And 1945. Double whammy. Germany never made a comeback.
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.
German here. It's actually true that you see a lot of "public intellectuals" that publicly tell how bad they were at math.
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.
I think Germany has been quite good in practical research (see world leading companies, especially smaller ones in niche markets you never heard of),
not so in science (think Nobel Prize winners).
One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and dismissed as psuedoscience, as pathological science: "Jüdische Physik". There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa).
The disease is independent of context. It's about taking a political club and using it to hit anybody you don't like. And we're far from being immune to it even now.
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.
Not the same thing. Twice the unique zero of cos in [0, 2] is provably equal to the circumference of a circle of diameter 1. It's not equal to 3.2 or whatever the Indiana Pi Bill was trying to legislate.
The depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time.
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 :-)
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect.
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.
Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it.
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.
I've just watched a documentary on Netflix, "Three Identical Strangers" (SPOILER ALERT), about a 1960's to 1980's study about identical twins/triplets separated at birth and who grew up in intentionally distinct conditions (of the triplets, one grew up in a blue collar family, one in middle class, and one in a upper class family, all with an older sibling in the family as a sort of "control").
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:
There's a dirty fashion in climate science to include political activism or call to action in their papers. Especially if they've found something that shows good news about climate change. They qualify it with "... but we must all make an effort to reduce fossil fuel use".
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.
Nothing wrong with wanting it, but a research paper is not the place to express personal opinions on how other people should behave. It's not a result they got from their own work, just rhetoric they know they're supposed to repeat, perhaps for safety of their careers, or perhaps because they unethically want to use their platform for activism.
I've accepted that we are going to destroy ourselves and there is essentially nothing to be done at this point, but isn't that generally considered a bad thing? I'm surprised that endeavoring to continue the existence of humanity is so controversial.
Yes, I never really got the appeal myself, but I'm told that people do in fact place great value on children which is why I'm so surprised at their willingness to destroy the planet.
6 degrees Celsius will basically render the Earth inhospitable for human occupation, but perhaps with some remnants remaining near the poles. Some of the latest work from James Hansen (whose previous work has been quite prescient) is suggesting that 10 degrees is likely. I apologize for my hyperbole.
6 deg of what? fahrenheit, celsiius? And what, increase or decrease? Inaccurate alarmists are even wrose. Please dont even reply, I couldnt care less about your opinions.
You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones.
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.
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?
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.
IQ test have genuine predictive power when applied to large groups. So no, they're not unscientific. In fact, the idea of IQ tests being useless or culturally biased is a now-outdated excuse that people used to use to justify the different results between ethic groups. It's now well accepted that different ethnic groups have different average IQs, and that IQ is a useful predictor of various life outcomes. What the politically-motivated researchers don't agree on is whether that's entirely environmental or partly genetic. Everyone agrees that it's at least partly environmental.
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.
In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscientific and essentially meaningless concepts, your correlation is equally unscientific and meaningless.
> There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ
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.
I think you'd have to be a bit of an expert to understand these results, just because of words like 'intelligence', that could mean anything, really, and I think accounting for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence is not exactly blowing the question out of the water.
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.
True, intelligence is not simple. But no matter how complex it is, the difference between an IQ of 100 and an IQ of 70 is undeniably a difference in intelligence.
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.
> The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence.
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, ... ?
I mean, nationality is obviously an enviromental factor, right? There's no 'german gene'. Ethnicities like 'French' don't actually exist in genes. So even if there is this nation-by-nation IQ variation, it shouldn't matter if you let people live where they want.
Can't you train a predictor on skull shape/bone length and IQ and go from there? Yeah there's no causation there, but you should be able to give a percentage that someone's IQ is above a certain number depending on high-rez MRI scan input of skull and bone length measurements.
You can train a predictor on anything: that's how the famous cases of 'racist AI' came about. The point is, you can't establish a causal relationship without accounting for confounders. If you're starting with a question established by racists, with 'race' and 'IQ' as your two poles, and human populations as your data, good luck managing that.
Finding evidence to be obnoxious because of political associations is anti-science. You could make a moral argument that humans shouldn't be allowed to know certain things because we can't be trusted with that knowledge, but that's separate from trying to understand reality.
> 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.
So IQ is a word used to describe the results of a bunch of tests first established by eugenicists in the late 19th century, and has no scientific extraction whatsoever. Genetics is a field of science, and you can identify groups that carry particular genes. However, the 'races' don't map to distinct genetic groups, which is very unsurprising: the 'races' or 'ethnicities' are just administrative or cultural groupings from the 19th century.
The origin isn't relevant to whether it's valid or not.
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.
... That's just nonsense. Normal scientists working in genetics don't believe in race. The field has moved on from the 40s. It's not a conspiracy, there's just no evidence, because why should there be? It would be very surprising if a bunch of 19th century racists had accidentally discovered a deep truth about genetics before anybody had even discovered DNA.
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.
I can't understand how you can say that when it's transparently false. There's an enormous quantity of research on ethnicity and genetics. Researchers have found all sorts of correlations. Even common sense tells you things about eye color, hair color, etc. but it goes far deeper than that. It's more precise than classic race but both are still valid classifications.
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.
This guy clearly is just trying to bang on about racial superiority but coaxing it in terms of "they won't let us say the thing". Your response neatly shuts him down. Well done.
Shut me down by saying false things? Why do you believe IQ is unscientific? It's routinely used by scientists for science and has falsifiable predictive power, which distinguishes it from unscientific things like astrology and homeopathy. Race isn't unscientific either - even if we're talking about the classic 3 races (which is not actually how people use the word anyway), they do in fact correspond to broad common genetic histories. Yes, they're an artificial classification people invented, but species are also an artificial classification. Neither is capable of classifying every individual and neither is unscientific because both are well enough defined to be useful to make predictions from.
Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death.
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.
Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers.
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.
I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that.
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.
I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020?
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)
> 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.
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.
>scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming)
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.
There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore.
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.
It depends what you mean by "antivaxer", what is the subclinical myocarditis rate for ACAM1000 again? (Not ACAM2000, I'm very specifically talking about ACAM1000)
>There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though.
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."
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
Imagine someone asks you: "If I flip a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds it comes up tails on the 100th toss?"
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.
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.
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.
Ironically, this is how popular beliefs are supported, but I don't think anti-vax is one of them. The news tells people what they want to hear to keep them engaged to make money from advertising to them. That's why news organizations are split into partisan groups, they have to do that to serve their own markets. Anyone being neutral would alienate most of their audience by making them uncomfortable.
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.
I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1].
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.
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.
"My article" isn't mine, it's an article discussing a lengthy technical debate recently held on the merits of zoonotic origin Vs Lab leak origin cases with a great many qualified onlookers, experienced judges, and $100K USD at stake on the outcome.
