I haven’t been able to locate any international surveys on Macron vs. Le pen like there were for Trump, unsurprisingly so, since France is after all less important than the US.
Still, I have been able to find polls from Germany, Russia, and the UK.
According to a ZDF poll of who would be better for Germany (April 28), some 90% of Germans supported Macron (adjusting for “don’t knows”).
Even AfD voters only favor Le Pen by the thinnest of margins.
| . | Total | Moscow & SPB | cities with ~1M people | cities with 500k-1000k | cities with 100k-500k | cities with <100k | Rural |
| Macron | 8 | 9 | 8 | 11 | 5 | 11 | 6 |
| Le Pen | 61 | 69 | 61 | 63 | 63 | 57 | 58 |
| Neither/don’t care | 26 | 18 | 27 | 24 | 24 | 30 | 28 |
| No answer | 5 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 8 | 2 | 8 |
According to a VCIOM poll of whom Russians sympathize with (May 2), Marine Le Pen would beat Macron 86%-14%.
That is almost the exact inverse of her results in Germany.
Curiously, even though they disliked Trump almost as much as the average German, the Brits have a much more positive outlook on Le Pen according to a YouGov poll (April 24).
Only 53% of Brits thought Macron would be better for Britain.
The results, predictably, followed party lines. Labour, the LibDems, and the SNP were strongly for Macron; the Conservatives leaned towards Le Pen; and UKIP was overwhelmingly for Le Pen.
This is basically an extension of attitudes towards Brexit.
This makes sense. At a minimum, a Le Pen in power in France would make the UK’s own process of exiting the EU much easier.
As some commenter here at Unz on another thread put it: either way the French vote, their country is going to be ruled by a woman, whether Le Pen or Merkel.
That’s what Le Pen herself said at the debate. She has some pretty hilarious zingers, like Trump but better (because she’s smarter).
I have my doubts about that ZDF poll, ZDF basically is just government propaganda. But a majority of Germans probably really does fear Le Pen somewhat, partly because of her somewhat anti-German noises about the EU and the Euro, partly out of rather irrational reasons. A female acquaintance of mine told me a few months ago she fears that with Le Pen as French president there would be war between France and Germany…because France would attack…
It’s probably not that surprising though that even quite a few AfD voters favour Macron. The party still does have quite a few economic liberals in its ranks, and its voters aren’t coherent in their world views, opposition to Merkel’s government is the glue holding it all together right now. Also German mainstream media coverage has been totally one-sided of course, some of Macron’s more outrageous statements (“no French culture”) and his background in finance haven’t been given much attention.
Joan of Arc and Napolean Bonaparte in one soul! What other blessings will Le Pen give us?
Perhaps attitudes toward Le Pen mirror attitudes toward the EU? Sometimes I think the EU is more of a Fourth Reich than anything else.
The whole Fourth Reich thing is nonsense in my opinion. Germans who are in favour of the EU really do believe that it’s some sort of atonement for the Third Reich, that nations are inherently bad (because they lead to world wars and genocide) and should be submerged in some sort of post-national structure. They genuinely don’t get how anybody could view things differently. It may be difficult for foreigners to understand, but “Europe” (= ever closer European integration) has acquired a sort of quasi-sacral status in German political discourse. It’s a kind of salvation history, to bring redemption for Nazism. And below the surface there is always the fear that if the European project fails, Germany will drop out of the “West” once again and revert to what it once was (this also legitimates the rule of Germany’s establishment parties and kills off any talk of referenda on important issues – “You can’t trust the people, they elected Hitler after all”).
Now I can understand to some degree how it may look very different from the outside. There’s certainly a lot of German arrogance, and creatures like Merkel or Schäuble have shown themselves to be disturbingly cold and heartless about what’s going on in Southern Europe (we get all that sentimental dreck about “refugees”, but no one in Germany really cared much about the disastrous youth unemployment in Italy or Spain; but then Merkel and Schäuble don’t give a f**k about German pensioners looking through thrashcans for recyclable plastic bottles, or about people like me, either). But still, talk of a “Fourth Reich” misses the point.
The EU is not a “Fourth Reich” but rather a version of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg’s plan of September 1914 for an European economic union under German hegemony, superficially tarted up to suit modern sensibilities. It has served Germany well, but other countries not so well. Germany’s historic enemies and victims know the score and have kept their distance; Norway, for example, has stayed out of the EU entirely, while Denmark and Britain have stayed out of the common currency, and Britain has now voted to leave the EU.
