Debts, promises and the erosion of democracy | 423 comments (422 topical, 1 editorial, 0 hidden)

So we can't draw parallels because too many people are historically illiterate? Rational man indeed.

Anyway, the interesting parallels (mainly) aren't in the workings of the fully fledged Nazi state, they're in the rise of that entity.

Mind you, as discussed above, and given the way history works, it's not entirely unlikely that the current lunacy will eventually manage to produce it's own holocaust(s).

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 07:10:44 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

No, the problem is not historical literacy, it is the emotional content. The Nazi regime, the Holocaust and the second world war is not only a piece of history, it is a story that is the mayor historical emotional reference point - reinforced through gun'n'nazi-movies - that establishes our secular devils and angels.

Unfortunately for mankind, but fortunately for those who wish to draw historical comparisions, most things the nazis did has been done to a larger or lesser extent somewhere else, so it is only a problem if you either a) don't know any other examples or b) want to draw on the emotional content of evil nazis.

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by A swedish kind of death on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 07:41:51 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 5)

I think the idea is that Germany has had a confrontation with their past, and there's been a national cleansing of sorts, so that any mention of the Nazis (as analogy) seems grossly unfair as it wipes away the postwar confrontation with history.

But I place much of this discussion on an analysis of certain repercussions that have not yet been dealt with.

Frankly, I've been shocked at the depiction of Greece and Greeks by the German media and German hierarchy. Given Germany's history vis-a-vis Greece, I did assume Germany would be more chaste in its approach.

This is what sticks in my craw more than anything: when discussing Greece's history of poverty and defaults on its loans, it's apparently OK to go back centuries and insinuate there is something rotten in Greek genetics or DNA, but with Germany, it's verboten to go back in history to make the same examination. As well, we hear of heeding the dangers of inflation given Germany's pre-war experience, but such references block out the experiences of lesser countries that suffered under the Nazi boot by focalizing events solely through German eyes.

To sum up: there's a double standard at play in the revision and analysis of history. If you're going to look back, you can't delimit the discussion. It presents a skewed context if you do.

by Upstate NY on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 10:49:54 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

Germans have not learned a thing except to be quiet while talking about Jews when there are other people around, and I say that as a German.

by stevesim on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 11:25:20 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

Really. Do you really thing present day Germany suffers from e. g. militarism?

by IM on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 11:46:37 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

let's face it - Germans are super arrogant.

in a lot of southern vacation spots, they have two areas - one for Germans, and one for the other guests.

I know scientists who went to do some work in Germany and could not stand the arrogance of the scientists they were working with, who did not have the knowledge or experience of my North American friends but would simply say "We are German, of course we are better scientists". This, while my friend is a consultant to help them set up their apparatus.

Germans are super defensive and consider that they should be supreme in all aspects of everything. For example, in my last job, the Germans would tell me that while I knew American movies, I did not seem to know German movies so well - maybe because Germans haven't made such a big impact as Americans have on the field!

And on, and on, and on.

They are no longer so military, but their aggressiveness and superiority complex needs to be toned down quite a bit. They are obnoxious.

I am, of course, speaking in generalities here and not every German fits into this type, but a LOT of them do.

by stevesim on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 12:28:00 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

when I was working for the EU project, there were 2 groups - the Germans, and everyone else. The Germans did not mix with the others, despite being invited. They would go to Germany for lunch from Strasbourg every single day, despite France being known for its good food.

And as I said, I AM German, speak it and have a German passport. And I had real problems tolerating them.

by stevesim on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 12:35:14 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

If anything, they suffer from pacifism.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 04:13:05 PM EST
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Some Germans.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 11:48:53 AM EST
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that goes without saying.

by stevesim on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 12:28:20 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

I don't claim it is fair. But neither is really the role of devilish Germans in the gun'n'nazis version of history that takes Nazi Germany out of context by leaving out the atrocities and genocides various european powers committed in their colonies. Still, it is what it is, mention nazis and many - not limited to Germans - will immediatley jump to the Holocaust. Within a national discourse in a country that was occupied by Nazi Germany I guess the occupation may trumf the Holocaust as primary reference and thus be instead if you mention nazis you better say something about the occupation because that is what your audience will have on their minds.

The rest of German history is another matter. Blame them for the Latin empire, or imposing that deadbeat German prince who failed to pay his bills and I don't think you will get the same reaction.

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by A swedish kind of death on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 04:30:57 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 3)

Actually the interesting parallels are in the striking similarity of values shared by the pre-war fascists and the modern corporadoes.

The Nazis were more extreme and systematic about pursuing their aims, and they did the militaristic jack boots and pantomime thing, which the corporadoes don't do to anything like the same extent.

But it's desperately naive to believe that just because there are no jack boots and sieg heil salutes the corporadoes aren't inherently fascist and totalitarian.

It may be a more a sophisticated form of fascism with more indirect violence and abuse. But for anyone who can be bothered to do some basic research, there are obvious similarities between the pre-war fascist doctrine of violence and war as inherently virtuous, and the corporado ethic of 'competition' as an unarguable social good.