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.
"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,” "
Maybe I'm a little behind on this stuff, but I thought that it hasn't been conclusively proven either way (lab leak or naturally occurring). The lab-leak hypothesis was shouted down in mainstream media early on because they didn't want to offend China, but I don't think it's ever been conclusively proven that it wasn't a lab leak. However, there hasn't been sufficient evidence to back that hypothesis either.
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect.
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.
String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED
Quantum physics and relativity were a radical departure from classical mechanics and remain very counter-intuitive for laypeople so it's not hard to see how contemporary persons with ulterior motives and little interest in scientific inquiry would fixate on those.
The Nazis weren't unique in dismissing categories of research on ideological grounds. The USSR label of "bourgeois pseudoscience" [1] was applied to various fields like evolutionary biology.
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.
> 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
And google and apple are spending millions of dollars to reimplement GNU software because they want to escape the GPLv3 license.
There’s a difference in having a subjective opinion on an OS and flat out denying physical phenomenon like the photoelectric effect. What kind of nonsensical analogy is this.
When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
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.
> When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.
You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of something nearly the entire world has received which was being said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than the thing that actually killed millions of people during the last few years?
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.
"Major political parties" know that votes from idiots are as valuable as votes from people they are unable to fool: no-vax conspiracy theorists are one of many despicable constituencies that they want to be nice to, at the cost of alienating a smaller number of better people.
No, that's because you are right in that politics got involved so people got super confused. Wearing masks indoors in your own home for social signaling or wearing masks outdoors after it was long clear that was silly.
But the US being overly politicized doesn't have any impact on if the vaccine worked or not. Reality doesn't care.
Protecting people from COVID involves more than preventing them from contracting the illness. It reduced mortality and hospitalizations. Compare the mortality rate in a country like Brazil to the US and tell me again how the vaccines didn't protect people from 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.
> …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.
The Nazis have had a strong mystic and esotheric undercurrent which also had to do with the Thule Society. When Hitler came to power German of all walks of life thought they could wield him to reach their own goals. Being correct in the sense of logic isn't what the Nazis were about. Or as my grandfather said paraphrased from Austrian German (who was in the Hitler Youth, like all kids his age — he was 12 when the war ended): "I didn't like the Nazis because in their ranks only simpletons and brutes would get into positions of leadership." So I am not surprised all kind of things have been called "jewish", as this was an easy way to quickly get rid of people you either disliked, envied or who simply did better work than you.
In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.
> There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
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.
What I mean is that I regularly see science being denied on the right because it’s labeled “woke.” Mostly social science at the moment, but I see the term attached to medical science as well, vis a vis the pandemic for example. It’s utterly nonsensical, but the point is to imbue the subject with negative feelings by association.
Woke people believe math is racist. They get people banned or fired from universities. 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?
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.
>> Could you give us an example? I know about racism issues associated with math education, but I've never heard that 'mathematics is racist'.
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.
The discussion of Weyl is incoherent: according to the author he was both forced out and decided to leave. The reality is that he decided to leave Germany out of fear for his family, after delaying an alarming interval of time.
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/
It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host.
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.
From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence.
"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.
Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.
It’s true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century it was called Jew hatred. “Antisemitism” was an attempt to dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that.
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).
There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.
No one would dispute that hatred towards Jews existed for 1000s of years, but I think you're mincing words here and being somewhat uncharitable. The kind of anti-Semitism that was based on an innate racial inferiority rather than based on religion and culture was very much a 19th century development and it was that specific form of hatred towards Jews that was widespread across Europe and America rather than an opposition towards Jewish customs and beliefs.
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.
While the impact on Jewish individuals was the same, it's true that Nazi style antisemitism focused on them as a racial group (Their ancestry), whereas previously they were targeted as a faith group (What they believed).
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.
I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I made to describe a specific part of the Nazi world view.
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.
So, I didn’t read you that way, and, fair enough. But that’s still not true. Antisemitism was racialized in Spain, too, and I think you can find sources for earlier strains. And all “scientific racism” will of course stem from the 1800s, along with science itself.
Actually I believe it was invented in France, although I could be misremembering that. It was certainly big in France for a time. I didn't mean to imply it was uniquely German.
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.
Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does.
None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.
I think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of.
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.
i think the main difference is that in the middle ages conversion to Christianity was a way to avoid persecution, while this was not an option under nazi Germany.
> I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century.
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.
I linked to a lot of resources that cover the points you're trying to make and IMO it'd be worth reading them if you want to have an informed discussion of antisemitism, e.g. antisemitic events that occurred hundreds of years prior to the 19th century and are viewed by mainstream scholarship as being part of European antisemitism that directly led to the Holocaust.
When you say a lot, do you just mean the three Wikipedia articles? Because I looked at them and they reaffirm what the other person is saying, that there is a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. In fact right in the very link you post it states:
>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:
If you could read past the first paragraph you would find:
> 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.
No dispute about that, antisemitism as a term to describe persecution of Jews certainly is used to apply to instances that took place 1000s of years ago. That does not mean that antisemitism didn't change, with different forms emerging with different excuses. Hatred of a group of people often precedes rationales for that hatred, excuses are made after the fact.
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.
I am simply disputing the original claim that "anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that."
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.
The idea that it's minimizing to point out that antisemitism emerged as a form of hatred on the basis of ones race, who one is inherently and born as, as opposed to one's beliefs or customs is really quite an absurd position to take and I hope you'd take some time to reflect on your overall position on this matter.
But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent, when it clearly wasn't in almost anything. The "racial" anti-Semitism was merely a fig leaf provided by quack science of the times.
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.
Anti-Semitism in the context of what we're talking about.
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.
Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed.
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.
Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
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.
I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.
> 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.
This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?
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.
Yes, at the end of the 1400s Spain and Portugal were regarded as the "periphery" of Western Europe, they had just gotten "in" more or less as a result of La Reconquista and of the Aragon kings having started doing their thing in the Southern part of Italian peninsula in the 1400s (especially Napoli) but nothing more than that.
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.
I'm not sure why you keep trying to talk about 1300s Spain when the expulsion of the Jews from Spain happened in 1492, which is in the 15th century and very nearly in the 16th. Jews were clearly a thing in Spain in the 15th century, and Spain was a part of Europe.
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.
There have always been Jews in Europe. Martin Luther famously spent quite some time ranting about them.
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.
I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.
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.
I did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down.
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.
For the scope of England, I think you are probably right. However, Wikipedia lists a number of events that occurred in western Europe well after the crusades, including one in Spain (referencing the Jewish Encyclopedia):
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.
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.