The old EEC worked well as a simple customs union, but with the reunification of Germany following the fall of the Iron Curtain, German hegemonic ambitions reasserted themselves. To prevent this, it would have been better to break the country up into its historic states, e.g., Bavaria, Prussia, Württemberg, etc., to be governed as independent countries, as it was before the Wilhelmine Second Reich.
Macron is the German candidate.
The constituency he dominated the most was the German one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_2017#By_constituency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_constituency_for_French_residents_overseas
http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/59022
It is way too late for that.
Germany’s Europa will absorb Germany and the other European countries just as the Reich absorbed German states and destroyed them.
So the Fourth Reich will be the First Reich back again?
Yes, I know, there’s a certain type of person in Britain (I assume you’re British, sorry if I’m wrong) who regards the very existence of Germany as offensive, that’s nothing new. But you needn’t worry, if present trends continue, Germany has a few decades more at most anyway.
As far as I know, he’s also stated occasionally that he’s in favour of Eurobonds…which, to put it mildly, is a rather controversial idea among the German public.
“I have my doubts about that ZDF poll, ZDF basically is just government propaganda.” But the AfD doesn´t do better than Le Pen in the polls.
But then, who’s gonna rule? Why balkanize a country where regions with similar culture can’t go back to their long gone independent status and they are well suited together?
And I don’t see how the EU has been just been positive to german hegemony if they have to bail out broken countries and they still have to play the globalist agenda of self-destruction of its own society and economy.
Germany is just the US appointed manager of Europe, at one side benefiting from being the political and economic center of Europe, but at the same time having to pay the bills of its busybody neighbors that keeps the leash on and also lick the hand of its american masters.
But still, talk of a “Fourth Reich” misses the point.
If the current Nazi infiltration of the German armed forces is as successful as it is being played to be here in the US, we might see a Fourth Reich. 🙂
? Sorry, I may be a bit slow, but I don’t quite get what’s that supposed to mean…could you explain?
Are you referring to the case of that Nazi Bundeswehr officer who pretended to be a Syrian refugee (who couldn’t speak any Arabic…)? They’re reporting that in the US now???
Yes, it made it to NPR this morning.
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526779497/german-defense-minister-launches-probe-into-far-right-extremism-in-the-military
I guess that was to be expected, English language media just loves stories about far right extremists in Germany, apart from the Nazi past it must be their main interest in the country.
Admittedly it’s worrisome though that someone like that guy could become an officer (there have also been several cases of Islamists in the Bundeswehr…last year allegedly two dozen of them were uncovered). Personally I think it’s just a matter of time anyway until there’s some significant right-wing terrorism in Germany. The number of neo-Nazis has declined since the 1990s, but there still are a few thousand. There’s also a really crazy movement of right-wingers called Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich – they claim the federal republic is illegitimate and that the German Reich is still in existence) who are apparently hoarding weapons. Last year one of them shot and killed a policeman when his flat was searched. A few months ago an alleged terror cell of those guys was uncovered (their leader being a self-appointed neo-pagan “druid” who supposedly planned violence against Jews, Muslims and asylum seekers).
What’s really interesting though about the case of that Bundeswehr fake-refugee is how easily he could trick authorities (but of course that is downplayed in most media). The guy has an Italian father, so he supposedly might look a bit Mediterranean…but he has no Arabic language skills whatsoever. He actually claimed his native language as a Syrian Christian was French! Despite that, he was granted refugee status, wasn’t uncovered for more than a year and got regular payments. And of course he’ll hardly be the only case (the Afghan “minor” who raped and murdered Maria Ladenburger after all probably also isn’t a minor at all and was in any case known to be a violent criminal already in Greece; the Islamist who attacked the Christmas market in Berlin had about a dozen different identities – which authorities knew BEFORE his terror attack; there are reports of asylum seekers with multiple identities who are committing welfare fraud in different cities…). It’s totally clear that the system is out of control and that no one has any clear idea who’s actually in the country.
This makes sense because Germany is the natural enemy of Russia, and France is a country which has been in decline for more than a century and could only ever hope to satisfy its delusions of being a grand power and counteract Germany through an alliance with Russia.
