I've only read McMeekin's book on the July Crisis and Stalin's War so I cant comment on the book you referenced but I would encourage you to read Clark's Sleepwalkers if you want a well regarded neutral book that comprehensively tears the Fischer Thesis apart. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Mcmeekin in blaming the entire war on the Russia…
I've only read McMeekin's book on the July Crisis and Stalin's War so I cant comment on the book you referenced but I would encourage you to read Clark's Sleepwalkers if you want a well regarded neutral book that comprehensively tears the Fischer Thesis apart. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Mcmeekin in blaming the entire war on the Russians but the Tsars decision to mobilize was unquestionably the point at which a major war in Europe was unavoidable.
Again I'm not sure what exactly McMeekin claimed about Armenian responsibility for the Genocide but in hindsight its hard to argue that Russian encouraging Christian uprisings and British encouraging Greek interventions in Anatolia and then abandoning them served either groups interests at all.
-- "in hindsight its hard to argue that Russian encouraging Christian uprisings and British encouraging Greek interventions in Anatolia and then abandoning them served either groups interests at all."
Say what you will about the British for being flakes, but the Russians fought for three years on the Ottoman front up until a certain event forced them out of the war.
The Caucasian Front was a sideshow despite the enemy being much inferior to the forces on the Eastern Front. It's difficult to not notice the cynicism of Russian foreign policy in the region all the way back to the 19th century.
It was a sideshow because, you know, it WAS. You can only focus so much on the Ottomans, the weakest of the three enemies arrayed against you, when the other two are busy steamrolling through your lines.
Funny you should say that, because Clark's book is *also* very economical with the truth and takes care to paint its subject in the rosiest colors possible. Which makes sense - Clark is, after all, a Hohenzollern family defense attorney, and his historical work on Germany is widely lauded for "improving Anglo-German relations". The agenda is not just on display, it's at the level of the emperor's new clothes.
Unfortunately, laypeople don't bother to do even basic background checks on the historians they read, which means that for every David Irving who only becomes infamous by lying about a subject as charged as the Holocaust, a hundred other liars get to stay in the zone of respectability just because they chose to lie about a topic nobody cared enough about to call them out on TV and which so many people *wanted* them to be correct on. The result is that they can falsify even basic events with complete chutzpah, safe in the knowledge that any layman with a sentimental tenderness for the Kaiser's Germany will applaud them as a hero for the cause. Clark is the Kaiser's PR man through and through - if you want a more honest appraisal of Willy and his government's role in starting WW1, read Rohl's "The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany", followed by Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer".
I'm going to be perfectly honesty you, like alot of people who hold this fixation about pre 1918 Germany, seem completely emotionally compromised so I don't really take anything you have to say at this point very seriously. The comparison of Christopher Clark to David Irving genuinely made me laugh out loud, hysterical in both senses of the word.
The last statement unlike the rest of your post had some substance so that I'll actually address. If you think it's some revelation the German government was discussing plans for annexations after the war and that's damning to their intentions or that that was unique to them I really don't know what to tell you other than you should probably look into Allie diplomatic discussions about their war aims. You might learn something.
It is true that he literally got paid by the Hohenzollern family to write a report exonerating Crown Prince Wilhelm of support for Nazism as part of their claim for restitution following German unification, and appears to have deliberately selected information in order to make the strongest possible case. This is a kind of weird thing for a historian to do.
A less emotional way of putting it is that Germany wanted to be a big imperial power and were willing to roll the dice to get there. They were butthurt about being too late to the party to pick up a lot of colonies, but they should have gotten over it, and also had the foresight to realize that the profitability of imperialism was about to nosedive. I'm inclined to the view that both the Russophobes and Germanophobes are right.
Wanted to be a big imperial power in ways that (a) resemble the Nazis in that they require lots of genocide and are motivated by an explicitly *racial* need for lebensraum, and (b) got completely forgotten after the war, in large part because only the Germans knew about it and made sure the information was buried for decades until Fischer dived into the archives in the 50s.
I used to believe in the Moldbug Thesis of WW1 and had sympathy for the Kaiser's Germany. Then I found out about the Polish Border Strip and went down a long rabbit hole learning about prewar German political literature, and afterward a rabbit hole on how the war actually started and the preceding decade that had led up to it. Ironically, for all the unsavory things that it reveals about the Central Powers' position, this stuff is basically unheard-of among pro-Entente online casuals. You have to be willing to consider the idea that Germany was not just 'the bad guy' of WW1, but a full Nazi-level bad guy as well, which is just too radical a conclusion for most people to even contemplate - it just seems too mean-spirited, almost cartoonishly so when compared to the standard "it was all a horrible mistake" narrative that everyone was fed in school.
Let me tell you, it really hurts finding out that the thing you thought of as the sane historical alternative to Nazism for a rightwing Germany was infected with the same ideological syphilis and quickily progressing toward the same endpoint sans swastikas.