Likewise with the explicit social Darwinism of the Nazis and the implied social Darwinism of the corporadoes, where individuals who cannot be forced into delivering value to the state must be punished - see e.g. the current Tory pogrom against those on disability benefits.

And so on.

I think it's more dangerous not to acknowledge the parallels, than it is to flee shrieking from them because they break some imaginary rule about Godwinism.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 07:46:09 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 3)

Not just the fascists. It seems widely forgotten that most of the stuff the fascists picked up was lying around in the conventional wisdom of the time. Eugenics. Nationalism. Racism. Corporatism.

All of which have happily been purged from the modern union.

I don't think that calling the modern manifestation of that "fascist" is helpful. It's more the ground fascism and other fun weeds can grow in.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 08:22:59 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

I don't see the distinction. The fascists took those ideas and tied them together so they could sell them as a political brand, with a sideline in coloured shirt sales.

But arguably the older colonial European cultures were equally fascist - concentration camps were a British innovation, after all. They simply called it 'patriotism'.

Now we have a different and more sophisticated brand, which uses financial dictatorship as an excuse for political oppression.

Financial dictatorship has denuded Africa and swept third world populations into corporate slavery, so I'm not sure it's any less morally acceptable in practice than Nazism was. There are fewer outright wars - more or less - but I'd guess the body count is similar, if perhaps less specifically targeted.

The one key difference is that the stated reasons for violence are more subtle - in the sense of not really making any sense - and therefore more difficult to challenge directly.

And if there's any talk of a class - perhaps not a race, not quite - which deserves everything at the expense of the disposable and defective, it never goes far beyond board rooms. (Although from what I hear it's not an unusual sentiment at public schools in the UK.)

I'd suggest this understatement is a feature and not a bug.

Really, the Nazis were terribly vulgar, and one doesn't need to be quite that blatant to get what one wants.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 08:48:33 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

I'd guess the body count is similar

I'd guess it's at least an order of magnitude bigger.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 08:50:58 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

You appear to be using 'fascist' as a synonym for 'evil'.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 08:51:49 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

No, I'm using fascist as a synonym for a certain kind of politics.

If I was using it as a synonym for evil I'd be including extra goodies like paedophilia, top-down drug dealing, and certain brands of media ownership.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 09:09:43 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

One of the defining characteristics of fascism is the close link between business and the state. In Nazi Germany the state was dominant in that relationship. In some ways it is worse that today business is dominant - so much so that the entire political and regulatory apparatus is little more than an auxilliary to corporate power.

From the corporate point of view a disadvantage is that any given corporation has to share the control of the political system with other corporations. Hence my analogy of the US being run by a cabal of pirates. But they are all united in their insistance that the government let business be business, especially when business is giving the business to some hapless mere individual.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 01:57:05 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

Violence through war and economic and colonial oppression are constants throughout history. What gives "fascism" enough difference that we should want to use the word?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 09:22:33 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

It's a not-so-subtle variation on the "Shoah business" card that international Likud has so badly overplayed.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II}

by eurogreen on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 10:57:52 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

sorry, that was in reply to this.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II}

by eurogreen on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 12:03:43 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 2)

ThatBritGuy:

Now we have a different and more sophisticated brand, which uses financial dictatorship as an excuse for political oppression.

The history of the Albanian fascist party might actually be enlightening.

See, Albania had accepted help form Italy with loans, army training and a central bank located in Italy. Gradually they became totally dependent and when Italy finally invaded - because Albania could not pay their debts - the armed forces with its many italian officers did not even put up a resistance. Then the Albanian fascist party came to power.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 04:36:35 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

ThatBritGuy:

I think it's more dangerous not to acknowledge the parallels,

spot on.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 09:04:21 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

ThatBritGuy:

I think it's more dangerous not to acknowledge the parallels

I think it is ineffective communication to bring up the Nazis.

Italian fascists, Spanish falangists, the Albanian fascist party and so on contain similar stories and are less likely to immediatley trigger an assocation to the Holocaust.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 04:40:09 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 4)

Well to defend some of the rhetoric in Greece, when Greeks say "Nazis" they do not refer to the Holocaust (although that claimed a disproportionate number of Greek Jews), but to generalized horror. Travel to Crete for example, and you will see in inland villages, column after commemorative column with the names of those executed summarily, by the Nazi occupation forces. And these are events within living memory of many. Apart from the actual mass killings, murder and pillage, the German occupation was also indirectly responsible for the last recorded famine in Europe AFAIK, where ~300.000 people starved to death, mostly in the cities. My mother-in-law has childhood memories of the cart that went daily around her neighborhood picking the corpses of those starved to death from the streets and the sidewalks, which then they moved on to bury in unmarked mass graves.