Sounds like terrorism is extraneous, any illegal actor could use it as a way to supplement his profitability. Say, are there any new fads with illegal drugs there?
If you didn’t want a unified Germany, you should have told Napoleon not to invade Germany 200 years ago.
Anybody with half a brain knows that Germany overall has generally been either a reactionary or moderating influence in Europe. A broken up France or United Kingdom would have been much less destructive.
The reality is that Germany is surrounded by lazy and incompetent losers who simply can’t compete with Germany, but are so arrogant and have such delusions of grandeur that they refuse to accept this, and indeed went around the world colonizing backward places in a desperate attempt to compete and are now getting back all those people from the former colonies. If they had some humility and knew their place, there’d be much more stability.
I don’t know, I’m not taking any…
In Berlin however they have a lot of asylum seekers (mostly Africans) who are quite openly dealing drugs, which is seen as rather cool by the local progressives and therefore tolerated. That terrorist who crushed the Christmas market had also supplemented his income as a drug dealer (was known to authorities, but then they had also known for months that he was intending to commit a terror attack, and still couldn’t arrest/deport him).
I don’t see any hope at all for putting things in order in Germany by legal, constitutional or peaceful means any longer.
The trouble is that many of those who advertise themselves as taking an alternative route will be BND agents.
Why, pray tell, is Germany the natural enemy of Russia? The two can be very good friends at the expense of Poland.
German internationalism is primarily about securing access for German industrial goods. Even nationalist Germans tend to be in favour of free trade. Ever since the 1860s Germany has been a major industrial exporter and Germany is constantly looking for new markets. The EU provided a brilliant opportunity for Germany to create a large captured market.
Before entering the EU, Britain had a captured market in the UK Commonwealth, but it wasn’t particularly large, and they had lost control of Canada to the US, hence Britain wanted to be export to the soft-underbelly of Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece etc) so it joined the EU.
However, on entering the EU Britain found it couldn’t compete with Germany, France etc so eventually it decided to leave.
This is why many British people want to break up the EU. They see it as a Germany monopoly which doesn’t benefit Britain.
By what standard can Norway, Denmark and Britain qualify as more enemies or victims of Germany than Belgium, the Netherlands and France?
To think that nationalism and ethnic unification could have swept through the rest of Europe but left Germany untouched is to live in a fool’s paradise. The choice was not between a kleindeutsche Lösung and nothing, but between a kleindeutsche Lösung and a großdeutsche Lösung. The unification achieved by Bismarck was the most conservative and least threatening to European order that was possible.
who advertise themselves as taking an alternative route will be BND agents
I don’t know with confidence about Germany, but in the US some of these guys play both sides.
1) Germany also ‘went around the world colonizing’ and in fact was responsible for one of the worst, if not the worst, colonial genocides (the extermination of the Herero in modern day Namibia- not a lot of total death since there weren’t a lot of Herero to start with, but proportionately something like 40% were killed).
2) The influx of modern day immigrants doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with colonization. France and Britain decided to take masses of people from North Africa / South Asia respectively for reasons of cheap labour and multicultural ideology. And there are large scall migrant flows to country which never were much involved in colonization, e.g. Sweden and Denmark.
Why, pray tell, is Germany the natural enemy of Russia?
Because everyone else in the world feels safer when that is playing out?
which never were much involved in colonization, e.g. Sweden and Denmark.
Well sure, if you don’t count the British Isles. 🙂
Oh, and the Rus. What about Iceland?
I thought that there was some connection between Britain and her former colonies and the same for France with regard to some immigrants.
English language media just loves stories about far right extremists in Germany
True, but you also get a lot of favorable stories for accepting the “huddled masses” from everywhere.
how easily he could trick authorities
I suspect that you are in the same situation as the US.
I mean, when a peson’s own father calls up and tells you that his son is a terrorist and he still executes his terrorism, Houston has a problem.
Denmark actually had a colony in the West Indies, with sugar plantations dependent on slave labor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_West_Indies
And Greenland of course.
Sino-German cooperation was incredible, and for that I think China has not only been more or less grateful, but has had a permanent impact on the culture. Its notable that Chinese perceptions of Germany remain highly favorable to this day, though vice versa is not true.
