-view of the Nazis, and what Hitler did and didn't believe.
Anti-Semitism came rolling out of 19th century racial science; many people self-described themselves as such. As in: "against the Semitic race" (as opposed to the Aryan race), in the same way someone might describe as "anti-" any number of things today.
A number of organisations in the late 19th century carried the label (e.g. Antisemitische Volkspartei in Germany, or Antisemitic League in France), and a number of elected candidates from other parties were explicitly and proudly self-described anti-Semitic.
From outside the Nazi world-view, it of course makes a lot more sense. A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks. But I don't think you can so easily separate Nazi-ism and the second world war.
Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.
It’s true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century it was called Jew hatred. “Antisemitism” was an attempt to dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that.
Especially in the context of the Nazi ideology, this really matters. Recall that the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jews, who were also considered racially inferior, and the plan was to kill many more. Nazis treated the Danish, Dutch, French, English, etc. much better (no mass executions of prisoners of war, and the occupation of those countries was markedly different from the occupation of Slavic countries).
There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.
No one would dispute that hatred towards Jews existed for 1000s of years, but I think you're mincing words here and being somewhat uncharitable. The kind of anti-Semitism that was based on an innate racial inferiority rather than based on religion and culture was very much a 19th century development and it was that specific form of hatred towards Jews that was widespread across Europe and America rather than an opposition towards Jewish customs and beliefs.
Indeed the term "anti-Semitism" was coined to reflect the shift in hatred towards Jews from one rooted in culture and religion to one root in race. The very fact that you acknowledge that pogroms prior to the 19th century were not based on race suggests that if you had just taken the time to actually understand what was being said you could have avoided your confusion.
While the impact on Jewish individuals was the same, it's true that Nazi style antisemitism focused on them as a racial group (Their ancestry), whereas previously they were targeted as a faith group (What they believed).
Your example of the Pale actually makes the point; Converting to Russian Orthodox actually released you from the rules imposed on Jews within the Pale. Conversion wouldn't save you from Nazis.
I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I made to describe a specific part of the Nazi world view.
This is not "weird thing", it's a mainstream view that I got from mainstream Jewish authors on the history of Jews. But hey, maybe those are also weird *shrug*
And your extremely condescending attitude is not appreciated.
Hatred of a people based solely on religion while despicable has a different nature from racial hatred.
If you had googled "expulsion of jews from" you would notice there were many times they were allowed to stay if they converted (at least, give the appearance of). The Marrano during the times of the Spanish Inquisition is a notable example.
But if you are a jew in the era of antisemitism, there is nothing you can adopt to not be a jew. In the eyes of racists, you will always be a jew and the object of their hatred.
So, yes, 19th century antisemitism has a markedly specific nature that doesn't compare to the past.
Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does.
None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.
But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent, when it clearly wasn't in almost anything. The "racial" anti-Semitism was merely a fig leaf provided by quack science of the times.
And yes, the Nazis viewed the Slavic peoples as "Untermensch", but didn't harbor as much animus towards them. They were simply in the way of the Nazi expansionist policy of Lebensraum. Whereas anti-Semitism was extremely widespread through German society and further inflamed by the Nazis.
And no, "anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science" is not accurate one bit. The majority of today's anti-Semitism is purely religious in nature. Oh, some white supremacists might try to invoke some bullshit the racial inferiority of the Jews, but the real hate is religious in nature. Combine that with anti-Zionism (which is often a mask for anti-Semitism) and it all falls apart.
And it's incredibly disingenuous to trot out the usual arguments about how the Nazis killed more Slavs than Jew, etc etc. These are part of the playbook that attempts to minimize the Shoah.
Finally, the bit about how the Nazis treated the Western countries much better, EXCLUDES the Jewish citizens of those countries.
I'm pretty sure you're not arguing in good faith at all, but you seem to be wanting to keep this going.
I very explicitly said it's not: "A lot of the Nazi rhetoric isn't even internally consistent and it was all a load of bollocks"
Are you even reading what I'm writing? Your unhinged ridiculous accusations which directly contradicts what I wrote suggests you're not.
I did not mention or talk about contemporary antisemitism. Don't try to twist things.
And yes, obviously "they treated the Dutch, English etc. better" excludes Jews. It also excludes communists, and gays, and some other groups. This is a boring "gotcha" type argument.
Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed.
Yes, I do know about the very unfortunate anti-semitic acts carried out in German cities as part of the First Crusade, but that kind of proves my point, starting with the 1200s-1300s the Jewish population throughout (what would later be called Western) Europe stopped being a thing.
Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...
And where do you think the Jews in the 1800s in Europe came from? Of course, they'd been there all along, except in the countries that actively ethnically cleansed them like Spain.
I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.
> Spain is about as West as you can go and still be in Europe...
Geographically, of course, but in this type of historical discourse geography isn't the ultimate decider. Notice how Northern countries like Norway, Sweden and even Finland are considered as part of "Western Europe", even though there's only about a 3-hour drive between Sankt Petersburg and the Russian-Finnish border.
There have always been Jews in Europe. Martin Luther famously spent quite some time ranting about them.
All I said is that the shape of antisemitism was different before the 19th century, and that this distinction matters. Not that persecution of Jews didn't exist before that time, and certainly not that there were not Jews in Europe.
Whether it's a major factor in European history is somewhat subjective. It's certainly a major factor in Jewish history.
I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.
The massacre at York in 1190 took the lives of about a hundred Jews, whilst the population of York at that time was somewhere around 7000. As a proportion of the population, that makes it as bloody, possibly considerably more so, than the Holocaust within their respective scopes. I would posit therefore that antisemitism was a very major factor, but the decentralised, often pastoral political geography of pre-industrial Europe makes it harder to see the extent of that antisemitism.
I did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down.
After that I wouldn't say that there were"repeated" violences against Jews (when it comes to Western Europe) for the simple reason that there were almost no Jews around against whom to have that violence anymore. All that changed starting with the 19th century.
Not to mention that Hitler took a lot of influence from Southern USA racists/Jim Crow. The idea of racial purity was thoroughly globalised by the time the Nazis took power.
American's LOVED eugenics for giving them an excuse to keep believing what they already wanted to believe. Other southerners took the approach of letting their pastors tell them that "it was god's will that the negro serve us" and that keeping slaves was outright the morally upstanding thing to do with "savage races"
We also used eugenics as a "science" to make laws that allowed us to non-consensually sterilize "lesser" people.
We never actually dealt with this hateful undercurrent in our society. Large sections of america still believe in a hierarchical world order where their "type" of person is at the top and other "types" of people are less deserving. It has been holding us back and ruining our country for 250 years.
You're mixing up the unintended consequences with the intended consequences. Persecuting jews (and others) was an intended consequence and started a lot earlier than WW2. Hitler wanted war, but just to the east - not a world war with the west. He was convinced the French, British and Americans wouldn't care enough to resist him. WW2 was an unintended consequence.
This explanation fails to describe what happened in 1940: when Hitler invaded Poland, UK and France declared war, but they stayed in France and Belgium so if Hitler only wanted war on the East, he could very much have it due to the reluctance of the colonial powers to attack. He deliberately chose to invade France.
(And it was an overwhelming success by the way, his demise came from the betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (and the even stupider move by the Japanese to attack the US at Pearl Harbor): had the conflict settled, or at least stick to a stalemate, in the positions of May 1940, WWII would have ended as a complete German and Japanese success.)
It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board. Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia, given the support they would have received against Stalin without their accompanying genocide.
The big but in this, is whether they would have gotten there to begin with. Picking on the Jews was a huge cash/property grab, which was used to buy their support with general German population. Are the Nazis still the Nazis without the genocide? Do they even end up wanting to start a war?
It was so much more than just a cash/property grab. It was also an accidental ideology hack to plaster over the unsolvable conflict between working class and capitalism.
Short reminder that by name, it was a socialist workers' party. But a socialist workers' party fooling themselves into believing that all strife of the working class could somehow be blamed on the subset of capitalists who happened to be Jews. And by doing so, they offered capitalists who were not a lifeboat to survive the upcoming revolution, survive with all their status and wealth, or more even. A revolution was coming, and they would rather have it brown than red. Many of the moneyed class despised Nazis as the uneducated roughlings that they were, but begrudgingly accepted them as lesser evil compared to red socialists. Before, in almost all cases I guess, eventually getting pulled in by all the cheering. It may sound absurd to us, but Nazism ran on positivity. "Be part of it, it will be awesome" (unless of course you happen to be one of those we need as common enemies to unite against, please be a good victim and just shut up while we remove you from existence. Don't worry, we'll find a substitute for you to push out next when you're gone)
Without antisemitism to distract the working class, nazism would have never grown beyond a group of sad drinking buddies with bad pick-up lines. The cash/property grab happened much later, about a decade after antisemitism enabled the unlikely alliance of (some) capitalists and (some) workers that carried them into power.