It's one of my major historical gripes with Moldbug, because it's a case study for how his approach of reflexively looking at history from the perspective of the loser is a bad one. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly useful, but it leaves one open to being pwned by the object of one's sympathy. By focusing on the predatory intentions of the budding Universalist empire, Moldbug ignores the possibility that any of its foes had embarked on a similar quest for world power and that their efforts had been memory-holed after the fact.
"The old world of Biedermeier, of Central European haute-bourgeois aristocracy, is exactly as dead. But there were many attempts to preserve it, and fascism was one. Conditions are ripe for fascism when there exists an old tradition which is in the process of being destroyed by democracy, but has not yet quite been destroyed. The half-recreated fascist tradition is half reactionary, half democratic, and all nasty.
"If you want to see fascism in its pre-Nazi state, take a look at Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War (1911):
>The struggle for existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis of all healthy development. All existing things show themselves to be the result of contesting forces. So in the life of man the struggle is not merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle. “To supplant or to be supplanted is the essence of life,” says Goethe, and the strong life gains the upper hand.
"Hitler was a genius, I admit, but he wasn’t smart enough to have actually invented this swill. And why does it appear in Germany around this time? And Russia, and Austria-Hungary? Because all three are being democratized, and jingoism is an excellent way to appeal to the masses against the elite. It works in Britain too, by the way."
In case anyone cavils at that last bit, consider that Nazi Germany's crimes against anyone but the Jews were largely memoryholed after WW2 despite Germany being the loser of that conflict. In fact, it was done with the US government's explicit consent because it needed to rehabilitate Germany's image so that the American public could let bygones be bygones in face of the new Soviet threat.
The Clean Wehrmacht myth only lost its status as historical orthodoxy after the Cold War ended. If it took that long to abandon a myth that covered up a horrific genocide by the hated Third Reich, how likely do you think it would be for a myth that covered up plans that had been prevented from ever seeing implementation - regardless of how horrifying the documented details of the plans were - by a widely beloved Second Reich?
Apologists of the Third Reich have such a hard time precisely because the Nazis refused to finish the "Conquer everything" part of the plan before they embarked on the "Genocide everything" part, which meant that even if they destroyed all the documentation of their plans, their intent would still be obvious even if they failed at the first step. On the other hand, apologists of the Second Reich can thank their lucky stars that men like von Beseler wanted to take one step at a time.
As long as German nationalists hold up the Second Reich as 'the good Germany' as opposed to the indefensible Third Reich, then there will always be a political motive to continue to blackball the evidence of the Fischer thesis out of the status of uncontested Historical Orthodoxy - the stuff that gets taught in schools to every schoolkid - the same way that evidence against the Clean Wehrmacht thesis was kept out of historical orthodoxy until the 1990s.
The guy insists that WW1 was forced on Germany and fantasizes about how awesome and wholesome a Europe under the Kaiser's domination would've been, pretty much explicitly because he *wants* it to be the clean rightwing alternative to the Nazis. So, what do I think of him?
He is the platonic ideal of a Germanophile rightoid. Everything about his 'history' stems from a need to see a clean rightoid Germany that could save Europe from the Bolsheviks without American interference. To that end, any evidence which does not fit the narrative must be denied, no matter how silly the denial looks to anyone who isn't a complete noob - after all, it's only meant to convince noobs who want to believe in what he's selling.
But in his general politics, he isn't very Rightoidy. Aside from moving to the US, he is consistently Atlanticist on foreign policy, so much so that he even supported the Iraq war, and he was offended enough by the Cooper-Carlson podcast to a brief media tour defending Churchill. He's married to practically the avatar of liberal interventionism. I don't understand where the WW1 stuff fits in to his worldview.
I think it's explained by the fact that he came onto the scene in the late 90s, when America was at the height of its studliness and seemed to have won everything. For a young and pliable Westerner with rightoid psychological profile, it was a time well-suited to making one patriotic. I think that has left its mark on him.
Ferguson just thinks that the West has lost its way and needs to return to being that vigorous civilization that it once was. No wonder that he is overjoyed whenever America engages in expressions of force and youthful vitality, like foreign wars against the 21st-c. equivalent of colonial savages: it shows him that the West is not yet dead and can still turn around if only it comes back to its senses. "Human rights" are simply today's "Christian mission".
For him, Germany is obviously a daydream of "what if we had Western civilization under the sheltering wings of America, but better" -- none of this anticolonialism nonsense, no truck with socialists and hippy tossers, a proper reactionary aesthetic (ie. basic public hygiene), etc. Once Germany adopts all those qualities in one's mind, it becomes an object of wish fulfillment and all further intellectual output on it stops being useful. Hence his complete unwillingness to admit to the rot within Germany, or to its predatory intentions for its fellow Western powers, especially his own beloved Britain -- it would just be too painful and he would have to find himself some other pre-1914 nation to idolize. If Germany can't save Europe from the communist hordes, who else can!?!
