The problem Is that Nazi Germany was probably much less bad for the average citizen however if you're Jewish you have to pick the second option or else have a pretty high risk of being put in a concentration camp.
No doubt living standards were far higher in Germany than in the USSR
Nazi Germany existed for 12 years, at the end of which I think people did live in fear of their children getting pressganged into badly armed last-ditch army units ("Volkssturm"). The Soviet Union too had a honeymoon (New Economic Policy).
Oh by the way although I responded to some of your arguments ,I don't think what you're saying Is unreasonable,I'm responding to Nick over here who'se attacking my Historical knowledge just because he disagrees with my argument.
Well how Is the fear of being drafted into a terrible war any lower in the USSR?
A Huge percentage of Russian soldiers died at the front,probably higher than was the case in Germany.
This isn't a moral "defense"of Nazi Germany,I'm not trying to claim muh life was better for the average citizen under Hitler so we should have sided with him, absolutely not ,Hitler's aim was to annex all of Europe and quite literally enslave and exterminate its population ,Stalin's was not(in fact I believe Kennan had the exact right take on the USSR)
You Say the USSR had a "honeymoon period",what you neglect to mention Is A)the honeymoon period came right After a massive civil war that caused millions of deaths B)The USSR was simply much poorer than Germany, something that was in part due to Communism but mostly due simply to the fact Russia was a more backward country to begin with,at no point under the NEP were living conditions better in the USSR than in the Germany of 1934.
Another point:you can't compare the 1985 Soviet Union under Gorbachov to 1934 Nazi Germany.
Why?because the Soviet Union of 1985 experienced 50 years of extra growth(despite suboptimal conditions under Communism),you have to compare conditions under the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the same Historical period,otherwise you're making a completely baseless argument .
To end:
Before accusing me of ignorance try to make arguments that stand up to the most basic scrutiny,because what you're saying Is pure howgwash.
By the way I wasn't educated in the U.S,I'm European.
My point wasn't that the Soviet Union was better; it was that you can't evaluate the quality of life under a dictatorship by its first decade. As you correctly point out, the communists gave the Soviet Union its first taste of communism during the Civil War (if not earlier if you count the anarchist terror, but that can be argued to be a different faction), and the troikas and black ravens did not just appear when Stalin came to power, but by 1926 the average Petya could still tell a convincing (to himself) story of how an initial rough ride -- revolutions are never pretty -- led to an ever-improving economy. Another dozen years and we'd catch up with and overtake the West!
That's fair however the question Is about whether in absolute terms It would be preferable to live under the USSR or Nazi Germany and I don't see how you answer the question without assessing the quality of life in each under the relevant period.
Deciding you can't assess quality of life under a dictatorship during its first decade makes this exercise impossible,the Nazis were only in power for 12 years ,does that mean we can't take into account the years from 1933-1943?
Or rather I should say that It Is unlikely economic conditions under the NEP were equivalent to those in the Germany of the same era ,despite its notable economic woes
> Would you rather live in America for half your life, and Nazi Germany in the other? Or would you rather live in the Soviet Union for your entire life? I would bet for almost everyone, the answer is the former.
Maybe this sounds self-evident for an American sentiment (after being fed with the USSR boogie man your whole life) and Americal level of historical education (in which the Soviet Union was some kind of nightmarish hellscape end to end throughout its existence), but many people would even voluntarily want to live in the Soviet Union, especially in the early years and after Stalin.
And people ignorant of history who think they know it because they read some scarry tales. A large percentage of people who lived (and were old enough) when the USSR/DDR etc fell, preferred it to what followed in polls.
Of course many people preferred life in the USSR to the post-Soviet economic implosion that followed. That’s what happens to command economies when state institutions collapse. But I thought we were comparing the USSR to the USA here, not Yeltsin-era Russia.
> But I thought we were comparing the USSR to the USA here, not Yeltsin-era Russia.
If we had just been comparing those, I'd agree, but in the post's bizarro world it also said people would preffer to live in Nazi Germany over USSR.
Only people with a carricature version of USSR (which is often the result of Cold War style American "education" about it) would have preferred to live in Nazi Germany over it.