You are right on the point. Also note that antisemitism was the ideological way to unify the image of a nebulous jewish german finance class with bolshevism, painting them as both sides of the same jewish conspiracy coin. This way the hatred to the capitalist class was diverted to hatred against bolshevism. Antisemitism was what made that ideological manoeuvre possible.
The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial might of the US alone was simply too powerful.
"You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!"
I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht.
But I think they would never have succeeded if it hadn´t been for the 1929 US crash, and the subsequent withdrawal of loans from Germany by the New York banks in response, which pushed Germany over the edge for the second time.
As to how Germany wins WW2, or at least fights into a Cold War like stalemate. Germany continues the Battle of Britain for another month, rather than switching to bombing London, the RAF runs out of operational pilots (rather than newly trained pilots with 8 hours flying experience who have yet to fire their guns, they had plenty of those.). Or just that the men who made up the Polish and Czech squadrons that had the most kills in the Battle of Britain don´t make it across Europe to fight on for the RAF.
Britain falls, the London government retreats to Canada, Hitler can now turn his attention to Russia, without having to fight a two front war. They might still have lost that one, Russia is big, and would presumably have been backed up by the USA and the remains of the British Empire, but the atom program in Germany isn´t that far behind, and they do have the V3 by 1944, so it hopefully? ends up in some kind of Cold War by the 1950´s. (Essentially the storyline of several alternate histories out there. and the SS-GB series.)
It's possible that had the Germans forced a surrender or armistice upon Britain, that the US never gets involved. Domestic sentiment against US involvement was pretty strong and took all of FDR's political skills to overcome for Lend Lease etc.
I'm not sure that Britain could fall though, especially with Lend Lease. The Luftwaffe, while able to initiate the BoB, had surprising losses in the invasion of France, Poland and the Low Countries. Given how the Luftwaffe rarely rotated pilots out of combat squadrons to train new pilots, these losses were difficult to replace, and probably were one of the reasons for the success of the RAF. Also, none of the German fighters really had enough range to escort their bombers over the UK. And the RN was a huge impediment to any invasion of Britain that I doubt could be overcome.
Lend lease was signed in March 1941 - Battle of Britain was Autumn 1940. It's hard to say how much the RN could have done, it's not that far across the channel, and it would have been potentially a very broad front.
Another fun read are Churchill's war diaries (all 6 volumes), where he reveals one of the first things he did was write a begging letter to Roosevelt to send 100,000 rifles to arm the home guard amongst others. Then as now, the UK was woefully ill prepared for war. They did manage to get copies of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster out though - it was printed to be displayed after a successful invasion.
Anti-semitism(or any other type of systematic hate) is not a disease but a symptom of a declining, rotten society.
It's also wishful thinking that any society that engages in genocide will self-destruct. Plenty of historical examples exist where it continued to survive and collapsed for other reasons.
It's really not. It leaves open the possibility that others could fill in the gaps, given enough time. Their wasn't enough time, and path dependence matters.
It doesn't seem like Germany suffered any setbacks in this regard. In fact it seems that this dispute was a major cause of antisemitism, rather than its result.
This actually comes up a lot in the "alternative history" community, who like to imagine ways "the nazis could have won", and in the end, they always come down to "If the nazis had just been less nazi, they could have survived".
Nazism was society built upon hatred and lies, including lying to yourself. When you are no longer connected to reality in such a way, you miss very clear details, things like "Hey maybe we can't win against everyone at the same time"
Indeed, that is what Sebastian Haffner argues in The Meaning of Hitler: In December 1941 he abandoned the goal of world conquest in favour of the Final solution–exterminating the Jews [1].
The counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain power, but is a double edged sword since you can only ramp up the rhetoric if you want to keep your coalition together, the very force that brings you to power distracts you from your actual objectives.
Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign.
In the end it's a "what if?" type question, but I think a decent case can be made that anti-Semitism was not key to the Nazi success, although it was part of it. The NSDAP was far from the first or only anti-Semitic party, even at the time. But it was the only major fascist party in Germany at the time. In other countries fascist parties managed without such strong explicit anti-Semitism, Italy and Spain being the most notable.
In my reading of events of the 20s and 30s, it was much more of an ideological battle and disappointment with the ruling class than anything else. This is also why the communist party did well at the time, and one reason the Nazis spent so much effort fighting them even though there are more similarities than both liked to admit.
Or in brief: most people voted mostly for the fascism, not anti-Semitism. The basic concept of "strong leader to get shit done" has been and remains popular in various forms for a long time, especially in times of hardship.
Hitler's ascension to power was aided and abetted by the ruling class which thought he would be a tool they could control. And the Reichstag fire was just a pretext for Hitler to assume complete control; the Nazis were already in control of the German government at this point.
And Hitler did seize power quite easily. After the Beer Hall Putsch was put down, he was given extremely light treatment for treason. Upon his release from Landsberg, he was funded by the industrialists and aristocracies who were afraid of a communist/socialist government.
If you've read Mein Kampf or listened/read many of Hitler's speeches from 1924 through his seizure of power in 1933, there's one thread that runs through them all; anti-semitism and blaming the Jews for all of Germany's woes.
Without the "your enemy is not capitalism, it's the Jew!" ploy that entire "working class brownshirts beat up communists on behalf of industrialists" thing would not have happened at all. Antisemitism was the keystone that kept their self-contradicting ideological mess from collapsing before they even got a foot on the ground.
You have to tap into some strong basic instinct to get unquestioning massive support from the majority of the populace. In most cases, like in the case of Nazi germany, it is/was tapping into tribalism. Doing that builds up the in group’s self worth, imbues them with a feeling of superiority and generally makes them feel like they are living better, happier lives. Having someone to look down on is probably the easiest way to feel successful and happy. This isn’t rational thinking.
A
Alfred Adler
Hermann Adler
Max Adler
Raoul Auernheimer
B
Bertolt Brecht
Otto Bauer
Vicki Baum
Johannes R. Becher
Richard Beer-Hofmann
Hilaire Belloc
Walter Benjamin
Robert Hugh Benson
Walter A. Berendsohn
Ernst Bloch
Felix Braun
Bertolt Brecht
Willi Bredel
Hermann Broch
Ferdinand Bruckner
Edmund Burke
C
G. K. Chesterton
D
Dorothy Day
Ludwig Dexheimer[3]
Alfred Döblin
John Dos Passos
E
Einstein's official 1921 portrait after receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics
Albert Ehrenstein
Albert Einstein
Carl Einstein
Friedrich Engels
Erasmus
F
Sigmund Freud
Lion Feuchtwanger
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Marieluise Fleißer
Leonhard Frank
Anna Freud
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
G
Edward Gibbon
André Gide
Ernst Glaeser
William Godwin
Emma Goldman
Claire Goll
Oskar Maria Graf
George Grosz
H
Ernest Hemingway
Ernst Haeckel
Radclyffe Hall
Jaroslav Hašek
Walter Hasenclever
Raoul Hausmann
Heinrich Heine
Ernest Hemingway
Theodor Herzl
Hermann Hesse
Magnus Hirschfeld
J. Edgar Hoover
Jakob van Hoddis
Ödön von Horvath
Karl Hubbuch
David Hume
Aldous Huxley
I
Vera Inber
J
Hans Henny Jahnn
Thomas Jefferson
Georg Jellinek
K
Franz Kafka in 1910
Franz Kafka
Georg Kaiser
Mascha Kaleko
Hermann Kantorowicz
Erich Kästner
Karl Kautsky
Hans Kelsen
Alfred Kerr
Irmgard Keun
John Maynard Keynes
Klabund
Heinrich Kley
Annette Kolb
Paul Kornfeld
Siegfried Kracauer
Karl Kraus
Peter Kropotkin
Adam Kuckhoff
L
Portrait of Jack London, taken between 1906 and 1916
Else Lasker-Schüler
Vladimir Lenin
C. S. Lewis
Karl Liebknecht
Jack London
Ernst Lothar
Emil Ludwig
Rosa Luxemburg
M
Thomas Mann in the early period of his writing career
Joseph de Maistre
André Malraux
Heinrich Mann
Klaus Mann
Thomas Mann[4]
Mao Zedong
Hans Marchwitza
Ludwig Marcuse
Karl Marx
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Walter Mehring
Thomas Merton
E.C. Albrecht Meyenberg
Gustav Meyrink
Ludwig von Mises
Thomas More
Erich Mühsam
Robert Musil
Taryn Moses
N
Alfred Neumann
Robert Neumann
John Henry Newman
O
Carl von Ossietzky in Esterwegen concentration camp (1934).