So when soup-kitchens form around Greece, and thousands of people go homeless as a result of policies widely perceived to be instigated by the German government, it isn't the Shoah people have on their minds when carrying plackards with Merkel in a Nazi uniform.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 06:16:19 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

Talos, I know that. Most Germans do not, though. They find these placards very offensive and unfair and in an emotionalised climate it is impossible to speak about it, and about the different meanings of the nazi symbolic. I suspect it explains a bit of the high approval rates for Merkel. I find the German rhetoric and the lazy-Greeks-campaign at least as offensive and I am shocked that the communication can break down so quickly.

by Katrin on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 06:44:02 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 2)

The show of solidarity around Germany (i.e., i.e.2) helped a lot I can tell you. So did a group of German protesters, protesting outside the German embassy in Athens and getting arrested for it... The thing is, as people are pushed below poverty en masse, Schauble on TV pontificating on how y'all deserve it doesn't help at all...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 07:05:57 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

Maybe the lack of a common language is more important than we care to believe.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 01:32:09 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

Well here comes that argument again. When Germans see Nazi references, is the holocaust the first thing they think of? Not WW2? I feel a bit confused.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 05:13:34 AM EST
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Yes, Germans will understand that as a reference to the Holocaust, which is why they find the current produce of Greek cartoonists so unfair.

by Katrin on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 06:22:08 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

But you can't really separate the two. Without the war the holocaust is hard to imagine. Even the action T4, that is the killing of mentally handicapped, started at the beginning of the war. It is easier to justify all sorts of killing when organized killing has started anyway, to hide a heap of corpses with a heap of corpses.

Quite apart from the facts, in the consciousness in Germany the Second World War is the holocaust and then the eastern front in the Soviet union. It is a bit as if you would ask if the americans remember slavery and not the civil war.

Anyway I was very much not talking about any protest signs in Greece but about comparisons partly to the nationalsocialistic dictatorship, partly explicit to the holocaust right here on this blog.

by IM on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 08:50:13 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

The holocaust would have been unthinkable without the war, but you can't reverse the statement.

You have read Talos's post above (btw, I have been to Crete, and I have seen impressive memorials there). It's not only Greece: many Europeans connote "occupation and starvation" rather than "holocaust" when they make a nazi reference. They think they can make themselves understood that way.

Germans connote "holocaust" before other concepts. They too think that everyone connotes in the same way.

by Katrin on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 09:06:21 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

here in rural italy there are people who remember and still talk about how cruel the nazis were.

perhaps that cruelty was par for the course for most any invading/occupying war machine, while the holocaust was novel, in its sheer scale and industrial efficiency, so that's why people in germany blow off any other parts as just normal behaviour during wartime. all armies are perceived as more or less inhumane after all. no saints on the battlefield...

ethnic cleansing is as old as time, whereas the holocaust was organised genocide on an historically unsurpassed level.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 11:41:15 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 3)

I think that aside from the Holocaust, the other pillar of Nazi horror is that it brought to Europe practices and methods used till then by Europeans against Third World colonies and darker skinned folks. I note that a decade after the war, the UK didn't have a problem with large scale concentration camps and a massive military operations affecting non-combatants, including starving them, as long as it was in Kenya...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 12:39:38 PM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

excellent, under-appreciated point...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Feb 23rd, 2012 at 04:16:05 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 4)

Yes, I understand that. And I don't really have a problem with rethoric in Greece, as I wrote elsewhere:

A swedish kind of death:

Within a national discourse in a country that was occupied by Nazi Germany I guess the occupation may trumf the Holocaust as primary reference and thus be instead if you mention nazis you better say something about the occupation because that is what your audience will have on their minds.

Of course, when this get quoted in Germany, the perceived meaning shifts. But then again media in Germany has showed little willigness to understand the situation in Greece at all, so anything said in Greece is likely to be misunderstood by the general public in Germany after the German media has interpreted it.

What I am primarily concerned about in this discussion, is communication on this site. And here, I think it is important to notice that a lot of people (not at all limited to Germans) read nazis as a reference to the Holocaust and thus it becomes ineffective communication (or at least communication with a high probability of being ineffective) if you want to highlight something using, lets say Nazi sports policies.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 04:18:48 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

On this site it then should be a little easier to establish that many non-Germans find collective, exemplary punishment, such as killing all of the inhabitants of a village from which a few killed a German soldier or engaged in other hostile action, when used as a policy, to be almost as monstrous as the holocaust. And, in fact, these were subjects that were partly dealt with at Nuremberg, (and that precedent still haunts US actions.)

Such collective punishments happened in Greece, in Belgium and elsewhere. This attitude is in spite of the fact that the countries from which they come have committed and continue to commit similar atrocities, even if the memory has been suppressed and/or the PR handled much better. The Nuremberg precedent and the UN Charter of Universal Human Rights are a high point when most of the world agreed to a higher standard of behavior. It is being eroded and that erosion needs to be opposed.

I would hate to hold up the USA as an example of proper behavior, given such incidents as the infamous helicopter press slaughter in Baghdad and the slaughter of witnesses to atrocity in Iraq by US soldiers, but, at least, this is not official policy. The regular troops get themselves involved in trying to execute plans in virtually impossible situations and take their frustrations out on civilians, but I blame the leadership, right up to the President, more than the troops for such occurrences. I do not hold Germany to any higher standard than I hold my own government.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 03:34:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Debts, promises and the erosion of democracy | 423 comments (422 topical, 1 editorial, 0 hidden)

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