Was that the shooter in that gay club in Orlando? Well, that guy at least was a US citizen, it’s not that easy to do something in such a case. The thing with that guy who crushed the Christmas market in Berlin is that he shouldn’t even have been in the country. His application for asylum was obviously fraudulent. It was known that he used multiple identities, committed welfare fraud and dealt with drugs. It was also known that he was an Islamist and was interested in carrying out a suicide attack. And still they couldn’t prevent it. That’s really a bit much imo.
Nonsense, Bismarck divided Germany, separating the Germans from their old capitals Wien and Prag. It was pragmatic, but certainly not conservative.
Don’t know if that’s true. China’s political system is certainly disliked, but I don’t think there’s any deep-seated animosity towards China on a cultural level (and I can’t think of any reason why there should be). Obviously there are some conflicts of interest (industrial espionage etc.), but I don’t think German perceptions of China are that negative. Some Germans who can afford it even go on vacations there now.
Buonaparte did not unify Germany – he disunited it, bringing about the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The true thousand-year Reich was that first one, having been established with the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.
The loose federation of Holy Roman Empire was a far better system than either the Second Reich, in which the Prussian King subjugated or deposed the rulers of the former electoral states, or the Third.
I did not say they were more so – only that they were wary of the EU at an earlier point. They also had relatively small numbers of Nazi sympathizers before the onset of World War II. Mosley gained no traction in Britain, Quisling was detested in Norway, while Lembcke and Clausen never obtained even 2% of the vote in Denmark.
On the other hand, there were significant Nazi or Nazi-like parties in Belgium and the Netherlands, and the Vichy government enjoyed rather wide support in France.
As much as I despise Victoria Nuland, I share her opinion of the EU.
and yet Germans support bringing ever more such people in.
I understand the Nazi period much better now: Germans are the most docile population in the world. They support whatever their leaders tell them too.
Unfortunately I can’t really disagree.
The Holy Roman Empire was not a nation-state, which is what we’re really talking about here.
The point still stands – Buonaparte did not unify Germany. It was loosely federated and he brought an end to the federation. The various German principalities remained independent for more than the next sixty years, and were unified by Wilhelm I in 1871.
In what universe was Prague ever a capital of the Germans as a whole, instead of the sometime residence of one electoral prince? If division were not conservative, the HRE would have been extremely radical.
You felt safe from 1941-45? Well, different strokes, I suppose.
Equating individuals with the popularity of an ideology is just ridiculous.
Quisling conspired with the German elite to invite an occupation that would put him in power in Norway. Opening the gates from the inside to a foreign army in the hopes of some sort of a reward has been considered the lowest form of treason by just about every human society that has ever existed. There was no way Quisling would have support even among ideological nationalists.
The leadership of Vichy France is not at all comparable. They were men who had fought Germany, admitted defeat and when given the choice of vassalage or complete dismantling of France picked vassalage. A nation can re-emerge from vassalage and leaders that have made a similar choice to Pétain’s have become national saints, eg. Alexander Nevsky and the Mongols…
Scandinavian elites pre-WWII were commonly sympathetic to much of what would now be considered “Nazi ideology” like racial Nordicism, anti-communism, eugenics and the like, though obviously they were never sympathetic to German expansionism. There was little need for a radical political party to embrace what was already common.
It’s reported in Hungary, too.
The favored residence is usually the capital of the Germans.
Why do you think did Berlin and Bonn end up as capitals?
Frankfurt is the true German capital.
Now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands.
That’s true for the previous (and much smaller) mid-late C20th wave of immigrants that the anti-racist taboos were first created to suppress opposition to. Anachronistic idealism and political and economic connections with the British Commonwealth in Britain, and the rather silly idea that Africans under French imperial rule should be regarded as Frenchmen (because, after all, France was a Republic and not an Empire) in France certainly played their part in enabling those flows.
The more recent and far larger influxes long post-date those connections, though. France long ago pulled out of Algeria, and links to the British Commonwealth countries were in practice degraded to relative insignificance following accession to the EU.
It was a reference to the failed “underwear bomber” (he didn’t mange to destroy the plane in which he was a passenger, but evidently did seriously blow up his junk): an African Islamist yout, whose father was a well-placed banker in his home country.
Just as an example, Prague was the capital of Rudolph II as Holy Roman Emperor from 1576 to 1612.
