This video is sponsored by Paradox Interactive. Indy shares his thoughts on what he thinks would have happened if the French would have decided to meddle in the Spanish Civil War – triggering a Civil War.
Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance is now available! You can play Hearts of Iron IV for free until next Sunday, the 1st of March! Discover it here: https://pdxint.at/39Re5ld
The Nazi economy appears to do well during the 1930s. But this is largely myth, as the German economy under Hitler is based on a self destructive, ideologically or selfishly fuelled irrationality driven by conquest and criminal practice.
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Document This 1” – Peter Sandberg
– “March Of The Brave 10” – Rannar Sillard – Test
– “Ominous” – Philip Ayers
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “Split Decision” – Rannar Sillard
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
Spartacus Olsson
1 day ago
From an intellectual viewpoint, this is perhaps the most challenging episode I have written in this series. First of all it’s hard to make economic policy interesting, even when it’s about the Nazis. It tends to get, well … grey. Second of all it’s not that easy to simplify things without completely losing the essence of what was going on. Third of all, I’m fighting an uphill battle against a post truth, political talking point based on … let’s just call it less than ingenious purposes.
Obviously that’s the idea that the Nazis were Socialists. And perhaps that is not so far fetched when you think of the name of their party, the way they framed their anti-semitic rhetoric in a way that it would sound friendly to the working class, and their absolute disregard for telling the truth about anything, and everything. But although we have painstakingly showed you the facts, I am painfully aware that it won’t make a difference to stop the nonsense out there and in here — some pundits will religiously stick to their ideas, because if they don’t, they might have to face that some of the ideas they have are mutual with the people they so desperately want to distance themselves from. The same happened with the far left between the 1930s and 1970s, when they tried with cramped desperation to frame Stalinism as a right wing, Fascist movement — Red Fascism was the term — obviously as much nonsense as the alt-right idea that Naziism is Socialism.
And is it important? Well yes and no — the dumbos will probably get worn out at some point, it’s after all quite challenging to look for ways to distort the record over, and over again. I don’t really care if the extremists try to push their mutual garbage in each other’s lap — as a supporter of democracy and humanism, I have no regard for either end. I do however have an incredible amount of respect for conservatives, liberals, and progressives who are equally dedicated to democracy and human rights — and there is where it matters.
When the far left tries to frame Stalinism as right wing, and the far-right tries to frame Naziism is left-wing, they are trying to co-opt a position of less extremism. It’s an invasive attempt for Communists and (real) Socialists to just look like regular Progressives, and Fascists and Nazis to just look like regular Conservatives. And that my friends is dangerous, to all of us, regardless of our nationality, creed, political affiliation, or opinion — because it is specifically our individual rights and democracy that is at stake in this game. That’s what they want to take away, or in some places stop from developing.
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Written and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)
Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation in Time”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Wendel Scherer – “Reunion”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Hakan Eriksson – “The End of The World 2”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
Spartacus Olsson
3 days ago
You’d think that the Nazis would know how nationalism works … well, it turns out that when Hitler’s fantasies of race meet the very real nationalism of the old European monarchies, race doesn’t have the trump. Now, in 1940 nationalism isn’t that old, but it’s anchored in old traditions that the monarchies now occupied by the Nazis have managed to reconcile with modernity rather successfully. And here’s an important point: nationalism is often decried as the root of all of these conflicts, and perhaps it is, but in some places it’s also proved to be fertile ground for modern democracy. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt somewhere in there, and maybe that’s that in the end it’s not what, but how that makes a difference. What’s particularly interesting, in for instance the Netherlands with the February Strike or in the Germany resistance rings, is that when faced with a common enemy to the nation, patriotism unites people across the political spectrum, well except those obsessed with the idea of race.
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Many leading 20th-century architects, including Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, were openly disdainful of the public’s preferences. On occasion they evinced subtle and overt racism. In 1913, in one of the most influential essays in the history of Modernist architecture, “Ornament and Crime,” the Austrian architect Adolf Loos declared that modern man (read: white northern Europeans) must go beyond what “any Negro” could achieve in design, and strip away all that is superfluous, all that is morally and spiritually polluted. It is Papuans and other primitives who, like innocent children, ornament themselves with tattoos. Loos’ race has superseded them: “the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” The same held for ornament in architecture. (To this day, architects — who continue to believe they are the vanguard of civilization’s progress — find ornament retrograde. Yet ordinary people stubbornly continue to adorn themselves with cosmetics, jewelry, and, yes, tattoos.)
In the 1920s, during the time he was a member of the French Fascist party, the seminal architect Le Corbusier said he was disgusted by the “zone of odours, [a] terrible and suffocating zone comparable to a field of gypsies crammed in their caravans amidst disorder and improvisation.” He also chimed in with Loos: “Decoration is of a sensorial and elementary order, as is color, and is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages … The peasant loves ornament and decorates his walls.”