But what nation would it be? France - too lefty. Austria - too weak and pussified since 1866, Russia - I think you can understand why a guy raised pre-1991 would not even think of that idea. Britain - it already is a totem for him, but he knows too much to believe that it could dominate Europe like America could.
This is the basic question lurking underneath nearly all Western rightoids' psychology: "If we could change or avert things, how best can we save European civilization and avoid WW2?" The typical grug-brained answer is "Just have Germany win WW1, that'll fix every conceivable angle of it!", hence why Kaiserreich scenarios are the 2nd most popular genre in alternate history behind Nazi Victory scenarios, and why they're so replete with "The world is an endless utopia which avoided all the megadeaths of OTL, and Germany is Europe's chadly shield against the yellow communist hordes!"
-- "you compared Christopher Clark to David Irving, omg how dare you? reeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!"
What's the problem? Their crime is the same, the only difference is that David Irving had the bad sense to go after the one issue which people get really emotional about.
-- "If you think it's some revelation the German government was discussing plans for annexations after the war and that's damning to their intentions or that that was unique to them"
Excellent, now give me some examples of Entente powers frothing at the mouth to expel Germans from the Rhineland to resettle Belgians and Frenchmen there for lebensraum. Meanwhile, you had those kinds of aims being discussed in German press *since before the war even began* via organizations like the Pan-Germanic League, and you had the Kaiser happily nodding along like a bobblehead. Then again, when you consider that he was a close friend of none other than Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the OG of Nazi racial ideology, and the kind of things he said about Jews and Slavs in his letters, none of that is at all surprising.
This narrative that Hitler was the font of all German evil needs to die in a ditch.
If this was your attempt to persuade me you're not completely emotionally compromised by this subject this is really not the way to go about it. I dont have to give you hypothetical plans; they actually implemented them. Large numbers of ethnic Germans in both Alsace Lorraine and West Prussia were denied citizenship by their new governments and deported. There's this trick Fischer does which I notice in you as well to add these pointless modifiers "Frothing at the mouth" for example when describing pretty mild bureaucratic statements to present them in the least charitable light possible without any curiosity to compare them with other state actors. If you had any knowledge of the political culture of the Third Republic you would not be making this mistake but for some reason you guys are obsessed with the Kaiser, it's weird.
> If this was your attempt to persuade me you're not completely emotionally compromised by this subject this is really not the way to go about it.
As if you're one to talk! You types are all the same. Any hint that the Kaiser can be compared with Hitler in any way is met with stunned accusations that are clearly motivated more by the need to save a political idol from degradation than anything else, in the same way fans of a famous singer might deny his confirmed pedophilia to save him in their mind. You wouldn't be convinced by any argument, no matter how dispassionately presented, because you are a German nationalist (whether native-born or not, it doesn't really matter), and nationalists never accept any criticism of their favorite country. The Germany of 1871-1918 is pure and sacred, therefore it cannot be attached to the stain of 1933-1945 by any means, and anyone implying otherwise must be shouted down at all costs. You have shown yourself to be such a person, so you have merited such treatment.
> obsession with the Kaiser
Oh, I approach it from an entirely different direction from most people. Most people who hate the Kaiser do so because smt smt undemocratic militarism - you know, the typical liberal shite. I, like many, used to be the opposite - I adored the Kaiser for that very reason, and thought of him as a sane German alternative to Nazism. Then I stumbled on some obscure information that made that idea untenable, so I adjusted my opinion accordingly.
> Alsace-Lorraine,
A minority (~10%) of the Alsatian German population, arbitrarily selected as anyone who had settled in Alsace after its annexation to Germany in 1870. A very shameful and despicable act for a nation supposedly espousing liberalism and tolerance. But if you can compare that with a straight face to plans for the expulsion of all Poles, Jews and Lithuanians from a territory the size of Belgium, or the enserfment of all non-Germans in Belarus and the Baltic, then you are psychologically fit to be a politician.
> Western Prussia
Very clever of you, rhetorically lumping West Prussia (no expulsions) with Alsace-Lorraine (actual expulsions) in order to buttress your narrative of equivalence. Try better next time.
> "Frothing at the mouth"
You're trying to divert from the facts by nitpicking semantics. Always the sign of a weak and flailing defense.
> political culture
You can go on about the many important differences between the two regimes all you want, but does it really matter whether Max von Sering, Han von Beseler and Wilhelm II are talking about the need to deport and murder millions of eastern untermenschen for the greater glory of the German people, or if it's Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank and Hitler?
The only meaningful difference is that the latter group had more ambition, weren't going to wait for the war to end before they started the process, and invented ways of mass-killing that the former group didn't even know existed and would probably have found unmanly and unwarriorlike.
> "Third Republic"
Sorry, English doesn't work like that. If the Third Reich was a Republic, then it certainly wasn't the third one.