I’m not “equating individuals with the popularity of an ideology.” I am using them as examples of their parties’ strength. Compare the insignificant support that Mosley had from the British electorate, that Quisling had from the Norwegians , or Lembcke and Clausen had from the Danes, with that which (say) Degrelle’s Rexists had in Belgium, or the Dutch Nazi Party had in Holland, or that a variety of Nazi-sympathizing politicians and publicists had in France. A much larger segment of public opinion favored Nazism or some local equivalent in those countries than did in Norway, Denmark, and Britain.
With a bit more imagination, and less land grabbing, Stalin could have recreated Prussia leaving three states; Prussia, Germany and Austria. Prussia has almost as much justification to exist as a separate entity as Austria does.
Again, pure silliness. There were ideological Nazis in Norway and Quisling had low support among them BECAUSE HE WAS A TRAITOR WHO WANTED TO INVITE A FOREIGN ARMY TO INSTALL HIM AS A LEADER. It didn’t matter what ideology he had, with a trick like that you lose support of even people who agree on ideology.
The failure of one man is worthless as evidence of common sentiment. In any case, what does “opinion favoring Nazism” even mean in a country other than Germany, since a big part of it were uniquely German issues like the East Prussia question and reversing the treaty of Versailles? Were there a lot more Frenchmen than Norwegians sympathetic to German revanchism and re-armament?
Prussia was too absorbed by Germany.
The HRE worked quite well in the middle ages, but the Reformation was its downfall. After that, it included only the Catholic states of southern and western Germany–not the whole country. Obviously, it was in no real position to protect even those people from the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, during which Germany lost nearly HALF its population. Nor–as a commenter above noted–was it able to protect them from Napolean. (To be sure, Napolean–and France itself–had a bit of a cheering section in western Germany, so some of them viewed the situation more as a form of liberation than an occupation. But the fact remains: Austria was unable to prevent Napolean from occupying the Rhineland.) It was Napolean who enginered the HRE’s downfall in 1806. It had to renounce western/southern Germany for good, and was officially renamed the Austrian Empire.
What do you mean by “Prussia was too absorbed by Germany”? That is like saying that you went out to dinner last night and were absorbed by a beefsteak.
Prussia did the absorbing. Wilhelm I was king of Prussia before becoming kaiser of Germany. He persuaded and pressed the other German states to accept his overlordship. When Hanover refused do so, he deposed its king, George V.
Yes, Germany had been a battleground for foreign armies for centuries, and there was a distinct history of French aggression (it should be remembered that even the war of 1870/71 started with a French declaration of war). It may have been regrettable that Germany was unified under the leadership of militarist Prussia, but the idea that it should have stayed the way it was, just so all the great powers in its neighbourhood could feel “safe”, is a bit much imo.
To some extent, he did. The old DDR states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg were the western part of Prussia. The eastern part is, of course, what we now call Poland.
Prussia conquered Germany, but just like the Manchus in China they were eventually absorbed by their new empire.
After 7 decades of integration into a German national state, trying to separate the Prussia from Germany would be as successful as separating the Saarland from Germany which failed twice.
I was referrring to this point:
“I have my doubts about that ZDF poll, ZDF basically is just government propaganda”
What I meant is that the ZDF poll is realistic after all, because the percentage of AfD voters should be an upper bound of people in Germany who like Le Pen. Thus as the AfD right at the moment struggles to get get even 10% in the polls the poll for Le Pen is realistic.
I’m not sure those polls are correct either. It seems pretty clear to me that some polling institutes deliberately downplay potential AfD support to demoralize AfD supporters (Forsa is always mentioned in this regard, its chief Güllner quite obviously tries to influence politics and puts a dubious spin on results). Plus, given how demonized the AfD is, it’s possible quite a few people won’t admit to sympathizing with them.
That being said, we certainly shouldn’t hope for some great breakthrough in the September elections. If the AfD gets more than 10%, it will be a success. I just hope they won’t implode due to their internal power struggles.
That and the previous instance of Charles IV were the only cases in which an emperor ever resided in Prague, and they did so in their capacity as kings of Bohemia. In principle, the HRE retained the early mediaeval system long abandoned by other states, by which the monarch had no fixed capital. Only Vienna’s record as the usual imperial residence under the Hapsburgs obscured that distinction in practice.
I just hope they won’t implode due to their internal power struggles
There seems to be a paucity of good, much less great leaders, worldwide. I expect squat to get done without good leadership. I don’t know whether they are doing something else (making as much money as possible?) or don’t exist.
