GrumpyCatFace wrote:Probably because they’ve been shamed into submission, thanks to the actions of their grandparents. It will still be a while, before anyone thinks of Germany without thinking of Nazis.
Which sucks, because it’s one of the greatest nations on earth. Extremely well run, beautiful food, people, culture. I’d love to live there.
Ok, this might be a wall of text, but anyway.
Germany aren't wallowing in shame of WW2 anymore, and there's been quite some time since they did. They are afraid of a pop cultural perception of nazism, which is why they're trying to distance themselves from former deeds, while not fully acknowledging the whole German part of nazism, and how the cultural framework of Germany made nazism possible to rise there.
Keep in mind, nazism had its roots in an ideology, and a lot of popular theories among intellectuals at the time. Fascism gained traction in Italy, while eugenics and race theories were primarily a Swedish thing. Germany, and a lot of western europe today have managed to distance Germany from nazism, even in WW2. You'll see the arguments everywhere, especially from Germans: "Germany were led astray by a poisonous gang of madmen", "Hitler didn't win the election, but flaws in the system made him seize power", "Most Germans weren't nazis", so on and so on. A common denominator is how most people today differentiate Germany and Nazism to an extremely high degree, as if they're unrelated.
So, we get the whole story about the unfair Versaille treaty, economic despair, a former great nation thrown into disarray, fear of communism, and then the nazis entered, and are treated as a catalyst, unrelated to German culture, and how they've managed to turn the whole deal into a murder machine of an empire.
I think that approach is wrong. If the Germany-apologists were correct in their assumptions, we'd see nazism earlier in Europe, and it gaining considerable traction in other countries too. Especially in Sweden, since that's where the Himmler-esque parts of nazism had its roots. It was a great nation, turned into a shadow of its former glory, being threatened by communists. Nazism should grow into a movement in Sweden in the late 1800s, the same time national romanticism were a huge deal in Scandinavia. But it didn't. Sweden had gone through everything Germany had gone through, in the previous century, yet they didn't evolve into a nazi state. They instead evolved into a well functioning democracy. The great depression hit other countries, which had also been weakened by the great war. Great Britain didn't fall for nazism, or even fascism. The US didn't. France didn't. Sure, fascists, and even nazis were being talked about, and they were more popular after the depression than before, but they were still really small. Except in Germany. Other countries even evolved into fascist states in the early 1900s. Italy, Spain, Portugal, but they never took the whole step out into full retard nazism.
Nazism grew big in Germany, not because of propaganda, economic despair, being humiliated in a war, or some rotten eggs getting into government by random chance. Nazism grew big in Germany because Germany is rotten to the bone. It had been rotten long before nazis were a deal, and it's rotten now that they've no longer have any nazis. The Einsatzkommando weren't alone in their atrocities. Even the Imperial army massacred villages in WW1, although the static nature of that war made the murder of innocents pretty rare, they did show their true colors already then. And the murder wasn't really wanton either, just like in WW2, they had a clear plan and goal with them, basic human rights be damned. They simply wanted to be as brutal as possible, so they'd make the war as short as possible. They didn't like doing it, but they did it anyway. Just as a lot of German SS troops had to be drunk to keep on slaughtering slavs and jews, and eventually had to resort to gas chambers for the final solution. But they kept doing it.
Forced sterilization and eugenics happened in Sweden and Norway too, and continued until the seventies. But germans were even euthanizing children early on. It started with a mother petitioning Hitler for doctors to kill her kid. The people wanted it, because those "lesser people" were a parasite on the Volk.
German culture makes for cooperative people, that are easy to lead. And ambitious people, that makes qualified leaders. But they weren't then, before, or now a people that recognize the inherent value of a human. They realize nazis are bad, because WW2 killed 6 million jews + countless slavs, political opponents and other people. But try to get them to understand how it's wrong to infringe on another individual's rights, and you'll never really succeed. It's all a cost-value analysis to them. Go to war with France? Nothing about the moral dilemma of war, just "Can we win, and if so, what do we gain?". Eugenics? "Does it work?".
If they'd won the war, they'd realize in time it was wrong. "But necessary". These people will throw any human right out the window, as long as they deem it "necessary for the greater good". And when it turns back on them, they'll change policy. But they'll never really change. Munster was not an isolated event, nor nazism, nor the thirty years war. And don't get me wrong, Norway, Sweden and Denmark has a lot of the same vulnerability as Germany to fall for any of these things, which is why it's so important to not join together. Switzerland is small enough to not fall.
But have enough germanics under the same flag, under the same cause, whatever the flag or the cause. And you're going to have a bad time. It might not be nazis the next time in Europe. But it will for sure be Germans.