When you say America is a racist country borne in white supremacy, everyone shrugs and nobody bats an eye. But when a guy with glasses says Churchill stinks, well then everyone loses their minds!
But was Cooper that factually incorrect, though? I generally agree that effective historical revisionism focuses on narratives, not facts, since mainstream (re: liberal) academic history tends to mislead by moralizing and by obfuscating inconvenient primary sources that fail to suit their just-so version of history, rather than by lying outright about facts.
In a world where the political formula of the west was not founded on a particular narrative of WWII, the Holocaust would be nothing more than footnote in the history books listing all the atrocities perpetrated by both sides in what was essentially a no-holds-barred race war. In such a world, it’s difficult to imagine there being any Holocaust deniers, simply because no one would care one way or the other besides for Jews descended from survivors.
All that being said, i don’t think i caught Cooper on any factual inaccuracies. All he did was speculate on the motivations of Churchill and the Germans in a way that made the former look worse and the latter much more sympathetic than we’re used to. But since it’s impossible to prove what’s going on in someone’s head even at the time, let alone 80 years later, I’m not sure you could say with certainty he was wrong.
Could he have been more optical about it? Of course. But I think it’s revealing that the reaction of the mainstream to this was not to issue any factual corrections (besides for a few based on misunderstandings of what he said), but just to sperg out about how he must be a secret nazi.
His thesis is basically that Churchill was installed by Jewish financiers for the cause of zionism. In reality one of the many people people that paid him was Jewish. If you want to talk about sperging, you could look at a big lie by omission plus unfalsifiable speculation and call that "factually correct", that would be pretty aspergarian.
He said that about Russian POW’s, not the Holocaust. Although Tucker does kind of sneakily refer to the Holocaust by saying “you could go to jail for talking about this in Austria!”. But the topic is never explicitly mentioned anywhere in the interview, and even about the Russians, he still caveats that by saying the Germans are morally accountable for every death, and a lack of planning should not be construed as letting them off the hook entirely.
Excellent. Btw If you keep an eye on the right currently, who I used to agree with, they are repeating that 'IQ tests are a tool of Jewry stuff'. I saw a really popular pundit say hereditarianism is a tool to make excuses for Jewish control.
I mean I think the most effective proof of my argument Is the Soviet soldiers' reaction to the average German's relative wealth when marching through Germany.
Were the Soviets shocked at how much poorer the Germans were than them?
Attacking the factual basis instead of the moral superstructure is a failure mode that I've seen several times before, often causing sky-high collateral damage. Quite recently it was on display when leading right-wing figures decided to attack the COVID vaccines instead of making a principled stand against vax mandates. On the center-left, the closest thing is IQ denialism, which is running roughshod over education. Maybe this is one fallacy that really needs a name.
What are you talking about? Leaving out the period when Nazi Germany was terminally losing a war, and if you're not a Jew or otherwise subject to special attention, it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR. Now, the qualifying period in Germany was relatively short (1933-1943?) but there were no Holodomors there.
At this point, and given the lack of clarity in the way the comment software works, I'm not even sure who or what I was responding to. But the number killed in the Holocaust overall isn't relevant to whether "it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR", at least for most of the specified period.
If you spend 10 years living normally, but 2 starving and ultimately dying in a concentration camp, the overal experience is pretty bad. Even though it was positive "for most of the specified period".
The Nazis got Germany into a seriously terminal losing war which, even if they had been as non-totalitarian as Britain or the US or Belgium might have made their "overall experience" pretty bad even for those not getting the special attention that might result in them dying in a concentration camp (which was the fate of relatively few GERMANS). But that too has no relevance to whether "it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR". Without identifying what my response was to this conversation is unmoored.
Again, that has nothing to do with "it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR".
Also, the idea that democracies don't launch aggressive unnecessary wars, which is the theory I guess you are bringing up, is claptrap. Remember the Maine.
The problem Is that Nazi Germany was probably much less bad for the average citizen however if you're Jewish you have to pick the second option or else have a pretty high risk of being put in a concentration camp.
No doubt living standards were far higher in Germany than in the USSR
Nazi Germany existed for 12 years, at the end of which I think people did live in fear of their children getting pressganged into badly armed last-ditch army units ("Volkssturm"). The Soviet Union too had a honeymoon (New Economic Policy).