Not to mention that Hitler took a lot of influence from Southern USA racists/Jim Crow. The idea of racial purity was thoroughly globalised by the time the Nazis took power.
American's LOVED eugenics for giving them an excuse to keep believing what they already wanted to believe. Other southerners took the approach of letting their pastors tell them that "it was god's will that the negro serve us" and that keeping slaves was outright the morally upstanding thing to do with "savage races"
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.
You're mixing up the unintended consequences with the intended consequences. Persecuting jews (and others) was an intended consequence and started a lot earlier than WW2. Hitler wanted war, but just to the east - not a world war with the west. He was convinced the French, British and Americans wouldn't care enough to resist him. WW2 was an unintended consequence.
This explanation fails to describe what happened in 1940: when Hitler invaded Poland, UK and France declared war, but they stayed in France and Belgium so if Hitler only wanted war on the East, he could very much have it due to the reluctance of the colonial powers to attack. He deliberately chose to invade France.
(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.)
It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board. Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia, given the support they would have received against Stalin without their accompanying genocide.
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?
It was so much more than just a cash/property grab. It was also an accidental ideology hack to plaster over the unsolvable conflict between working class and capitalism.
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.
You are right on the point. Also note that antisemitism was the ideological way to unify the image of a nebulous jewish german finance class with bolshevism, painting them as both sides of the same jewish conspiracy coin. This way the hatred to the capitalist class was diverted to hatred against bolshevism. Antisemitism was what made that ideological manoeuvre possible.
The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial might of the US alone was simply too powerful.
"You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!"
I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht.
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.)
It's possible that had the Germans forced a surrender or armistice upon Britain, that the US never gets involved. Domestic sentiment against US involvement was pretty strong and took all of FDR's political skills to overcome for Lend Lease etc.
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.
Lend lease was signed in March 1941 - Battle of Britain was Autumn 1940. It's hard to say how much the RN could have done, it's not that far across the channel, and it would have been potentially a very broad front.
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.
Oh there's no doubt that the British Army was too small and had suffered tremendous losses before evacuation at Dunkirk. But the Germans had no transports that could have crossed the Channel, especially when challenged by the Royal Navy. And the Royal Navy got an infusion of 50 destroyers from the US (in exchange for overseas basing rights). These weren't the latest and greatest ships, but they were symbolic of the US commitment to Britain. This preceded Lend Lease.
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.
Anti-semitism(or any other type of systematic hate) is not a disease but a symptom of a declining, rotten society.
It's also wishful thinking that any society that engages in genocide will self-destruct. Plenty of historical examples exist where it continued to survive and collapsed for other reasons.
It's really not. It leaves open the possibility that others could fill in the gaps, given enough time. Their wasn't enough time, and path dependence matters.
It doesn't seem like Germany suffered any setbacks in this regard. In fact it seems that this dispute was a major cause of antisemitism, rather than its result.
This actually comes up a lot in the "alternative history" community, who like to imagine ways "the nazis could have won", and in the end, they always come down to "If the nazis had just been less nazi, they could have survived".
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"
Indeed, that is what Sebastian Haffner argues in The Meaning of Hitler: In December 1941 he abandoned the goal of world conquest in favour of the Final solution–exterminating the Jews [1].
The counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain power, but is a double edged sword since you can only ramp up the rhetoric if you want to keep your coalition together, the very force that brings you to power distracts you from your actual objectives.
Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign.
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.
Hitler's ascension to power was aided and abetted by the ruling class which thought he would be a tool they could control. And the Reichstag fire was just a pretext for Hitler to assume complete control; the Nazis were already in control of the German government at this point.
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.
Without the "your enemy is not capitalism, it's the Jew!" ploy that entire "working class brownshirts beat up communists on behalf of industrialists" thing would not have happened at all. Antisemitism was the keystone that kept their self-contradicting ideological mess from collapsing before they even got a foot on the ground.
You have to tap into some strong basic instinct to get unquestioning massive support from the majority of the populace. In most cases, like in the case of Nazi germany, it is/was tapping into tribalism. Doing that builds up the in group’s self worth, imbues them with a feeling of superiority and generally makes them feel like they are living better, happier lives. Having someone to look down on is probably the easiest way to feel successful and happy. This isn’t rational thinking.
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
Common estimates are that WWII killed 50
million to 100 million people. So, wanted
to get some understanding of how it
happened, how to avoid such, and looked at
many descriptions of that history.
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.
> Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay.
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.
> 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????
Hitler was certainly brilliant in certain ways, e.g. as a public speaker he must have been very persuasive. I don't think that changes anything about how utterly insane his (and his fellow Nazis') ideology was, though.
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.
> By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.
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.
> No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.
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.
- 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
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.
This goes to show how prestige and reputation built up over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of decades.
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.
It's about the institutional culture, not the superstars. The reputation that matters comes from a culture, where the people who are good at what they do can focus on what they choose to do. But if the government / administrators / donors / other politruks get too much say over how the institution is run, that reputation can easily be lost. Superstars leaving is then just a symptom of a wider issue.
If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress.
Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.
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.
> 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?
Or how many really brilliant people spend their lives trying to push even more ads on the population at large, for good money and good living standard, but mostly harming humanity instead of helping it with their talent.
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.
I think the relentless push for progress leads to wars.
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.
Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2?
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.
Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
> 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.
There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't.
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.
You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable.
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?
Nationalism was coming alive as a powerful political force in the second decade of the 20th Century, so it's hard to estimate what would have happened had Princip missed. Odds are the Black Hand would have simply kept trying to kill the King as a means of obtaining independence.
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.
IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.
"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."
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.
I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English.
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?
You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life.
Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.
There are plenty of business use cases for computers. Before the invention of electronic computers companies employed rooms full of people to do math by hand, so there was obvious economic incentive to automate this. Every step after that, including smartphones, had obvious economic incentives. Sometimes war helped it along, like demand for better weather simulation or the Apollo program kickstarting demand for silicon chips, but the advances would have come either way.
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.
During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s
And 1945. Double whammy. Germany never made a comeback.
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.
German here. It's actually true that you see a lot of "public intellectuals" that publicly tell how bad they were at math.
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.
German here. Grew up in the 70s with anti-intellectual TV-shows (like Rappelkiste).
Despite that Germany did manage to elect a p-chemist as BK.
Interesting idea.. but ABleton comes out of germany!
I think Germany has been quite good in practical research (see world leading companies, especially smaller ones in niche markets you never heard of), not so in science (think Nobel Prize winners).
How about Zeiss?