Flannery O'Connor
George Orwell
Carl von Ossietzky
Ouida
P
Marcel Proust
Thomas Paine
Hertha Pauli
Adelheid Popp
Marcel Proust
R
Erich Maria Remarque in Davos, 1929.
Fritz Reck-Malleczewen
Gustav Regler
Wilhelm Reich
Erich Maria Remarque
Karl Renner
Joachim Ringelnatz
Joseph Roth
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
S
Rudolf Steiner around 1891/92, etching by Otto Fröhlich
Nelly Sachs
Felix Salten
Rahel Sanzara
Arthur Schnitzler
Alvin Schwartz
Anna Seghers
Walter Serner
Fulton Sheen
Ignazio Silone
Adam Smith
Joseph Stalin
Rudolf Steiner
Carl Sternheim
T
J.R.R. Tolkien
Ernst Toller
Friedrich Torberg
B. Traven
Leon Trotsky
Kurt Tucholsky
Mark Twain
V
Voltaire
W
H. G. Wells circa 1918
Jakob Wassermann
Armin T. Wegner
Simone Weil
H. G. Wells
Franz Werfel
Oscar Wilde
Eugen Gottlob Winkler
Friedrich Wolf
Common estimates are that WWII killed 50
million to 100 million people. So, wanted
to get some understanding of how it
happened, how to avoid such, and looked at
many descriptions of that history.
I'm just a US citizen, not a professional
historian, and here have only rough
explanations, maybe not 100% wrong.
A really short description: Hitler became
a dictator and then went nuts.
For a little more:
(1) Foundation. The German culture
didn't have much in resistance, walls,
defenses, etc. against a dictatorship.
Hopefully our US Constitution and three
branches of government will have the US do
better.
(2) Provocation. Germany suffered in WWI,
the provisions of the Treaty of
Versailles, some massive monetary
inflation, and, then, the Great
Depression.
(3) Unification. Early on, say, starting
near 1933, Hitler was an effective speaker
and able to exploit the culture and
the provication politically to unify
Germany.
(4) Success. Soon Hitler was a dictator
and had something of a 4 year plan to get
the economy going again. In simple terms,
the plan worked.
Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there
and likely been okay.
(5) Empire. Long in Europe, the idea of
an empire was common, and Hitler wanted
one and started grabbing land.
There was the reaction of the conference
and treaty at Munich, 9/30/1938.
Hitler could'a stopped there, but, nope,
he was only beginning. He had an excuse
he could use -- his master race wanted
living space.
(6) Poland. He attacked Poland and
quickly occupied about half of it. An
excuse was that he wanted the piece of
Poland that separated Germany and East
Prussia. France and England responded
with war on Germany, but it didn't do
much. Hitler could'a stopped there.
By then Hitler had done lots of ugly
things and got away with them, e.g., the
Holocaust.
(7) Military. Hitler's military did well
in fast attacks against opponents not yet
taking war seriously.
For longer, larger battles, his military
was not good: His airplanes didn't have
enough range to do well bombing England.
England's defense -- radar, Spitfires --
was good; Hitler's losses were high; and
he gave up.
He could'a stopped there.
Instead, he attacked Russia; his front and
supply lines were both too long; and
Russia was too much for his "fast attack
military".
(8) Two Fronts. While Hitler was losing
in Russia, the US and England did the
D-Day attack at Normandy and quickly ran
to Germany. He was in a "two front" war
with both fronts long lasting and too
much for his "fast attack military".