You felt safe from 1941-45?
I’m old, but not that old.
A German/Russian combo would be a handful.
I’m aware of the Danish Virgin Islands colony (as well as abortive attempts at Swedish and Latvian colonization), but those are so small and so long ago that they’re really the exception that proves the rule. I more meant participation in the Second Age of Imperialism (the 19th and early 20th century spread of European empires into Asia, Africa, and the Pacific), and there the players were really England, France and Germany, and then at a lower level Belgium, Italy and Portugal.
Greenland of course has such a trivial population that if they did all move to Denmark they would be a drop in the bucket (and I don’t think Inuit culture promotes high fertility the way some African, Asian, and Middle Eastern ones do anyway).
I don’t think AFD support should necessarily be taken as linked-at-the-hip to Le Pen support. I am a (highly alienated) American who didn’t support Trump after all, but if I was French I would support MLP.
It’s not intrinsically unreasonable to believe ethnic nationalism is a reasonable model for some counrties but not others. German Reader and others have noted that Germany has a particular guilt over WWII and that’s understandable, but there’s no necessary reason for that to translate into opposition to Le Pen (who after all at this point is much more the heir of Gaullism than of her father’s beliefs).
Problem with that analogy is unlike the Manchus in China, the Prussians were actually the demographic majority in their new empire.
Actually that makes me kind of curious about fertility rates in Prussia vs. the rest of Germany, particularly Bavaria, during the 1871-1918 empire. That seems like the kind of think Anatoly would of course have at his fingertips.
It wasn’t meant as a criticism of you, nor did my post really have much of a point…I just thought it was an interesting fact. Denmark isn’t a country you’d expect to have had a colony in the Caribbean. At least I was very surprised when I first read about it.
It’s not just “guilt” over Nazism (I have my doubt anyway that many Germans really feel genuine “guilt” about that), it’s a whole set of “lessons” one has to supposedly draw from that past – or else you’re a very bad person. One of those lessons is a quasi-religious belief in “Europe” (meaning the European Union and ever closer integration), with Franco-German “friendship” traditionally being seen as an indispensable core element of this. As I wrote above, it’s a kind of salvation history (or more cynically, you could say the whole European project was a way for Germany to become respectable again after national identity had been tarnished by Auschwitz). If MLP or someone like her came to power in France, obviously that project as envisaged by Germany’s elites would have failed, their entire world view would have been invalidated. I don’t know what kind of repercussions this would eventually have for Germany, but it would be a momentous change.
Prussian territory wasn’t homogenous though; Prussian rule in Western Germany was often resented. Part of my family had roots in the Saar country in the very far west, and Prussians there were basically remembered as oppressive tyrants with spiked helmets who sent cavalry against workers. It’s also claimed by some that certain dubious aspects of Prussia’s former Rhine territories (modern North-Rhine-Westphalia) like corruption levels date back to Prussian rule; according to that interpretation people there basically regarded the state as an instrument of foreign (Prussian) domination and acted accordingly, similar to the attitude of many Southern Italians and Sicilians towards the modern Italian state. I don’t know if there’s really any data to support that view, but in any case many Prussian subjects seem to have had a rather ambivalent attitude towards Prussia.
the prussians were actually german speaking, with a strong city tradition and norms similar to northern germany. The manchu were semi-pastoral and warlike, less so than the mongols but different from the Han.
Oh, I didn’t take the remark about the Danish West Indies as criticism. I think the brief attempts at Danish, Swedish, and Couronian colonization (for that matter even the Scots tried briefly to have a colony) are quite interesting.
The idea that the only logical corrective to Nazism is a quasi-religious belief in “Europe” seems, well, absurd.
It is absurd. German elites also seem quite oblivious to how unpopular Germany has become in Europe because of the whole Euro mess, austerity measures and then Merkel’s utterly insane open borders policy; there is not even a hint of an honest discussion about this. I suspect all of this will end pretty badly for Germany.
I’ve heard (don’t know if it’s true) that the Swedes introduced log cabins to America during their colonization attempt in New Jersey/Delaware. I wonder if that means William Henry Harrison owes them his Presidency!
So, would they become actually unfriendly to maintain their fictitious ideal of friendship?
I quite agree.
Sorry to butt in, and all that.