One aspect of this that fascinated me is Nazi Germany's "physics denialism" (?) — the reactionary response to the modern physics revolutions of the early 20th century. (I.e. the twin revolutions of quantum physics and of relativity). It was a much weirder response than simply an attack on physicists who happened to be Jewish humans. Fields of physics were conspiratorially labelled as having a "Jewish" character, and dismissed as psuedoscience, as pathological science: "Jüdische Physik". There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik ("Deutsche Physik" or "Aryan Physics")
It was the same thing in mathematics. For example, when Edmund Landau defined pi as "twice the value of the unique zero of cos in the interval [0, 2]" (a very common definition) instead of geometrically, this was attacked as being "un-German" (even though you can obviously go from the geometric to the analytic definition and vice versa).
https://institucional.us.es/blogimus/en/2017/03/pi-and-the-n...
The disease is independent of context. It's about taking a political club and using it to hit anybody you don't like. And we're far from being immune to it even now.
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.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> The correct reaction is to identify people using this particular pattern and penalize them regardless of political or cultural affiliation.
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.
Here's a remarkable quote: "The Cauchy-Goursat theorem arouses intolerable displeasure in us Germans".
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))
Haven't multiple states done the same thing? (trying to redefine pi)
Not the same thing. Twice the unique zero of cos in [0, 2] is provably equal to the circumference of a circle of diameter 1. It's not equal to 3.2 or whatever the Indiana Pi Bill was trying to legislate.
Multiple? No.
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)
[flagged]
The depictions of "wrong physics" in the 3 Body Problem show kinda remind me of that. Any kind of thinking that had even a whiff of going against the party line would cause problems for the author. What a weird time.
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 :-)
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect.
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.
Also a "climate alarmist". There is a band of climate science you can freely publish without reputational damage, but don't go over or under it.
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.
I've just watched a documentary on Netflix, "Three Identical Strangers" (SPOILER ALERT), about a 1960's to 1980's study about identical twins/triplets separated at birth and who grew up in intentionally distinct conditions (of the triplets, one grew up in a blue collar family, one in middle class, and one in a upper class family, all with an older sibling in the family as a sort of "control").
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...
>uncomfortable conclusions about the polemic "nature VS nurture" debate
These always seem to miss the effect of nutrition (and other) in the womb, which is massive. You need nonidentical twins as controls.
There's a dirty fashion in climate science to include political activism or call to action in their papers. Especially if they've found something that shows good news about climate change. They qualify it with "... but we must all make an effort to reduce fossil fuel use".
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.
[flagged]
Nothing wrong with wanting it, but a research paper is not the place to express personal opinions on how other people should behave. It's not a result they got from their own work, just rhetoric they know they're supposed to repeat, perhaps for safety of their careers, or perhaps because they unethically want to use their platform for activism.
I've accepted that we are going to destroy ourselves and there is essentially nothing to be done at this point, but isn't that generally considered a bad thing? I'm surprised that endeavoring to continue the existence of humanity is so controversial.
Climate change is no threat to the existence of humanity. You've been misled by extremists.
Think of the children!
> In debate, it is a plea for pity that is used as an appeal to emotion, and therefore may become a logical fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
Yes, I never really got the appeal myself, but I'm told that people do in fact place great value on children which is why I'm so surprised at their willingness to destroy the planet.
"destroy the planet" is pretty much an exaggregation which demonstrates nicely that you seem to be alarmist. No point in having a discussion then.
6 degrees Celsius will basically render the Earth inhospitable for human occupation, but perhaps with some remnants remaining near the poles. Some of the latest work from James Hansen (whose previous work has been quite prescient) is suggesting that 10 degrees is likely. I apologize for my hyperbole.
6 deg of what? fahrenheit, celsiius? And what, increase or decrease? Inaccurate alarmists are even wrose. Please dont even reply, I couldnt care less about your opinions.
I specified Celsius. And being willfully foolish as to the direction of the temperature change is childish.
You got some of those edgy papers near? I keep hearing things like this, but at every turn the science being published is hot trash.
You're probably not searching with a genuine effort to find the good ones.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
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?
> exceedingly implausible that differences were [...] or entirely environmentally based
"entirely environmentally based" is the popular and un-scientific belief that I disagree with. So you agree with me?
What's the conclusion everyone is missing?
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.
IQ test have genuine predictive power when applied to large groups. So no, they're not unscientific. In fact, the idea of IQ tests being useless or culturally biased is a now-outdated excuse that people used to use to justify the different results between ethic groups. It's now well accepted that different ethnic groups have different average IQs, and that IQ is a useful predictor of various life outcomes. What the politically-motivated researchers don't agree on is whether that's entirely environmental or partly genetic. Everyone agrees that it's at least partly environmental.
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.
In general the thing people find obnoxious about this kind of argument is that both 'race' and 'IQ' have their origin in eugenics, but are meaningless in genetics. The genetic variation across one race (say black) is much greater than the variation between races. There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ. So, even if you do find evidence that there is a statistical correlation between these two unscientific and essentially meaningless concepts, your correlation is equally unscientific and meaningless.
> There are no well-established genetic predictors of IQ
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
I think you'd have to be a bit of an expert to understand these results, just because of words like 'intelligence', that could mean anything, really, and I think accounting for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence is not exactly blowing the question out of the water.
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.
True, intelligence is not simple. But no matter how complex it is, the difference between an IQ of 100 and an IQ of 70 is undeniably a difference in intelligence.
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.
> The difference between a society with an average IQ of 100 and a society with an average IQ of 70 is one of intelligence.
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, ... ?
I mean, nationality is obviously an enviromental factor, right? There's no 'german gene'. Ethnicities like 'French' don't actually exist in genes. So even if there is this nation-by-nation IQ variation, it shouldn't matter if you let people live where they want.
It would be a bad policy... If the people of those western countries were having children. They aren't. They need those immigrants.
There is no nation without natalism.
Can't you train a predictor on skull shape/bone length and IQ and go from there? Yeah there's no causation there, but you should be able to give a percentage that someone's IQ is above a certain number depending on high-rez MRI scan input of skull and bone length measurements.
You can train a predictor on anything: that's how the famous cases of 'racist AI' came about. The point is, you can't establish a causal relationship without accounting for confounders. If you're starting with a question established by racists, with 'race' and 'IQ' as your two poles, and human populations as your data, good luck managing that.
Or make asset worth a predictor.
Finding evidence to be obnoxious because of political associations is anti-science. You could make a moral argument that humans shouldn't be allowed to know certain things because we can't be trusted with that knowledge, but that's separate from trying to understand reality.
> 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.
So IQ is a word used to describe the results of a bunch of tests first established by eugenicists in the late 19th century, and has no scientific extraction whatsoever. Genetics is a field of science, and you can identify groups that carry particular genes. However, the 'races' don't map to distinct genetic groups, which is very unsurprising: the 'races' or 'ethnicities' are just administrative or cultural groupings from the 19th century.