The lack of self-awareness here has gone from amusing to boring. If you showed this exchange to 10 random people I would bet $1,000 every single one of them would recognize you are the one more emotive here. Just own it this is getting embarrassing.
It's clear youre just going to continue to shift goalposts and sperg so the last comment I'm going to make is on the fact you don't know what "Third Republic" means in the context of French history which really makes the point here better than anything further I can say about your lack of knowledge or even curiosity about this period. Go ahead and continue to sperg I hope you work out whatever's causing you to be this tedious on early 20th century history. I would recommend going outdoors, reading isnt for everyone.
This conversation was more interesting before it got acrimonious. Either of you are welcome to write a post that, subject to quality control, I will post on the substack.*
*You think that is me being a gracious host, but actually I'm Jewing you for free content.
And perhaps if you could pull your tongue out of the Kaiser's colon and that stick out of your ass, any conversation with you might be more interesting than reiterating basic facts ad infinitum, and you screaming "No, no! I will not submit!" and bringing up extraneous shit to try to deflect from the point because it hurts you too much.
> Third Republic
The fact that you were referring to the French in that sentence only makes it more retarded. The fact that you can't come up with any sources or plans even a tenth as bad as what the Germans had tells me all I need to know about the worth of your arguments. I bring up plans for wholesale expulsion of all its untermensch for the sake of German settlement, and which verifiably directly informed the Third Reich's later plans, and you bring up some limpwristed comparisons to France's half-hearted expulsion of a limited subset of Germans from Alsace. Even what the French *did* do, I'm prepared to condemn, and yet you fob off what the Germans did as unobjectionable on the weak excuse that "the Entente had war plans too" while neglecting to mention anything in the same ballpark as what the Germans had planned.
> "you're being emotive!!1"
There we go with the attempts at deflection. Instead of addressing the facts, you try snobbery and tone-policing instead, implying that the facts somehow don't need to be addressed just because the rhetorical format they were presented in was a bit vulgar and plebeian for your tastes. Sorry that my output in a mere comment thread isn't up to your lofty standards.
There really isnt a point with rationally engaging with beliefs not grounded in reason. I really tried to give the ability to calm down and you've just become more hysterical in both senses of the word. Even the essay you referred to earlier the author without any hint of irony begins with his emotional attachment to the narratives in question. It's not even fun it's really just pathetic you should be sorry.
Since the only thing you seem to do when someone presents you with information that doesn't conform to your biases is to cope and project, I see no reason to continue. Maybe one day you'll leave behind your Kaiserphilic bias just like I did, but I doubt it.
But if you ever do, here's where to start when looking things up:
+ German War Council on December 8th 1912: a meeting where the Kaiser and his generals said some very interesting things which is of some relevance when discussing the July Crisis.
+ Max von Sering: German WW1 era economist, conducted a survey of the Eastern lands in 1916-17 to assess viability of various German colonization scenarios, especially in the Baltics.
+ Prussian Settlement Commission: German gov't body responsible for German colonization plans during WW1.
+ Heinrich Claß: leader of the Pan-German League, a lobbying group of German lebensraumist interests with extensive connections in German politics.
+ Houston Stewart Chamberlain: the Kaiser's best friend, so-called "John the Baptist of Nazism" because of his outsized role in shaping Nazi ideology and friendship with Hitler. His influence on the Kaiser was strong, judging by how they wrote to each other.
+ Heinrich von Treitschke: German prewar politician, advocated lebensraumism and antisemitism long before it was cool to do either, and was highly respected by the WW1 generation of German leaders. Reference to him or his ideas shows up a lot in their conversations, diaries, etc.
+ Friedrich von Bernhardi: chief historian of the German General Staff and its main ideological voice for many years leading up to WW1.
+ Kurt Riezler: aide of Bethmann-Hollweg whose diaries are of some interest regarding the July Crisis.
+ Polish Border Strip: a proposed strip of land to be annexed from Poland and emptied so that Germans may be settled there. Its exact borders were the subject of proposals and counterproposals within the German gov't, with private citizens occasionally weighing in as well.
Do with that as you wish, but let it be known that you HAVE been presented the concrete facts without "emotional language". Also, here are a few historians to look up:
+ Immanuel Geiss: German postwar historian, did work on the Polish Border Strip.
+ John Rohl: Anglo-German postwar historian, did work on politics at the Kaiser's court, and the July Crisis specifically.
+ David Fromkin: American postwar historian, for his aforementioned book on the July Crisis.
+ Holger Herwig: German-Canadian postwar historian, wrote on the interwar coverup of German aims by officials of the previous administration. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538811 if you're interested.
I've only read McMeekin's book on the July Crisis and Stalin's War so I cant comment on the book you referenced but I would encourage you to read Clark's Sleepwalkers if you want a well regarded neutral book that comprehensively tears the Fischer Thesis apart. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Mcmeekin in blaming the entire war on the Russians but the Tsars decision to mobilize was unquestionably the point at which a major war in Europe was unavoidable.
