It is an embarrassing and little-discussed fact, but until May 8, 1945, Germany operated under the Weimar Constitution.
After the Reichstag Fire the Reichstag put the emergency clause in the Weimar Constitution into effect.
The only reason the Weimar Constitution is no longer in effect is because Germany lost World War II.
I wrote a piece about Militant Obedience.
No matter how many words you cover it with, the only LOGICAL difference between Lincoln’s new Constitution declared in the Gettysburg Address and Hitler’s Weimar Constitution is that Lincoln won and Hitler lost,
We DO NOT want to get derailed on this fact, but it IS a fact.
It is a simple fact of life that the parameters of ANY discussion of public affairs are set by who won.
This is not even mildly disputable. If, as Buchanan discusses in his book, Britain had not gone nuts and declared war on Germany when Germany AND Russia invaded Poland, all of our public discussion would have an entirely different twist.
Germany would have been able to invade Russia, an aim Hitler had announced in Mein Kampf in the 1923.
Please note that I am NOT discussing anything specific about alternative history, which is subject to debate. All I am saying is that any alternative history would have produced an alternative DEBATE. History COULD have been different.
No one has any trouble with the simple fact that history COULD have been different.
I am talking about an equally indisputable fact: If history had been different, all the “reasonable discussion” we see professional commentators engage in would be unrecognizable.
If Englishmen and Americans had not been killed off by Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would have had Stalin all to himself. Ideally, the two dictators would have worn each other out, but in the long run, in a one-to-one match up, the USSR would probably have been beaten.
Now imagine the “reasonable debate” in the post-War years.
Germany would have had nuclear weapons. It would be the Lindbergh faction who would have bumper stickers saying “Better Nazi Than Dead.”
The left would have been made up entirely of nuke crazies.
#1 by Epiphany on 05/19/2011 - 6:40 am
That seems to make sense. And, there would not have been as many Marxists on Campus as there are, in US universities. There would not have been Political Correctness and a whole lot of other things, as well!
#2 by BGLass on 05/19/2011 - 8:11 am
and the children of reds, not germanic-movie-typed whites, would be the ones experiencing endless cognitive dissonance in what they would still sorta think of as “their own” country.
vaguely, they would think, we fought WITH Hitler, so why do they teach history from the perspective of others where we’re always the bad guys?
Absence is always a presence. The buried history is always present, always latent, always ready to emerge. Like Horus says, “negative conditioning.” Yin-yang. The slow one now will later be fast.
It’s harder to imagine where some whole new set of questions that could then have emerged would have taken thinking, b/c one thought would have led to another. The set of questions we got seem to have exhausted themselves noticeably. Propaganda to keep it just keeps repeating itself now, like the “types” one sees over and over, from Madanna to Lady Gaga, old wine in new skins, over and over, like it can do nothing new any longer, if it ever could at all.
#3 by BGLass on 05/19/2011 - 8:25 am
They say the victor writes history– but it’s worse! He even determines what citizens will be allowed to discuss, study, or think about after the war is over!
#4 by BGLass on 05/19/2011 - 9:03 am
So: Only a nation (“a people”) can produce art. When that word was redefined as proposition, the only “expression” could then be of an “idea” (propaganda).
So a “type” can only be re-made, over and over, in such a “nation”. (Like Madonna becomes Lady Gaga).
So, movies can only be RE-MADE but now with the “idea” (the endless re-makes with “diverse” characters, putting other colors in the “roles” of an old play.)
This expression of one idea, over and over, necessarily produces a dead world, the ennui the communist “philosophers” then absurdly complain of, even as they make it happen.
The idea of “art” can only become to try to be more shocking– like shock jocks or Jerry Springer or what Disney became in the Crying Game, or increased images of violence. As if all these people might someday jolt themselves out of their own dead state.
Art, for them, is just a defibrillator— the existence of which is blamed on capitalism, which no longer exists.
art becomes more violent, more hateful, in hopes the hate and shock will DO something, make something happen, shock them into living, but only the experience of ‘a people’ ends this, maybe.
#5 by Scythian on 05/19/2011 - 11:30 am
How could the great heroic leader who saved the people from utter destruction and the peoples’ children from a lifetime under tyranical dictatorship lose an election a couple months after he did so? “it’s the economy stupid!” – bullshit!
#6 by Scythian on 05/19/2011 - 11:38 am
In other words, the “exit polls” might not have told you that perhaps the British realized that it was indeed Chamberline who had the right strategy, and not just because of the endless body bags.
#7 by Epiphany on 05/19/2011 - 11:51 am
And, we now know that no matter what the Soviet Communists and the Red Chinese did– no matter how many Nazi–like crimes that they committed, neither the Russian Communists nor the Red Chinese will ever be quite as vilified and condemned for their acts, as the Nazis were!
#8 by James C on 05/20/2011 - 4:57 am
Everyone always says “History is written by the winners”, but damn few people ever think about what it means.
Our enemy’s favorite wars were obviously the American Civil War and World War II. Consequently those are only two wars that I know of that are painted black and white, with the vanquished being evil incarnate and the victors being as pure as the fresh driven snow.
The only other “war” that gets this treatment is the culture war, embodied in our savior the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther of the King. Despite all the stories of the daunting obstacles the “civil rights activists” had to overcome, there is no word, not one, that there even WAS another side, much less that the vast majority of white who opposed Saint King actually had opinions worthy of consideration.
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had just “made the world safe for Democracy” barely a decade earlier, but when it came to the cause of “civil rights”, Democracy was no where to be found. Instead we were blessed with judicial dictatorship, and it was good, because employees of the establishment said so.
#9 by BGLass on 05/20/2011 - 10:08 am
“…Democracy was no where to be found. Instead we were blessed with judicial dictatorship…”
In real terms, this is what “democracy” seems to mean, the real-experiential reality of it. Wherever it is “being spread,” means serious warfare, often on people portrayed as being really poor and maybe having a donkey.
One of things that makes it unseemly for some viewers. The “greatest military power in the world” beating up on poor people in shepherd outfits who have a donkey.
Many watching t.v. will find this discrepancy surreal, but who would “speak out” against something so seemingly psycho?
#10 by Scythian on 05/20/2011 - 3:53 pm
“Our enemy’s favorite wars were obviously the American Civil War and World War II. Consequently those are only two wars that I know of that are painted black and white, with the vanquished being evil incarnate and the victors being as pure as the fresh driven snow”
Liberals and respectable conservatives will agree that the only wars in human history whereby one side was ‘unquestionably’ the devil and the other ‘clearly’ angel is the civil war & WW2. I saw I believe it was an opening scene of an x-man movie whereby the “hero” finds himself in several different wars on the “right” side killing evil white racists; the one time he finds himself on the “wrong” side is when it’s not whites killing other whites, but whites killing Vietnamese – then he has to save an asian girl from getting raped by the side he’s on – the evil white racists. Of course, you’ll never see x-man saving a German girl from being raped by a Soviet mongoloid Siberian. I can’t help but laugh at the sheeple who buy this shit hook, line and sinker.
#11 by James C on 05/22/2011 - 12:28 am
I just want to add one more thing. We don’t have to delve into Alternative History to find American leftists who were gaga for nuclear war.
They were the jews pushing for, and working on, the Manhattan Project. Their entire motivation was to drop atomic bombs on Germany. I can only imagine how disappointed they were that Germany surrendered BEFORE they could use it.
It wasn’t until AFTER the war ended, and nuking the nazis was no longer an option, that the commies turned all peacenik.