The origin isn't relevant to whether it's valid or not.
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.
... That's just nonsense. Normal scientists working in genetics don't believe in race. The field has moved on from the 40s. It's not a conspiracy, there's just no evidence, because why should there be? It would be very surprising if a bunch of 19th century racists had accidentally discovered a deep truth about genetics before anybody had even discovered DNA.
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.
I can't understand how you can say that when it's transparently false. There's an enormous quantity of research on ethnicity and genetics. Researchers have found all sorts of correlations. Even common sense tells you things about eye color, hair color, etc. but it goes far deeper than that. It's more precise than classic race but both are still valid classifications.
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.
This guy clearly is just trying to bang on about racial superiority but coaxing it in terms of "they won't let us say the thing". Your response neatly shuts him down. Well done.
Early stage of liberal thinking:
https://imgb.ifunny.co/images/9c89e75eaf0c192986a8cd5c929620...
Late stage, once genetic patching is ubiquitous:
https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2014/10/hyper-racism.h...
Shut me down by saying false things? Why do you believe IQ is unscientific? It's routinely used by scientists for science and has falsifiable predictive power, which distinguishes it from unscientific things like astrology and homeopathy. Race isn't unscientific either - even if we're talking about the classic 3 races (which is not actually how people use the word anyway), they do in fact correspond to broad common genetic histories. Yes, they're an artificial classification people invented, but species are also an artificial classification. Neither is capable of classifying every individual and neither is unscientific because both are well enough defined to be useful to make predictions from.
Thank you
Verbally smacked down? Yes. But it's absurd to even compare this to the purges in China, Germany and Russia, were people were literally killed to death.
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.
Not arguing with your point but “killed to death” sounds like an awesome metal band name
"Killed to Death" is an album by Murdered [0]
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...
And then there was that classic movie, "Murder By Death."
"Kohga, the stupendous chief of the Yiga Clan, is gonna kill you all... to death!"
heck there are probably humans who can sight read ROT13
Funny I was thinking of how so many otherwise intelligent and educated people believe climate change is just a liberal hoax.
Ask any of your friends how much sea level will rise by 2050 and you will get some pretty wild answers.
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.
I’m an ex-climate militant, so the fun part is that I have a very large corpus of knowledge on this topic. It’s an incredible experience to have read papers deeper than people who try to defend climate, and to know the weakness of each paper. Militants and even professionals really generally don’t know what they’re talking about, which is across the board in climate change. They are right, but often by mistake or pure luck, and I abhor that.
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.
I guess it got swept up in the reasonable skepticism that resulted from the exposed overt politisation of science that was already on the rise but went hokystick in 2020?
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)
> 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.
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.
>scientists being branded “climate alarmists” (even as their models consistently under-estimate global warming)
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.
There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though. You can certainly have egotistical reasons but the herd immunity created through general vaccination isn’t just a theory anymore.
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.
It depends what you mean by "antivaxer", what is the subclinical myocarditis rate for ACAM1000 again? (Not ACAM2000, I'm very specifically talking about ACAM1000)
>There are no scientific merits for being an antivaxer though.
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."
[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/74035/download
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
Imagine someone asks you: "If I flip a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds it comes up tails on the 100th toss?"
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.
> I’d be more curious as to how anti-vaccine agendas ever became a thing.
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.
Ironically, this is how popular beliefs are supported, but I don't think anti-vax is one of them. The news tells people what they want to hear to keep them engaged to make money from advertising to them. That's why news organizations are split into partisan groups, they have to do that to serve their own markets. Anyone being neutral would alienate most of their audience by making them uncomfortable.
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.
> Turned out to be a big conspiracy and false.
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.
I agree it's not conclusive, so I shouldn't have said "false", but the FBI says it was most likely a lab leak [1].
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...
From your link:
"My article" isn't mine, it's an article discussing a lengthy technical debate recently held on the merits of zoonotic origin Vs Lab leak origin cases with a great many qualified onlookers, experienced judges, and $100K USD at stake on the outcome.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.
It's not a strawman, it's your real man. It's the first sentence in the article you cited.
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 FBI doesn't know ("likely" isn't a proof, it is not even a certainty). When Trump was in power, why hasn't any conclusive proof published?
Maybe I'm a little behind on this stuff, but I thought that it hasn't been conclusively proven either way (lab leak or naturally occurring). The lab-leak hypothesis was shouted down in mainstream media early on because they didn't want to offend China, but I don't think it's ever been conclusively proven that it wasn't a lab leak. However, there hasn't been sufficient evidence to back that hypothesis either.
FWIW in the current time we definitely encounter "wrong physics" in places where science and politics intersect.
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.
String theory has, however, been successfully applied to oranges. Here in Germany, these are now routinely sold in nets, made of some sort of string. QED
That makes sense. After all, orange is a color: wrapping oranges with strings is a way of deriving the phenomenon of color confinement.
Struggle sessions were full of this stuff yea. Many people were killed during the Cultural Revolution for accepting reality.
Quantum physics and relativity were a radical departure from classical mechanics and remain very counter-intuitive for laypeople so it's not hard to see how contemporary persons with ulterior motives and little interest in scientific inquiry would fixate on those.
The Nazis weren't unique in dismissing categories of research on ideological grounds. The USSR label of "bourgeois pseudoscience" [1] was applied to various fields like evolutionary biology.
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.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bourgeois_pseudoscience
> 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
And google and apple are spending millions of dollars to reimplement GNU software because they want to escape the GPLv3 license.
There’s a difference in having a subjective opinion on an OS and flat out denying physical phenomenon like the photoelectric effect. What kind of nonsensical analogy is this.
When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
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?
> When did the soviets deny physical phenomena like the photoelectric effect? I believe they had issues with the kind of non-falsifiable metaphysical arguments put forward to try to explain or understand quantum mechanics.
There were many, but the most famous example is probably Lysenkoism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
I don't know, what's rationality's current reputation?
Similar to some tendencies today with Right Wing from German AfD or American MAGA to dismiss complete fields of science. Whether it is climate change or vaccinations. They do not have a discussion, they dismiss it outright.
You’re not wrong. This comment doesn’t deserve the downvotes.
You mean things like thinking that the vaccine harms of something nearly the entire world has received which was being said would kill people in two years time is more dangerous than the thing that actually killed millions of people during the last few years?
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.
"Major political parties" know that votes from idiots are as valuable as votes from people they are unable to fool: no-vax conspiracy theorists are one of many despicable constituencies that they want to be nice to, at the cost of alienating a smaller number of better people.
In the end it seems both "sides" were wrong on this. The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid, but they also didn't kill them.