Again I'm not sure what exactly McMeekin claimed about Armenian responsibility for the Genocide but in hindsight its hard to argue that Russian encouraging Christian uprisings and British encouraging Greek interventions in Anatolia and then abandoning them served either groups interests at all.
-- "in hindsight its hard to argue that Russian encouraging Christian uprisings and British encouraging Greek interventions in Anatolia and then abandoning them served either groups interests at all."
Say what you will about the British for being flakes, but the Russians fought for three years on the Ottoman front up until a certain event forced them out of the war.
The Caucasian Front was a sideshow despite the enemy being much inferior to the forces on the Eastern Front. It's difficult to not notice the cynicism of Russian foreign policy in the region all the way back to the 19th century.
It was a sideshow because, you know, it WAS. You can only focus so much on the Ottomans, the weakest of the three enemies arrayed against you, when the other two are busy steamrolling through your lines.
A little perspective is nice.
Funny you should say that, because Clark's book is *also* very economical with the truth and takes care to paint its subject in the rosiest colors possible. Which makes sense - Clark is, after all, a Hohenzollern family defense attorney, and his historical work on Germany is widely lauded for "improving Anglo-German relations". The agenda is not just on display, it's at the level of the emperor's new clothes.
Unfortunately, laypeople don't bother to do even basic background checks on the historians they read, which means that for every David Irving who only becomes infamous by lying about a subject as charged as the Holocaust, a hundred other liars get to stay in the zone of respectability just because they chose to lie about a topic nobody cared enough about to call them out on TV and which so many people *wanted* them to be correct on. The result is that they can falsify even basic events with complete chutzpah, safe in the knowledge that any layman with a sentimental tenderness for the Kaiser's Germany will applaud them as a hero for the cause. Clark is the Kaiser's PR man through and through - if you want a more honest appraisal of Willy and his government's role in starting WW1, read Rohl's "The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany", followed by Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer".
Rohl sums the controversy up quite well in this piece: https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field_publication_docs/INTA91_1_09_Roehl.pdf As an aside, I would highly recommend this article by Holger Herwig on the postwar effort to whitewash Germany's image -- https://www-jstor-org.proxy16.noblenet.org/stable/2538811 -- in case you find yourself shocked at the suggestion that a historian as honored as Clark could be on someone's payroll to distort history.
And if you want to preserve your good image of pre-Hitlerine Germany, never under any circumstances look up the Polish Border Strip plan.
Fascinating. Thankyou for sharing. This certaintly puts 'kick the dog until it bites, then shoot it' in a different light.
I'm going to be perfectly honesty you, like alot of people who hold this fixation about pre 1918 Germany, seem completely emotionally compromised so I don't really take anything you have to say at this point very seriously. The comparison of Christopher Clark to David Irving genuinely made me laugh out loud, hysterical in both senses of the word.
The last statement unlike the rest of your post had some substance so that I'll actually address. If you think it's some revelation the German government was discussing plans for annexations after the war and that's damning to their intentions or that that was unique to them I really don't know what to tell you other than you should probably look into Allie diplomatic discussions about their war aims. You might learn something.
It is true that he literally got paid by the Hohenzollern family to write a report exonerating Crown Prince Wilhelm of support for Nazism as part of their claim for restitution following German unification, and appears to have deliberately selected information in order to make the strongest possible case. This is a kind of weird thing for a historian to do.
A less emotional way of putting it is that Germany wanted to be a big imperial power and were willing to roll the dice to get there. They were butthurt about being too late to the party to pick up a lot of colonies, but they should have gotten over it, and also had the foresight to realize that the profitability of imperialism was about to nosedive. I'm inclined to the view that both the Russophobes and Germanophobes are right.
Wanted to be a big imperial power in ways that (a) resemble the Nazis in that they require lots of genocide and are motivated by an explicitly *racial* need for lebensraum, and (b) got completely forgotten after the war, in large part because only the Germans knew about it and made sure the information was buried for decades until Fischer dived into the archives in the 50s.
I used to believe in the Moldbug Thesis of WW1 and had sympathy for the Kaiser's Germany. Then I found out about the Polish Border Strip and went down a long rabbit hole learning about prewar German political literature, and afterward a rabbit hole on how the war actually started and the preceding decade that had led up to it. Ironically, for all the unsavory things that it reveals about the Central Powers' position, this stuff is basically unheard-of among pro-Entente online casuals. You have to be willing to consider the idea that Germany was not just 'the bad guy' of WW1, but a full Nazi-level bad guy as well, which is just too radical a conclusion for most people to even contemplate - it just seems too mean-spirited, almost cartoonishly so when compared to the standard "it was all a horrible mistake" narrative that everyone was fed in school.
Let me tell you, it really hurts finding out that the thing you thought of as the sane historical alternative to Nazism for a rightwing Germany was infected with the same ideological syphilis and quickily progressing toward the same endpoint sans swastikas.