More recently, indicative of architecture’s current race problem, in 2006 the aforementioned highly influential dean of Tulane’s architecture school, Reed Kroloff, wrote the embarrassingly tone-deaf, flat-footed essay “Black Like Me.” (As I discuss below, he collaborated with Betsky on a post-Katrina project.) Kroloff — the privileged, self-described gay white Jew from Waco, Texas — announced that he was now black, that the Hurricane Katrina disaster had made him feel first-hand the African-American predicament. His piece was subject to much ridicule. No wonder the Mods have chosen to insulate themselves from the un(brain)washed masses. Architecture has become a gated community.
Betsky, to his credit, doesn’t pretend that architects should even try to make outreach. Showing little sympathy for democracy, he says that appeals to the public are “mystical.” The people — the 99% — do not deserve a seat at the table. Yet Betsky would have us believe that he and the architecture he supports are “progressive.”
Beginning part two, Italy has been recaptured by the Byzantines thanks to the tenacious ambitions of Emperor Justinian. But throughout the Middle Ages, the land became a battleground for more powerful empires. The 19th Century Italian revolution would see the peninsula swept up in the waves of nationalism that was taking the continent by storm.
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From 1935 onwards, the German Wehrmacht was expanding rapidly. Millions of men joined the army, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s visions for the 3rd Reich.
Highly motorized Panzergrenadiers, elite parachute- and resilient mountain-infantry troops were trained and and led with the utmost combat-efficiency in mind, supported by state of the art Panzers and aircraft. If it came to war, they would break the enemy and break them fast, achieving fast victories in a series of devastating hits. However, succumbing to the ideological influence of National-Socialism, the Wehrmacht found itself soon to be both culprit and accomplice to a self-reinforcing cycle of violence and atrocities.
Spain in the early 1930’s was practically Europe in Microcosm, with numerous political and ideological movements clashing in debate and open battles on the streets of Spain. All of this worsened in 1936 as Spain slowly descends into Civil War.
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Naman Habtom
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminski
We originally planned to just do one episode on the Spanish Civil War, but the more I researched it the more I realized how complicated everything was even before the real fighting even breaks out. To understand the battle-lines of the conflict you have to understand how they were drawn in the turbulent years of the Second Spanish Republic. In the space of just 5 years it sees numerous insurrections, revolutions, and a coup. In an era of political radicalism across the world, Spain really stands out as the most defined by it, and by 1936 is already in a state of quasi-civil war. This episode gives you a detailed insight into that. We’ll be covering the course of the war itself in a later episode.
Cheers, Francis.
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The widely accepted narrative of modernism à la Gropius is that it was some kind of logical or ineluctable development from the Arts and Crafts movement. This seems to me utterly fantastic: it is like saying that Mickey Spillane is a logical or ineluctable outgrowth of Montesquieu. It is true that in the work of certain artists, for example Mondrian, one can see a gradual change which might be considered logical, starting from figurative landscapes and ending, via ever greater abstraction, to purely geometric shapes. But even where there is such a development, it is ultimately beside the point: it does not prove that what came later was better. Each artistic product has to be assessed aesthetically on its own merits (which in architecture includes its harmony with an existing townscape), and only someone who sees with an ideology rather than with eyes could conclude anything other than that modernism has been overwhelmingly a disaster.
Moreover, claiming respectable ancestors is somewhat at variance with equal claims to be starting from zero (as Gropius put it), but such a contradiction is hardly noticed by the grand narrative history of modernism that Professor Curl attacks and destroys.
He is not unable or unwilling to praise where it is due, though it is due rarely enough; and he is particularly effective in tracing the opportunistic ideological divagations of the modernists, whose one constant predilection was for absolute power over others. Mies, for example, was attracted to socialist totalitarianism, and his only objection to Nazism was that the Nazis eventually rejected his desire to have everything built according to his prescriptions. He left Nazi Germany because he feared his previous pro-leftism made him permanently suspect in its eyes, not because he was appalled by its brutality. If only they’d let him build! But contrary to apologists for Mies, and to a legend constantly repeated, it was not the Nazis who closed the Bauhaus but Mies himself, and he left Germany only four years after their assumption of power.
Finding refuge in America, Mies quickly perceived that the power of patronage of megalomaniac building lay with giant corporations rather than with fascists or communists and persuaded many of them to build his preternaturally inhuman and uninspired monstrosities. By a strange quirk of history, and because of mankind’s perpetual propensity to make logical errors, Mies was able to pose dishonestly as anti-totalitarian and even as a friend of freedom precisely because he had fled Nazi Germany where they hadn’t patronised him. He was fortunate that soon afterwards the United States had another totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. Mies and his allies were thus able to claim that his totalitarian modernism was actually a manifestation of western freedom. There are many such ironies pointed up in this book that would be delicious had they not had such appalling consequences.
