The purge of German science in 1933
privatdozent.co
privatdozent.co
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.
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.
Not sure about the 1970s hypothesis, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure you know how unscientific IQ tests are, I'm surprised that's what you're bringing up here as being "good science" being shut down politically. Just trying to correlatw the two tests they used is absolutely subjective, I would take a step back and reexamine the parts of those studies that convinced you of whatever beliefs you have - it seems like a shoddy foundation.
There's honestly no evidence for the environmental-only theory of intelligence. That's the popular politically correct belief but every study I've ever seen or heard of either fails to support it or supports the opposite.
Common misconception, sadly untrue. There are known genetic predictors of intelligence, they're just not simple genes that the layman can wrap his head around.
All the same, I guess I am out of date (in 2017, they were getting 1% - perhaps in 2030, they will be up to 50%? Or back down to 2%?)
In general, I don't think there's any problem with saying some traits we call intelligence are heritable and that has a genetic component. I'm less sympathetic to the idea that intelligence is a simple scalar (the Q in IQ) or a quantity that should be used to prejudge candidates for given technical or social tasks. I mean, if somebody is good, does it matter that they are dumb as hell? I certainly would rather a talented dumbass than a useless genius as a coworker.
The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence. That's why, for example, any policy that allows emigrations from IQ 70 societies to to Western countries, which usually average around 100 IQ, is a bad policy for those Western countries.
There is no nation without natalism.
Strong claim, hard no.
In 20th century scientific records that's about the difference between pre WW German country schools and the same regions in the later part of WWII under siege and under supplied.
That large difference has been attributed to nutrition rather than intelligence given the same genes, the same schools, the same society, etc.
> True, intelligence is not simple.
At yet there you are, mere sentences later, over simplying it and ignoring significant confounding factors. Deliberate malfeasance, oblivious blind ignorance, ... ?
> The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races.
Why did you say that? Are you implying that there must be a wider range of IQs among various ethnicities within a race than between races? That's not a logical conclusion. Do you have some other chain of logic in mind?
By the way, I only use the word race loosely. I really mean ethnicity. Although the findings do still broadly apply to the classic 3-ish races.
No, ethnicities are absolutely not just administrative or cultural groupings. You've clearly done no research into this topic whatsoever and are just repeating some misinformation you got fooled by. Even the classic races which are unnecessarily crude by modern standards do actually partly correspond to distinct genetic groups. We can now classify ethnicities at a much finer level of detail and they're still distinct genetic groups.
Ironically given the article this is under, IQ was considered to be dirty Jewish science by the Nazis, probably because it showed Jews to be superior.
Honestly, you just sound like you're a racist. Which is sad, but it's also indicative of a lack of common sense that you expect the universe to conform to your prejudices.
You must also think scientists don't believe in the distinction between planets and dwarf planets, or even stars. Yes it's an arbitrary classification, but it's still useful.
You're thinking is just like the people in TFA. Rejecting some science for arbitrary and nonsensical political reasons. You've replaces dirty Jewish science with dirty racist's science.
where the bulk of scientists agreed in various ways that the confounding problems made it exceedingly implausible that differences were either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based?
> This is an area where the science all points in one direction but popular opinion is in the other direction.
Or maybe an area where the science is inconclusive but personal opinion shades the reading and subsequent presentation?
"entirely environmentally based" is the popular and un-scientific belief that I disagree with. So you agree with me?
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.
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:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2208369-three-identical...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/11/nature-or-nu...
These always seem to miss the effect of nutrition (and other) in the womb, which is massive. You need nonidentical twins as controls.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Did it now?
Lableak truther loses $100,000 in his own debate https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/lableak-truther-loses-...
Even with money on the line and an arsenal of medical expertise and documents that's not a case that can be conclusively made.
Your article starts by calling it a "false myth" so they're clearly still in the political partisanship trap whatever the outcome of some bet. Anybody who's certain it was of natural origin is just being fooled by the news and some prominent scientists who made some intentionally misleading statements.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-o...
underscoring a divide in the US government as the majority of the intelligence community still believes that Covid either emerged naturally in the wild, or that there is still too little evidence to make a judgment one way or another.