It's one of my major historical gripes with Moldbug, because it's a case study for how his approach of reflexively looking at history from the perspective of the loser is a bad one. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly useful, but it leaves one open to being pwned by the object of one's sympathy. By focusing on the predatory intentions of the budding Universalist empire, Moldbug ignores the possibility that any of its foes had embarked on a similar quest for world power and that their efforts had been memory-holed after the fact.
Moldbug actually warns against this even if he didn't always keep to his own strictures: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/04/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_15/
"The old world of Biedermeier, of Central European haute-bourgeois aristocracy, is exactly as dead. But there were many attempts to preserve it, and fascism was one. Conditions are ripe for fascism when there exists an old tradition which is in the process of being destroyed by democracy, but has not yet quite been destroyed. The half-recreated fascist tradition is half reactionary, half democratic, and all nasty.
"If you want to see fascism in its pre-Nazi state, take a look at Friedrich von Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War (1911):
>The struggle for existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis of all healthy development. All existing things show themselves to be the result of contesting forces. So in the life of man the struggle is not merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle. “To supplant or to be supplanted is the essence of life,” says Goethe, and the strong life gains the upper hand.
"Hitler was a genius, I admit, but he wasn’t smart enough to have actually invented this swill. And why does it appear in Germany around this time? And Russia, and Austria-Hungary? Because all three are being democratized, and jingoism is an excellent way to appeal to the masses against the elite. It works in Britain too, by the way."
In case anyone cavils at that last bit, consider that Nazi Germany's crimes against anyone but the Jews were largely memoryholed after WW2 despite Germany being the loser of that conflict. In fact, it was done with the US government's explicit consent because it needed to rehabilitate Germany's image so that the American public could let bygones be bygones in face of the new Soviet threat.
The Clean Wehrmacht myth only lost its status as historical orthodoxy after the Cold War ended. If it took that long to abandon a myth that covered up a horrific genocide by the hated Third Reich, how likely do you think it would be for a myth that covered up plans that had been prevented from ever seeing implementation - regardless of how horrifying the documented details of the plans were - by a widely beloved Second Reich?
Apologists of the Third Reich have such a hard time precisely because the Nazis refused to finish the "Conquer everything" part of the plan before they embarked on the "Genocide everything" part, which meant that even if they destroyed all the documentation of their plans, their intent would still be obvious even if they failed at the first step. On the other hand, apologists of the Second Reich can thank their lucky stars that men like von Beseler wanted to take one step at a time.
As long as German nationalists hold up the Second Reich as 'the good Germany' as opposed to the indefensible Third Reich, then there will always be a political motive to continue to blackball the evidence of the Fischer thesis out of the status of uncontested Historical Orthodoxy - the stuff that gets taught in schools to every schoolkid - the same way that evidence against the Clean Wehrmacht thesis was kept out of historical orthodoxy until the 1990s.
What's your take on Niall Ferguson?
The guy insists that WW1 was forced on Germany and fantasizes about how awesome and wholesome a Europe under the Kaiser's domination would've been, pretty much explicitly because he *wants* it to be the clean rightwing alternative to the Nazis. So, what do I think of him?
He is the platonic ideal of a Germanophile rightoid. Everything about his 'history' stems from a need to see a clean rightoid Germany that could save Europe from the Bolsheviks without American interference. To that end, any evidence which does not fit the narrative must be denied, no matter how silly the denial looks to anyone who isn't a complete noob - after all, it's only meant to convince noobs who want to believe in what he's selling.
But in his general politics, he isn't very Rightoidy. Aside from moving to the US, he is consistently Atlanticist on foreign policy, so much so that he even supported the Iraq war, and he was offended enough by the Cooper-Carlson podcast to a brief media tour defending Churchill. He's married to practically the avatar of liberal interventionism. I don't understand where the WW1 stuff fits in to his worldview.
I think it's explained by the fact that he came onto the scene in the late 90s, when America was at the height of its studliness and seemed to have won everything. For a young and pliable Westerner with rightoid psychological profile, it was a time well-suited to making one patriotic. I think that has left its mark on him.
Ferguson just thinks that the West has lost its way and needs to return to being that vigorous civilization that it once was. No wonder that he is overjoyed whenever America engages in expressions of force and youthful vitality, like foreign wars against the 21st-c. equivalent of colonial savages: it shows him that the West is not yet dead and can still turn around if only it comes back to its senses. "Human rights" are simply today's "Christian mission".
For him, Germany is obviously a daydream of "what if we had Western civilization under the sheltering wings of America, but better" -- none of this anticolonialism nonsense, no truck with socialists and hippy tossers, a proper reactionary aesthetic (ie. basic public hygiene), etc. Once Germany adopts all those qualities in one's mind, it becomes an object of wish fulfillment and all further intellectual output on it stops being useful. Hence his complete unwillingness to admit to the rot within Germany, or to its predatory intentions for its fellow Western powers, especially his own beloved Britain -- it would just be too painful and he would have to find himself some other pre-1914 nation to idolize. If Germany can't save Europe from the communist hordes, who else can!?!