Corbusier was a fascist in the most literal sense of the word, and early during the Occupation advocated the removal by force of the majority of Paris’ population because it had no business to be living there. Can one wonder that a man with thoughts like that built monstrosities?
Today, courtesy of Tom from Legacy Collectibles, we are taking a look at “party leader” PPK pistols. There are three different versions of these, and we will look at all of them in sequence. They are highly valued in the collecting community, and also extremely easy to fake, making authentication quite difficult. I will give you as much information as I can to assist in this, and Tom is happy to help (free of charge) as well.
To see more about Legacy, check out their YouTube channel:
If you want to read more about WW2 leadership, read Andrew Roberts Masters & Commanders.
Victor Hanson, a professor emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, lectured to a history class on Masters and Commanders at Hillsdale College. In this fall seminar in classical and military history Professor Hanson examined how leaders, both civilian officials and generals on the battlefield, conducted themselves in wartime. That day’s class focused on Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and how those very different American and British leaders learned to work together to defeat Nazi Germany.
Someone on SSC Discord summarized James Scott’s Against The Grain as “basically 300 pages of calling wheat a fascist”. I have only two qualms with this description. First, the book is more like 250 pages; the rest is just endnotes. Second, “fascist” isn’t quite the right aspersion to use here.
Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as “progress” towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn’t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was “progress” only from a state’s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.
Against the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, “The Devil was the first Whig”, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.
Get a free audiobook and 2 Audible Originals with a 30-day trial: http://audible.com/greatwar or text greatwar to 500 500.
Like many former soldiers, lance corporal Adolf Hitler was disillusioned with the new German Republic after the Armistice in 1918. Like man of his country men he was also in dire need of a job. The Bavarian Army provided an opportunity and soon young Adolf Hitler found himself in the ranks of an obscure political party in Munich: The German Workers’ Party.
» SOURCES
Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin.
Gottfried Feder, Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft 1919.
Fest, Joachim C.: Hitler. Eine Biographie, 1973.
Heiden, Konrad: Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Ein Mann gegen Europa, 2016.
Ulrich, Volker: Adolf Hitler. Band 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889-1939. 2013.
Fest, Joachim C: The face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership. 1999 Program of the German Workers’ Party, 1920 (http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/s…)
Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919-1945, Vol. 1, The Rise to Power 1919-1934. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998, pp. 12-14.
»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Phillip Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Markus Linke
Fact checking: Florian Wittig
Channel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van Stephold
A Mediakraft Networks Original Channel
Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2019
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Where all German faithful Nazis? Not by a stretch, but a resounding majority approved of the Nazis, especially before the war, and again after the victory in France. Anyone that actively opposed Hitler and his gang were not only risking their life, but faced an uphill battle against public opinion. And yet … some people did.
Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
5 hours ago
This is the first episode of five War Against Humanity videos that will focus on Resistance in 1940. In this episode we look at Germany, then France, after that the Benelux countries and Scandinavia, then Poland and finally China. The first two episodes will come out before Christmas and the next will follow at the beginning of the new year. These episodes are all introductions to a recurring coverage of the war behind the lines. Resistance and collaboration with the occupying enemy was an essential component of WW2, but because it was clandestine, often private enterprises, the records are less detailed than the ones of the official war machines of the belligerents. Thus, resistance is not always as easy to organize on a weekly time line. Therefore we will return irregularly to the events behind each frontline to look at the developments over a somewhat longer timespan. We will do our best to follow the individuals who played a central part in the events and machinations. We hope that in this way we can give you more insight into WW2 events that are often overlooked, or covered in a less cohesive way.
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[T]he Nazis’ focus on the threats that risky habits pose to “public health” makes perfect sense in light of their collectivist ideology. “Brother national socialist,” said one bit of Nazi propaganda, “do you know that your Führer is against smoking and thinks that every German is responsible to the whole people for all his deeds and missions, and does not have the right to damage his body with drugs?”
Smith adds: “Clearly there were considerable links between the promotion of particular lifestyles and the racial hygiene movement. Tobacco and alcohol were seen as ‘genetic poisons,’ leading to degeneration of the German people.”
The point, I hasten to add, is not that today’s “public health” paternalists are Nazis. I am not suggesting that everyone who hates smoking is just like Hitler. But there is an unmistakable totalitarian logic to the notion that the government has a responsibility to promote “public health” by preventing us from engaging in activities that might lead to disease or injury. The implication is that we all have a duty to the collective to be as healthy as we can be, an idea the Nazis embraced but one that Americans ought to find troubling.