Quite possibly, just look at the harsh position they take towards Britain because of Brexit (basically “make it painful for Britain to leave, so others will be deterred from doing the same thing”…totally idiotic).
Living in Prussia is not the same as identifying yourself as Prussian and liking Prussia.
Konrad Adenauer spent most of his life in Prussia.
That did not stop him from arguing for a dissolution of Prussia after the fall of the imperial order.
In the end, he won and Prussia was buried.
I may have my generalization wrong but it seems to me that the 19th and 20th centuries were given over to dividing the world into ethnic states, with special emphasis on Europe. If we look at the Balkans or different oblasts we can see that the ethnic nation state project was incomplete and flares up into killing others on a regular basis. In spite of that most of the elites seem intent upon “stirring” the mix everywhere.
I am a (highly alienated) American who didn’t support Trump after all
I can match your alienation and raise you a very. I supported Trump out of the gate. He is the only Republican Presidential candidate that I have ever supported and I started throwing my vote away with the George McGovern candidacy.
My comment on colonies was meant to point out that where one draws the timeline will give different results. Colonization was the way of the world for hundreds if not thousands of years until it became unacceptable.
Same with slavery. The Southern Aristocracy was among the last holdouts.
The belief that other peoples were sub-human and did not deserve any consideration as such held sway from the beginning of time and has been hundreds of years in making the change to the universality of humanity. This is why the Nazis are looked at the way they are. They were among the last people in control of a European state who clung to the belief of a sub-humanity.
That is because the elites are usually less ethno-centric.
They tend to be more cosmopolitan.
They benefit from the decline of national states.
It offers them more opportunities.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-return-of-ethnic-nationalism
There was a good article about this in Foreign Affairs, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” by Jerry Muller.
Ahh, yes, the good ole days when the royalty spoke a different language and were a different ethnicity than the peons.
Where are the guillotines when you really need them?
I am originally from the US, but I have lived in Cologne for 10 years. It seems you are right about West German attitudes towards the Prussians. The people here, historically, had more respect for the French than for the Prussians. I assume it had something to do with the religion. The Prussians were Lutheran; most people in NRW are Catholic. In fact, the city-state of Cologne was actually run by the church for centuries. The Archbishop of Cologne was their HRE elector (Kurfürst). It’s not that religious anyomore, of course; but some of these old attitudes remain. During Karneval, for example, some people here still like to dress up like Prussian soldiers as a form of mockery.
And yet, they’re now daring Poland and Hungary to leave the bloc (both over their migrant policy and their purported challenges to liberal democracy in their countries).
If your credo is “do as we say or leave” and you also make it as difficult for people to leave as possible, how intellectually honest are you being?
The division into relatively ethnically homogenous states (culminating in the mass expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945) probably has a lot to do with why Europe has been relatively peaceful since then. As did the Cold War. Unfortunately the Cold War is gone, mass immigration and the Schengen pact is making European countries less homogeneous again, so I think the next 70 years are going to be more conflictual than 1945-2015 were.
It worked in Greece.
Why not try it again?
They know that the governments of Poland and Hungary need them more than vise versa.
to be honest a few months ago I hoped AfD could become the second strongest party in September by overtaking SPD. But actually getting in the Bundestag is all we need at this moment. This alone will be a real game changer with the possibility of “parliamentary question” etc. But of course having third most votes would be a nice add-on.
The US purchased those islands in 1917 for $25 million.
I don’t think that was ever realistic. But I agree, it’s absolutely necessary that the AfD enters the Bundestag with as high a percentage as possible. No doubt there are a lot of embarrassing freaks among their candidates, but it’s the only chance we’ve got.
Would be nice if the Greens didn’t make it into parliament again.
They have a deluded view of human nature in my opinion. Now to some extent it may be justified to want people to leave behind “atavistic” xenophobia and ethnocentrism, after all we’re no longer living in hunter-gatherer societies (even though that evolutionary legacy still shapes us), and some extent of “diversity” is unavoidable in the modern world. But what’s happened in the last few decades with mass immigration and multiculturalism was just grossly irresponsible. It’s a utopian project and those rarely end well.