Oh by the way although I responded to some of your arguments ,I don't think what you're saying Is unreasonable,I'm responding to Nick over here who'se attacking my Historical knowledge just because he disagrees with my argument.
Very ungentlemanly conduct
Well how Is the fear of being drafted into a terrible war any lower in the USSR?
A Huge percentage of Russian soldiers died at the front,probably higher than was the case in Germany.
This isn't a moral "defense"of Nazi Germany,I'm not trying to claim muh life was better for the average citizen under Hitler so we should have sided with him, absolutely not ,Hitler's aim was to annex all of Europe and quite literally enslave and exterminate its population ,Stalin's was not(in fact I believe Kennan had the exact right take on the USSR)
You Say the USSR had a "honeymoon period",what you neglect to mention Is A)the honeymoon period came right After a massive civil war that caused millions of deaths B)The USSR was simply much poorer than Germany, something that was in part due to Communism but mostly due simply to the fact Russia was a more backward country to begin with,at no point under the NEP were living conditions better in the USSR than in the Germany of 1934.
Another point:you can't compare the 1985 Soviet Union under Gorbachov to 1934 Nazi Germany.
Why?because the Soviet Union of 1985 experienced 50 years of extra growth(despite suboptimal conditions under Communism),you have to compare conditions under the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the same Historical period,otherwise you're making a completely baseless argument .
To end:
Before accusing me of ignorance try to make arguments that stand up to the most basic scrutiny,because what you're saying Is pure howgwash.
By the way I wasn't educated in the U.S,I'm European.
My point wasn't that the Soviet Union was better; it was that you can't evaluate the quality of life under a dictatorship by its first decade. As you correctly point out, the communists gave the Soviet Union its first taste of communism during the Civil War (if not earlier if you count the anarchist terror, but that can be argued to be a different faction), and the troikas and black ravens did not just appear when Stalin came to power, but by 1926 the average Petya could still tell a convincing (to himself) story of how an initial rough ride -- revolutions are never pretty -- led to an ever-improving economy. Another dozen years and we'd catch up with and overtake the West!
That's fair however the question Is about whether in absolute terms It would be preferable to live under the USSR or Nazi Germany and I don't see how you answer the question without assessing the quality of life in each under the relevant period.
Deciding you can't assess quality of life under a dictatorship during its first decade makes this exercise impossible,the Nazis were only in power for 12 years ,does that mean we can't take into account the years from 1933-1943?
That seems completely arbitrary
Or rather I should say that It Is unlikely economic conditions under the NEP were equivalent to those in the Germany of the same era ,despite its notable economic woes
> Would you rather live in America for half your life, and Nazi Germany in the other? Or would you rather live in the Soviet Union for your entire life? I would bet for almost everyone, the answer is the former.
Maybe this sounds self-evident for an American sentiment (after being fed with the USSR boogie man your whole life) and Americal level of historical education (in which the Soviet Union was some kind of nightmarish hellscape end to end throughout its existence), but many people would even voluntarily want to live in the Soviet Union, especially in the early years and after Stalin.
Fair enough. I'd be glad for the Soviets or modern China to take that group!
Indeed, the world is filled with dumb people sich as those you just described.
And people ignorant of history who think they know it because they read some scarry tales. A large percentage of people who lived (and were old enough) when the USSR/DDR etc fell, preferred it to what followed in polls.
Of course many people preferred life in the USSR to the post-Soviet economic implosion that followed. That’s what happens to command economies when state institutions collapse. But I thought we were comparing the USSR to the USA here, not Yeltsin-era Russia.
> But I thought we were comparing the USSR to the USA here, not Yeltsin-era Russia.
If we had just been comparing those, I'd agree, but in the post's bizarro world it also said people would preffer to live in Nazi Germany over USSR.
Only people with a carricature version of USSR (which is often the result of Cold War style American "education" about it) would have preferred to live in Nazi Germany over it.
When you say America is a racist country borne in white supremacy, everyone shrugs and nobody bats an eye. But when a guy with glasses says Churchill stinks, well then everyone loses their minds!
I thought the complaint was that Cooper tried to make it look like Churchill was more belligerent than Hitler, not just that he was a terrible person.