> The vaccines didn't protect people from getting covid
What do you mean by this? The vaccines absolutely decreased the likelihood of getting and the severity of Covid.
[flagged]
Whatever information you're getting, know that you're on the end of disinformation, because the mortality reductions were definitely broad-spectrum.
Is that why the US is the only country to mandate covid vaccines for children when there were no deaths in that group?
The US does not mandate covid vaccines for children.
you are indeed deeply misinformed, to the point of not getting basic facts right. Please admit it.
https://www.statista.com/chart/25326/obligatory-vaccination-... https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
No, that's because you are right in that politics got involved so people got super confused. Wearing masks indoors in your own home for social signaling or wearing masks outdoors after it was long clear that was silly.
But the US being overly politicized doesn't have any impact on if the vaccine worked or not. Reality doesn't care.
I meant exactly what I wrote, almost everybody who took the vaccines contracted covid.
And without the vaccines they would likely have had worse symptoms as well as potentially had symptomatic covid even more times than they did.
In other words the fact that vaccinated people contracted covid does _not_ mean the vaccines didn’t protect them from the disease.
Protecting people from COVID involves more than preventing them from contracting the illness. It reduced mortality and hospitalizations. Compare the mortality rate in a country like Brazil to the US and tell me again how the vaccines didn't protect people from 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.
> I seriously don't get this antivax nonsense.
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.
> It's a shame they didn't protect people better…
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.
That’s dumb. If you can take something that will reduce a potentially deadly disease to some mild symptoms for a few days it’s effectively a cure.
How do you expect to have any fruitful exchange with your behaviour? People will prefer to avoid talking to you.
The Nazis have had a strong mystic and esotheric undercurrent which also had to do with the Thule Society. When Hitler came to power German of all walks of life thought they could wield him to reach their own goals. Being correct in the sense of logic isn't what the Nazis were about. Or as my grandfather said paraphrased from Austrian German (who was in the Hitler Youth, like all kids his age — he was 12 when the war ended): "I didn't like the Nazis because in their ranks only simpletons and brutes would get into positions of leadership." So I am not surprised all kind of things have been called "jewish", as this was an easy way to quickly get rid of people you either disliked, envied or who simply did better work than you.
In a sense Trumpism echos that sentiment, where merit or truth doesn't count, but yelling the right thing loud enough does.
[flagged]
[flagged]
I'm out of the loop on this. Could you point me in a certain direction where I could read about this?
What's happening to biology today?
For both siblings, I'll risk guessing it's about a denial of sex being binary, and the taboo (amongst "liberals") of saying so.
> There was a fanaticism that's hard to grapple with philosophically, a thing that's far outside rationality, a magical thinking. How much more "magical" can you get than disregarding natural physical laws, and substituting your own? That's the definition of magic.
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.
Or “woke.”
What in a 'woke' ideology has denied basic, consequential science?
What I mean is that I regularly see science being denied on the right because it’s labeled “woke.” Mostly social science at the moment, but I see the term attached to medical science as well, vis a vis the pandemic for example. It’s utterly nonsensical, but the point is to imbue the subject with negative feelings by association.
So, yeah, history repeats itself yet again.
Woke people believe math is racist. They get people banned or fired from universities. 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?
> Woke people believe math is racist.
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.
>> Could you give us an example? I know about racism issues associated with math education, but I've never heard that 'mathematics is racist'.
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.
The discussion of Weyl is incoherent: according to the author he was both forced out and decided to leave. The reality is that he decided to leave Germany out of fear for his family, after delaying an alarming interval of time.
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/
Thanks! Looking forward to this!
Of the scientists who stayed.. what did they do during/after the war?
Put people into space and put people on the moon.
Heisenberg was the leader of the Nazi atomic weapon program.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg?wprov=sfti1#
It occurs to me that anti-semitism is a disease that ultimately destroys its host.
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.
From a Nazi perspective, what you're saying makes little sense. It would be similar to "we should enlist Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh in the army, because they've shown to be excellent at bombing stuff". That would be silly because these people and the organisations they associate with are considered a corrupting influence. In the Nazi view, Jews consisted a corrupting influence.
"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.
Anti-Semitism as a 19th century development doesn't seem historically accurate. While anti-Semites in the 19th century glommed on to racial theories as backing for their hate, the origins of anti-Semitism are millennia old.
It’s true in a very strict sense: before the 19th century it was called Jew hatred. “Antisemitism” was an attempt to dress it up in a veneer of science.l, and that does date to the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
As a modern, industrial phenomenon about specifically jews as an ethnicity its unique.
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.
It's not; anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that.
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).
There's a lot of weird things in this comment, but the weirdest is the claim that antisemitism is a 19th century innovation; Google "expulsion of the Jews from" and see where it autocompletes for you. Similarly: pogroms in the Pale of Settlement were not motivated by (and predate) 19th century race science.
No one would dispute that hatred towards Jews existed for 1000s of years, but I think you're mincing words here and being somewhat uncharitable. The kind of anti-Semitism that was based on an innate racial inferiority rather than based on religion and culture was very much a 19th century development and it was that specific form of hatred towards Jews that was widespread across Europe and America rather than an opposition towards Jewish customs and beliefs.
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.
But I don't think that's true either. See: the Inquisition where even converted Jews weren't safe
> 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.
It's kind of interesting how any such distinctions have been essentially eliminated. Nature is very mysterious.
While the impact on Jewish individuals was the same, it's true that Nazi style antisemitism focused on them as a racial group (Their ancestry), whereas previously they were targeted as a faith group (What they believed).
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.
Eh.
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.
I didn't claim that "antisemitism is a 19th century innovation", I claimed that Anti-Semitism in the sense of "against the Semitic race", as I described in my previous comment, is a 19th century invention. A distinction I made to describe a specific part of the Nazi world view.
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.
So, I didn’t read you that way, and, fair enough. But that’s still not true. Antisemitism was racialized in Spain, too, and I think you can find sources for earlier strains. And all “scientific racism” will of course stem from the 1800s, along with science itself.
Actually I believe it was invented in France, although I could be misremembering that. It was certainly big in France for a time. I didn't mean to imply it was uniquely German.
> Google "expulsion of the Jews from"
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.
Um, please explain The Merchant of Venice. c. 1600 in an England which basically had no Jews.
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.
Again, anti-Judaism is not the same thing. This is just "normal" religious persecution that has been around since forever and that many (if not all) religious groups have experienced at some point or another. Does this matter? Well, in the context of discussing Nazi world-views it does.
None of this is especially controversial among mainstream Jewish historians, as far as I know.