But what nation would it be? France - too lefty. Austria - too weak and pussified since 1866, Russia - I think you can understand why a guy raised pre-1991 would not even think of that idea. Britain - it already is a totem for him, but he knows too much to believe that it could dominate Europe like America could.
This is the basic question lurking underneath nearly all Western rightoids' psychology: "If we could change or avert things, how best can we save European civilization and avoid WW2?" The typical grug-brained answer is "Just have Germany win WW1, that'll fix every conceivable angle of it!", hence why Kaiserreich scenarios are the 2nd most popular genre in alternate history behind Nazi Victory scenarios, and why they're so replete with "The world is an endless utopia which avoided all the megadeaths of OTL, and Germany is Europe's chadly shield against the yellow communist hordes!"
-- "you compared Christopher Clark to David Irving, omg how dare you? reeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!"
What's the problem? Their crime is the same, the only difference is that David Irving had the bad sense to go after the one issue which people get really emotional about.
-- "If you think it's some revelation the German government was discussing plans for annexations after the war and that's damning to their intentions or that that was unique to them"
Excellent, now give me some examples of Entente powers frothing at the mouth to expel Germans from the Rhineland to resettle Belgians and Frenchmen there for lebensraum. Meanwhile, you had those kinds of aims being discussed in German press *since before the war even began* via organizations like the Pan-Germanic League, and you had the Kaiser happily nodding along like a bobblehead. Then again, when you consider that he was a close friend of none other than Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the OG of Nazi racial ideology, and the kind of things he said about Jews and Slavs in his letters, none of that is at all surprising.
This narrative that Hitler was the font of all German evil needs to die in a ditch.
If this was your attempt to persuade me you're not completely emotionally compromised by this subject this is really not the way to go about it. I dont have to give you hypothetical plans; they actually implemented them. Large numbers of ethnic Germans in both Alsace Lorraine and West Prussia were denied citizenship by their new governments and deported. There's this trick Fischer does which I notice in you as well to add these pointless modifiers "Frothing at the mouth" for example when describing pretty mild bureaucratic statements to present them in the least charitable light possible without any curiosity to compare them with other state actors. If you had any knowledge of the political culture of the Third Republic you would not be making this mistake but for some reason you guys are obsessed with the Kaiser, it's weird.
> If this was your attempt to persuade me you're not completely emotionally compromised by this subject this is really not the way to go about it.
As if you're one to talk! You types are all the same. Any hint that the Kaiser can be compared with Hitler in any way is met with stunned accusations that are clearly motivated more by the need to save a political idol from degradation than anything else, in the same way fans of a famous singer might deny his confirmed pedophilia to save him in their mind. You wouldn't be convinced by any argument, no matter how dispassionately presented, because you are a German nationalist (whether native-born or not, it doesn't really matter), and nationalists never accept any criticism of their favorite country. The Germany of 1871-1918 is pure and sacred, therefore it cannot be attached to the stain of 1933-1945 by any means, and anyone implying otherwise must be shouted down at all costs. You have shown yourself to be such a person, so you have merited such treatment.
> obsession with the Kaiser
Oh, I approach it from an entirely different direction from most people. Most people who hate the Kaiser do so because smt smt undemocratic militarism - you know, the typical liberal shite. I, like many, used to be the opposite - I adored the Kaiser for that very reason, and thought of him as a sane German alternative to Nazism. Then I stumbled on some obscure information that made that idea untenable, so I adjusted my opinion accordingly.
> Alsace-Lorraine,
A minority (~10%) of the Alsatian German population, arbitrarily selected as anyone who had settled in Alsace after its annexation to Germany in 1870. A very shameful and despicable act for a nation supposedly espousing liberalism and tolerance. But if you can compare that with a straight face to plans for the expulsion of all Poles, Jews and Lithuanians from a territory the size of Belgium, or the enserfment of all non-Germans in Belarus and the Baltic, then you are psychologically fit to be a politician.
> Western Prussia
Very clever of you, rhetorically lumping West Prussia (no expulsions) with Alsace-Lorraine (actual expulsions) in order to buttress your narrative of equivalence. Try better next time.
> "Frothing at the mouth"
You're trying to divert from the facts by nitpicking semantics. Always the sign of a weak and flailing defense.
> political culture
You can go on about the many important differences between the two regimes all you want, but does it really matter whether Max von Sering, Han von Beseler and Wilhelm II are talking about the need to deport and murder millions of eastern untermenschen for the greater glory of the German people, or if it's Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank and Hitler?
The only meaningful difference is that the latter group had more ambition, weren't going to wait for the war to end before they started the process, and invented ways of mass-killing that the former group didn't even know existed and would probably have found unmanly and unwarriorlike.