But was Cooper that factually incorrect, though? I generally agree that effective historical revisionism focuses on narratives, not facts, since mainstream (re: liberal) academic history tends to mislead by moralizing and by obfuscating inconvenient primary sources that fail to suit their just-so version of history, rather than by lying outright about facts.
In a world where the political formula of the west was not founded on a particular narrative of WWII, the Holocaust would be nothing more than footnote in the history books listing all the atrocities perpetrated by both sides in what was essentially a no-holds-barred race war. In such a world, it’s difficult to imagine there being any Holocaust deniers, simply because no one would care one way or the other besides for Jews descended from survivors.
All that being said, i don’t think i caught Cooper on any factual inaccuracies. All he did was speculate on the motivations of Churchill and the Germans in a way that made the former look worse and the latter much more sympathetic than we’re used to. But since it’s impossible to prove what’s going on in someone’s head even at the time, let alone 80 years later, I’m not sure you could say with certainty he was wrong.
Could he have been more optical about it? Of course. But I think it’s revealing that the reaction of the mainstream to this was not to issue any factual corrections (besides for a few based on misunderstandings of what he said), but just to sperg out about how he must be a secret nazi.
His thesis is basically that Churchill was installed by Jewish financiers for the cause of zionism. In reality one of the many people people that paid him was Jewish. If you want to talk about sperging, you could look at a big lie by omission plus unfalsifiable speculation and call that "factually correct", that would be pretty aspergarian.
Put another way, you could say to anyone playing spot the Jew that he's technically correct by highlighting someone that exists.
Didn't he claim that the deaths of the Holocaust were due to a lack of supplies rather than the desire to kill?
He said that about Russian POW’s, not the Holocaust. Although Tucker does kind of sneakily refer to the Holocaust by saying “you could go to jail for talking about this in Austria!”. But the topic is never explicitly mentioned anywhere in the interview, and even about the Russians, he still caveats that by saying the Germans are morally accountable for every death, and a lack of planning should not be construed as letting them off the hook entirely.
Excellent. Btw If you keep an eye on the right currently, who I used to agree with, they are repeating that 'IQ tests are a tool of Jewry stuff'. I saw a really popular pundit say hereditarianism is a tool to make excuses for Jewish control.
I mean I think the most effective proof of my argument Is the Soviet soldiers' reaction to the average German's relative wealth when marching through Germany.
Were the Soviets shocked at how much poorer the Germans were than them?
I believe not.
Attacking the factual basis instead of the moral superstructure is a failure mode that I've seen several times before, often causing sky-high collateral damage. Quite recently it was on display when leading right-wing figures decided to attack the COVID vaccines instead of making a principled stand against vax mandates. On the center-left, the closest thing is IQ denialism, which is running roughshod over education. Maybe this is one fallacy that really needs a name.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-148800385?source=queue
What are you talking about? Leaving out the period when Nazi Germany was terminally losing a war, and if you're not a Jew or otherwise subject to special attention, it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR. Now, the qualifying period in Germany was relatively short (1933-1943?) but there were no Holodomors there.
Besides the 6 million Jews, the Holocaust killed 11 million gentiles. They had a lot of special attention to dole out.
At this point, and given the lack of clarity in the way the comment software works, I'm not even sure who or what I was responding to. But the number killed in the Holocaust overall isn't relevant to whether "it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR", at least for most of the specified period.
If you spend 10 years living normally, but 2 starving and ultimately dying in a concentration camp, the overal experience is pretty bad. Even though it was positive "for most of the specified period".
The Nazis got Germany into a seriously terminal losing war which, even if they had been as non-totalitarian as Britain or the US or Belgium might have made their "overall experience" pretty bad even for those not getting the special attention that might result in them dying in a concentration camp (which was the fate of relatively few GERMANS). But that too has no relevance to whether "it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR". Without identifying what my response was to this conversation is unmoored.
The fact that they got involved with that war is not unrelated to their form of government.
Again, that has nothing to do with "it was quite possible to expect to live better in Nazi Germany than in the USSR".
Also, the idea that democracies don't launch aggressive unnecessary wars, which is the theory I guess you are bringing up, is claptrap. Remember the Maine.