You may feel the article is biased as the (qualified) author clearly thinks lab leak is an improbable origin, you can go to the actual debate record being discussed and judge whether that was a fair pitting of one viewpoint against another - great lengths were taken to ensure a fair playing field in a debate for a cash prize.
Nobody is certain .. that's your ongoing strawman in in all your comments here so far, but the probabilities with all things considered very heavily fall on the natural origin side.
The best arguments put forward for a lab leak being more likely failed to carry the day.
It's still possible just very unlikely and certainly not certain.
The conspiracy I'm talking about is the one described here: https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
"For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory."
which identifies the misinformation's origin here:
"Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet.2 “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” "
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
And there are 7 bands that had a song like that [1]
[0]: https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Murdered/Killed_to_Dea...
[1]: https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=Killed+to...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you claim Ballmer had no ideology?
There were many, but the most famous example is probably Lysenkoism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
And google and apple are spending millions of dollars to reimplement GNU software because they want to escape the GPLv3 license.
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.
What do you mean by this? The vaccines absolutely decreased the likelihood of getting and the severity of 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.
Maybe you have been conditioned to react with extreme suspicion when somebody even dares to mention the word "vaccine", so you don't even read what people write and start imagining what they "must be meaning"? We live in an age of paranoia and hostility, even after the pandemic.
I'm incredibly happy that the people saying that the vaccines were dangerous were wrong. It's a shame they didn't protect people better, but in the end the pandemic ended just as expected, ie a super-contagious and much less lethal strain infected everybody. This is how the black plague probably ended, reading accounts from the time. Even if they didn't know anything about viruses then.
And it’s great its protection wasn’t worse!
> …but in the end the pandemic ended just as expected, ie a super-contagious and much less lethal strain infected everybody. This is how the black plague probably ended, reading accounts from the time. Even if they didn't know anything about viruses then.
There was never any question that in the long term general immunity wouldn’t cause the strains to become less virulent, it was always a question of how many people would die or get very sick before we got there. The Black Death killed a third of Europes population so im happy we know more about viruses now than they did then.
In other words the fact that vaccinated people contracted covid does _not_ mean the vaccines didn’t protect them from the disease.
https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-n...
Indiana, in 1897, tried, but the bill failed (after notable early success!).
https://www.straightdope.com/21341975/did-a-state-legislatur...
(Other sources seem to agree)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Bieberbach
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hit... ("How German Mathematicians Dealt With the Rise of Nazism" (1967 / 2016))
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.
Ohh no. The correct reaction is to do nothing if censorship is on the table. It is trivial to push BS by blaming fighting BS.
I believe the correct action is to pretend they are sane and calmly explain why I think they are wrong in combination with ignoring them.
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.
So, yeah, history repeats itself yet again.
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.
Why are you referring to yourself in plural? Regarding your question, you can literal copy paste what you quoted into your favorite search engine and you will get a ton of hits. But I'm sure you are well aware of it already, since you are a frequent commenter on cultural war issues here on HN.
>> What does that have to do with denying or rejecting science?
Since when firing faculty staff for ideological nonsense has nothing to do with rejecting science?
>> Also, sometimes people get fired for legitimate reasons; the fact that they were fired is not a sign of problems.
This type of argument where you write some truism to downplay victims is not cool.
>>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.
Of course, but you can say that about anything. So what is the point of your argument? Why did you even bother to comment on something you by your own admission don't know exists and couldn't even be bothered to look it up on the internet.
In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1#
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.
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.
“if you died you were weak and deserved to die”
vs nazi:
“you are weak, you deserve to die”
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.
"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.
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).
Or the Edict of Explusion c. 1290.
Or the Jews being under the direct whim and jurisdiction of the king. c. 1066
I can go further and further back ...
Anti-semitism is old.
None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.