(9) Nuts. He had lots of chances to stop
in place, declare victory, sign some
papers, and live in peace. Instead, as
his attack on Russia was failing he went
nuts and went even more nuts after D-Day.
Lesson: Too commonly, if make a human a
dictator, they will be short on
constraints and do nutty things, e.g.,
want to take over the world. So, have a
constitution and a democracy that keeps
out dictators.
> Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay.
If Hitler had been Franco or Mussolini, then maybe. But racism and especially anti-semitism were integral parts of Nazi ideology. It wasn't principally about wealth or strategic objectives as we might recognise them. They really believed that the races of the earth were in a big struggle for resources and that if the "Aryan race" didn't exterminate or subjugate the others, it would risk extinction.
Your analysis seems to rest on the idea that Hitler was some brilliant politician that went nuts because he had too much power, but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power.
> but he was "nuts" way before he ever came into power.
I agree, sure, but strictly, literally that doesn't conflict with what I wrote -- i.e., I didn't claim he was not nuts before 1933 or before he became a dictator! I considered being clear and explicit on this point but omitted such to make the main points shorter and simpler. And I part way addressed this issue by noting that with constraints a nut might not look like one but look nuts if the constraints are off.
> was some brilliant politician
Well, it seems accepted that on his way to being a dictator he was an effective speaker. Maybe he had some industrial backers who were brilliant.
On the Nazi ideology, Aryan, master race stuff, you know more than I do and might be right, but I omitted mention of those out of not being sure they were more than just a party line, a way to get political support, etc.
"Master Race"? Let's see: Math, science, music. Hmm .... Germany, yes, but also Poland, France, Russia, Austria, Hungary, England, the US, ....
Ah, poor Hitler and his "master race": About then, the 1936 Olympics in Germany, Dad was at Ohio State and knew Jesse Owens -- 4 Gold Medals!!!! Hitler's athletes just needed better running shoes -- that was the problem????
Hitler was certainly brilliant in certain ways, e.g. as a public speaker he must have been very persuasive. I don't think that changes anything about how utterly insane his (and his fellow Nazis') ideology was, though.
There are "effective" dictators who manage to have a stable, if brutal reign, and then there's Nazi-ism which at its very core is such a destructive ideology that it can't really even sustain itself in the long run.
> By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.
No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.
Not to say Hitler hadn't already gotten away with plenty of ugly things by the time he attacked Poland. But the Holocaust wasn't one of them at that time.
> No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.
Hitler attacking the Jews started before 1941, and I used Holocaust as a one-word description of all the Hitler attacks on the Jews. E.g., Google says that Kristallnacht was 11/9/1938.
- Hitler had rich German backers who specifically wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic[0], because democracy was starting to turn on the German capitalist class.
- Hitler was never popular enough to gain control through democratic means. The Weimar Republic was split in thirds between liberals, Nazis, and communists; the liberals thought letting Hitler be "vice-chancellor" (under a liberal chancellor) would be the least bad option. Hitler exploited this and demanded the chancellorship at the last minute. Once he was in position he was able to cause chaos and rip up the Weimar government.
- Very similar events played out in America.
America had its own very popular fascist parties. Furthermore, we had a very long history of people wanting to subvert or exit democracy in the name of white supremacy[1], and even a successful Presidential assassination to stop the fledgling Republican Party from stopping the South from reinventing slavery. Our constitutional guardrails are actually really thin and always have been.
1930s America also had very similar economic problems to Germany. We didn't have crippling war debt or hyperinflation, but the Great Depression was a globalized problem, so everyone had people demanding a strongman, which means fascists have a stall in the marketplace of ideas.
FDR was able to avert catastrophe, largely by subverting several of America's constitutional defenses against dictatorship. To be clear, capitalists had already coopted and corrupted classical liberalism, and they were able to successfully get the Supreme Court to shut down every moderately Progressive[2] policy because the one thing the Constitution was good at stopping was those policies. FDR threatened to pack the courts, and then suddenly the Supreme Court shut up.
But before that, the American capitalists tried doing exactly the same thing Hitler's backers tried - hiring a strongman to go and take over the US government[3]. Except they hired Smedley Butler, who was already getting tired of being Wall Street's hitman, so he immediately blabbed about it to the government. I'm under no illusion that America had plenty of competent men who would sell their country out in order to sit on a comfy chair and let the capitalists loot America. We're just lucky the capitalists picked the wrong guy.
