chapotraphouse

Love the video of the German diplomat trying to scold the Namibian president about accepting too many Chinese immigrants.

Having the gall to be an official representative of a country that was both the former colonial overlord and comitted genocide and deciding to scold them about the lack of German communities compared to Chinese.

the usual spiel I get about this is that the genocide of the herero and nama is some far past history, like roman conquests, as if it wasn't like 30 years earlier than the genocide. 30 fucking years!

Oh god no, the only thing worse than someone identifying as "german" is identifying as "bavarian" or "hessian" or some other failstate, since that's actually socially acceptable to be proud of and they will channel all their need to feel superior into that identity instead. "german" at least comes with some historical baggage that keeps them from saying what they think.

There is a concept of an immigrant german, but an "immigrant bavarian"? A "black bavarian"?

You're too kind

Apparently I have been promoted to People's Commissar on the National Question, and as such I will issue an answer: at least you aren't American, like I have the misfortune of being. Wear it like a badge of pride.

But seriously, I do always caution people against rhetoric like this:

there is nothing about being german that I find appealling and wouldn’t cast off in moment given the chance

It's for a couple reasons. First: people mean different things when they talk about "casting off" their nationality, but many of them rest on some liberal notion of a universal subject -- the individual, complete in himself, with real essence unshaped by any kind of broader social group. This is un-Marxist, and (for me most convincing) contrary to Juche. I am no racial or national essentialist, but I think you do have to realize, and make peace with, the fact that the particular society you grew up in will always shape the way in which you see the world, and will do so on a deep level. This way of perceiving will often persist through any ideological sea change. Take Russell Bentley, who renounced his US citizenship to fight for an independent Donetsk: despite being a communist and pro-Russian, the guy is as American as they come. It comes through in any discussion he has or anything he writes.

Second, when you conflate a people with its government, you cede ground to the enemy. (I'm talking here about a legitimate, materially-constituted nation, not an artificial construct like Israel -- or indeed the US as one entity). In the history of any genuine country, there is always something to be proud of: it may be great, it may be small or meager, but it serves as a germ of the future. It is up to communists of every nation -- Germany or anywhere else -- to discover what is progressive and of substance in their history, and to seek its fulfilment in the present. Which is why I give no prescriptions, other than to say that yes, Hitler was German, but so were Marx, Hegel, Engels, Goethe, Bach. And that the yankee influence in your country really needs to go.

(You can maybe see how uncomfortable I feel writing this. EDIT: Not because it's a question that shouldn't be addressed, but more because it makes me a Yank dictating culture to other people, and my government already does way too much of that).

When you tell capitalists that facism is the most brutal and chauvinist elements of the bourgeoisie trying to uphold capitalism in crisis by open violence, their only suggestion for effective antifascim is

The US were smart to give us treats and keep us as vasalls or else we might have done another holocaust"

I mean you can see where the economic downturn is leading right now. That's not wrong wrong

I was raised to understand that the "excessive" punishment of Germany post WW1 was the reason we ended up with Hitler, the third reich, the holocaust and WW2. The proud German people were humiliated and degraded by the hardships imposed. And who can blame them? Didn't the German people suffer in the soggy trenches of WW1 like all other stupid pre-democratic people who had no choice but to accept to conscription? They weren't the ones who signed the foolish treaties which led to WW1.

So they looked for an explanation and inevitably someone started talking up this whole "scapegoat" idea which is like human nature or something and for whatever reason it just happened to be jewish people. It happened to be adolph hitler, but it could have been someone else. The manner of concluding WW1 set the trajectory. With the wisdom of hindsight we see it is inevitable.

So this is why Germany, nazis and the others couldn't be punished very badly after WW2, except for just a few figureheads. Who knows what would have been caused by such indignity? An even worse holocaust.

That's the story anyway.

I find it quite effective. It justifies all kinds of post WW2 actions which might seem contradictory, like operation paperclip and Germany still being a G8 country with oodles of power. It also sets up a world view where large scale horror can never really be addressed in any way because it would only serve to create an even worse horror down the road. So pre-justifies any and all crimes as long as they are committed on a national level.

I swear there is a Chomsky segment about America being fixated on Nazi efficiency but I cannot find it. The point is that the Nazis were deeply inefficient, their industry was disorganized and corporatized so extremely that they couldn't get their shit together. Tanks needed parts made by one factory only and couldn't be repaired with the same piece from another, shit like that.

Part of the fixation on this industrialized genocide is that that is how the Holocaust capital H was portrayed by the Nazis in western Europe. There is a reason we call what happened in the east the Holocaust by Bullets, at least specifically in the occupied USSR. The exterminations in the east, and frankly most of them in the entire war, were hasty, brutal, inefficient, and not uniform. We have this need to almost romanticize the Holocaust, make not only the exterminations the Nazis did, but even specifically the killing of Jews in camps into this one specific image. It becomes pageantry.

Germany was industrial and loved pushing that, but importantly even the Autobahn was a failure, and the Nazis never used trucks as their primary means of logistics in WW2, it was always horses, but they made sure that in propaganda people just saw cars moving artillery

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/horses-the-mechanized-myth-of-the-eastern-front/

Numbers range from 75% to 80% of the German forces relying on horses. And they didn't even come close to the efficiency the Soviets had with them. America actually had some spats with the Brits over beasts of burden. WW2 at Sea covers an example with a British admiral being pissed that for Operation Husky invading Sicily the American commander he is to carry units for is bringing mules. They fight over it and eventually the American wins. Low and behold by the time the sun is coming down on the first day incredible progress is halting because trucks are breaking down on the rocky inclines from the beaches, the one unit to make it over though, the one that was able to switch to using mules when their trucks stalled. The admiral later admitted he was an idiot

https://books.google.com/books?id=94NvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT220&lpg=PT220&dq=truscott+connolly++scilly+mules&source=bl&ots=NjFxlLtWH3&sig=ACfU3U0Qx4N0w5YVe20KRtm_LBIQt4pglQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjb5Med9YqEAxU8EFkFHYPADxQQ6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q=truscott%20connolly%20%20scilly%20mules&f=false

Oh here's a fun one, pedal reflectors on bicycles got patented by some chauffeur for the SS dipshit and patented it, then they were required by law and the patend payments got kick backed to the SS by the chauffeur dipshit

Like that's the kind of efficiency the nazis were good at. They were in power anyways but instead of doing like, a normal tax, it had to be this convoluted corruption scheme

That genocide wasn't really "industrialized", really only industrial element to it were trains they used to transport huge numbers of people.
Everything else would be possible for example during Roman times too.

Just that nobody else before did genocide in such systematic and planned way for such a long time and scale. So you could argue this is what they have in mind using that term, but some historical atrocities like for example massacre after battle of Changping in 260 BCE were planned equally meticulously without any industry, even if being single events without the huge scale of holocaust.