Posts by Joe Wylie
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. . . one should never underestimate just how horrendously efficient the Nazi machine could be when it set its mind to it.
True. While the U.S. designed everything from locomotives to prefabricated buildings to be operated and assembled by a semi-skilled workforce in response to wartime conditions, the "Nazi machine" adapted much of their industry to a workforce that was literally worked to death.
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The difference between my visual field results for June and October is so profound it looks like magic –
Oh far out, best wishes and congratulations on being Adric-free.
Adric - like Hamish, it's the sort of name that's more adjective than noun.
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. Distaste for them and their activities didn't stop the rest of the world adopting many of their scientific and warfare advances.
Given Germany's population, and level of industrialisation at the time of Hitler's coming to power, is the technical legacy of the Third Reich really exceptional? As Craig correctly notes, the Nazis expanded the autobahn system. Despite the prevailing myth, they didn't originate it.
I don't see any real evidence that the reputation of Nazi technical achievements owes as much to scientific reality as it does to the efforts of Joseph Goebbels and the likes of Leni Riefenstahl in creating a political myth. While the technical legacy of Germany's WW2 guided missiles may have made the space race possible they did little to alter the course of the war, and the principles on which they were based were already published before the project began.
The postwar success of the Volkswagen - never produced in any quantity during Hitler's lifetime, and essentially a stolen Czech design - wasn't because of any special technical superiority. Credit should go to a rather visionary Briton who was given the task of making viable a chunk of infrastructure that even Citroen refused to take by way of war reparations, and to the later marketing skills of Madison Avenue.
No doubt there were numerous advances and breakthroughs that we enjoy the fruits of today, but are they proportionally greater than those produced by the other participants in WW2? The Arriflex was certainly a better portable cine camera than anything the allies had, and Kodak recognised the superiority of the German-invented Carousel slide projector once they regained their German assets. As for Fanta, the ersatz orange drink developed by Coca-Cpla's nationalised subsidy, there's no need to point out that the reason that it's still around today is a triumph of cynical marketing, rather than technical superiority.
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Thank you very much Graeme, delightful.
In a rather different vein, this little Russian jewel from the dying years of the cold war has surfaced on Youtube:
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I wouldn't underestimate the fact that another fascist, Franco, got to die in his bed. These forces don't just implode and defeat themselves.t
Another example of state slave labour, carried out in peacetime, and sanctified by the supposedly liberal Pope John XXIII.
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Simon, I presume that you're familiar with Robert Harris's Fatherland. While I don't claim any expertise, the hypothetical sanitised postwar Nazi state he portrayed gave me the impression that he'd been down this particular path in some detail. What do you think?
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Joe - I've no doubt you meant "Horrible as the Pinochet
regime was ...", sorry not spotted inside 15 mins.Thanks Chris (embarassment emoticon).
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But blaming it all on Nazi Germany rather than stepping back and working out why scares the fuck out of me. The use of Slave Labour to advance Germany was openly touted by the right, including parts of the Centre-Right, in Germany without much objection from that part of the political spectrum prior to WW1.
Like you I believe that it's vital to attempt to understand how a situation like the Nazi regime could come to be. You don't have to Google too far to find some pretty reprehensible political philosophies being openly touted today. If I follow your gist, the threat is always there.
Perhaps we're privileged to have known people who suffered the privations of WW2, and to have benefitted from their insights. For example, the former prisoner of the Japanese who gained a Japanese granddaughter-in-law and resultant grandchildren. Knowing that he'd been brutally treated in captivity I once asked him how he'd coped. He replied that as she was of a different generation he could start afresh, but to visit Japan and encounter people who might have been his tormenters would have been more than he could bear.
He told me that, as far as he was concerned, the potential for one group to abandon their humanity and systematically mistreat another was latent in everyone, regardless of race. While he spoke specifically of the Japanese code of bushido he'd given the problem plenty of thought, and believed that any system that subjugates our humanity is able to overpower us.
The former Allende Government minister, the late Orlando Letelier, described how when he was held in appalling conditions under the Pinochet regime a guard would occasionally take pity on a prisoner and slip them some small comfort. They'd always demand absolute secrecy, pointing out that they had families that their superiors would take reprisals against if their indiscretion was discovered. By such means was the system maintained.
Horrible as the Allende regime was, the system it employed seems to have fallen short of the Nazi and WW2 Japanese versions in its totality. People who have become possessed by an ideology and the system it spawns are different from us, but essentially the same. That such things can arise anywhere, among any group, is what scares the fuck out of me. Everything I've read, and in my mercifully limited experience, confirms that.
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It's like watching the Australian cricketers. I can admire the way Ricky Ponting carves up our bowling attack almost every time we play Australia. But I'd sooner die than support the Aussie team.
If it came to light that the Australian cricket establishment had been methodically slaughtering aboriginal people and selling their organs to fund their operation perhaps your admiration might be a little tempered. I have no problem with the Australian RSL's extension of associate membership to WW2 Wehrmacht veterans, though it would certainly bother me if it were to include former members of the SS.
The critical difference for me is that those ordinary soldiers for the most part abided by the Geneva convention, while the SS were part of an economic entity that methodically violated human rights for economic gain in the service of an ideology. To admire Nazi economic performance is to either condone or ignore the systematic enslavement and slaughter that was an integral part of it.
John Ralston Saul rightly compares elements of the modern corporate state to that of Mussolini, but when he extends the argument to include the holocaust as a logical outcome of corporate capitalism he plays down the role of Nazi ideology. Michael Thad Allen makes a critical distinction when he stresses that those who ran the death camps and slave labour enterprises were not bland bureaucrats. He presents a convincing case that they were for the most part committed idealogues, operating in a culture driven by "the belief that industrial and economic activity should be bent to the service of national identity rather than sordid profit gains."
According to the wiki, "By 1944, slave labour made up one quarter of Germany's entire work force, and the majority of German factories had a contingent of prisoners. The Nazis also had plans for the deportation and enslavement of Britain's adult male population in the event of a successful invasion."
When you pay a little attention to just what it was that underlay Nazi Germany's economic performance, things don't appear quite so miraculous.
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. . . destroyed the Twin Towers while telling all the Jews to chuck a sickie
The Elders of Zion projectile vomiting! How utterly Icke-y.