Ultimately the thing that got America out of the Great Depression was WWII - and not because wars are inherently good, but because it gave FDR a blank check to rebuild the economy with government money. And yes, FDR had to engineer this too, by embargoing Japan and daring them to attack us. And yes, even with a not-shitheaded liberal running the show there were still dramatic overreaches of government power[4] that our constitutional guardrails did jack shit against[5].
Not to mention the whole "running for four terms" thing. Yeah, that's right, Presidential term limits were a norm - not a rule - until FDR decided he was just going to keep going until his body stopped him.
America did not come out of WWII with its democracy intact because it has superior structures. Nor because its people are inherently more trustworthy or we had more experience with democracy. (I mean, we did, but barely.) It was largely dumb luck:
- Luck that America's fascist movements didn't shoot first.
- Luck that the Progressive movement backed a liberal, not an authoritarian. FDR absolutely had all the power and could have destroyed American democracy instead of rebuilding it.
- Luck that the capitalist reaction stumbled at the starting line. The Business Plot could have taken him like the South took Lincoln.
The only thing mostly determined at the outset was that we were going to win the war, because we owned the oil. That's why America is still obsessed with oil to this day.
also
>Hitler's military did well in fast attacks against opponents not yet taking war seriously.
This is an echo of how authoritarians take power: do something so batshit insane so quickly that nobody has time to notice you palming everyone's phones. Think like January 6th: had Trump actually been coordinated rather than just angrily lashing out, he could have actually stopped the election before it was certified, gotten his 6-3 Supreme Court to look the other way, and then seized power.
[0] There are historical echoes to the French aristocracy's attempts to choke fledgling democracy out, though in that case the fledgling democracy went paranoid and made its own dictators first.
[1] To be clear, "White" was far narrower then than it is today. It excluded the Irish, Mormons, Italians, and so on. But for the purpose of this discussion we can use the modern colorist definition rather than the far more racist definition they used back then.
[2] As in the political movement, not the extremely genki insurance salesperson character
Yup, I've wondered how many barriers, constraints, etc. the US REALLY has to ensure that we are safe from being like 1930s Germany. My guesses are our Constitution and three branches, but that's guessing and hoping. Uh, my doubts, worries are the main reason I looked into what happened in Germany.
This goes to show how prestige and reputation built up over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of decades.
Also the prestige and reputation of institutions rest solely on the superstars that are in that institution. A single prominent scientist can carry the prestige of an entire institute. This means when they leave, the reputation goes with it.
It's about the institutional culture, not the superstars. The reputation that matters comes from a culture, where the people who are good at what they do can focus on what they choose to do. But if the government / administrators / donors / other politruks get too much say over how the institution is run, that reputation can easily be lost. Superstars leaving is then just a symptom of a wider issue.
If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress.
Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.
On one hand, the fact that a lot of smart people are trying to kill you is a great motivation for rapid technological advance and reduction of red tape.
On the other hand, many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.
> many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.
The problem of geniuses dead in wars pales in comparison to the number languishing in poverty or ignorance. These may number in the billions right now.
How many potential Einsteins are miserably toiling away in dead end jobs? How many Ramanujans are eking out lives in villages in India? So on and so forth.
And another issue: if 100 million die in war or 1 billion aren't born due to fertility collapse, which is worse for progress?
Or how many really brilliant people spend their lives trying to push even more ads on the population at large, for good money and good living standard, but mostly harming humanity instead of helping it with their talent.
Waste of talent doesn't necessarily take the form of poverty and danger. We should be aware of the other part of the scissor, because it means that improving living standards aren't a panacea for this problem.
Hungary 100 years ago, a fairly backward and mostly agricultural country, somehow produced a long string of incredible geniuses that contemporary Dubai cannot.
I think the relentless push for progress leads to wars.
Think about it: You have a top 0.5% intelligent person. You can influence his carreer choice. You can either pay him a good wage to become a detective, or he can become scientist. If he becomes the former, a few good papers on horse fly entomology won't be written. If he becomes the latter, a dumb detective will cause an injustice that will escalate into an assassination, and a world war.