I think you're trying to draw a hard line distinction where only a blurry evolution exists. While antisemitism in the 19th and 20th centuries had some unique characteristics that co-evolved with other forms of racism, antisemitism existed before the 19th century and there are clear evolutionary roots e.g. "Jewish badges" [1] that date back to the 1100s, which the famous "Jude" badge from the Nazi era was a continuation of.
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
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres
i think the main difference is that in the middle ages conversion to Christianity was a way to avoid persecution, while this was not an option under nazi Germany.
Racial excuses replaced religious excuses.
> I don't know of many mainstream Jewish historians who would agree that antisemitism didn't exist prior to the 19th century.
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.
I linked to a lot of resources that cover the points you're trying to make and IMO it'd be worth reading them if you want to have an informed discussion of antisemitism, e.g. antisemitic events that occurred hundreds of years prior to the 19th century and are viewed by mainstream scholarship as being part of European antisemitism that directly led to the Holocaust.
When you say a lot, do you just mean the three Wikipedia articles? Because I looked at them and they reaffirm what the other person is saying, that there is a distinction between anti-Judaism and antisemitism. In fact right in the very link you post it states:
>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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism
If you could read past the first paragraph you would find:
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism
No dispute about that, antisemitism as a term to describe persecution of Jews certainly is used to apply to instances that took place 1000s of years ago. That does not mean that antisemitism didn't change, with different forms emerging with different excuses. Hatred of a group of people often precedes rationales for that hatred, excuses are made after the fact.
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.
I am simply disputing the original claim that "anti-Semitism as we know today is very much rooted in racial science (well, "science") of the 19th century. Before that it was an anti-religious thing: anti-Judaism, which was a markedly different and similar to Anti-Catholicism, anti-Protestantism, and things like that."
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 splitting hairs in an attempt to minimize both anti-Semitism and the acts of the Nazis.
The idea that it's minimizing to point out that antisemitism emerged as a form of hatred on the basis of ones race, who one is inherently and born as, as opposed to one's beliefs or customs is really quite an absurd position to take and I hope you'd take some time to reflect on your overall position on this matter.
But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent, when it clearly wasn't in almost anything. The "racial" anti-Semitism was merely a fig leaf provided by quack science of the times.
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.
> But you're assuming Nazi ideology was coherent
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.
You literally said:
"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.
Anti-Semitism in the context of what we're talking about.
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.
Anti-semitism wasn't a major factor in European history until the (second-ish part) of the 19th century, for the simple reason that the European Jewish population wasn't that big of a presence for hundreds of years. Once the Enlightenment and French Revolution happened and once the Jewish population started to get some rights (which gets us into the 19th century) then things changed.
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.
Jews not "being a thing" in Europe from the 1200s until the 1800s is so preposterously wrong it's hard to know where to start. The Spanish expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, with the subsequent very famous Spanish Inquisition, might be a decent place to start reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain
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.
I didn't count the current territory of Spain up until the late 1400s as "proper" Western European, in fact most of the histories of Spain do not dwell on the history of Al-Andalus in the 14th century for too long, if at all.
> 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.
This is once again so wrong it's incredible. History of Spain not including 1492, the year Columbus set sail? Really? The beginning of European colonialism of the Americas is ignored by "most of the histories" of Europe and Spain?
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.
Yes, at the end of the 1400s Spain and Portugal were regarded as the "periphery" of Western Europe, they had just gotten "in" more or less as a result of La Reconquista and of the Aragon kings having started doing their thing in the Southern part of Italian peninsula in the 1400s (especially Napoli) but nothing more than that.
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....)
I'm not sure why you keep trying to talk about 1300s Spain when the expulsion of the Jews from Spain happened in 1492, which is in the 15th century and very nearly in the 16th. Jews were clearly a thing in Spain in the 15th century, and Spain was a part of Europe.
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.
I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.
There have always been Jews in Europe. Martin Luther famously spent quite some time ranting about them.
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.
I wouldn't agree with the assertion that it wasn't a major factor. The repeated violence against Jews and their expulsion from various areas is not a singular event, but forms a significant common thread across European history. It has happened so many times that the idea of persecuting Jews became a part of European culture, and thus gave the Nazis their inspiration for the Holocaust.
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.
I did include the caveat "starting with the 1200-1300s", and I did have the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in mind when writing that down.
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.
For the scope of England, I think you are probably right. However, Wikipedia lists a number of events that occurred in western Europe well after the crusades, including one in Spain (referencing the Jewish Encyclopedia):
> 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.
Yes, “very unfortunate”.
Not to mention that Hitler took a lot of influence from Southern USA racists/Jim Crow. The idea of racial purity was thoroughly globalised by the time the Nazis took power.
American's LOVED eugenics for giving them an excuse to keep believing what they already wanted to believe. Other southerners took the approach of letting their pastors tell them that "it was god's will that the negro serve us" and that keeping slaves was outright the morally upstanding thing to do with "savage races"
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.
You're mixing up the unintended consequences with the intended consequences. Persecuting jews (and others) was an intended consequence and started a lot earlier than WW2. Hitler wanted war, but just to the east - not a world war with the west. He was convinced the French, British and Americans wouldn't care enough to resist him. WW2 was an unintended consequence.
This explanation fails to describe what happened in 1940: when Hitler invaded Poland, UK and France declared war, but they stayed in France and Belgium so if Hitler only wanted war on the East, he could very much have it due to the reluctance of the colonial powers to attack. He deliberately chose to invade France.
(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.)
It's an interesting question, and on the face of it, yes, the Nazi's probably would have won with the Jewish people on board. Similar arguments can be made about their invasion of Russia, given the support they would have received against Stalin without their accompanying genocide.
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?
It was so much more than just a cash/property grab. It was also an accidental ideology hack to plaster over the unsolvable conflict between working class and capitalism.
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.
You are right on the point. Also note that antisemitism was the ideological way to unify the image of a nebulous jewish german finance class with bolshevism, painting them as both sides of the same jewish conspiracy coin. This way the hatred to the capitalist class was diverted to hatred against bolshevism. Antisemitism was what made that ideological manoeuvre possible.
The only way the Nazis would have "won" is if they developed the atomic bomb before the US. Even with many of the emigres that helped with the Manhattan project, that might not have been possible. The Soviets were never going to surrender, same with the British, and once the Americans started supplying Britain with arms, they were safe. And then when Hitler declared war on the US, it was game over. The industrial might of the US alone was simply too powerful.
"You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!"
I think the cash/property grab aspect was there from the beginning, and even in the 20´s you see it manifesting itself on a local level with intimidation etc. Klemperer's, I will bear witness, diaries from Dresden in that period are a fascinating read on the day to day impacts. Then as you say, it escalates culminating in Kristallnacht.
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.)
It's possible that had the Germans forced a surrender or armistice upon Britain, that the US never gets involved. Domestic sentiment against US involvement was pretty strong and took all of FDR's political skills to overcome for Lend Lease etc.