> "Third Republic"
Sorry, English doesn't work like that. If the Third Reich was a Republic, then it certainly wasn't the third one.
The lack of self-awareness here has gone from amusing to boring. If you showed this exchange to 10 random people I would bet $1,000 every single one of them would recognize you are the one more emotive here. Just own it this is getting embarrassing.
It's clear youre just going to continue to shift goalposts and sperg so the last comment I'm going to make is on the fact you don't know what "Third Republic" means in the context of French history which really makes the point here better than anything further I can say about your lack of knowledge or even curiosity about this period. Go ahead and continue to sperg I hope you work out whatever's causing you to be this tedious on early 20th century history. I would recommend going outdoors, reading isnt for everyone.
This conversation was more interesting before it got acrimonious. Either of you are welcome to write a post that, subject to quality control, I will post on the substack.*
*You think that is me being a gracious host, but actually I'm Jewing you for free content.
And perhaps if you could pull your tongue out of the Kaiser's colon and that stick out of your ass, any conversation with you might be more interesting than reiterating basic facts ad infinitum, and you screaming "No, no! I will not submit!" and bringing up extraneous shit to try to deflect from the point because it hurts you too much.
> Third Republic
The fact that you were referring to the French in that sentence only makes it more retarded. The fact that you can't come up with any sources or plans even a tenth as bad as what the Germans had tells me all I need to know about the worth of your arguments. I bring up plans for wholesale expulsion of all its untermensch for the sake of German settlement, and which verifiably directly informed the Third Reich's later plans, and you bring up some limpwristed comparisons to France's half-hearted expulsion of a limited subset of Germans from Alsace. Even what the French *did* do, I'm prepared to condemn, and yet you fob off what the Germans did as unobjectionable on the weak excuse that "the Entente had war plans too" while neglecting to mention anything in the same ballpark as what the Germans had planned.
> "you're being emotive!!1"
There we go with the attempts at deflection. Instead of addressing the facts, you try snobbery and tone-policing instead, implying that the facts somehow don't need to be addressed just because the rhetorical format they were presented in was a bit vulgar and plebeian for your tastes. Sorry that my output in a mere comment thread isn't up to your lofty standards.
There really isnt a point with rationally engaging with beliefs not grounded in reason. I really tried to give the ability to calm down and you've just become more hysterical in both senses of the word. Even the essay you referred to earlier the author without any hint of irony begins with his emotional attachment to the narratives in question. It's not even fun it's really just pathetic you should be sorry.
Since the only thing you seem to do when someone presents you with information that doesn't conform to your biases is to cope and project, I see no reason to continue. Maybe one day you'll leave behind your Kaiserphilic bias just like I did, but I doubt it.
But if you ever do, here's where to start when looking things up:
+ German War Council on December 8th 1912: a meeting where the Kaiser and his generals said some very interesting things which is of some relevance when discussing the July Crisis.
+ Max von Sering: German WW1 era economist, conducted a survey of the Eastern lands in 1916-17 to assess viability of various German colonization scenarios, especially in the Baltics.
+ Prussian Settlement Commission: German gov't body responsible for German colonization plans during WW1.
+ Heinrich Claß: leader of the Pan-German League, a lobbying group of German lebensraumist interests with extensive connections in German politics.
+ Houston Stewart Chamberlain: the Kaiser's best friend, so-called "John the Baptist of Nazism" because of his outsized role in shaping Nazi ideology and friendship with Hitler. His influence on the Kaiser was strong, judging by how they wrote to each other.
+ Heinrich von Treitschke: German prewar politician, advocated lebensraumism and antisemitism long before it was cool to do either, and was highly respected by the WW1 generation of German leaders. Reference to him or his ideas shows up a lot in their conversations, diaries, etc.
+ Friedrich von Bernhardi: chief historian of the German General Staff and its main ideological voice for many years leading up to WW1.
+ Kurt Riezler: aide of Bethmann-Hollweg whose diaries are of some interest regarding the July Crisis.
+ Polish Border Strip: a proposed strip of land to be annexed from Poland and emptied so that Germans may be settled there. Its exact borders were the subject of proposals and counterproposals within the German gov't, with private citizens occasionally weighing in as well.
Do with that as you wish, but let it be known that you HAVE been presented the concrete facts without "emotional language". Also, here are a few historians to look up:
+ Immanuel Geiss: German postwar historian, did work on the Polish Border Strip.
+ John Rohl: Anglo-German postwar historian, did work on politics at the Kaiser's court, and the July Crisis specifically.
+ David Fromkin: American postwar historian, for his aforementioned book on the July Crisis.
+ Holger Herwig: German-Canadian postwar historian, wrote on the interwar coverup of German aims by officials of the previous administration. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538811 if you're interested.
+ Robert L. Nelson: American(?) historian, wrote about Max von Sering and the German settlement program. https://www.amazon.com/Frontiers-Empire-Sering-Colonization-1871-1945/dp/1009235362