“It’s not intrinsically unreasonable to believe ethnic nationalism is a reasonable model for some counrties but not others”. I actually think it would be a good idea to test all the BLM/antiracist/postcolonial/radical left ideas in one big western country. One country should sacrifice itself and have totally open borders, no jail for blacks anymore, 200 million subsaharan African immigrants in the first year, free right for muslims to expel any non-muslims, 90% tax for the rich, free income for everybody etc. Maybe the antiracist are right after all and it would actually work. And if not: at least the countries could be learn the lesson.
And yet the Saar voted by 90% to rejoin a National Socialist Germany in a free plebiscite in 1935.
Nazis did not like Prussia either.
Kaiser Wilhelm and his “Huns” forgotten?
Based on what I read in “Iron Kingdom” (a Prussophile book), the core of Prussia was always just Brandenburg, which is (roughly) the middle part of the former GDR, a little bit of the former FRG, and a little bit of current Poland. Prussia rapidly expanded in land area before and during the Seven Years War thanks to the “enterprise” of Frederick the Great. Silesia didn’t use to be Prussian. Neither was much of Baltic Prussia (the eastern parts containing Poles and Lithuanians, the western parts Swedish Pomeranians; only East Prussia centered on Koenigsberg had been German for centuries) Then the partition of Poland made Prussia the ruler of large swathes of Polish country (including Posen, from where much of the Junker aristocracy of the 19th-20th century hailed.)
The point is that Prussia was a highly polyglot, and in many parts a colonial, country. Even their Hohenzollern rulers were a Western German dynasty.
Germans didn’t really do much against China, and actually tended to supply military arms to the Chinese against other Europeans, which was seen as pretty terrific during the time. Long story short, the Chinese and Germans seem to “get each other” as both have some sort of obsession with “practicality” and the engineering mindset.
Germany was part of a coalition then and while German troops certainly committed atrocities, on the whole German crimes against China were minor compared to what the other imperialist powers did (opium wars etc.). There also was quite a bit of support for the Chinese nationalists in the 1930s through military advisors etc., and I guess that overshadows earlier German imperialism.
I recall reading somewhere that the Germans also tried to mitigate the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese during the early occupation of China, at least before WW2 started. Is that accurate? They certainly would have had some influence with the Japanese.
I recall reading something like that too, but that would have stopped around WW2, no? The Germans needed the Japanese as allies.
I think Hitler stopped it in around 1938 or something like this; there were however German military advisors around even during the early stages of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Rana Mitter’s “China’s war with Japan 1937-1945. The struggle for survival” seemed like a decent account to me and mentions this in some detail.
Don’t know if there was some general German effort in that regard (I actually doubt it, it was Nazi Germany after all), but there were the actions of John Rabe during the sack of Nanjing in 1937 who tried to shelter Chinese civilians threatened by the Japanese. There actually was a Hollywood movie about this a few years ago iirc.
What genocide?
There were the ‘Nazis’ with the mythological ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ and there were the ‘Nazis’ without the mythological ’6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’.
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
see the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here:
http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here:
http://forum.codoh.com
There is not a single verifiable excavated enormous mass grave with contents actually SHOWN, not just claimed, (recall the claim of 900,000 buried at Treblinka, 1,250,000 at Auschwitz, or 250,000 at Sobibor) even though Jews claim they still exist and claim to know exactly where these alleged enormous mass graves are.
Why have supremacist Jews have been marketing the ‘6,000,000’ lie since at least 1869?
http://i1117.photobucket.com/albums/k598/WhiteWolf722/TheSixMillionMyth.jpg
Not particularly. It turned into an unusual situation where the Japanese forces were fighting German-trained KMT units, but essentially Himmler decided to throw in with the Japanese over the Chinese. I understand that Hitler was opposed initially, but ultimately accepted that the Chinese weren’t going to be in a battle ready nation in time to help the Axis.
But yes, individual Germans were pretty horrified at the actions of the Japanese, and this was probably heavily associated with the fact that Germany had been backing China very heavily in the decades before. There are Chinese Wehrmacht officers.
All in all, though, it was fairly understandable how things turned out, though.
Indeed: for example the adoptive son of Chiang Kai-shek.
My grandfather was one of them, too! What a weird mess it was: German-trained KMT with Axis sympathies fighting against the Axis-allied Japanese. Well, we made a good show of things, at least, we put up a hell of a good fight against the Japanese. Pity that in the end, the combination of the commies and everything else saw us going downhill.
I was talking specifically about the Rhineland. The Saarland is separate.