You got your cars, you got your airplanes, but you got a society in a state of disorder, that lead to the sciences getting taken over by morons as well, and made further progress impossible, with the east asian countries competing over technological superiority.
Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2?
IIRC the end of colonialism and thus the end of the associated oppression, is also associated with the world wars, as they left the colonial powers too exhausted to retain their overseas empires.
Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
> Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.
There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't.
Sorta depends if progress means being ready to repel a hostile alien invasion, or if it means being capable of large scale cooperation on geoengineering projects in the face of biosphere collapse, or you know... whatever other can-you-survive-this test comes our way.
You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable.
But if that one shot missed, perhaps we wouldn't have WW1, and without WW1 there wouldn't be WW2 as circumstances would be completely different. Was there a single development as small as firing a single bullet that affected world's history this much?
Nationalism was coming alive as a powerful political force in the second decade of the 20th Century, so it's hard to estimate what would have happened had Princip missed. Odds are the Black Hand would have simply kept trying to kill the King as a means of obtaining independence.
Even had the Balkans not been the powder keg, I think there was not much doubt that there would be a conflict on the Continent between a unified Germany and either Russia or France. Germany was trying to compete for colonies, for resources, and even without the web of treaties that lead to WW1, would have found a reason to flex their muscle.
IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.
"Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."
Take a look at the very first Nazi book burning, for example, which targeted Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. It was the leading institution of its kind, and the complete destruction of its archive and community not only set back the LGBT community in Germany (and to a large extent the rest of the Western world) some 30 years - it didn't really recover until at least 1970!
If it can cause that much damage there, imagine what it would've done to the wider scientific community.
I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English.
But for the most part the technology level of Germany is coupled to that of the rest of the world. It's hard to tell how that would have evolved. Maybe keeping the existing research clusters in Western Europe intact would have lead to faster advances in chemistry and particle physics.
On the other hand we probably wouldn't have a space station today if it weren't for the Nazis bankrolling a rocketry program, the two world wars leading to the creation and rise of the Soviet Union as well as the ascension of the United States to superpower status, and those two bankrolling competing space programs in the aftermath of WWII as a way to show the superiority of their respective ideological systems.
No WWII would have also meant no Manhattan Project. Even a more limited WWII where only the Pacific Theater happened wouldn't have lead to Manhattan Project since the fear of a German nuclear weapon was a major driver. Without nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles make little sense. Which both means that rocketry is even less likely to get off the ground, and that bombers would play a much bigger role (US firebombing on Japan had similar devastation as early nukes, at the expense of needing a lot more bombs for each attack). This would probably mean more advanced aviation than in our timeline.
Without WWII decolonization might not have happened. Not a major impact on Germany as they only had few colonies even before the wars, but the impact on their neighbors would be profound.
Without the world wars leading to the US rising to power and the cold war and nuclear threat the arpanet wouldn't have happened. Would Germany have created something similar, and would it be as decentralized without the defense department backing and threat of nukes taking out key network interchanges? Maybe French Minitel would still have happened and the internet would have been French?
You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life.
Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.
There are plenty of business use cases for computers. Before the invention of electronic computers companies employed rooms full of people to do math by hand, so there was obvious economic incentive to automate this. Every step after that, including smartphones, had obvious economic incentives. Sometimes war helped it along, like demand for better weather simulation or the Apollo program kickstarting demand for silicon chips, but the advances would have come either way.
The same isn't true for rocketry. Communication satellites are nice, but took decades of massive investment, no private enterprise would bankroll this. Space stations still haven't really paid off, they will see (private sector) return of investment once we have figured out some kind of resource extraction (mining of asteroids, the moon, mars, or wherever). With advances in computer technology, metallurgy, etc these technologies got cheaper, so we might have rocketry by now, but I believe space stations would have happened at least a century later than in our timeline without the world wars and the cold war.
Similarly, the incentive for nuclear power is pretty weak. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't a great technology, half a century later we still struggle to make them make economic sense. Without the massive military backing kickstarted by WWII they wouldn't have happened. And that military backing might have eventually happened, but not at nearly the same pace without the threat of nazi nukes and soviet/us nukes.
During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s
The anti-science culture revolution of the 1970s cemented this. It's cool to be bad in science in schools since then, every celebrity boasts about how bad they were in mathematics etc.