I'm not sure how Hitler winning 1932 German elections improved human rights in Germany and overall Europe. Instead it turned into dictatorship, tyranny and mass murder. And you can not say that Germany at the time was not rational and not educated populace. It was a Physics mecca of the world with people like Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein.
My point is education does not equal to rationality, and democracy is not good but it is the best system we had so far.
"Germany 1932 was massive mess. It was not rational place in a lot of ways. It was also quite violent place."
I know, there was hyperinflation in 1920s and there were violent conflicts and confrontations between right nationalists and left communists. I think huge negative influence was Soviet Union exporting communist revolutions in European countries which eventually escalated to civil war in Spain and almost a civil war in Germany. But Hitler and his ideology were a product of First World War and not a product of unstable Germany or unstable Europe.
There were multiple political murders too. There were fistfights in parlament and screaming. But violence definitely was not just Soviet export. Communists were minority compared to right wing extremists - who started to operate right after WWI.
> But Hitler and his ideology were a product of First World War and not a product of unstable Germany or unstable Europe.
What does this mean? WWI itself was consequence of unstable Europe. Germany was heavily militarized culture even prior WWI. Their imperial ambitions were definitely pre existing.
Hitler tapped into nationalistic, racial and Darwinian trends that already existed.
World War II has been over for a while and Germany has a scientist as the leader of the country.
Human rights in Germany improved as a result of WWII because Germany - unlike any other country - has seen first hand what will happen when you let human rights slide.
I was referring to the guy who said "Societies with largely rational, educated populace are weathering COVID just fine, wrt. democracy and respect for human rights."
My conclusion was that education does not equal to rationality with regards to human rights and that democracy is not good but it is the best system we had so far.
Sure. But China, arguably not much of a democracy did just fine.
So the whole link between the pandemic and political systems is mostly nonsense, the countries where the impact is least are simply the ones that reacted fastest and most decisive. Everybody else is playing catch-up and they may have to substantially pause their 'freedoms' and 'democratic rights' to get through to the other side.
This is a simple result of early incompetence and refusal to assign sufficient gravity to the situation.
So you believe in information that Chinese communist party is providing. A totalitarian regime with mass violation of human rights?! I love China and Chinese people but people suffer a lot under the rule of CCP. They are faking their financial data and they are faking their COVID data as well.
I believe that if a regime shares information that is at face value negative for that regime that we can believe them in so far as that aspect is concerned. China has shared a lot of information around the pandemic that can be classed as 'draconian countermeasures', but they do seem to have the COVID situation under control.
If you want to argue the opposite then you should substantiate that with data and sources, rather than just with claims left hanging without support.
I'm sure there is going to be some discrepancy between the facts and what we get from official communications but at this point in time there are very few governments left that have been 100% transparent during this whole saga. China likely is no exception to that but I would not expect them a-priori to be worse than say Russia or some of the countries of the EU.
I'm the guy you refer to. You are confusing broad education with STEM. It is very possible to be poorly educated while being OK at math or engineering.
I think it's more that Germans, unlike most nationalities, had great psychological and political incentives to imagine themselves as the victims of human rights abuses, but unlike real victims of human rights abuses, didn't face an entrenched establishment designed to keep them from asserting their rights.
It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators. A large part of the post-war German identity was based around the idea that they did not know what was being done, that they would have never allowed it if they had known, and so on.
My opinion here is obviously controversial (especially in Germany), but it goes a long way to explain why Germany, unlike most post-genocidal nations, has very robust defence of human rights at the core of its state. Most survivors of genocide (e.g. the Armenians) face an establishment committed to defending itself against any assertion of wrongdoing, and a society committed to keeping hold of stolen property and lands. In Germany, there were essentially no survivors, and no advocates for the dead, so there was no real pressure either to bring the perpetrators of the holocaust to justice, or to defend them. In Turkey, recognition of the genocide would have been extremely expensive, both in terms of reputations of establishment figures, and in terms of property and land. In Germany, most Nazis and Nazi businesses (VW for instance) could simply go on.
In any case, I'm not sure how you would respond to the Holocaust within the framework of human rights. Retroactive justice is against the german constitution, and what the Germans did in the second world war was predominantly legal. It would have been very hard, even if there was a great desire to do so, to convict anybody of doing acts which were fully lawful at the time.
> It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators.
On the contrary, the vast majority of the Germans alive today are the descendants of those who saw these things 'first hand'. You have this about as backwards as it gets.
No in relation to Nazi victims in general. Jews were not only German victims of it all and most killed Jews were foreign. (German Jewish minority was rather small). As any other regime, it had huge amount of other victims too.
The crimes against non-jewish germans are part of the whole thing and part of reason for robust rights. So was the destruction of Germany after all of that which was pretty profound.
makes for interesting reading. Particularly the line: "some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps". Although it's hard to say if that was the Germans or the Allies who were responsible. Perhaps both?
This is an epic side track, but the argument you could make is that Germany's choice at the time was between Nazi-ism and Stalin controlled communism. Liberal democracy was a distant third option that had no real chance.
We know the Nazi option turned out very very bad. But it's possible a German/Soviet Stalinist block would have been even worse.
First, the second most probable outcome was non-nazi military dictatorship that almost happened.
Second, the other largest party was strogly pro democracy. They were called social democrats and were definitely not communist. Trying to cast them as such is just repeating nazi propaganda.
> We know the Nazi option turned out very very bad. But it's possible a German/Soviet Stalinist block would have been even worse.
Say what you want about Soviet-caused famine, but they never shipped people in trains to gas chambers for the express purpose of exterminating them. Pretty contrived and callous to say that choosing the Nazis might have been the right choice.
Stalin did plenty of genocides of his own, and murdered far more of his own citizens than Hitler did.
If your criteria is that the genocide has to be conducted with a similar train system etc as the Holocaust, you're probably not serious about this discussion.
> Stalin did plenty of genocides of his own, and murdered far more of his own citizens than Hitler did.
Hm, yes - I would like to see the evidence that Stalin directly, intentionally murdered more than 11 million of his citizens.
You're really going out of your way to justify voting for the Nazis, huh.
If you're just going to go ahead and conflate the Holodomor and Holocaust as basically the same thing, then it's not really worth continuing the conversation.
My point is education does not equal to rationality, and democracy is not good but it is the best system we had so far.