I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century. They would agree that racial antisemitism developed largely during the 19th century alongside pseudoscience about race in general, but that religious and economic antisemitism has existed for over a thousand years, and that the latter two also informed the development of the racial version. [2] For example, the Rhineland massacres in 1096 are generally considered to be antisemitic [3] and part of a sequence of historical mass murders of Jews that lead to the Holocaust, despite Europe not then having a clear concept of race.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_badge
Depends on your your definition of "antisemitism"; if you mean "general prejudice against Jews", then sure, obvious that existed. But if you you mean "anti-Semitism against the Semitic race (as opposed to the Aryan race)", then that's quite a different thing.
I don't think it's a hard-line distinction; obviously there's overlap and nuance. But the move from more or less generic religious persecution to racial-based persecution was a very marked and notable shift that many many people have commented on, and that's really not very controversial.
Does this distinction matter? Well, it seems to me that it does. I don't think the holocaust would have happened without this. And all of this strongly shaped Nazi world-views, which was really the point I wanted to make.
>The development of racial and religious antisemitism has historically been encouraged by the concept of anti-Judaism, which is distinct from antisemitism itself.
It's that distinction that is being discussed, and the other Wikipedia articles which do recognize that distinction point out that this was a 19th century development:
> Although the term "antisemitism" did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of antisemitic persecution include the Rhineland massacres in 1096; the Edict of Expulsion in 1290; the European persecution of Jews during the Black Death, between 1348 and 1351; the massacre of Spanish Jews in 1391, the crackdown of the Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492; the Cossack massacres in Ukraine, between 1648 and 1657; various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, between 1821 and 1906; the Dreyfus affair, between 1894 and 1906; the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II; and various Soviet anti-Jewish policies.
That doesn't change the fact that hatred towards Jews as a race, hatred towards them on the basis of their birth, their intrinsic nature, as opposed to on the basis of their religion or as a culture, emerged in the 19th century. In almost all of the instances you mention prior to the 19th century, with the exception of the Cossack uprising, conversion from Judaism to Christianity would have spared you. The Cossack uprising and in particular the Khmelnytsky Uprising was not on racial grounds, it was on mercantile grounds and opposed to Jews on the basis of their status as tax collectors as well as propaganda about their collaboration with Polish nobility. Certain Jewish communities seen to have not been involved in either aspect were spared, indicating that the hatred towards Jews was not based on race.
In Nazi Germany, if you were considered a Jew by race, nothing you did could have spared you. Nothing.
Antisemitism predates the 19th century, and not all hatred of Jews prior to the 19th century was "similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that." While there is a term "anti-Judaism" used by historians to describe religious strife similar to anti-Catholicism, the term "antisemitism" isn't limited to the 19th century and later, and not all hatred and oppression of Jews prior to the 19th century was simply anti-Judaism.
For example, during the Black Death, Jews were blamed for outbreaks and were mass-murdered, with no attempts at conversion at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the...
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.
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.
Russian folk wisdom says "Жид крещёный - что вор прощеный. Веры нет" - "A converted Jew (slur) is like a forgiven thief - no faith/trust".
And in later times, "бить будут не по паспорту, а по морде" - you'll get beaten up on your face, not on (according to) your identification papers, a play on words meaning if you look Jewish, it doesn't matter that your papers say otherwise.
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.
It's kind of interesting how any such distinctions have been essentially eliminated. Nature is very mysterious.
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.
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.
"It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century."
So yes, you were talking about contemporary anti-semitism.
There are many different flavours of antisemitism: from Judeophobia to unhinged criticism of the Israeli state to racial. And all of those can be further subdivided. All of these are very different and worth commenting on, but all I did was describe anti-Semitism as viewed by the Nazi world-view and some background on that. That is the only thing I'm talking about. I don't think I need to include an essay on antisemitism to make such a point.
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.
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.
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.
> https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10442-martinez-f...: The great massacre occurred at Seville June 6, 1391, when several thousand Jews were killed and many forced to accept baptism.
If an estimate of Seville's population at that time at around 90,000 is to be believed, that would make the relative brutality equivalent again to the York incident.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1021985/thirty-largest-c...
This is rapidly exceeding my own background knowledge on the topic, but it looks to me as if re-settlement by Jews (and then subsequent violence against them) was a pattern all through the middle ages.
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.
> 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.
