Harp
I'll Lock Up
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GOK said:fftopic: (slightly) I think it's incredibly difficult for us today to understand the mindset of 1930s Germany. Just the same as we find it hard to understand the mindset of religious fanaticism of today or 500 years ago. We are of a completely different world.
It's easy to condemn someone for being a Nazi because we have the benefit of hindsight but had we all been patriotic Germans living during Hitler's time, would we have reacted any differently to the majority of the German people? I'm not convinced we would.
Weimar societal dissolution and the rise of National Socialism has long
been blamed on the Treaty of Versailles and post-WWI allied vengeance,
which set the stage for Adolph Hitler's meteoric rise. I disagree that it is
difficult to understand the Germany of 1930-39; afterall, it was not that
long ago; moreover the economic/societal situation was, to some extent,
reflected globally in a world-wide Depression. What has confronted
historians, economists, philosophers, and psychologists ever since is the
Teutonic mindset that allowed and even applauded the Holocaust; which
cannot rationally be ascribed to Versailles. Nor can Imperial Japan's infamous
Rape of Nanking be comfortably explained or rationalized today.
The Japanese simply prefer to ignore their Second World War legacy.
The fact remains that the 20th Century was a slaughterhouse of epic historical
proportion. And that much of this horror occurred in Europe;
supposedly the cornerstone of Western Civilization, is a cold fact that
academe cannot explain. The Cambodian genocide that followed the
fall of South Vietnam and African holocaust has been conveniently ignored
by the liberal university intelligentsia. However, with Tito's death and the
Balkan proscenium conflagration, Europe once again posed her question;
reflective of the past, yet present in the latter stage of the bloodiest of
all centuries. Now the world awaits a nuclear-armed Islam, and an incapable
Occident-whose post modern philosophy cannot grapple with truth
nor recognize evil, must confront the determined Orient. If the recent past
is prologue-without rational comprehension of human behavior-then this
century holds little hope for mankind.