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.
Lend lease was signed in March 1941 - Battle of Britain was Autumn 1940. It's hard to say how much the RN could have done, it's not that far across the channel, and it would have been potentially a very broad front.
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.
Oh there's no doubt that the British Army was too small and had suffered tremendous losses before evacuation at Dunkirk. But the Germans had no transports that could have crossed the Channel, especially when challenged by the Royal Navy. And the Royal Navy got an infusion of 50 destroyers from the US (in exchange for overseas basing rights). These weren't the latest and greatest ships, but they were symbolic of the US commitment to Britain. This preceded Lend Lease.
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.
Anti-semitism(or any other type of systematic hate) is not a disease but a symptom of a declining, rotten society. It's also wishful thinking that any society that engages in genocide will self-destruct. Plenty of historical examples exist where it continued to survive and collapsed for other reasons.
That is, ironically, racist, as it sort of implies that jews are somehow the only ones capable of doing science.
It's really not. It leaves open the possibility that others could fill in the gaps, given enough time. Their wasn't enough time, and path dependence matters.
It doesn't seem like Germany suffered any setbacks in this regard. In fact it seems that this dispute was a major cause of antisemitism, rather than its result.
This actually comes up a lot in the "alternative history" community, who like to imagine ways "the nazis could have won", and in the end, they always come down to "If the nazis had just been less nazi, they could have survived".
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"
Indeed, that is what Sebastian Haffner argues in The Meaning of Hitler: In December 1941 he abandoned the goal of world conquest in favour of the Final solution–exterminating the Jews [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Hitler
The counterpoint is that Hitler wouldn't have been able to seize power so easily were it not for the clear "other" to demonize. That's just human nature. Fascists always need some identifiable enemy to rally against and there was no shortage of antisemitism already in the country to work with. This is why they also picked up on hating Gypsys and homosexuals. Fear mongering is one of the most efficient ways to gain power, but is a double edged sword since you can only ramp up the rhetoric if you want to keep your coalition together, the very force that brings you to power distracts you from your actual objectives.
Hitler didn't exactly seize power "easily"; it took an attack on the German parliament (possibly orchestrated by the Nazis themselves), a paramilitary force intimidating opposition parties (and at times directly preventing them from voting in parliament), and an assassination campaign.
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.
Hitler's ascension to power was aided and abetted by the ruling class which thought he would be a tool they could control. And the Reichstag fire was just a pretext for Hitler to assume complete control; the Nazis were already in control of the German government at this point.
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.
Without the "your enemy is not capitalism, it's the Jew!" ploy that entire "working class brownshirts beat up communists on behalf of industrialists" thing would not have happened at all. Antisemitism was the keystone that kept their self-contradicting ideological mess from collapsing before they even got a foot on the ground.
Well, "most people" didn't actually vote for the fascism. The ticket was split enough that it ended up being minority rule.
"Most people" of the people who voted for the NSDAP, obviously.
Ah the fine line between fascist:
“if you died you were weak and deserved to die”
vs nazi:
“you are weak, you deserve to die”
In the end, Hitler basically stated the first axiom about Germany, so it really wasn’t a difference
Yes he wouldn't have been able to seize power. But what is power for? If he had not sized the power he would be able to see his grandchildren grow.
You have to tap into some strong basic instinct to get unquestioning massive support from the majority of the populace. In most cases, like in the case of Nazi germany, it is/was tapping into tribalism. Doing that builds up the in group’s self worth, imbues them with a feeling of superiority and generally makes them feel like they are living better, happier lives. Having someone to look down on is probably the easiest way to feel successful and happy. This isn’t rational thinking.
[flagged]
Here is a purported list of authors banned in Germany in 1933:
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
Common estimates are that WWII killed 50 million to 100 million people. So, wanted to get some understanding of how it happened, how to avoid such, and looked at many descriptions of that history.
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.
> Hitler and Germany could'a stopped there and likely been okay.
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.
> 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????
Hitler was certainly brilliant in certain ways, e.g. as a public speaker he must have been very persuasive. I don't think that changes anything about how utterly insane his (and his fellow Nazis') ideology was, though.
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.
> By then Hitler had done lots of ugly things and got away with them, e.g., the Holocaust.
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.
> No, actually the Holocaust, meaning the actual mass killing of Jews, didn't start until 1941, about the time Hitler attacked Russia.
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.
A couple of things you're missing:
- 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
Thanks!
> 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.
> Luck that the Progressive movement backed a liberal, not an authoritarian
This one seems important. The liberals who backed Hitler did so far more spitefully than did ours backing FDR.
This goes to show how prestige and reputation built up over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of decades.
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.
It's about the institutional culture, not the superstars. The reputation that matters comes from a culture, where the people who are good at what they do can focus on what they choose to do. But if the government / administrators / donors / other politruks get too much say over how the institution is run, that reputation can easily be lost. Superstars leaving is then just a symptom of a wider issue.
I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.
If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress.
Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.
Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.
I wish could answer that.
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.
> 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?
Or how many really brilliant people spend their lives trying to push even more ads on the population at large, for good money and good living standard, but mostly harming humanity instead of helping it with their talent.
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.
I think the relentless push for progress leads to wars.
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.
Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the expense of cultural and societal progress.
Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.
Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2?
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.
Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
> 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.
There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't.
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.
You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable.
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?
Nationalism was coming alive as a powerful political force in the second decade of the 20th Century, so it's hard to estimate what would have happened had Princip missed. Odds are the Black Hand would have simply kept trying to kill the King as a means of obtaining independence.
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.
IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.
The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.
Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years.
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."
I'm not convinced it's that simple.
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.
I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
>get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
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...
The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English.
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?
You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life.
Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.
There are plenty of business use cases for computers. Before the invention of electronic computers companies employed rooms full of people to do math by hand, so there was obvious economic incentive to automate this. Every step after that, including smartphones, had obvious economic incentives. Sometimes war helped it along, like demand for better weather simulation or the Apollo program kickstarting demand for silicon chips, but the advances would have come either way.
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.
During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s
The wars were a driving reason for a lot of technology and innovation, and at the least accelerated some important technological advances.
the amount of destruction and financial ruin that comes with war makes it a very negative outcome
If you sell arms to both sides and no fighting occurs on your territory…
No one has said there should be aggressive intervention in Ukraine or Middle East to minimize the environmental damage and financial impact of war.
Some suggest that war focuses the economy and drives it forward. How quickly would atomic power evolve without WWII?
Long and interesting article from 2024, the title is "The Great Purge (1933)" (which kind-of clashes with the HN conventions ...)
Thanks—I've edited the title a bit to solve that problem.