By the way, historians refer to 1400s as the 15th century, not the 14th century. FYI. That's how century counting works.
And there was no Al Andalus at that point, either; the last trace of Muslim rule, the Emirate of Granada, had lost nearly all of its territory before surrendering their final fragment in January of 1492.
And I was referring to the 14th century not in connection to 1492 (because, as a fact, I do know that 1492 was in the 15th century, even though I do like the Italians calling it "il Quattrocento", but I digress), but to the Spanish 14th century being outside the civilization of Western Europe, which it was, because in the 14th century most of Spain was still civilizational Arab in the parts that counted. During that time Granada was the 3rd largest city in geographical Europe, while Cordoba was 9th largest (going by wikipedia [1]), and yet you don't see that many mentions of them when it comes to the history of the European Middle Ages. Which is to say that back in the Spanish 1300s, when the Jewish presence was still of importance in Spain, the then territory of Spain was not civilizational European.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_citie....)
And they weren't just in Spain; there were large Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire throughout most of the period you're claiming they weren't a thing in Europe — in fact, Yiddish is famously a fusion of Hebrew and High German — and Louis XIV issued letters of patent to the Jewish community in Alsace in the 1600s. Many of the Jews expelled from Spain were initially welcomed by the Papal States, who already had existing Jewish populations — until they were expelled from the Papal States by Pius V in the 16th century. Venice oppressed their Jewish population brutally and confined them to ghettoes, but of course, they existed — otherwise there would be no ghettoes. Not to mention the massive Jewish presence in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was one of the largest European states in the 1500s, although given your backtracking to "Western Europe" perhaps you don't consider the Grand Duchy to be "civilizational European." And in the 1600s, Denmark began explicitly encouraging Jewish immigration from the rest of Europe, due to the Danish fiscal crisis from the Thirty Years War, with hundreds of thousands of Jews moving.
You are simply wrong.
Honestly, given the level of Israel/Palestine conspiracy takes on Jews never having existed in the Middle East, or having no presence there until the 20th century (also wrong), I'm somehow shocked to find someone with a theory that Jews didn't exist in Europe prior to the 19th century.
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.
People generically hated every religion that wasn't theirs for millenia. The idea of hating a Semitic race after God was pronounced dead is different.
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.
(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.)
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?
"You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!"
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.)
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.
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.
There were several necessary prerequisites for invading Britain. First was destroying the RAF. Without absolute air supremacy, no invasion could be contemplated.
Second was destruction of the Royal Navy. Despite some success in attacking Scapa Flow with U-boats, the Kriegsmarine was simply incapable of challenging the Home Fleet, much less the combined might of the overseas fleets. The only hope would be from Luftwaffe bombers, primarily JU-87 Stukas. Unfortunately for the Germans, these suffered great losses in the Battle of France, as well as during the initial stages of the Battle of Britain. The Home Fleet was a considerable force in 1940: 4 battleships, 3 battlecruisers, 2 aircraft carriers, 20 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 23 submarines, and numerous smaller craft.
Finally, once ashore, the invasion force would have to overcome the British Army and the Home Guard. While these forces were seriously depleted, the Empire could have brought enormous numbers of troops from India, Egypt, and other regions. That this was never seriously considered might indicate that the British Army wasn't as weak as Churchill would have liked to portray.
I loved reading Churchill's diaries as a kid, but later on realized how much of them were self-aggrandizing and not as accurate as one would hope. Still a fascinating insight into one of the most important leaders of the 20th Century.
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.
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_banned_in_Nazi...
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
Z Carl Zuckmayer Arnold Zweig Stefan Zweig
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.
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.
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????
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.
- 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
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
This one seems important. The liberals who backed Hitler did so far more spitefully than did ours backing FDR.
> rich German backers
I can believe that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's basically what happened during the Cold War. Aerospace technology and others were advanced incredibly (e.g., the Apollo moon missions).
These days, we don't get this so much, so we have to rely on advertising companies to give us innovation...
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?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487
"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."
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.
No one has said there should be aggressive intervention in Ukraine or Middle East to minimize the environmental damage and financial impact of war.
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?
Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.
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.